Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Victor had a body now. Well, kind of: he had a clunky, obviously robotic metal frame that he could maneuver mostly normally hooked up to his completely human looking head. He'd felt a little self-conscious at first, worried that the form he was using to walk around the Hostel dipped a little too close to the uncanny valley, but nobody had said anything, so he figured he was in the clear. If anything, reactions had seemed positive.

Gert seemed especially happy that he had a body now. While the sharp edges and hard planes of the metal frame obviously weren't completely, 100% ideal for either of them, Victor was pretty sure that if they ever wanted to, he could still—

Anyway, he could pick up a pen now. He could write! He could jot down notes when studying old Pride books with Gert. He could help make lists for shopping, whenever Chase or Nico were ready to go out on a supply run. He could write little reminders on sticky notes to put on Molly's door, whenever she had something to do that everyone else was pretty sure she wouldn't remember. He could write… letters.

Letters. He had been thinking about that pretty much since he woke up months ago to the sound of his old friend's voices. Because he had been dead (asleep?) all that time, it felt as if only minutes had past since he'd been killed. So he'd left the Arlington courthouse jail with unfinished business. And while Victor felt that in many ways, it would have been better for the world if he hadn't come back to life, there was one thing that he was at least glad he got the chance to do.

He had to write to Viv. Well, he didn't have to, and maybe he even shouldn't, but he felt like it wasn't right to just go completely radio silent after all that had happened. What was she even up to? Was she still in school? Was she angry? Sad? Did she know that he was alive?

If she found out, would she be as incensed as the rest of her family had been that first time?

And so Victor had gotten a set of stationary from Molly, a ballpoint pen from Gert, and tried his best to remember the address he needed to send the letter to. He'd told the others not to come into his room for a while, said he'd be working on something important. He'd turned off all the lights but a singular lamp to illuminate the page. He'd sat down in the chair, pulled it in close to the desk, took a second instinctively adjusting himself to be comfortable even when he knew the steel frame wouldn't feel the hard wood the same way his old body had.

It felt ceremonial. So much setup for something that should be as simple as writing a letter to his niece. At first, he didn't want to admit it to himself, but maybe that was because he was stalling.

There was no more stalling.

Even if he didn't need to breathe, Victor was used to inhaling long and slow to gather his thoughts and reinforce himself before doing something stressful. In, out, deeply, until he felt less like his head was going to explode. He picked up the ballpoint. He touched it to the cute, mascot-decorated stationary.

Dear Viv,

No. She wouldn't want him to speak to her with that kind of familiarity after what had happened. Victor shook his head, crumpled up the adorable paper, and threw it in the wastebasket. He picked up another sheet and started writing again.

Viv Vision,

It's your uncle Victor. I'm alive (not by choice.)

Was that okay? Straight and to the point, right? I mean, how many different ways even were there to open up a letter like this?

You definitely don't have to respond to this. You can crumple this letter up, throw it out, burn it, whatever. All I'm going to ask is that you read it, at least once. Please.

Victor's brow furrowed. Was this pathetic? Did he sound desperate? If it was pathetic and desperate, was that a good thing or a bad thing? Or did it totally not matter at all, as long as he got across what he needed to say? He wasn't doing this to ask for forgiveness. He was doing this to do the right thing.

He tried to ignore the tightness in his throat as he moved on to the next line.

It's been a while since… you know

He shook his head. No, he'd better not skirt around the issue. That was not taking responsibility.

It's been a while since… you know what happened with your brother.

Still not right.

It's been a while since… you know what happened with your brother since I killed your brother.

He might as well say it how it was. Even if his hand shook when he wrote the word as the memories came flooding back, the crackling sound of supercharged lightning replaying in his ears, there was no reason to say anything other than that he had straight up killed Vin.

Saying that I'm sorry would be the understatement of the century. Not a single day ever goes by where I don't think about what I did to your brother. I know (we both know?) it was an accident, but I think that fact probably matters to me about as much as it mattered to your parents.

Victor's metal hand went up to cup the back of his neck, like he used to do when he was nervous and had an actual body. It was cold against his remaining "human" skin.

He was pretty sure that he was steering the letter too much towards the direction of self-pity. Like he was the one who had lost a brother (well, in a way, he did, but that was also his own fault.)

He doubted she wanted to hear any of that crap, not from him.

Either way, I'm sorry. That's something I never got the chance to say to you, and it's something you deserve to hear. Even when I know it doesn't cut it.

But I hope you're doing well.

Hope you're doing well? He hoped she was doing well? Victor smacked his own forehead, groaning. What was he even writing? That wasn't something you put in a letter to someone where you're apologizing for killing their family member. I hope you've managed to get a full night's sleep at least semi-regularly and that flashbacks to what happened don't haunt your waking hours would have been more apt.

Why was he even doing this? He knew she wouldn't respond. He definitely knew she wouldn't forgive him. He wasn't sure she even wanted an apology.

He looked down at the page on the desk below him, rereading all that he had jotted down up to this point. It was wallowing and horribly written, with occasional messy letters trailing off in one direction or another from his hand shaking as he wrote. He didn't know what else to write. He wasn't sure if there was anything else to write. But there was still space there, at the bottom of the page, that had to be filled. And the only way out was through.

Victor tried to summon to mind something, anything honest to say to her that didn't sound pathetic, or groveling, or like he was trying to guilt trip. But was it really guilt tripping when he was being honest about how he felt? When it was true that almost anything out in the world— the sound of crackling electricity, the dull humming of Vibranium, the smell of something burning or even William fucking Shakespeare— could set his mind barrelling back in time to the time he'd killed and innocent kid?

The longer he dwelled on the topic, the more his eyes started to cloud up and the harder it was to think of anything other than Vin, suspended in the air, held by the electricity wound around him but not steadily enough to not hurt him. Of Vision and his wife, walking in on the scene, horrified as Victor himself could do nothing but curl up in the corner repeating the same words again and again. How at that moment, he had known it was the end of—

Ah. There was something.

His hand moved so quickly in writing the last sentences that he was sure it would have cramped had it not been made of metal.

If this means anything, I enjoyed the time I spent with you all, regardless of my true reasons for being there. I wish that I could have gotten to know you all better, on something closer to my own terms. As family.

Victor signed the letter as quickly as he could, pushing the paper out of the way right as the first tear fell from his eyes and on to the smooth wood below him. More came. Resting his head on the desk, he let them flow. Sniffles grew into quiet sobs, his throat tight from holding in what might be a scream.

That... wasn't ideal. He had hoped to send the letter tonight, but he knew he was in no state to go to the post office. He didn't know why he had expected any different.

Chapter Text

Viv rarely found letters in the Visions' mailbox addressed specifically to her. Why would she, when she hardly ever signed up for mailing lists and she could contact all of her friends needing nothing but her own internal processor? The only things she was used to seeing arrive in the mailbox with her own name on the shipping label were occasional packages from online shopping and the school news. Letters were new.

She didn't have the faintest idea of who had sent it. The letter was held by a light pink envelope, the kind that one would slide a flashy birthday card into before sealing with a sticker in the shape of a star or heart. That suggested someone young having sent it. But the writing on the center of the letter, spelling out the address it had been sent to as well as Viv's name, was neat, the work of someone old enough to have been taking notes for classes. Her full name was written out— "Vivian Vision," not just Viv— suggesting it was someone that she did not count among her friends. But still, it was someone who knew her address, and that was not something she made readily available.

The return address was easy enough to find in seconds simply by scanning the internet. It belonged to a PO box in Los Angeles, registered under the name Stein. That wasn't a name she recognized.

That was somewhat worrying. A letter addressed to her from a place she didn't recognize under a name belonging to nobody she knew could be any number of things, many of them unsavory. Threats, blackmail, and baseless accusations were things that the Champions received not infrequently, although they had never been sent directly to her house. It was pertinent that she open the letter immediately. She rushed to her room.

The stationary on which the letter was written matched the childish appearance of the envelope, pastel colored and decorated with mascot characters. The handwriting, however, remained clean and legible until the very end, when it became messy and harder to read. Viv's eyes, in her curiosity, immediately jumped to the bottom of the page, where the letter was signed shakily in black pen.

Regards,

Victor Mancha

That had not been on her limited list of guesses as to who the letter could be from.

If Viv had still been human, there would be no doubt that her thoughts would immediately be those of sadness, or fear, or anger. But her emotional core was disengaged as of now, and she had only one thought in her mind— she couldn't let her father find out about this.

Viv got up and locked her door to show she wanted to be left alone. Although the Vision could, in theory, phase through the walls to enter her room at any time, he had begun to respect her desire for her own space more after their rift had been mended. Now, he generally tried the door first to see if it was locked. Not because he couldn't get in, but because the two had established that a locked door meant a need for privacy.

He had promised to respect that in every case but emergencies. As far as Viv was aware, lying was not a core part of his programming.

Viv sat down to read.

The letter started out addressing her by her full name the same way the envelope did. Generally speaking, Viv knew this was not the "proper" way to address a letter to someone you knew outside of a professional capacity. It was certainly not how one addressed family, though Viv wasn't sure that word really applied here. He hadn't been so much as mentioned in the household since Vin had died. Since he had died, too, although that apparently didn't stick.

Viv read through the first paragraph of the letter quickly, digesting the information at the lightning-fast rate that her synthezoid brain allowed her to. In less than a second, she processed the words for their meanings, strung out what they meant all together, and internalized the message.

Uncle Victor. Alive, but not by choice. He had given her permission to burn the letter or throw it out, not that she needed it his consent to get rid of the letter if she so desired. He implored her to read it to the end, like he expected her to throw it out as soon as she had seen who it was from.

Perhaps the old her, from before she had disengaged her emotional core, would have. But she had no intention of doing that. She had been given something to read, and she would read it to the end. The letter wasn't particularly long, anyway.

Unsurprisingly, Victor brought up Vin's death almost immediately, although it looked like it took him a couple of tries to find the "right" wording. It appeared that he didn't find the first way he had written it direct enough, and had written it again, and then a third time, until he landed on the truth in its purest form: "since I killed your brother."

It struck Viv as strange that it had taken him three tries to reach such a point. Did he not remember things correctly at first, separated to a degree from the events by a sort of misty curtain just as she was? Was he at first unsure how to phrase it? Or was he simply skirting around the topic, the way humans often did when avoiding situations they considered uncomfortable?

Viv recalled that even though he was a creation of Ultron similar to her father, Victor was neither human nor synthezoid. Perhaps he occupied a space in between, with a mind like that of her human teammates on the Champions and a body similarly artificial to hers.

She read on.

After the acknowledgement, Victor immediately began with an apology. It was long, rambling, and emotional, though perhaps not overly so for the situation being discussed. Humans did not react well to having made mistakes, and particularly so ones that hurt others. She had observed this in her teammates on multiple occasions. And seeing that as far as she knew, none of them had accidentally killed a family member with their own two hands, it would be reasonable to expect the reaction to an event of that sort would be similar to Ms. Marvel's guilty breakdowns, magnified several times over.

Conclusion when taken at face value: her uncle felt guilty over what had happened to Vin. Noted.

The letter continued, telling her that Victor hoped she was doing well. An interesting choice.

Conclusion when taken at face value: he did not wish her any harm. Noted.

Viv's eyes traveled down to the final paragraph on the page, sitting centimeters above the signature that had first caught her eye. This final paragraph was where the pen marks became harder to read, even trailing off erratically at points, as if the hand holding the pen had been trembling.

Conclusion when taken at face value: the act of writing the letter had elicited a strong emotional response. Noted.

If this means anything, I enjoyed the time I spent with you all, regardless of my true reasons for being there. I wish that I could have gotten to know you all better, on something closer to my own terms. As family.

Viv stared at the page for a moment longer than she needed to in order to simply read the words. Processing.

Conclusion when taken at face value: he wished that he could still count them among his family.

Viv shook her head. An unrealistic wish. She knew that her father would likely have confiscated the letter if he had found it first, not letting her even get the chance to see it. The probability of him ever getting back into the good graces of her father was close to zero.

The probability of him ever getting back into her good graces was also low. She had read the letter, because she saw no reason not to, but everything she knew about common thought processes, behavior, and emotions told her that "forgiveness" was not something the average person was likely to extend in a situation like this.

Even if recalling the deaths of her father and mother no longer elicited emotional distress from her, simple logic stated that Victor Mancha was not to be forgiven.

But it did not mean that she wouldn't write back.