The word "Begin" had barely finished traveling when the arena stopped being a place where things were decided and became a place where things were settled.
There was no clear front or flank.
It was everything, everywhere, at once.
Wade carved a path through three Elders of the Universe, screaming at considerable volume: "The Collector? More like the Hoarder with Abandonment Issues! Grandmaster? I've seen better game shows on public access! And you, whatever the fuck your name is, you look like someone's grandpa who got lost at Comic-Con!". Ben Grimm drove his fist through an adaptive Celestial defense plate and discovering, apparently to his own satisfaction, that it cracked. The Ancient One moving through the chaos without wasted motion, her hands already weaving the next spell before the first one landed.
Captain America's shield leaving his arm and returning in a clean arc that had been practiced ten thousand times, and that still, somehow, caught a watcher across the side of its head.
The noise was chaos given sound. Everything a fight could be at once: the crunch of Gorilla Man catching a Beyonder's projection on his knuckles, the shriek of Phoenix Force fire burning through a gap in the Griever's defense, the soundless efficiency of Hit-Monkey working, which was essentially no sound at all except for the results.
Jay was not watching any of it.
He had moved the moment the Tribunal said begin.
He moved toward Oblivion. He'd made a promise and it was time to deliver.
He got maybe forty feet.
Then the scythe came around in a flat arc that was not particularly fast and was not meant to be, because Oblivion was not a being that needed speed. He was the void.
He was the thing that existed before light had something to fall on. The scythe moved and the space it moved through was simply lesser than the space on either side of it, and that was enough.
Jay deflected rather than blocked, fed the energy sideways into his Force, and used the momentum to roll rather than absorb.
He came up on his feet fourteen feet away and took two steps back toward Oblivion before his brain sent a clear signal about what he'd just done and how well it had worked.
He landed back where Domino and Luv were standing.
He landed on his feet, which was something, but the landing communicated several things about the exchange. Domino looked at him. She didn't say I told you so, but her expression was doing the work.
"You're letting him get in your head," she said. She reached down and took his arm, a hand on his elbow, pulling him back upright to his full height. "You've been building up for that punch, babe. And that's exactly the problem. You're not thinking. You're reacting."
Jay exhaled through his nose. He knew she was right before she finished the sentence. He was furious and he was broadcasting it, and Oblivion, who had been predating everything including the concept of anger, was reading it perfectly. "Right," he said.
He forced his shoulders back, reset his stance. "Right. Okay."
Something tugged at his trouser leg.
He looked down.
Luv stood there with both hands cupped together, holding something. He looked up at Jay with those blue eyes that had been full of tears for the better part of the day and were currently full of purposeful.
"Mom said to give these to you," Luv said.
He opened his hands.
Jay stared at what was sitting in his son's small palms for a full two seconds. Six stones of six different colors, each one pulsing with the light that contained more than any physical object should be able to contain. The Mind Stone's gold. The Time Stone's emerald. The blue of the Space Stone from Tether, somehow. The amber of the Soul Stone. The red of Reality. The purple of Power.
All six Infinity Stones. In his five-year-old son's hands.
He looked at Domino.
She nodded once, and the corner of her mouth did the thing that meant she was pleased with herself and had been sitting on this for a while.
Jay looked back at Luv.
He felt something shift in his chest, something that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with the specific quality of this moment: his son, in the middle of a cosmic arena, in the middle of the biggest fight either of them had ever been in, handing him the thing he needed with the calm trust of a child who has never once doubted that his father would know what to do with it.
He went down on one knee to be at Luv's level and just as he started to say something.
The Celestial came out of nowhere.
Eson, or one like him, gigantic and moving with the seismic deliberateness that had ended civilizations by landing on them. The dome of its helmet was dropping toward the three of them with the patience of a being that has done this before and found it efficient.
Domino turned without looking.
The Colt came up and the Death Stone along the barrel pulsed violet, and the shot she fired was not a bullet so much as a statement of cosmic intent. It hit the Celestial's dome dead center and the energy didn't damage it so much as unmake the argument for its existence in that location. The armor dissolved from the point of impact outward, matter becoming the memory of matter, until there was nothing above them except the arena ceiling and a scattering of dust that had been, two seconds ago, something capable of cracking a moon.
The arena went slightly quieter in their immediate area.
Every being within range, cosmic or otherwise, processed what they'd just seen, and several of them quietly revised their operational approach.
"Hey, dome-head." Domino's voice carried the flat authority of someone who has killed things much larger than herself before and found it unremarkable. She was already reholstering the Colt, not looking at where the Celestial used to be. "Can you not see they're having a moment? That's going to be a core memory for my kid. The next one of you that interrupts their father-son moment is going to find out what happens when Death stops being patient."
The area around them remained clear.
Jay looked at Domino. There was a lot in that look. Then he looked at Luv, who was watching his mother with the expression of someone who has always known their parent was exceptional and has just received additional confirmation.
"Your mum really is something, isn't she?" Jay said.
Luv nodded. He had the look of a child who has been told this before and is now witnessing the proof firsthand and finding it considerably more impressive than the telling.
"That's why we love her," Jay said. "Isn't it?"
Another nod. Yes, I understand, and I will remember this.
Jay put his hand on his son's shoulder. The arena roared around them, heroes and cosmic entities and things without category doing what they were here to do, and in the middle of it the three of them had this one quiet beat.
"I'm sorry, Luv," Jay said. He kept his voice level and clear, because Luv deserved to hear this properly, not through the filter of battlefield noise. "I should have been strong enough to stop them from taking you. I put you in danger by not preparing better, by not anticipating this. That's on me."
He paused. "And I'm even more sorry for what I'm about to undo. I put those locks on your abilities because I wanted to give you time to be a kid before the universe started making demands. But this isn't the time for that anymore. This is the time for you to be exactly what you are."
He reached forward, both hands, and let the power theft work in reverse. Not stealing. Releasing. Every suppression he had placed on Luv's abilities over the past months, every carefully constructed null field and dampening layer, came apart like knots being pulled free from both ends at once.
"Go all out," Jay said. "Your mum and I are right behind you."
The light that came off Luv was like a bloom, blue-white and expanding, like light finding room it hadn't known it had. The floor of the arena lit up under his feet. Every cosmic entity in the gallery that had a survival instinct felt the pressure of a new register of power announcing itself, and that pressure was coming from a small boy in black-and-white overalls who was currently glowing like a small star and looking extremely surprised about it.
Luv looked at his hands. Then up at Jay. "That's a lot," he said, in a very small voice.
"You get used to it," Jay said. "Go."
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