Chapter 2
Wanda sits opposite Vision, and her fingers frame his face. Her thumbs curl under his eyes, thumbnails lightly pressed against his nose. Her fingertips graze over the stone on his brow, fleeting repeatings of touch. With each touch the stone pulses. With each touch Vision sinks deeper into his mind, and Wanda's eyes glow brighter.
Her mind is a dancing mantra, singing Pietro, Pietro, Pietro over and over in the shadowed space of her mind. Vision's mind is a great net of neurons around them, warping into and out of her mind with each grazing touch over the stone on his brow. Each time the net passes into her cathedral it illuminates brighter, allows her to spot specks of blue and silver tucked behind pillars, or hidden between pews.
Wanda tugs each piece of blue and silver closer, forms them into a single nested egg of light, a thing glowing like the moon. Sometimes the pieces she collects in are tiny, as small as a mote of dust, and other times they are huge, just hidden by some part of the structure of her mind. Wanda's thumbs stroke over the stone on Vision's brow, and his golden net of illumination shines still brighter.
This is odd, he says, at one point, and Wanda's fingers pause their repetition.
Do you want to stop?
Vision's voice is warm as he replies, No. It is quite pleasant to see my mind so clearly.
Wanda's cathedral smiles around them, glowing scarlet, gold and red as blood, and when her fingers graze over his stone again her mind is illuminated more clearly than ever.
When each brightening pulse shows no more silver or blue, Wanda counts out how much of her brother's mind was kept within hers. It is not all of it, not as she had hoped and prayed, but it is still much of what he was, of how he was. The fragments contain his humour and his seriousness, contain memories he had given her of moments she had not been with him and contain, above all, his perspective. As her sighing joy sings through her mind the golden candles flicker, but do not go out.
Is it enough? Vision asks.
Yes, Wanda sends. I think so. But- We'll be making his body anew won't we? He's been in the ground too long to put him in the Cradle.
Yes.
There is a scream, echoing up from the depths of Wanda's mind, and all Vision can compare it to is the wave of weeping red when Wanda lost her brother.
Eventually, it ends, choked off into sobs, and pulsing black over the rich scarlet of Wanda's mind. Vision sends magenta tendrils down their half-formed rope-bridge.
Wanda?
Her voice is haggard when her mind speaks. The brain won't have memory-echoes.
Vision sends only a query.
Memory-echoes… the framework the memories remained in. It could plausibly fill in the gaps from memories missed. They had me replace memories stolen from people in training, and if there was a memory-echo it could fill itself in with only a little, but to put it into a different mind the entire memory had to go in. Wanda's scarlet wraps around the orb of blue and silver, tendrils cradling each and every part of it. This is all I have left of my brother now, and to have a hope to bring him back I will have to give up it all. No copy-memories, no trace-memories. Every single one, completely, and we don't even know if it will work entirely right, and if it fails then I've not just lost my brother forever, I've lost all trace of him.
Vision's tendrils stretch gently toward Wanda's winged thoughtform. Well, he says, and his voice is soft. I suppose we must not fail then.
It takes time for them to remake Pietro's body, and to ensure he would live once the Cradle had finished its work. This was not like Vision, a being born of technology and metal and mingled with flesh. This is a human, flesh, blood and bone, and while Doctor Cho has healed human bodies before, and made Vision from nothing, making a human is a different dance entirely.
Some days, during the setting up, Wanda sits in the Cradle room. She knows where the Cradle will sit, how big it will be, what it looks like. She knows where the cryo-tank with the DNA samples will sit, where the ancillary units for both will stand. The room is away from the other Cradles, the medical Cradles, and Wanda is almost glad that her brother will not be brought back in the midst of illness and injury.
When the sample is put into the Cradle Vision stands by Wanda as she watches. The outline of the body forms rapidly, lit up by the outlining lights, and Wanda murmurs quietly, "That is how you looked before you were made."
Vision does not ask, but his quirked brow is enough for her to send over the memories she had asked of Doctor Cho, who had seen it closer, and ones from her own mind.
"It will not be long now," he says. "And you will have your brother back."
"Or a not-brother. It may not work. I may have warped the memories with how long I have kept them. I may have missed a part that's essential. I may send him his memory of my memory, silvered from his mind and not meant to stay-," Vision's hand runs gently over Wanda's shoulder.
"Worrying," He says, "Will not help at this point, I think." They watch the forming body in silence, watch face and body and limbs take shape, and take a breath. Vision half-smiles. "Nos vivere saluto," he says. "We who are about to live salute you."
It pains Wanda to give up her brother's memories to the not-brother in the Cradle. The mind is empty as she sends them threading over down the fresh-made bridge. Blue covers it, from the not-brother's end, and Wanda has to summon up memories of the old bond, the true bond, to be sure they are different.
Behind her, directly behind, not canted right or left, Vision stands. His hands hold her arms, hold her upright, while Snowsmoke holds her hand as tightly as she holds his. Thor paces with his hammer, the Widow and Stark help Doctor Cho with the tech. Wanda watches all their minds dance and feels like a lone column of scarlet and crimson, giving up her treasured, meagre silver.
Andrej's thumb rubs a cold line over her hand as the first memory goes. It is one Wanda knows well - the first moments of the first connection - but letting it go forces a sob, and a tear. Andrej's thumb runs over her hand and Wanda anchors herself with its coldness. The next memory she pulls up from the depths, one she has never looked at but simply knows, and sends it spinning down the connection to the fresh-made mind.
It is easier to let go of that one.
Wanda has to leave after she has sent the last of the memories over. She feels bereft, alone, in a way she did not before, without her brother's memories there. Snowsmoke follows, briefly, but leaves when Wanda's lashing scarlet makes the lights flicker. Wanda curls on her bed, in her room, and feels out the gashes and the gaps left by sending those memories to the not-brother.
She kept the connection to the not-brother's mind. She needs to, to know if it truly is Pietro when they wake him and not some doppelganger and to be able to stop him if he is a false creature, to wrest her brother's memories back from the not-brother so they are safe in her mind again.
She curls, small in the corner, and feels the humming of the silver-and-blue mind, feels it speed, feels lightning strike it awake. Wanda watches the new-woken mind, and feels as though her mind is hugged when bright blue thought bowls down the bridge and into her great cavernous cathedral.
Wanda! Where are you?
The thoughts of her brother's mind are more ideas than words but they are his and Wanda sobs with a golden-glad relief. The thoughts and directions she sends him are golden-tinted too, and it is only seconds before he is at her door. His hospital scrubs hang slightly oddly, as though he had pulled them on in a hurry, and Wanda launches herself from her bed, into her brother's arms.
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