For @littlestartopaz, Wanda/Vision, C (“Please, don’t leave”) and G (“I almost lost you”) from this, post CA:CW

Time for pain, children. Blame it on the fact that I found this gloriously accurate post full of thoughts about Wanda’s stint in the Raft.  In which Wanda has some trauma from being wrongfully imprisoned by a bunch of dickheads, and doesn’t talk much anymore.

“Wanda,” Steve said quietly, wrapping his hand around hers—he had tried to steer her by an elbow at first, the old habits of the forties coming up under stress, but she had stumbled back so quickly she’d barely missed falling off a curb.  “Come on, let’s go.”  He gave a tug and she drifted after him, silent.  He steered her toward the couch in their newest hideout and she let him push her down until she was sitting down, her hair pulled back into a tidy braid and her hands linked tightly together in her lap.  A blanket settled over her shoulders—Sam—and she slowly pulled her legs up to her chest, binding her arms tightly around her knees.

“We’re just going to be in the next room, kid,” Sam said, resting one hand on her shoulder, and waited, as if to give her a space to reply.  When she said nothing, he squeezed her shoulder and followed Steve out of the room. Wanda waited until they were gone and reached out with her fingers to catch the blanket and tug the corners over her hands.

She could still hear them, out in the kitchen. Her senses weren’t nearly as superhuman as Steve’s were, but they were…erratic.  Sometimes she could hear a pin drop across a football field and taste a single salt crystal dissolved in a glass of water, others she was stuck at a human range.  Generally she was somewhere in between, on the lower end of the enhanced spectrum, but since the Raft they had been cranked up to eleven, as if compensating for the deprivation in the cell.

“It’s been three weeks, Sam, what can we do for her?  What’s wrong with her?” Steve asked quietly.  “She hasn’t been like this since right after Pietro died.”

“Trauma,” Sam said, and she could picture perfectly his half-shrug.  His voice was tight with anger.  “They took all of us down pretty hard, but she got the worst of it.  They were scared of her.  Doped her to hell and got rough whenever she tried to walk on her own, strapped her into that straitjacket more or less right out of the gate.  She spent an entire night screaming at them before they gave her something that made her too sick to talk.”

“God,” Steve muttered, and there was a loud thud, as if someone had dropped heavily into a chair.  “This is all my fault, I should never have gotten her involved in this.”

“She wanted to help,” Sam said.  “She said to make sure you didn’t beat yourself up over it.”

“We’re not helping her,” Steve said, ignoring him. “Pulling her around with us like this. Maybe Lang should have taken her with him, he has a daughter, right?”

There was a quieter clatter, Sam pulling out a chair and sitting down.  “She didn’t know him.  She knows us. Clint might’ve been a better shot, but I don’t think he’s slept in the same place three nights in a row since you broke us out.”

Wanda stroked her fingertips over the edge of the blanket, a pattern of red coils over a blue background, and listened to the sound of her own breathing, feeling her chest expand and relax without anything getting in its way.  It was a luxury she hadn’t fully appreciated before their time in the Raft, the straitjacket strapped so tightly around her arms and chest that each breath came up short.

“We’ve gotta at least get her talking again,” Steve said, the staccato rap of his fingers on the table a steady backdrop to his voice.  

“Then she needs someone to talk to,” Sam said.  “And it clearly ain’t gonna be either of us, or she’d’ve done it by now.  Who else can we try?”

Steve sighed, fingers rattling to a stop. “Thor’s good at this sort of thing, if we can get him back on Earth for more than twenty minutes.  Otherwise we’ll need to get someone from Stark’s team. She and Nat were pretty good friends. Vision helped pull her out of it after her brother died—he was the one who found her after she collapsed.”

“Vision, huh?” Sam mused.  “He’s still Stark’s pet robot, though, isn’t he?”

Steve made a non-committal sort of noise.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know if he knows.  Wanda likes him, though, and he was worried about her on the tarmac.  He might come if I told him the situation.”

Wanda blinked, and when she opened her eyes she was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, wavering on her feet, the blanket still wrapped around her.  She wasn’t entirely sure how she’d gotten there—her mind had been doing this lately, clipping out bits of time and leaving her confused in the aftermath. It was frustrating, beyond the thick fog of numbness that seemed wrapped around her mind.

“Hey, kid,” Sam said, appearing at her side and resting an arm over her shoulders gently.  “Did you hear us talking?”  She slowly dragged her eyes away from the table to look at him, meeting his eyes. “D’you want to see one of the others? Like Nat, maybe, or Robocop?” Vaguely, she felt her lips twitch up at the nickname—it made Vision crazy, in a very polite, mildly confused sort of way.  She felt Sam nod over her head at Steve, and let him herd her away into her bedroom.

She didn’t expect them to actually go through with it.  She barely gave it another moment of thought, focusing on trying to make her voice work when Sam and Steve spoke to her.  They were good about not getting frustrated, about making sure that she was taken care of even if she wasn’t up to doing it herself.  Sam was a good cook even though Captain America was a bona fide disaster at the stove, and Steve had been braiding her hair for her since breaking them out, his fingers quick and deft as he wove the dark locks together.

“I used to do this for the chorus girls,” he said two days later when Sam asked, in the tone of someone who had been repressing his curiosity for weeks.  “Figured it was a handy skill to have.  Am I pulling too hard, Wanda?”  She took a moment to realize he was speaking to her, a small smile on her lips at the mental image of tall, muscled Steve with his lip between his teeth as a dainty chorus girl taught him how to do a French braid.  She gave a tiny shake of her head and he resumed braiding, twisting individual pieces loosely before winding them into the plait.  

“Chorus girls,” Sam said, seeming to consider the words, and Steve laughed as he finished the braid and tied it off, letting it drape over her shoulder.

“Yeah, they were real suspicious of me for the first couple weeks,” he said, his old Brooklyn accent getting thicker the way it always did when he talked about his past.  Wanda didn’t blame the girls for being wary—most guys built like Steve were musclebound jackasses.  “But, uh, they came ‘round and we got along great.”

“They ‘came around,’” Sam repeated, arching an eyebrow at Steve, and Steve cracked a smirk.

“A’right, so I beat the shit out of a guy for tryin’ to get his hand up Gracie’s skirt and makin’ her scream,” he admitted. “After that, they weren’t so suspicious anymore.”

The knock on the door almost made Wanda jump out of her skin, but Sam and Steve didn’t seem surprised.

“It’s all right, Wanda,” Steve said, his accent lightening into the blander twenty-first century version he usually put on. She was oddly flattered that he let himself drop into his old accent around her.  “I’ll go see who it is.”  He stood, walking around the short wall hiding the front door, and Sam replaced him at Wanda’s side.  “Hey,” Steve said in surprise.  “We were expecting…not you.  Does Stark know you’re here?”

“Not as such,” a familiar voice said, and Wanda stopped breathing, one hand clinging to Sam’s sleeve.  He stood up and she followed automatically, half-hiding behind him. “I said I was going for a brief trip and that I might be two or three days.  Is Wanda here?”  She had never heard the smooth voice so tense and strained.

“Yeah,” Steve said.  “Come on in.”

The Vision looked uncertain of his welcome, but he followed Steve into the room, and Sam carefully pried Wanda’s hand off of his sleeve.

“It’s going to be all right, kid,” Sam said.  “Vision’s your friend, right?  You trust him?”  She nodded slowly, eyes still fixed on the android.  “Okay,” Sam said cheerfully.  “Steve and I are gonna be in the kitchen.  You two play nice now.”  He caught Steve by the elbow and marched him efficiently out of the room.

Vision moved carefully across the room to where Wanda stood and stopped outside arm’s reach, so that she could get away if she wanted to.  He was dressed in civilian clothes rather than his usual cloak and costume, and his silver-ringed eyes were spinning with the start-stop sort of motion Wanda recognized as his ‘I am totally lost’ expression.  She sank down onto the couch again, and Vision knelt in front of her, so that she had the advantage of height on him.

“Hello, Wanda,” he said quietly.  “Captain Rogers and Staff Sargent Wilson told me that you have not been speaking since you left the Raft.  Do you mind that I am here?”  She gave a small shake of her head and Vision’s lips turned up minutely.  He sat in silence for a moment, then said, “I am glad to see that you are not there anymore, Wanda.  That place…you did not belong there.”  He reached out hesitantly and she let him take her hand in his—Vision ran warm, almost always, and his touch was as soothing as a hot water bottle against her skin.  He turned her hand over in his as if handling something fragile and precious, like a butterfly or a crystal.

“I am sorry,” he said, “for what I did. Attempting to keep you in the compound. I believed that it would protect you from somewhere worse, like the Raft, but I was wrong.  I hope you can forgive me.”  Wanda sat still for a moment, trying to breathe through the revelation of that.  His betrayal had almost disappeared in the chaos that had followed, but now she remembered the feeling of shock that he, of all people, was trying to keep her confined. She considered it, and let out a silent sigh, reaching out with her free hand and stroking her fingers down the line of his jaw, quick and light.  She earned another one of his small smiles and returned it cautiously.

The room was quiet for another few moments, the only sounds Wanda’s breathing and the low hum of Vision’s mechanics.  “You know,” he said, and she looked back to his face.  “I thought I was malfunctioning, but it seems that I am simply developing more emotional range than I had initially anticipated.”  She blinked at him, bemused, and he continued, “During the fight on the tarmac, I was supposed to be focused on combat.  I am designed for combat, it should have been effortless, but I was…distracted.”  Wanda cocked her head at him and he gave a rueful smile.  “I was supposed to be concentrating on the fight, but instead all I could think was that I almost lost you.  That I was losing you, no matter what happened.”

Wanda sighed again, and turned her hand over to squeeze his.  He bent his head until it rested against her wrist, bowed over her hand, and she hesitantly lowered her own hand onto the nape of his neck, the red synthskin smooth against her fingers.  They sat like that for a long few minutes, the Mind Gem a hard point of contact against her skin.  The gem pulsed, picking up speed to match the pulse ticking beneath the skin of her wrist, and his fingers gently inscribed a circle over the dent at the base of her palm.

“I am glad that I was wrong,” Vision said—whispered, really.  Wanda stroked her hand down the line of his neck, feeling his synthskin slide against her palm, and he straightened up, rising to his feet.  Her hands fell away from him as he took a small step back and she curled them into her lap again.  “I should leave,” he said, regretful.  “You must be tired, and I–”

“No,” she blurted, her voice rough and cracked from lack of use.  Her hand flew out for the first time in weeks and red light wound around his wrist, pulling him inexorably back into her grip.  He looked stunned, and she heard something heavy crash to the floor in the kitchen—almost certainly Steve, who was an inveterate eavesdropper.  As she pulled Vision back to sit beside her, his arm wrapped in red light, Sam and Steve appeared in the door as if summoned from thin air.  “Please,” she said, wrapping her hand around his wrist instead.  “Don’t leave me.”

Vision seemed startled, but it faded into a soft smile almost at once.  “As you wish, Wanda.”