For @littlestartopaz: 34 - Vision/Wanda
When you’re around I don’t know how to hide my feelings. I count in binary, in my head. zero one one zero one one and you count clouds. (while you count clouds)
So it was going to be a stand-alone Vision/Wanda thing but then I started it after eight hours of researching WWI and??? Instead it’s an immediate prequel to the first Vision/Wanda fic I ever wrote, it’s mostly Natasha being smug, and Wanda doesn’t even appear, I don’t know what happened.
Natasha prided herself on being difficult to sneak up on. It had served her well for their brief stint in Wakanda, but now they were in America again, scattered up the East Coast, and she was sitting on the roof of one of her less secret safehouses, watching the sun go down. And any dense half-blind idiot could see a six-foot bright red robot in a cape descending onto a roof in Middle of Nowhere, Appalachia.
The only reason she didn’t immediately yank out the gun she’d tucked away under the corner of her blanket was because Stark, Banner, and Rhodes were all about as subtle as…well, a six-foot bright red robot in a cape. She was confident that she’d notice them coming, and if she didn’t they deserved to cuff her.
“Vision,” Natasha said, neutral, as he hovered in front of her. He looked…uncertain.
“Agent Romanoff.” Natasha arched an eyebrow wordlessly at him and he smiled faintly. “I come in peace.”
“How did you find me?” She gestured lightly to the roof and he folded himself down beside her, with the careful precision she recognized as his not quite sure what to do attitude. Wanda had been good at cajoling him out of that stiffness, but…well. Natasha was a bit too prone to that sort of scrupulously human movement herself, to be any good at making others feel at ease.
“I retain a significant portion of my predecessor’s data banks, although not his memory,” Vision said, as easily honest as ever. “I eliminated the places where I knew you had safehouses, and the places where the Avengers have been known to congregate. I assumed you would remain in the United States given that Agent Barton has his obligations in New York City and I’ve never known you two to be on different continents if you weren’t on a mission. I cross-referenced your preferred climate and environment with locations which were sufficiently isolated to allow you to relax. Then I…guessed. This is the fifth location I’ve swept for a house that fit your usual safehouse criteria.” He paused. “I believe I may have discovered a cult at the previous location, I alerted the local authorities.”
Natasha muffled a laugh in one hand and shook her head, tipping her face up to the sky. “And what do you want, Vision? Come to bring me in for letting a couple of fugitives go? It’s not my fault you couldn’t stop them.”
“No, I’m not here as an Avenger,” he said. A crease appeared in his forehead, beneath the Mind Gem, and he said slowly, “I need…advice.”
“About people?”
That, at least, she knew how to do. Vision was observant, but his emotional and interpersonal skills weren’t up to scratch with his intelligence. Natasha had more control over both of those areas than she was strictly comfortable with, so she was usually his preferred translator if Wanda wasn’t available. Although Natasha had to think that Wanda was probably easier to find than she was.
“I believe there is a glitch in my system,” Vision said after a moment, looking out over the landscape as if he was human enough to be unwilling to meet her eyes.
“I’m a hacker, not an engineer,” was Natasha’s first response. “And I didn’t think you could glitch, with the.” She gestured at her own forehead.
“I believe there is an overload in my data processing abilities,” he pressed, and he sounded uncertain, like a child. “I have encountered circumstances in which I struggle to maintain an appropriate balance in my private thoughts and my actions.”
Natasha, because even after all this she was still more or less the same person Clint had dragged out of the Red Room and volunteered to be locked up with for a month while she sorted her shit out, took a moment to consider the potentially horrible outcomes of that sentence. Vision was virtually indestructible, a power level even Wanda could barely match—if he lost impulse control, they were probably all dead. She tabled that thought for further consideration and discussion the next time she saw Clint, and politely asked, “Which circumstances? What happens?”
“It’s as if one thought takes immediate precedence over every other,” Vision said, looking over at her with genuine distress in his face. “I become…distracted, and it affects my precision in combat. Colonol Rhodes’ injury could have been prevented if I was aware of this flaw sooner.”
“Colonol Rhodes?” Natasha reviewed the fight on the tarmac, hasty, and kept her face still as she slowly said, “This…glitch. It happened when you believed that Wanda was hurt, right?”
“Yes,” he said.
Natasha nodded and—very generously, in her opinion—didn’t laugh. “And this glitch, when else has it happened?”
“I was attempting to cook a meal, for Wanda,” he said. “And again, when Agent Barton attempted to take her from the base. I was…upset, worried for her, both times, and I could not manage my affect appropriately.”
“Succeeded in taking her from the base,” Natasha corrected, a little arch, because she was allowed to be proud of her idiot partner. “So, were there other times? Like, oh…” She stretched out her legs and wiggled her toes over the edge of the roof, letting a smile touch her face. “When you were happy, or enjoying yourself? What about when you were helping Wanda figure out how to fly?”
Relief washed visibly over him, and he nodded. “Yes!”
“You’re not glitching,” she told him, eyes crinkling in a grin. “Or at least no more than most people.”
“Impossible,” he said, brow furrowing again. “I should be capable of managing my own systems, I am an advanced artificial intelligence. This…distraction should not occur.”
“You might be advanced tech, but you’re still a person and you’re having person-problems. I sympathize,” Natasha sighed, stretching out on her back and folding her arms under her head, closing her eyes. Vision made a quiet whirr beside her, all his systems in perfect sync. “My diagnosis is that you have a crush, Vision. On Wanda.”
“A ‘crush,’” he repeated carefully.
“An emotional attachment with a romantic element.”
“I know what a crush is, thank you, Agent Romanoff.” He sat quietly for another moment. “And…what am I supposed to do about it?”
“Not much to do,” she said. “You sure as hell aren’t going to fix it with a software patch, although I’d understand if you tried.”
“What would you do, in my place?” he asked.
Natasha did laugh, then. “Well,” she said frankly, “I panicked and almost got killed in a shootout in Budapest while the object of my affections shouted obscenities at me over our comms, and then fucked him in a hotel room. He’d tell you I’m not much of a resource on these things—and if you ever tell Stark what I just told you,” she added, opening one eye to look at him, “I’ll find a way to pry your component atoms apart my own damn self, are we clear?”
“I had assumed Agent Barton informed you of that.”
“You assume correctly,” she said, closing her eyes again. “Just go visit her, Vision. She’s lonely, she’s a mess after the Raft, and it’s going to be cold enough to snow, soon. Take her flying. Kiss her, if that’s what you’re interested in. She and the fossil and Wings are in the City somewhere.”
“You expect me to find them myself, I take it,” he said.
“I’m thirty miles from anything in the middle of the Appalachians, do I look like I know where they are? I’m on a goddamn holiday.” She felt the shift as he rose to his feet and opened her eyes to grin at him again. “Make sure you come and tell me everything, afterward.”
“I will, Agent Romanoff,” he said, cracking a small smile of his own.
“And you can call me Natasha.”
“Natasha,” he said, almost shy. “And thank you.”
