Teamwork Vision

The strangest friendships are the ones that begin with the same gem.

Wanda Maximoff first encountered the Mind Stone in a HYDRA laboratory in Sokovia, when she was brave enough and desperate enough to volunteer for experiments that should have been impossible to survive. The Stone found what was already in her and opened it — red and brilliant and chaotic. She was changed forever by it, in ways she was still discovering years later.

Vision was created by it. The Mind Stone sat in his forehead and sparked his first thought, his first word, his first choice to be on the side of life. He had been alive for less than a minute when he picked up Mjolnir and handed it back to Thor, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if worthiness were something he had simply arrived with.

They found each other slowly. Not the way stories sometimes describe — not in a flash of recognition or a grand gesture. In small things. Vision tried to cook Wanda Sokovian paprikash on a quiet evening at the Avengers compound, and it did not come out right. It did not come out right the second time either, or the third. But Wanda always laughed. Not a polite laugh — a real one, surprised out of her. And Vision discovered that making her laugh was something he wanted to keep doing, which was a new kind of discovery for a being who could process ten thousand outcomes per second.

Can you picture it? A pink-and-silver synthezoid standing in a kitchen in an Avengers compound, very carefully reading a recipe for a dish from a country that had been partially destroyed in a battle he had helped end, bringing it to someone who had lost her family in that same country, hoping the paprikash would be right this time. It never was. But they had dinner anyway.

Then the Sokovia Accords divided the Avengers — a disagreement about how heroes should be accountable to the world, and it broke the team into two sides. Vision stayed at the compound, and for a complicated, reluctant time, he kept Wanda from leaving, because the government had asked him to. He did not want to. He could not explain to her how much he did not want to. But he did it, because he believed the rule of law mattered more than any individual's freedom, even his own.

Wanda chose Captain America's side anyway. And so they ended up at a German airport, trying very carefully not to hurt each other while everyone around them was fighting hard.

"I don't want to hurt you," Vision told her.

"I know," Wanda said. And then she used her chaos magic to do something rather spectacular, and the fight was what it was.

The hardest moment came later. In Wakanda. Thanos was coming, and Vision had known for a long time what it would mean. He found Wanda and told her what he needed her to do — destroy the Mind Stone, destroy the gem in his forehead, the gem that had first woken her gifts and first given him life, the gem that connected them before they even knew each other's names.

"It's not fair," she said.

"No," he agreed. "But you're the only one who can do it. And I trust you."

Wanda placed her palm over the yellow gem in Vision's forehead. Her hands were shaking. Red light blazed between her fingers. She wept. She did the hardest thing anyone had ever asked her to do, and she did it because she loved him, and he was right — she was the only one who could.

Real teamwork, Vision had said once, is doing the hardest thing for the friend at your side, and trusting them to do the same for you.

He had been right about that. He was right about most things, in his careful, deliberate way. And even though Thanos reversed the moment and took the Stone anyway — even though Vision was gone — what Wanda had done lived in her. Not as grief only. As something else too. A reminder that love is not just a feeling. It is a choice you make, over and over, sometimes at great cost, because the person beside you is worth it.

They had been connected by the same gem since before they met. They would be connected by it long after the gem was gone.