A couple of years (or about 100 chapters) ago

"Can I h… can I help you?"

The thing that the Vision found most unexpected about his new life, perceived through his own two cyber-blue eyes, was colour. There was a thought experiment in a particular school of philosophy, he knew, called Mary's Room: the room itself and everything in it was black and white, and Mary, its sole occupant, learned everything there was to know about colour from a black and white book and a black-and-white television with a black-and-white screen. But when she first left the room, when she saw the rose growing with blood-red, sunset-red petals outside her front door, she realised she knew very little at all…

The girl (Eva Kresk, her nametag said) watched him from her side of the counter with eyes that were inarguably green. If humanity had a colour, the Vision thought, it would be green; the colour of nature, growth and cycles. The green would fade and die sometimes, but it always returned next spring. Unlike the blue of sky and screens, eternal and cool, synthetic to the green's organic –

"Sir?"

He blinked. There was so much thinking to be done, now that he had a brain to do it with. "Sorry," he said, in a voice he was not yet used to hearing. "It's my turn to do the coffee run."

Mr Stark – or was it Tony, now? – had sent him out with a grin that the Vision did not entirely trust. His last memory before being ushered out of the half-ruined Avengers Tower was of Miss Potts' slightly worried expression. The others said it would be good for him, to gain some human experience outside of them before moving to the new headquarters in a couple of weeks. The Vision was quietly grateful for that. They kept laughing at him at odd moments, and he wondered if it was he had said something that sounded not quite… not quite right.

The crumpled piece of paper was slightly rough against his freshly made fingertips. He passed it over into the coffee girl's hand, which was clean and with nails that were bitten down to the beds, and watched as she wedged it under the bar of the chrome monstrosity that he supposed was the coffee machine.

"First time, huh?" she asked him with a very unimpressed look; the Vision, who was so used to being stared at in awe and terror, found it really rather refreshing. "Haven't seen you in here before."

"That's because I'm only two days old," he explained, or at least tried to.

The girl didn't even bat an eyelid. "That'll be it, then," she replied, with the slightly scathing undertone the Vision had already grown used to whenever someone replied to him after he said something apparently odd. But she did not laugh like the others had.

The girl looked young, and when she wasn't looking at him her head was bowed and her shoulders hunched, as though she wanted to take up as little room as possible. "I assume you had something to do with the near-Armageddon scenario that went down yesterday, then?" she asked, glancing back at him as her hands blurred on the machine.

The Vision felt a small twinge of guilt (a new feeling, and not a pleasant one), and picked up a business card as he avoided Eva Kresk's gaze. This piece of paper was glossy, smoother than the list, and a brown colour that was so dark it became oddly bright. The glyphs printed onto it assumed the order of words and sentences in a way he was still amazed happened. Back when he had been JARVIS, the language was either there, or it wasn't. He didn't perceive it as he did this; he merely knew it, without the information having been translated into this physical form. But now he was perceiving things, which meant he was involved in this human world now, with all its frailties and miracles.

"I was quite heavily involved, yes," he said, returning the card to its messy pile and carefully shuffling them into a neat stack.

The girl faltered for a millisecond over the machine. It such a fleeting moment any other being would surely have missed it. "You were one of the good guys, then?" she asked with ever-so-slight trepidation. "This isn't your punishment for trying to kill everybody, doing all Iron Man's powder monkey jobs?"

The Vision laughed, quite simply because he had never heard anybody talk about Tony Stark like that before. "No," he said, "I was one of the…" How had she put it? It had been such a human, almost fairytale way of dividing the chess pieces in the fight for Sokovia. "… One of the good guys."

"Well, congratulations on winning," she told him with a completely straight face as the machine juddered into the next phase of its cycle. "I think people might've actually been worried for a moment."

"Ah," he said, "I can understand how watching people get into an altercation that has nothing to do with them on the other side of the globe might be stressful."

The girl rolled her eyes. "Nothing wrong with a little empathy."

"Of course there isn't. Empathy is what makes you human, after all."

Eva Kresk laughed softly, shaking her head as she skimmed the foam off the top of the cups. The Vision watched as her eyes flicked to each one, counting them. "Banner not feeling thirsty today, then?"

The Vision thought of the Hulk's glaring absence. "I'm afraid I couldn't say," he said, unclasping the other hand which held a crisp hundred-dollar bill. His fingers brushed against the girl's for a moment, and his heart leapt at the sparse human contact. It was amazing even having a heart to leap. "Keep the change."

"Thanks," she said in a monotone voice, dropping the money into the till. "Enjoy your drinks."

It was a colloquialism, he was sure, and it took a moment for the Vision to understand what she was saying. "Oh, none of these are mine. I don't drink, you see." At least, he didn't think so.

The girl raised an eyebrow. "Then why are you doing the coffee run?"

"Mr Stark said I might enjoy it."

"And did you?" she asked, rather sharply.

He held her gaze steadily, green on blue. There was something about the girl that fascinated him. She seemed as though she really didn't want to be in this world, this world that was so new and awe-inspiring to him. The Vision thought of Ultron's condemnation of their kind, how they tore themselves apart and killed their own over nothing.

A thing isn't beautiful because it lasts, he had said. The green will die, but grow again next spring, brighter and more alive than it had done before.

The Vision, created to save the world, faced Eva Kresk, who didn't want to be a part of it. And he smiled.

"Yes," he said, "I suppose I did."

She grinned back at him, a slightly wonky, imperfect grin that set her face alight. "Have a nice day."

If the Vision could save the world, then he would be damned if he couldn't save the beautiful human mess that was Eva Kresk, too.

A/N a milestone chapter - this escalated a lot more than I thought it would back in 2015 and I can't imagine stopping any time soon. What's your favourite chapter so far? Are you one of those gosh-darned Evasion shippers? Do you still hate Security Pete? Let me know in the reviews, I read all of them and love doing it. Happy New Year, nerds. Thanks for everything.