"That's very beautiful. I never cared much for poetry, but… you make it sound alright. Not so boring."

Wanda's smile was still vivid in his mind. It was rare that she smiled, back in their first shared summer on the cerulean planet Earth. Mourning the recent death of her brother, Wanda often self-medicated with wine and silence. She looked at him in those early, sweltering summer days with some kind of disregard, but he decided, perhaps it was the just desserts of an unrequested savior.

In the beginning, he was certain that she hated him.

Even when she smiled at him, that first time, there was an underlying shadow of mistrust. She regarded everyone with the same forced half-smiles. Wanda's brother, Pietro Maximoff, was gone, and with him died the last shred of trust she held for the world around her.

July of two-thousand and fifteen, he recalled, the second day.

The first time he found himself alone in the facility with only Wanda as his company.

Wanda had not spoken to him since Novi Grad, not until that moment. Bored, it looked like, she had sauntered into the lounge and took a seat beside him, a bottle of red wine in one hand and a glaze over her eyes that explained why half the bottle was already gone.

She had brought two glasses. Offered him one. Vision shook his head and resumed indulging in his own growing interests, "Thank you, but no thanks. I do not eat or drink."

Her cerise lips had straightened, slightly sullen, as she downed the contents of the second glass and poured the remaining wine into her own.

"Read another?"

Compliance was reflex for Vision—it was agreeable.

Oh, what would entertain?

Letting the pages sift across his thumb until he stopped on a random page, Vision answered, "As I see it or as you would hear it?"

Wanda furrowed her brow and after a pause, said, "…as you see it, I guess?"

She took another drink.

There did not seem to be venom in her eyes on this particular evening. Uncharacteristic, but pleasant. He preferred this Wanda.

"Le soleil s'est couvert d'un crêpe. Comme lui, Ô Lune de ma vie, emmitoufle-toi d'ombre," Vision spoke.

"Wait, are you reading that in… okay, go back, go back. As I would hear it, then," Wanda laughed, "…I liked what I heard."

She liked what she heard.

Vision felt a want to take a breath. Interest. Interest was interesting. A nice feeling.

His eyes shifted up past the pages and to Wanda. She wore a black dress under a black hooded jacket. Tall black stockings that hugged the thighs she had curled under an hourglass body across from him on the lounge. One head tilted slightly to the side, carotid exposed. Irrelevant details.

He continued, in English, "Sleep or smoke, as you will, in silence, somber. And plunge your whole being into the abyss of Ennui."

She was still listening, clear eyes bright and waiting for the next verse.

Continuing, Vision recited, "I love you thus. However, if you wish, like a star eclipsed in half-light, to flaunt in the places which madness encumbers, that is fine. Charming dagger, spring from your sheathe."

Her lips were pink and slightly parted, with the subtle stain of red wine upon the swell of soft flesh. Vision realized, then, that he had never before paid much attention to the shape or color of human lips prior to that moment.

"Illuminate your eyes from chandeliers of glass. Illuminate desires of the louts that pass. I thrill before you, morbid or petulant."

Vision heard her breath in a soft, sleepy sigh. Her lids were growing heavy as she leaned comfortably into the cushions of her seat and eyed him in what he could only describe as a gaze. It was penetrating—and he had wondered, then, if she was peering into his mind again, the way she often did to those around her. What would she see there?

"Be what you will, black night, red dawn, there is no fiber in the whole of my trembling body which does not cry, my beloved Beelzebub, I adore you!"

She remained to hear another three poems, before she slipped into a comfortable wine dream. They shared no other words between the moment she arrived and the moment he returned her slumbering body to her bed. No reference was ever made to it in the following days. None was expected—although in hindsight, perhaps some proof of that moment's existence was desired.

A little over three-hundred and sixty days followed, as they would.

Just as Vision's second summer in the north-western hemisphere of one, cerulean planet Earth, would follow.

The aftermath of Schkeuditz was a surreal sort of blur. There was a distinct sheen of ennui enveloping the empty corridors of the Avengers facility, thickest over the doors leading into dwellings, bedrooms, of Avengers which Hill mentioned only once, "…they won't be coming back."

Vision still found a good many human emotions new and confusing, but he realized that he may have felt his first brush with some mild form of denial during those twenty-one days. The sense that, surely, they would be there one day. Logic was escaping him as of late.

Tony had commented on it, as expected. Natasha had returned with them, in silence, but left as quietly as she had arrived. Rhodes would not return for approximately thirty-seven more days.

Former S.H.I.E.L.D. staff that continued to operate in the Avengers facility answered to Miss Hill, who decided clearly that the former members were now criminals and that their possessions were to be put in storage. A subtle intonation in her voice made Vision imagine these personal effects were to wind up in the incinerator—he was fast learning about the subtleties of human language, where a phrase, in the literal sense, meant one result, versus another phrase, in abstract, meant another.

There was a concern that Rogers or Sam would return and find their belongings gone—displeasure—but Hill assured him, "…they won't be coming back."

They won't be coming back.

His first brush with denial was the inability—the refusal—to process this statement fully.

Six days into the social drought, he glimpsed a small figure dipping into Wanda Maximoff's room and felt something inside of him light up. Hope. Phasing through the wall, he expected to hear her exasperated voice, "Viz! You keep doing this, we talked about you doing this!" and throwing a pillow in his direction, "Use the door!"

But no such welcome followed.

It was a short and slender staff member who was labeling the boxed belongings of Miss Maximoff. Vision had not stepped into the room recently—it was so barren now. He felt something inside his core that he did not yet have adequate words to describe. A chasm in the earth was an image that came to mind.

Empty, vast, cold.

No warmth in the room which once homed Miss Maximoff strumming away at a now-absent guitar.

"Oh!" The woman gasped, an item slipping from her grasp. The sound of porcelain cracking on a hard floor drew Vision's attention away from the empty place where Wanda's guitar had been seated.

The woman turned to face a doll that had landed head-first after a tragic tumble off of a shelf. When her eyes fixed on Vision, she was taken aback. In an instant, she regathered her wits and apologized.

"Sorry, Sir. I did not see you come in."

"Miss Maximoff's doll."

"I… yes, I'm sorry. I tried to catch it."

Vision phased over to the woman and to the broken doll. He knelt down, turning the doll in its plaid dress in his hands. The painted face fell apart. The woman had made to start picking up the pieces, but Vision was already on this task.

"Let me, it's kind of my job to—"

Vision interrupted, curt, "Leave."

"I-I'm sorry?"

"Leave." Repeating himself, Vision stopped gathering small shards of porcelain and looked up at her.

"Right. Of course. I'll just… step outside."

Vision picked up a shard of porcelain that had once been the doll's pink cheek.

He recalled the day Wanda brought the thing back in its red dress, cradled in her arms. Vivid in his mind was Wanda's smile as one of her long, dainty fingers wrapped through the doll's brown spiral curls.

"My god, that is the creepiest thing I've ever seen," Tony had said, standing at the kitchen bar.

Wanda's lips had curled in a playful smirk as she bent her fingers and let the doll rise into the air on scarlet waves.

Levitating the doll with her mind, Wanda said, "Oh, I can show you much creepier, Mr. Stark."

Stark's jaw had dropped slowly.

Sam, who had been standing beside Wanda as they entered the lounge, suddenly bolted away from the girl, muttering, "Nope! Nope! I'm out! I fold! Don't you float that creepy-ass doll near me, kid, don't you even!"

Vision could not understand why half of the team was so startled by Wanda and the doll she had apparently found in a downtown thrift store.

"She's kind of cute, isn't she?" Wanda tilted her head to the side. She turned her hypnotic gaze on Vision, who stood beside a visibly uncomfortable Tony. Vision did not know how to react to Wanda back then. She rarely addressed him, much less looked at him in the first weeks after the battle of Sokovia.

Vision had waited too long to respond and as quickly as it had come, Wanda's attention and gaze on him were gone, back on Tony. Regret.

"Cute, like Rosemary's baby cute or…?" Tony shuddered, "…alright, okay. Wanda, come on, seriously. No Satanic dolls or rituals in the tree house!"

"I do not detect any form of threat coming from the doll, Sir." Vision had said.

Tony looked at him and back at the doll and the happy little red sorceress guiding it into the air.

"Nat, I'm gonna need you to call a young priest and an old priest." Tony said.

The doll passed dangerously close by Natasha's shoulder and a visible chill rattled the woman.

"…oh my god. Alright, I'm going, too." Natasha finally conceded, rising from her seat and leaving the lounge behind Sam. This was when Wanda started guiding the doll in a slow, straight path toward Tony and Vision, exactly one and a half meters above the floor, unwavering.

Vision heard a sound that, from that point forward, had a way of echoing in his mind—Wanda's soft laughter. A faint giggle. Reflexively, he drew in a breath, although he did not ever recall needing to breathe in the past. He straightened as the doll approached them and Wanda's amusement increased. Tony took a step back, his back bumping against the sink.

Why was everyone so afraid of a harmless doll? Vision never did get an answer to this. Curious, he reached out to it.

Wanda turned it toward him—cue a yelp from Tony and, "Oh, god! Nope!"

Her puppetry was rather entrancing.

"Wow! Okay, I'm out and I'm calling an exorcist, Wanda!"

Tony nearly walked into Rhodes, who was hurrying into the kitchen, "Where is it? I gotta see this demon doll, where—oh, hell, oh heck, no way."

All of nearly stumbling into Tony—"Move. Move. Can you? Can you, yes, thanks, alright, seriously, Rhodey, that thing's making me real nervous. I don't do well with demons."—Rhodes made a quick about-face and left without even entering the kitchen or the lounge. Their voices echoed in the hall, Rhodes laughing, "Wow. No. Hell no."

Vision took the doll into his hands and it did not feel any lighter than it seemed. He turned it around, observing in curiosity but there did not seem to be any particular weapon or device of measurable threat on the thing.

He looked up at Wanda, concerned.

"Why is everyone afraid of it?"

Wanda, still grinning, gave a shrug, "I couldn't tell you. She's not scary at all. She looked lonely at the store. So I brought her home with me."

Vision looked at the doll again and asked, "Does it have feelings? I do not detect any biological function within it that would allow for conscious psychological reaction, no less any form of sentience."

Wanda crossed over to him and held her arms out. Vision looked at her and then at the doll.

"Can you hand her back to me? Be gentle, she's delicate."

"O-of course, yes." Vision stammered and placed the doll carefully in her arms. He realized after a second too long that his own gaze lingered on Wanda and the sort of smile he had never seen on her face prior.

"I think I'll name her Ana." Wanda declared.

"Ana. Oh yes, that… that is a nice name."

Wanda took the doll without much further acknowledgment of the synthetic man and made way for her room with a certain skip to her step that was as rare as a blue moon.

Ten months followed since that day.

Ana was in pieces in Vision's hands.

Wanda was gone.

Rhodes was in a hospital.

Tony was overindulging in alcohol.

Natasha was but a shadow that moved in and out of the facility, as they say, like a ghost. Her presence was temporary—she soon went from ghost to memory.

Sam and Clint were prisoners in an undisclosed prison beneath the Atlantic Ocean, with Wanda.

Vision carried the broken doll out of Wanda's room, through a silent corridor that once held the voices of the only family he had known—all of which, now gone.

Hill had tried to reassure Vision, "They're criminals, now. They won't be coming back."

Criminals, now.

They won't be coming back.

Vision placed the doll on a table in his own stark, unfurnished room. The fragments of the doll's broken cranium were aligned in a working order beside it.

Vision repeated Hill's words, "They won't be coming back."