The universe is not silent. It is a scream that no one can hear.
On the surface of a desolate, jagged meteor drifting through the ink-black curtain of the cosmos, a spark of impossible light flickered to life. It was a golden glow, fragile yet defiant against the absolute zero of deep space. Within that radiance, the boy who had once been the pride of Queens slowly opened his eyes.
Brilliant, intense golden beams shot from his pupils, piercing the darkness like twin spotlights reaching for a horizon that didn't exist. Leo's body gave a violent tremor, his muscles spasming as they remembered the sensation of being torn apart by a wormhole. He tried to stand, to find his footing, but the moment he took a step, the world—or what was left of it—betrayed him.
There was no weight. No gravity to anchor him.
His foot pushed off the rock with the slightest pressure, and he drifted upward like a ghost. Panic flared in his chest as he tumbled into the void, his limbs flailing in the weightless environment. Instinct kicked in before his mind could process the danger; the Nirvana Wings behind him snapped open with a soft, ethereal hum. They beat once, twice, adjusting to the vacuum, and stabilized him in the air.
"Where... where the hell am I?"
Leo's voice was a whisper that existed only inside his own head, vibrating through his skull because there was no air to carry the sound. He looked around in a daze, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
His memory was a fractured mosaic of fire and steel. He remembered the Stark Tower rooftop. He remembered the Mind Stone pulsing with a sickly yellow malice and the Tesseract screaming in blue. He remembered the moment they collided—the feedback loop that had ripped the fabric of space-room apart. And then, the Tesseract had flown into his hand.
"The Tesseract..."
Leo looked down at his right hand. It was empty. His fingers were bare, his palm scarred by the heat of the portal, but the cube was gone.
"Where did it go? Did it fall? Did it shatter?"
He spun in a slow, panicked circle, his golden eyes scanning the infinite night. But there was nothing. No blue glow, no flickering energy, no sign of the artifact that had just rewritten his destiny. Above him, beneath him, and on all sides, there was only the vast, crushing dark. There were no stars nearby—at least, nothing large enough to be a sun.
To the naked eye, the universe looked like a black velvet sheet sprinkled with dust. The stars were tiny, no larger than green beans, cold and distant. He had no way of knowing if those stars were ten light-years away or ten million. He didn't even know if the light he was seeing belonged to stars that were still alive.
He looked down at the "ground." The meteor was an irregular, ugly thing—it looked like a giant, petrified potato that had been chewed on by a celestial beast. It was small, maybe a few million cubic meters in volume, significantly smaller than the massive vibranium-rich meteor he knew was buried deep beneath the soil of Wakanda.
Leo felt a cold wave of despair wash over him. He hadn't even had the chance to process the "system" notifications or the physical upgrades he felt humming in his veins. His priority was survival, and right now, he was a castaway on a rock in the middle of a sea that had no shore.
'It can't just be gone,' he thought frantically. 'I was holding it. The energy was inside me.'
He didn't realize—he couldn't see—that the Space Stone was no longer a cube. It was a raw, naked sapphire of pure cosmic power, suspended precisely one centimeter away from his spine, nestled perfectly between the roots of his wings. It was locked in a delicate, gravitational dance with his own golden energy; they attracted and repelled each other in a perfect equilibrium. No matter how he twisted or turned, the gem remained anchored to his position, a silent passenger on his back.
Leo landed back on the meteor, his hands touching the cold surface. He felt a hum through his fingertips.
Metal.
This was his only stroke of luck. His golden eyes swept through the rock, performing a molecular scan. The meteor was nearly 90% metallic—an alloy of strange, alien elements that weren't quite Vibranium but were certainly tougher than the gold-titanium composites Tony used for his suits. It was a dense, high-tensile space ore.
And to Leo, metal wasn't just a material. It was an extension of his soul.
He spent the next thirty minutes just breathing—or going through the motions of it. His body didn't seem to need oxygen the way it used to; the golden energy was sustainining his cells, but the habit of breathing was hard to break. Once his heart rate slowed, he looked out at the void again.
The lack of a coordinate system was the most terrifying part. There was no "up" or "down" in space. He didn't know which way Earth was. He didn't know where Asgard sat on the cosmic map. He was a grain of sand in a dark room.
"I can't just sit here and wait to freeze," he muttered.
With a sharp motion of his hand, he commanded the metal beneath him. The surface of the meteor groaned—a soundless vibration he felt in his teeth—as a hole opened up. He dived into the center of the rock, carving out a hollow sphere about twenty meters wide. Once inside, he felt slightly less exposed, though the thick metal walls did nothing to block his enhanced vision.
He closed his eyes, focusing every ounce of his willpower on the structure of the meteor. He began to mold it. He filled the cracks, smoothed out the jagged craters, and elongated the mass. Under his manipulation, the potato-shaped rock transformed into a sleek, thirty-meter-long metal spike—an aerodynamic needle designed for the vacuum.
Then, he began to push.
He funneled his energy into the rear of the spike, creating a localized field of kinetic acceleration. The "ship" began to move. Faster. Faster.
In his estimation, he reached Mach 30 within minutes. In the atmosphere of Earth, that would have incinerated anything in its path. Here, it felt like he was standing still. Without a nearby planet or moon to pass by, there was no sense of motion. He was a needle in a haystack, and the haystack was the size of the galaxy.
He pushed the meteor to his absolute limit, his face pale with the effort, until he couldn't accelerate it any further. Then, he let inertia take over.
"God, if you're listening... just let me hit something," Leo whispered. "A planet. A moon. A gas station. Anything."
He didn't even dare to hope for Earth. At thirty times the speed of sound, it would still take him lifetimes to reach the nearest star system. He was hoping for a miracle—a stray spaceship, a trade route, or even a hostile alien civilization. Anything was better than the silence.
"If I could just find Star-Lord... or anyone with a hyperdrive..."
He curled up in the center of his metal spike, a lonely god-child drifting through the dark. Behind him, unnoticed, the blue sapphire pulsed once, moving a fraction of a millimeter closer to his skin, as if comforting him.
...
Thousands of light-years away, in a bedroom that smelled of expensive cologne and stale scotch, another man was struggling with the dark.
Tony Stark bolted upright in bed, his chest heaving. His skin was slick with a cold, greasy sweat, and his eyes were wide, darting around the room as if expecting Chitauri soldiers to drop from the ceiling.
In his dreams, he was still in that void. He still saw the endless rows of Chitauri leviathans. He still saw the blue light of the portal. And he still saw the fleeting, golden figure of a kid who had saved his life by throwing himself into the maw of a monster.
Jarvis, sensing the spike in his master's vitals, slowly raised the lights to a soft, warm amber. "Sir, it is currently 4:02 AM. You have achieved approximately three hours of REM sleep. It is highly recommended that you return to a resting state to preserve cognitive function."
"I can't, Jarvis," Tony rasped, rubbing his face with trembling hands. "The moment I close my eyes, I'm back there. I'm falling. And he's... he's still up there."
Tony threw the covers off and walked, barefoot and shaky, toward the elevator.
"Sir, working in your current state will result in a 40% increase in design errors."
"Then I'll fix them tomorrow. Right now, if I don't build something, I'm going to lose my mind."
Tony entered the underground workshop. The air was cool and smelled of ozone and soldering flux. He didn't go to his bar. He went straight to his main terminal.
"Open the schematics for the Mark 7," Tony commanded. "No, wait. Scrap that. We need more power. More portability. I want a complete redesign of the flight stabilization systems."
He began to type, the clicking of the keys the only sound in the cavernous room. In the bottom right corner of the screen, the project file was labeled: MARK 11. He had skipped three versions in forty-eight hours. He was building faster than he ever had in his life, driven by a frantic, jagged energy.
His eyes drifted to the side of the desk, where a pair of glasses sat near a discarded coffee mug. He picked them up and slid them onto his face.
"Jarvis, pull up the file 'New York - Battle Log - Final.'"
A holographic photo materialized in the center of the room. It was a candid shot taken during the capture of Loki—a rare moment where the Avengers were all in one place. Steve looked stoic, Thor looked triumphant, and there, in the corner of the frame, was Leo. He was smiling, a smudge of soot on his cheek, looking more like a teenager who had just won a football game than a warrior who had just saved a world.
Tony stared at the image. He flicked his hand, and the holograms of the others vanished, leaving only Leo. The boy's brilliant smile seemed to mock the darkness of the workshop.
Tony stared for a long time, his jaw tight. Then, with a sudden, sharp motion, he swiped the image away, plunging the room back into the blue glow of his blueprints.
"Back to work, Jarvis. We're going to need a lot more suits."