this is going to be a stupid question, and he’s going to get a ‘no’, probably. but if there’s anyone else in this lifetime, that could even figure out what he’s feeling, despite there being a thousand other people who could build up a destructive cosmos, it would be her.
he gives her another short lived look. it’s a little tired.
it’s….it’s a bad day. it has been, and no one has to be arguing against him, or throwing the city into ruin for it to be a bad day. it just is. and he’s taking it as it comes. wanda’s soft approach is appreciated for it, and he feels welcomed in a home he didn’t grow up in. just because she’s here, and she’s trying. he tries not to think about what it would have been like, to watch morning cartoons on her sofa, or do homework at her kitchen table. if they’d even have normal lives like that at all.
he attempts to fit words together, so it doesn’t sound like a betrayal, or an accusation. he’s supported her, and defended her ( and will, with tooth and nail, if he has to ) and he can’t stop now.
“you didn’t know— what i was, did you?”
he can’t dance around this subject. it scares him too much. he hopes it doesn’t show.
“not about being your son, or my powers, i mean…about me being this demiurge. somehow”
it’s like turning down a light, the tentative notion in his eyes growing hard and the crease of his brow more prominent, it’s not her fault, but it’s his. for being…whatever he’s going to be. he’s a crossroads for history and future, apparently, and it’s hard to think about when he’s failed before. not that she’d know. or that anyone could figure; that feeling when the threads of reality are interwoven with his own, and then pulled and pulled and plucked at by some facade, a parasite playing the fibers of his body like un-tuned strings, leaving him bruises. can you bruise a feeling? or a thought? it was intrusive, and he’d fled.
he’d tried his best on his own. he couldn’t do it on his own. and he can’t. not yet anyway. but he doesn’t have to. and that’s. it’s something. it’s hope.
The question catches Wanda by surprise.
If she’s being honest with herself, she sometimes has a hard time picturing him as anything but her son; sometimes he’s a toddler running around a little house in New Jersey with his brother, sometimes he’s a brave young man sitting outside Avengers Mansion wishing he was as strong as she already knows him to be, sometimes he’s the impulsive teenager who invaded Latveria and somehow managed to rescue her in the process. Throughout it all, though...he’s always her baby, even when he’s not. She wonders a part of her will always see him that way.
And picturing him as some great cosmic being...it’s foreign, hard to visualise even though she has never doubted the extent or depths of his power.
“Why don’t you sit down?” she asked after a moment had passed, gesturing toward the couch and closing the door behind him without answering the question.