Jay stood up, turned, and looked at Bonk.
The Pachycephalosaurs had been sitting behind them through all of it, patient, dignified and Ready. His scales were still carrying the marks of what had happened in the court, the pale grey at the edges where he'd nearly not made it back. One eye tracked Jay with the attention that didn't need language for the things that mattered most.
Jay sat down on his heels in front of the dinosaur. He put one hand on Bonk's domed skull, the same skull that had launched itself at a teleportation spell because Luv was inside it and that was simply where Bonk went.
"Thank you," Jay said. He said it the way you say things to someone who has done something for you that you cannot fully account for and would not know how to repay and are not going to try. Just the words, plain and clear, with everything behind them. "You are such a pure thing. The best of us, really. I don't know what we did to deserve you."
Bonk made a low, thoughtful chirp from somewhere in his chest. The sound he made when he was being sincerely addressed and was taking it seriously.
"I want to give you something," Jay said. "The first power I ever genuinely loved. The one that made me understand what it meant to help people. I've been carrying it since almost the beginning and I've never given it to anyone, because it felt too important to let go. But you..." He pressed his hand flat against Bonk's side. "You're the only one who should have it. You've always been about protecting Luv. Now you'll have the means to do it properly."
Tommy's healing aura moved from Jay to Bonk the way warmth spreads into cold metal, finding its new home and settling. Bonk's scales, grey at the edges and damaged through the middle, began to glow green, deep and vivid, the color of something growing rather than something burning. The damage closed. The pallor left. By the time Jay lifted his hand, Bonk was looking at him with both eyes fully open and carrying an expression that was, in its own way, very much the same thing Jay had just said to him.
"Now," Jay said. "Would you do me a favor and look after Luv out there?"
Bonk's dome came down against Jay's forehead in a gesture communicating yes, absolutely, this is already what I was going to do. Then he turned and went, green light trailing from his steps, moving with purpose, a creature that had just been reminded it was capable and had places to be.
Jay watched him go.
Across the arena, Bonk found the section of the fight where Cyclops had taken a hit from three sides at once and was currently on the ground with his visor cracked, the optic blast that was his entire offensive capability now leaking uncontrolled into the arena floor and the X-Men around him in various states of concern. Bonk lowered his dome and nudged Scott firmly in the stomach. Scott went airborne, rolled, hit the ground, and then lay still for a moment before sitting up with the expression of a man who expected to be significantly more injured than he currently was.
The X-Men stared at the glowing green dinosaur.
Storm's expression went through several phases.
"Is that," she started. "A glowing dinosaur. That just healed Scott by headbutting him."
Scott flexed both hands and found that his ribs had stopped being cracked. "I think the dinosaur just healed me," he said.
Bonk had already moved on. He and Luv were cutting through the arena together, the boy running with blue light trailing from his hands and the dinosaur running beside him with green, and what they were doing was finding the people on their side who needed it most and fixing them, because that was what they were for, and they had been given the tools, and they were using them.
"Of course," one of the X-Men said, watching them go. "Of course it's one of Jay's."
Jay and Domino stood where they were for a moment, watching their son and his best friend work their way through the casualties on their side.
Something was happening in both of them that the arena and the chaos around them didn't have room for, and that they were carrying anyway. Watching your child do something extraordinary and understanding that you built the conditions for it and that the child did the rest.
Jay reached over and took Domino's hand.
She let him.
Nobody came near them.
This was partly because Domino had recently dissolved a Celestial and several of the remaining entities on Oblivion's side were still working out the implications. And partly because there are moments that even cosmic forces recognize as private.
"He's going to be okay," Jay said.
"He was always going to be okay," Domino said. "We just had to get through this part first."
Jay looked at his watch. The six Infinity Stone housings sat in their allocated positions around the face: the Space Stone at twelve, the others waiting where Eitri had built the spaces for them.
He had the stones now. All of them. Domino had somehow collected them while he'd been in the trial, probably during her ascension on Vormir, maybe with Didi's help or Eternity's intervention or just through sheer bloody-minded determination to have the tools ready when he needed them. That was Domino. That had always been Domino.
He looked at Domino. At the ankh at her collarbone with the Death Stone latched into it, violet light catching and dispersing in the arena's chaos. At the way she stood, which was the same way she had always stood, weight forward, ready, nothing wasted.
"You know what's funny?" he said. "While these Stones were a great gift. They're nowhere near the surprise you gave me." As he pointed at her death stone and the Ankh.
"Right? that was Didi's idea," Domino said. "The whole surprise entrance. She said you'd appreciate it."
"We really need to have a talk about that."
She almost smiled and changed the topic. "So. You going to use those stones or are we standing here appreciating the accessories all day?"
"One more second," Jay said.
He looked at the watch. He looked at the six stones sitting in his palm, transferred from Luv's hands and waiting. He thought about the Infinity watch. About the standard approach, about channelling six stones through a single point of external control, about the power ceilings that came with that configuration and the ceiling he was going to hit.
But at the last moment, he changed his mind as he took the first stone. Mind Stone was glowing gold and sharp, and swallowed it.
Every being who had a hint of what those stones were went quiet.
But the beings in the higher tiers who had been watching, who understood what those stones were and what they did to biological matter and what the upper limit of human tissue was in relation to the kind of energy a single Stone contained, went quiet in a different way. The quiet of creatures watching something they expect to go badly.
Jay swallowed the Time Stone.
Then the Soul Stone.
Then Reality, then Power, then the Space Stone from the watch's housing, and by that point, the gallery had stopped making sound entirely because there was no framework available for what they were watching.
The Living Tribunal's three faces, Equity and Necessity and Vengeance, produced an expression that was a mix of cosmic shock as his elbow slipped off his throne's handle.
Domino took one step back. Both from shock and surprise at his audacity.
The light that came was a color that existed at the intersection of six fundamental forces, finding a single host and reaching equilibrium. It lasted approximately four seconds.
When it cleared, Jay was standing in white.
The suit had gone white the way it went white when he had pushed past the level where the clothing had opinions about what it was containing. His hair had done the same. He'd been in this form before, that highest register of himself that he'd only ever touched at the outer edge of his ability, and this time it felt different. It felt like arriving rather than reaching.
The rainbow light came last, rising from the ground around him in slow columns and dispersing at shoulder height, quiet and continuous, six Infinity Stone resonances finding a shared frequency inside human tissue and deciding, apparently, that they were comfortable there.
He looked at his hands. Opened and closed them.
"Right," Jay said. "That's different."
He looked up.
Across the arena, Oblivion had registered the change before it was visible, through some older sense. The sense of something that has been the largest thing in every room it has occupied for the entirety of its existence suddenly noticing that the room has changed.
Every entity on Oblivion's side turned to look.
The Beyonders. The Griever. The Goblin Force, which didn't have eyes but had something worse. Sire Hate, who had been thoroughly occupied with the Phoenix Force and was now less occupied because even Sire Hate, the living embodiment of loathing, found its attention pulled by what was standing in the middle of this arena.
Master Order turned to Lord Chaos.
Lord Chaos, who had been having the time of her existence, looked at Jay and went slightly still for the first time since the trial began.
"Huh," Lord Chaos said, which was a remarkable thing for the embodiment of chaos to say, because it implied that something had surprised her.
Jay looked at Oblivion. Oblivion looked at Jay. The scythe was still in Oblivion's grip. The shadow was still around him, the void-born darkness of a being that had preceded existence.
Jay raised one hand, palm out, and the rainbow light shifted and focused and the arena floor between them cracked clean through from the pressure of what was preparing to happen.
"Right," Jay said, and his voice carried across the arena in a way that voices did not normally carry without amplification, because six Infinity Stone resonances inside a human body tend to have opinions about acoustics. He was looking at Oblivion, but the words landed everywhere.
"You bigoted piece of primordial shit. You tried to erase my son. You called the woman I love a whore. You stood in a cosmic courtroom and spewed hatred like it was cosmic law."
He raised both hands. Six colors of light began to spiral around his forearms.
"Let's finish this."
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