I just had a thought which made me sad.

Hayward only got away with what he said/did with Vision because Tony is dead.

Hayward told Wanda “I can’t let you have 3 billion dollars of vibranium to put in a hole in the ground” but Tony would have let her. Tony would have seen Vision as a person first.

Now obviously Tony wasn’t snapped and Vision was removed from the Wakandan battlefield somehow and got to Sword pre-Endgame. When Wanda came back from being dusted, he wasn’t there.

BUT Tony was in space when the Wakanda battle went down. He didn’t get back until some time later and he was in bad shape for a bit. I’m guessing perhaps Cap and the remaining Avengers brought Vision’s body back to the tower and Sword took it from them. Tony walked away from the Avengers, and by Morgan’s age Pepper was pregnant pretty quickly. I don’t think Tony would have let Sword take Vision if he knew about it, but I’m guessing he didn’t.

Tony was busy grieving for Peter, and trying to put some kind of life back together with Pepper. Also knowing Tony he was probably trying to fix the world, to deal with the logistics of half the population randomly vanishing and all that meant. I mean it was random who got dusted and that would have meant chaos. Experts, leaders, entire teams who take care of important stuff like power stations – big holes in infrastructure. He had a lot on his plate.

If Tony had lived then when Wanda immediately went looking for Vision to mourn him post-Endgame, he would have helped her. He would have found Vision at Sword and he would have moved heaven and earth to give Vision his dignity as a person – not just as a machine.

Hayward dismissed Wanda basically as “upset family member” who didn’t have the clout to argue. She wasn’t a citizen in Civil War (I remember Tony saying something about how they don’t give green cards to weapons, which suggests that he fought hard for Wanda’s legal rights and had trouble). She has that history as a fugitive post-Civil War (though that was presumably rescinded post-snap because Cap can move about freely). Whereas Tony is Tony Stark, head of Stark Industries, with more money than Midas and Pepper’s rolodex of important people to call.

I miss Tony 🙁