Chapter 33: The Scream
Is it true my love
has finally come to see me,
or am I dreaming?
Am I sane? Or is she
An invention of my needing?
~Anonymous, Manyoshu 2917, from Only Companion: Japanese Poems of Love and Longing, trans. Sam Hamill
Once inside the Source, Wanda's mind was bombarded with horrifying, bizarre images, things beyond her imagination. She struggled to ignore them, rejecting the reality of them. She rejected everything she saw, trusted entirely to the mind perception she'd gained from her exposure to the power of the Mind Stone. She could sense the attacks coming, could destroy the filaments of the Source before they reached her.
This was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. With a ball of energy around herself she was shielded, and everything she touched of it shriveled away, but it was so unfathomably huge.
She'd been inside it for at least twenty minutes. She had never sustained her full power for this long and could feel herself weakening, flagging.
And suddenly she saw it. She could no longer see the physical world, or even the illusions it threw at her trying to drive her insane, she just saw it—the Source in its full, horrifying glory. It looped around itself in ways that didn't seem possible, like an Escher artwork, but once her mind accepted that, she could see it was a fractal pattern, repeating as it spread outward, its symmetries building upon themselves, strands connecting it to every mind louse it had sent out. There had to be millions of them.
She saw something in the nature of this entity that led her to an epiphany about her power. The Infinity Stones, as she'd learned from Thor when he brought Vision to life Dr. Banner when Thanos first attacked, were the Power Stone, the Time Stone, the Space Stone, the Reality Stone, the Soul Stone, and the Mind Stone. They had been formed in the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe. Since her powers had been given to her by the Mind Stone, it made sense that they allowed her to sense people's minds and trigger the cascade of memories and visions that HYDRA had taught her to use as psychological attacks, but she'd often wondered why her powers allowed her to move physical objects that obviously didn't have minds. Now she could see it: power, time, space, reality, soul, mind—these were just words, labels someone came up with to try to describe things more ancient than any language, more complex than any words could contain. Just as time, space, and power filled every single point in the universe, so did the others. The Mind Stone didn't affect minds: there was something deeper, the material that consciousness was formed from, what minds were made of.
That material was what the Source was made of, and what it ate. It was a matter of entropy: to digest minds, it increased disorder in them to increase order in itself. And she was destroying it because her chaotic power returned its order to disorder. She was essentially disorganizing the mind material it was made of.
Now that she could see it clearly, she could discern its structure. With her powers she could see deep inside it, to the heart of it, the source of the Source, the nexus holding it together.
She shot toward that point, slicing her way through its convexities, cutting through it with renewed fury and focus.
And it pushed back against her harder than it ever had before. Physically and mentally.
She felt something around her finger. She glanced down and saw a dark blue string wrapped around her left ring finger.
Now she remembered:
She'd pulled a loose thread off Vision's passport and wrapped it around her finger, using her power to fuse it into a ring. She looked at it and whispered "I do."
She opened her eyes. She was still in that old house in Edinburgh.
It had all been a dream, a hallucination. She had finally gone insane and imagined Strange and Wong had come to her. Of course it wasn't real; it was delusional to think she was needed, or even useful, that she and she alone could save the world. She was too damaged, too psychologically ill, to be any use to anyone.
This was where she was, what her life had come to.
Vision—Red Ultron—was hollow. A delusion. A product of her own desperation, her own insanity, creating from nothing a simulacrum of her lost beloved.
But now that she realized it wasn't real, maybe she could wake up from it, regain her sanity, start living her life again, accept that Vision was really gone, forever, and learn to live without him. If it wasn't already too late. If she wasn't already too far gone.
No, wait...she wasn't in Edinburgh. She was still in that cell in the Raft.
Solitary confinement had driven her insane. She'd only hallucinated that Steve came to rescue them. That Vizh had ever felt for her the way she felt for him...
No! That was true! What they had together, however briefly, was real!
Refusing to believe reality was another kind of insanity. It had her. The Source had her.
She lashed out. She could see it again, now. It was enveloping her, holding her fast, wrapping her like a bug in a spider's web. She couldn't move.
She screamed.
One of the sorcerer's portals opened a few meter away, deep inside the Source, and a streak of red and gold shot out of it. Shields of mystic energy buttressed her, pushing away the tendrils that had imprisoned her. She began to fall, but felt strong yet gentle arms wrap around her.
She looked into Vision's face, and into his mind. He was real—not the same Vision she had known before, and not exactly Red Ultron, but someone new, a blending of both. He was real, and he loved her, and she loved him.
What the hell was he doing here?
"We need to go," he said.
Before she could argue, or agree that he was right, he was torn away from her. Rather, they were torn apart as the Source attacked them both. Wanda fought back, destroying every tendril that grasped at her. She saw Vision form shields of light between his hands to sever and repulse the tendrils coming at him.
But that made no sense; that was a sorcerer's spell.
She formed a protective ball of energy around herself and moved toward him. Before she could reach him, the attacking tendrils overwhelmed him, wrapping him. She could see them push inside his brain, could feel them invading his mind, doing to him what they'd just done to her.
With Red Ultron's past, the things he'd seen and the things he'd done, what horrors could the Source fashion from his mind to torment him? It would destroy him, tear his beautiful mind to shreds.
It was physically engulfing him, swallowing him deeper into itself.
"No!" she screamed. If this apocalypse required a sacrifice to avert, it would be her. Not him. Not this time.
Drawing on a well of power beyond her, she channeled it outward, shooting it through her.
The Source was taking Vision from her, torturing him, trying to destroy him.
How dare it!
She shot to the heart of it, the place she'd glimpsed before, its nexus point, the keystone of its structure.
She ripped it apart.
She incinerated it.
The Source began to untangle, unravel. Her senses were blasted with a mental scream of distress, desperation. Dying.
Where was Vision? Where was he? She couldn't see him. She couldn't sense him.
She couldn't sense anything over the scream.
She passed out.