Westview Life

Have you ever loved someone so much that even thinking of being without them felt impossible? That is the feeling at the very center of this story. It is a soft, strange, wondrous story — a little bit sad and a little bit beautiful — and it begins on the worst day of Wanda Maximoff's life.

Vision was gone. He had been gone for a while. Wanda had walked away from a very hard goodbye, and she did not know how to put herself back together. So one quiet morning, she got into her car and drove. She did not really know where she was going. She just drove. And eventually, almost without meaning to, she pulled off the highway and turned onto a quiet little road and arrived at a small empty lot in a small ordinary town called Westview, New Jersey.

Westview had a Main Street. It had a bakery, a grocery store, and a fire station. It had picket fences and tidy lawns. It looked like every American town in every old television show ever made. Wanda got out of her car. She stood in the empty lot. And the balloon of sadness inside her chest grew so big and so heavy that her magic — which had always been a little wild, a little uncontrollable, especially when she was hurting — did something it had never done before.

WHOOOOSH.

A great red dome of magic rose up out of the ground and wrapped itself all the way around the town of Westview, sealing it off from the rest of the world. From outside, the dome looked like an enormous shimmering bubble. You could not see in. You could not get in. The Hex, they would later call it. Wanda's Hex.

And inside the Hex — oh, inside the Hex was a place like nowhere else in the world.

Inside the Hex, everything had been turned into a SITCOM. You know what a sitcom is? It's an old kind of television show — a "situation comedy" — where a family lives in a tidy little house and things go cheerfully wrong and there is a laugh track in the background. Ha ha ha. That kind of show. And the whole town of Westview, with all its neighbors and all its mailboxes and all its picket fences, had been gently rewritten into one.

And right at the center of the sitcom, standing in the doorway of a small house at 2800 Sherwood Drive, wearing a suit and a tie, holding a briefcase — was Vision. Alive again.

The Hex was generous about time. It did not stay in one decade. It moved.

On the first day, the whole show was 1950s. Everything was black-and-white. Vision came home from work and called out, "Honey, I'm home!" in his calm British voice. Wanda fluttered around the kitchen in a polka-dot apron, trying to cook a dinner she had never made before. The neighbors — a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Hart — came over for dinner, and the magic gently rearranged Mr. Hart's questions whenever they got too close to the truth.

On the second day, the show jumped forward. Suddenly it was 1960s — in COLOR now. Vision wore a sweater vest and rode a BICYCLE to work, ringing the little bell on the handlebars as he passed the neighbors. Wanda had a beehive hairdo. The house had groovy yellow wallpaper. The laugh track was perkier.

Then 1970s. Then 1980s. Then 1990s. Then 2000s. Each decade brought new haircuts, new clothes, new music, new wallpaper. Vision tried each one with the same patient, polite smile, as if he had been ready for every fashion ever invented.

And then, somewhere in the middle of the week — POOF! — Wanda was suddenly pregnant! And POOF POOF — twin baby boys arrived! Tommy and Billy! Two beautiful little boys with chubby cheeks and bright eyes. The whole neighborhood barely had time to bring casseroles.

And because time inside the Hex was very strange, the babies did not stay babies for long. By that afternoon they were toddlers. By dinnertime they were five years old. By bedtime they were TEN. Two ten-year-old boys with backpacks and big front teeth, sitting at the breakfast table eating cereal.

Tommy could run very fast. ZOOOOOM! He was a blur. One second he was on the couch, the next second he was on the porch. The next second he was in the kitchen. He inherited a little bit of his Aunt Pietro's super-speed, even though he had never met her.

Billy was quieter. Billy could do small bits of magic — tiny red sparkles that danced around his fingers when he concentrated. Sometimes he could hear his mom thinking. He sat next to Vision at the dinner table and asked very thoughtful questions about everything.

And Vision — oh, Vision LOVED those boys.

He loved them with the same calm, steady, careful love he had once given the Avengers, only now stretched bigger and softer to fit a family. He flipped pancakes on Saturday mornings. He read bedtime stories in his gentle British voice, doing different voices for every character. He gave Tommy serious advice about not running so fast that he forgot to look around. He gave Billy serious advice about being kind even when no one was watching. He kissed Wanda good night. He kissed Wanda good morning. He fixed the leaky kitchen faucet. He was, in short, the best dad anybody could ever ask for.

But Vision was also a very thoughtful person. He always had been. He noticed things.

He noticed that the neighbors smiled too brightly. He noticed that the clocks all ticked at exactly the same tick. He noticed that sometimes — when a neighbor was talking to him — they would stop in the middle of a sentence, blinking, until Wanda gave a tiny wave from across the room and they snapped back into the story.

And he noticed that he did not remember how he had gotten to Westview.

One quiet evening, after Tommy and Billy were tucked into bed, Vision and Wanda sat together on the porch swing. CREAK. CREAK. CREAK. The sun was setting behind the houses across the street. A neighbor was watering her petunias. Somewhere, a dog barked.

Vision turned to Wanda. He took her hand. And in the gentlest voice he had, he asked the question he had been holding inside all week.

"Wanda. What is outside Westview?"

Wanda did not have a good answer.

Because the truth was hard, and the truth was sad, and the truth would mean the Hex couldn't last. Outside the red dome, the rest of the world was still spinning. S.W.O.R.D. agents in trucks had set up camp around the edge. A brilliant young woman named Monica Rambeau had walked right through the Hex wall to try to help. And the Vision who came home for dinner every night — the Vision who was reading bedtime stories upstairs to Tommy and Billy at that very moment — was not exactly the same Vision who had been gone. He was a Vision made of love and memory and red magic, given a temporary, beautiful, impossible body inside the bubble.

But here is the wonderful part — the part you must remember.

For one week. One bittersweet, golden, impossible little week — Vision got to be a husband. And a dad. He came home from work. He kissed his wife. He read his sons bedtime stories. He flipped pancakes on Saturday mornings. He gave careful advice about being kind. He had a porch swing and a leaky faucet and a calm British voice that said "Honey, I'm home" every evening just as the streetlights came on.

He had a whole life. A whole, ordinary, beautiful, sitcom-perfect life. And even though it could not last forever, while it lasted, on a quiet street in a quiet town in New Jersey — it was the happiest place in the whole entire world.

And that is more than most people ever get to have.