Chapter Text
The excitement was palpable as he took the safety off the dart gun and aimed for the monkey. In its one paw was a stuffed banana. The other clung to a branch. In his 10 years of hunting the monkey, the banana had always proved the perfect trap.
He fired the dart gun, and the monkey let go of the tree at the same moment. Vision tucked the gun into the khaki tactical vest pocket, removed his pith hat, and retrieved his binoculars.
There, on the lecture hall floor, laid a very tranquilized monkey.
Also, a very dusty monkey. He made a mental note to shake the stuffed animal clean before the next class demonstration.
“Alright, class.” He jogged down the stairs of the lecture hall, the arena seating half full with excited students filming the experiment. “What have we learned?”
No one answered. He took the dart gun from his pocket and placed it on the demonstration table beside his hat.
He saw everyone’s cameras still out, waiting for him to interact with the stuffed animal further. After ten years of teaching physics, he thought he would have gotten used to the extra enthusiasm of experiment days. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have great fun with them too—his outfit readily demonstrated that—but it was supposed to get them excited about Newton’s Laws, not filmography.
The projection above him showed his laptop screen with polling results. “More than half of you said that if the monkey dropped out of the tree at the same moment the gun was fired, the bullet would miss. Before us lies a dead monkey. At least a quarter of you knows why.”
Crickets. He picked up the monkey and removed the dart before heading to the whiteboard and picking out a red marker he knew had ink. “Last chance, class.”
“Gravity!” Someone yelled, and he jumped in surprise. It had been weeks since the last time anyone had participated. And several semesters since the participant was a woman. Not that they didn’t know the answers. From their exams, it was clear they more often did than the other genders. They just were much less loud about it.
“Yes!” Vision spun on his heel. “Who said that?”
100 heads turned towards the back of the room. He should have known.
“Oh, get out of here!” Vision cringed inwardly at how shrill he sounded. “You don’t even work in this department.”
Wanda shrugged. “The monkey and the bullet fall at the same rate. As long as your aim is right when you fire, the bullet will fall in parallel with the monkey and hit it where you aimed.”
Shaking his head, he finished writing down Newton’s first law as she spoke. So much for student engagement.
“Now, students, you be good to this man. He has at least three more rounds and two more bananas. Do not be tempted.” Wanda called back to the group as she exited the lecture hall. The class snickered at the prospect.
Vision waited for the door to close behind her. “Tenured professor. Dreadful how quickly the status can corrupt.” He smiled kindly to his students. “That being said, I do have three more rounds, and if one of you will come to the board and draw a diagram of how gravity pushed the dart, I will reset the experiment, redon my hat, and shoot the monkey again.”
Just under fifty percent of the class’ hands shot up.
She didn’t return to harass him during any other class section that week. It was driving him mad.
After the first incident of the statistics professor dropping by, he had spent his lunch hour preparing retorts. They ranged from “Ah, my next victim has arrived!” (Would imply shooting someone which was not a good look when teaching in America.) to “Professor Maximoff, what are the odds that you would get lost in the physics department yet again this week?” (He knew the answer—quite high. She seemed to get lost twice a month, the same frequency as he dressed up for elaborate demonstrations of science.) and his favorite, “If I didn’t know better, Wanda, I would think that your fixation on gravity is misplaced. It is obvious the only attraction you care to study is how you are drawn to my lectures regardless of your original vector.” (Too long. Also, it was only a hunch. A wishful, daydream of a hunch that all too often led to the next logical hypothetical of him marching up the stairs, taking two steps at a time, until he reached the top of the seating area and devoured her delicious, disruptive mouth in front of 100 camera phones.)
It had only been a semester since Wanda had taken over teaching the introduction to statistics class in the twin lecture hall beside his introduction to physics. Her instructional aides called her the chaos witch, and he was sure it was due to behavioral antics for the longest time. It made sense, what with her popping in and out of his lectures as though a guest star in a sitcom, shouting answers or heckling him. It was unprofessional, uncalled for, and unmistakably his highlight of any given day when it occurred.
“I don’t understand the problem.” Tony pushed the wall with his foot to spin his chair. The office they shared was as big as a postage stamp, barely able to hold a single chair for students that came by for office hours. “She obviously likes you or at least has a fetish for Englishmen in costume. Ask her out.”
“I’m sure there’s a rule against that.” Vision opened scribbled on a notepad he kept out to write equations on when tutoring students that reached out. “The dating portion not the fetish, although perhaps an unspoken rule also lies there.”
Tony picked up speed, his hair beginning to sway with the angular momentum. “Nope! No rules. I have personally checked and tested several times.”
Vision bit his tongue, easy retorts too easy to actually retort.
“Go tug on her pigtails. Interrupt one of her lectures. Preferably in costume. She’ll love it.”
A knock on the door frame paused the conversation, and Vision visibly relaxed. The white-haired and wise-cracking Tommy was the one to have come knocking, and he was a gifted student. So long as he applied, the department had already decided they would offer him a spot in their master’s program. Tony was banking on the young adult accepting—he had some ideas for a particle accelerator and proving how things went fast was right up Tommy’s alley. Vision had a particular fondness for the boy as well; when Thomas was a freshman, he had been the most engaged pupil ever to pass through his class. Now was the engagement productive? That was a different matter entirely.
But he was Ben Grimm’s outspoken problem now. Usually. He had taken a shine to Tony sophomore year, which meant dropping by at least once every week during office houses to shoot the breeze with his favorite professor.
“Are you still using that green and yellow thing?” Tommy tossed his backpack to the side and made himself at home in their guest chair. “That costume killed my girlfriend. And my boyfriend. It haunts me.”
Vision hoped he wasn’t blushing too hard.
“Wait, girlfriend and boyfriend? Like at the same time?” Tony stopped spinning.
Tommy shrugged. “I’m kind of a catch.”
Tony pointed a finger in the kid’s face and stared at Vision. “This kid gets it.”
“We are not having this conversation.” Vision undocked his laptop, tucking the electronic beneath his arm. “I’ll be in the kitchenette if a student needs me.”