Loki's proclamation ended mid-word.
He had become aware of a shadow.
The shadow came with breathing—slow, heavy, the kind that a human chest produces when the human in question is approximately three meters tall and built like a geological formation. Loki's divine sixth sense, which had served him reasonably well across several centuries of divine politics and outright treachery, delivered a very clear message: do not look up.
He looked up.
The Hulk looked back down at him, eyes very wide, with the specific expression of someone who has been waiting for this exact opportunity.
Not again—
Officially sponsored by the Hulk:
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The green giant grabbed an ankle, found his rhythm, and proceeded with the same focused enthusiasm he'd brought to their first meeting. Left, right, left, the floor of Stark Tower contributing a series of fresh craters to the architectural record. When he was done, he dropped Loki into the deepest of them and stepped back.
"Tui—puny little god."
Loki lay in the crater with his eyes rolled back and the expression of someone who is experiencing a dream from which they do not expect to wake in the near future. The Frost Giant lineage had kept him alive through the second round, which was more than most things could claim.
Down on the street, Steve Rogers was scanning the sky when he caught the movement: a gold-and-red figure, mask dark, no thrust, dropping fast.
"Tony—" He was already moving. "He's falling!"
Thor, squinting upward, could see the shape of Tony gesturing. Possibly shouting something. The distance and the ambient battle noise made it difficult to resolve. "What is he saying?"
Steve went quiet for a moment, superhuman hearing reaching through the wind.
"He's saying... help me."
"His armor is out of power! Someone catch him—"
Below the portal—which Jordan had quietly tossed 2012 Tony through along with a deployed Super Healing card, knowing the infrastructure for the classic catch was already in place—the Hulk happened to be passing by.
The universe has, on occasion, a sense of timing.
The portal finished closing.
The last aperture shrank to nothing, and Jordan was alone in deep space—shadow clones dissipating one by one as the work wound down, the Battle of New York fading behind him into another timeline's history. He held position in the vacuum for a moment, took stock, then pressed one finger to his forehead.
Instant Transmission.
The stellar environment blurred and reassembled.
He arrived in a shattered space—broken meteorites drifting in long, slow rotation, frozen, lightless, the specific cold and silence of a region that had been dead for a very long time. Stars visible at distance but nothing near. A place chosen for privacy.
Sound reached him, which shouldn't have been possible in vacuum, and was therefore evidence that someone present had made arrangements.
"My lord." A figure knelt before a floating throne, head bowed, words coming out in the practiced cadence of someone delivering bad news to an entity who has a track record with bad news. "The humans proved more resilient than our projections suggested. My vanguard—"
"You did well enough," said the figure in the throne. "This was always part of—"
His head turned.
The Chitauri leader—the Other—had approximately half a second to register that something had changed before Jordan's heat vision crossed the distance between them. The Other came apart. It was efficient and immediate.
Thanos watched the aftermath with mild interest, chin resting on one fist, the enormous ridiculous cliff of his jaw giving this pose a faintly comedic quality that his general bearing worked hard to counteract.
He turned his attention to Jordan instead.
Something about the young man's proportions—the height, the density of his build, the structural quality of a body that had been built well at every level—stirred a memory. Titans had looked like this. The Eternals who had lived on Titan in his childhood, before he'd ended that chapter. Created-perfect, like the work of something intentional. The recognition arrived with a softness Thanos probably didn't know was visible on his face.
"Young Eternal," he said, with the unhurried interest of a being who had been genuinely surprised in a way he found worth pursuing. "What brings you here? What is it you want?"
Jordan let the pause sit.
"Looking for you?" He picked up the card F-boy had just produced from the Other's soul particles—SSR grade, Chitauri Leader—turned it once, and passed it back without much interest. He looked at Thanos with the mild, deliberate quality of someone who knows where a nerve is.
"Tell me," he said pleasantly, "are you the the filial son who killed his own mother? Or the humanitarian who personally slaughtered his home planet?"
The smile on Thanos's face developed structural problems.
The buried history surfacing from a stranger's mouth—accurate, specific, the kind of detail that had no business being in any human's possession—produced a flash of something behind those ancient eyes. Quiet. Dangerous. The kind of calculation that ends in a verdict.
Jordan watched the calculation and kept going.
"You're planning to halve all life in the universe. You've been building toward this for decades." He let that land. Then, almost gently: "Is it because you're still—"
He met Thanos's eyes.
"—in love with Death?"
Silence.
The Death he meant was not Hela—the Asgardian goddess of death, who was somewhere in a dungeon and would have strong opinions about being misidentified: Hela: ???. He meant something larger: the cosmic entity. The one who had existed before creation completed itself. One of the primordial presences of the Marvel multiverse. The only being in all of it.
The Mind Network couldn't read Thanos—his psychic defenses were a wall Jordan hadn't built the tools to pass yet. He didn't need it. The expression was enough.
Every muscle in Thanos's face had locked.
Jordan covered his mouth. His eyes went wide.
"I was just taking a shot in the dark." He sounded genuinely delighted. "I didn't actually expect—"
The comics version of this story had Thanos genuinely, devotedly in love with the embodiment of Death—had spent an era constructing a grand gesture of galactic proportions to earn her attention. The tragedy of it was that she'd never reciprocated, and had ultimately chosen instead a deeply irritating man in a red-and-black suit whose face resembled something that had been left out in the weather.
The MCU had softened this into ecological philosophy and resource management, and Thanos had been very committed to the framing. But the original motivation was apparently still in there, underneath the reasoned justifications—
"ENOUGH."
The "Tyrant's Blade" materialized—twin propeller-blades, the weapon of an emperor, Thanos standing in his golden cosmic armor with the air of someone who has decided the conversation is over. "You have no right to speak of matters between me and that great being!"
"I just want to know if the feelings are mutual," Jordan said, squinting at him. "Yes or no."
"That is none of your business—"
"He's panicking," Jordan observed, to no one in particular.
"EAT—"
Thanos closed the distance and brought the blade down.
Jordan caught it.
One hand. Bare. The blade stopped.
The silence had a very specific quality. Thanos looked at where his weapon had stopped and at the hand holding it, and the expression of a cosmic emperor encountering his first genuine resistance of the encounter was something Jordan catalogued for later.
One-handed blade catch. Three-tenths effort. One hundred points of damage dealt.
Jordan watched Thanos's face with the same mildly amused expression Dio Brando would have worn, had Dio ever bothered to be amused by anything.
"Weakling," he said.
Thanos: "What—"
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