Moments before he had woken, Vision had been immersed in a dark space.
It was like a dark, empty parallel universe. There were no walls, no ceiling. He couldn't see the floor but he was walking on one, cold and smooth like black glass. It was infinite blackness, like the void of space, still and lifeless.
The silence began to lessen as a strange whispering crept into his hearing. He turned, seeing something rather odd. About twenty feet ahead of him, was a door. His brow furrowed at the absurdity, the impossibility of it. This wasn't right. This disobeyed all the laws of physics. Black spaces like this just did not exist in the real world, and random doors didn't just exist within them, jammed into the invisible glass floor like a shovel in the earth.
He began approaching slowly, cautiously, as if he were walking on thin ice. The door scared him, but at the same time, he was drawn to it, unable to stop himself as he drew closer. There were two old fashioned lamps floating either side of it, and it was a door made of polished wood with the number seventeen on it, and a heavy antique handle. He didn't recall ever setting foot in such a building, but he knew it was a hotel room door.
From beneath the door there were three lights seeping out. For the most part, there was a cloud of swirling red energy, with a single beam of yellow moving back and forth like a skylight.
There were also flecks of green amongst the red and yellow light, swirling backwards and forwards like a malfunctioning clock. Even though he knew what the red light was - her magic, the same flame used against him - the mysterious green frightened him more.
The whispering beginning to grow more audible. His breathing, his synthetic heartbeat, and the murmur of his circuits drowned out as he listened to the sounds. That was his voice. A woman's voice. Other people speaking.
He leaned against the door, trying to hear better. He heard whispered conversations, the sound of rain, explosions, and soft footsteps. The echoes of laughter, crying, and screaming. His red hand twitched forward, reaching slowly for the handle.
"It's time..."
"No. I can't..."
His fingertips were resting on the cold metal of the brass handle, and he felt it tremble slightly. He turned it a fraction, before there was a thunderous crash and the lamps flickered erratically. Vision snatched his hand back as the door shuddered violently, as if something were bashing against the other side, desperately trying to get out.
He jolted awake, sitting up in a panic, gasping as if he actually needed air. He looked around, feeling the presence of someone, as if someone had been standing above him, even if they are gone now. No. Nobody was here except for a few pigeons, looking at him in curiosity, cooing to each other.
He breathed a sigh, not quite of relief. He peered over the roof edge and across Edinburgh, trying to forget about the mysterious door. He felt a lot safer up here, out of sight, even if he was exposed to the elements. He shivered, drawing his arms and knees closer as a cold wind passed.
When he regained consciousness, he had found himself floating in the middle of the ocean. If he were human he would have surely drowned or frozen to death in the freezing waters, but no, he wasn't human, and he knew that. It had taken him hours to recover from the intense cold that had seeped through his entire body during his unconscious state. He had phased inside a ship cargo hold, and shivered for hours amongst the shipping containers.
Vision had stayed on the ship for a few days as it carried him across the Atlantic. It was a fast moving ship, more advanced than most, so he had gotten to Europe quickly. As he flew into the fog surrounding the ship, something inside him called out, and then an unseen force had pulled him north, made him fly into a country with lots of clouds and mountains. He had flown for almost a day straight until finally, he found the place that was calling him. Edinburgh.
The 'blueprint' was the existing pool of memory, random facts and common knowledge he had regained over the last few days. It told him that he could probably stay on the roof indefinitely if he so wanted to. He was physically incapable of getting sick or freezing to death, he didn't need food or water. He didn't necessarily need sleep either, or not a lot of it, but it was a comfort - a comfort at least when he didn't dream. A few hours rest from his busy, confused mind. A distraction from the voices inside his head going round and round.
The last few months were a haze, a blur of sound and movements. He had forgotten about what happened in the bunker, over the last few months. For now, he had forgotten fleeing in fear, forgotten what he saw in that river. There were random images inside his head to distract him. Voices would call to him and he would hear conversations from faraway, as if he was overhearing them from the other side of a wall.
"I know you're still in there, Vizh. You know me. You know you do."
He felt his heart thud a little as he heard her voice, partially from fear, and another emotion he couldn't place. Wanda. He had heard someone say it, but something told him that even if he hadn't heard that, he would have still known her name. It was a name he had always known, even before he met her.
Vision lifted his hand to his neck. It felt so strange to be free of the cold metal collar, to no longer hear the icy voice of the scientist inside his head. She - he had heard someone call her Josephine - had been the first face he had seen when he woke up the first time, and immediately, he had been terrified. Her grey eyes were cold and unfeeling, the window to a soul filled with anger, and that was before he was locked inside a dark room and not released until last week.
This stranger, Wanda, had freed him. Her face haunted his mind every moment of when he was awake, and he had heard her voice in every dream. It was a voice he had heard before, with the distinct accent. He struggled to pinpoint where it came from. A random word spontaneously emerged from his memory.
...Sokovia. He consulted the blueprint, and it told him that it was a country in Eastern Europe. For a moment, he didn't think it was anywhere special, just a country of origin. Then the stone burned, as if he had been touched by a live wire. In his mind, he saw a tall, menacing metal being. A city, falling from the sky. A young man with silver hair, laying dead and covered with bullet holes...
He kept seeing flashes - but he couldn't tell whether it was real. What if the scientist or Wanda were messing with his brain? Wanda didn't seem to want to hurt him - she had saved him, removing the collar. But if that was true, why had she tried to kill him? Was her intention sinister or not? Was that image of her in a forest real?
The stone continued to burn painfully as he thought about her, forcing that red fire into his head and into every cell in his body. "Stop." He muttered to himself, covering the stone with his hand, and after a few moments, the pain subsided.
Vision looked over the roof edge into the street below. It was late in the evening and a mist was descending over the city. There were still many people walking along and going about their day as it drew to a close. Maybe he could wait until nightfall...
The stone twinged slightly, uncomfortably. No, he couldn't stay up here a moment longer. Walking would take his mind off the confusion. Maybe he would find out why he was drawn to Edinburgh, of all places.
As silent as a ghost, he phased through into the empty church itself, passing a dusty mirror. He passed it and then retreated, turning to look at himself. You can't walk around looking like this. If anyone sees you... Vision remembered the icy voice of Josephine. Human form, she would say.
He concentrated. He watched as his red skin began to change colour, turning pale, the stone in his head disappearing. Short blonde hair appeared where the metal of his scalp would be. The gears in his eyes disappeared as human eyes emerged, and a black overcoat and trousers replaced his suit.
Vision frowned at his forehead. This form could not hide the lines. In his disguise, the lines resembled a strange birthmark or scar, with greyish skin in place of the fine lines. He went to feel it, but then changed his mind, dropping his hand. Touching it felt wrong. As if it were a healing burn. A hood formed to cover his head, hiding most of the mark.
He tried to open the door, to find it locked, a heavy padlock on the inside. He paused. He could just phase through it, but then, what if someone outside spotted him? Feeling a little bad, Vision took hold of the padlock and crushed it, tossing it to the floor before letting himself out into the street.
Walking through the cold streets, Vision began to wonder whatever had possessed him to come here. He had gone through so much trouble to get here, why? He looked around at the old buildings, the vast puddles in the roads from recent rainfall.
Nobody noticed him, the solemn figure walking in all black. People jostled past, laughing, chatting, some of them pausing to take pictures of the buildings. He passed by a small crowd of people standing in front of a coffee shop called The Elephant House. "This is where she wrote the books!" He overheard one of them exclaim, excitedly.
Vision tried to remember who they were referring to, but he couldn't. This wasn't one of the random facts and some common knowledge like this stored in his memory. But he felt like he should know, as he felt as if he'd walked this street before. Like it had just slipped his mind... He glanced ahead at the hill in the distance. This one he knew. That was Edinburgh Castle, he knew for sure.
He passed a family, and a young boy standing by his mother turned to look at Vision. The child stared at his forehead, having no concept of subtly yet. His mother glanced down at him and then to see what he was looking at, and she pulled the boy by the shoulder. "It's rude to stare, honey." She whispered in a reprimanding tone, but Vision heard.
Suddenly feeling very self conscious, Vision turned his face away. He hurried past, keeping his head down so nobody would see it. It did look rather unusual - like a very strange scar, a ragged circle filled with uneven grey lines. His mind began racing as he thought about it, as he failed to remember what he had seen in the river. Something had caused the lines. The scars -
Vision didn't notice the crate in his path until it caught his knee. Both he and the box went flying as he crashed to the floor, face first amongst the oranges he had sent rolling across the ground. He lay there on the cobblestones in shock for a few moments, before a voice with a Scottish accent made him jump.
"Christ! Are you alright?" A greying man with glasses, the stall owner, rushed to help him up.
"S-sorry." He stammered, pulling away from the man as he helped him to his feet. "I was... very distracted."
"Clearly, mate. You walked straight into my box of oranges..." He registered the fruit scattered across the pavement.
"I'm so sorry - let me pick all this up..." Vision began recovering some of the oranges, as the man had already begun to do so.
"Not to worry. No harm done. Nobody eats the skins anyway. You hit the ground hard though, are you sure you're okay? No cuts or scrapes at all?" The man said, eyes scouring Vision for cuts or bruises, and looking surprised when he saw there wasn't even a scratch. His eyes moved to his forehead, and for a moment he looked concerned.
"It's a -" Vision desperately consulted the blueprint for the word he was looking for. "Birthmark."
"Ah, I see. You know they say that a birthmark is a sign of your cause of death in a previous life?"
Vision felt the stone twinge painfully in his head at this sentence, and he tried not to flinch. "That's very interesting. Again, I'm sorry about your oranges.. I really must be more careful... "
"It's okay, my friend. Everyone's a bit scatter brained since the blip. I guess you got blipped too, huh?"
"I'm sorry, what?"
"No need to apologise, at least none of them went down the drain." The genuine question flew over the man's head as he rescued another orange from the pavement. He chuckled to himself. "I must say I was like that too, when I came back. One minute my grandson is playing with his Iron Man action figures, then I came back five years later and he's a teenager and Iron Man is dead. I was very confused when I blipped back into existence. Birthdays are going to a nightmare this year."
Five years? Iron Man?
Vision had many questions, but he had a feeling that asking the man would make him seem very stupid. The way the man spoke about it, as though it were something he should certainly know. The man paused to look at him, a look of genuine concern on his face.
"Are you sure you're alright, mate? You look... very lost."
"I... I'm not sure. I think I'm looking for someone." Vision said, absent mindedly, handing him the last orange before walking away in a daze, leaving the stall owner looking very confused.