Having been playing life coach across an entire arc now, Jordan reached for the warm, low-register voice he reserved for exactly this kind of moment.
"Think about it carefully," he said. "Is there really nothing you feel — for this 'father' of yours?"
Gamora's memories flickered back through her like images inside a revolving lantern, carried forward by Jordan's deliberately gentle, half-devilish prompting. A thousand small details of a childhood under Thanos's roof. The warm, careful hands after her first broken bone. The embrace he had given her, without saying a word, the first time an assassination assignment had gone sideways and she had come home crying.
Yes. A long time ago. Wasn't this man she now spent so much energy hating also, once, the one person in the universe she had most wanted to lean on?
This was what contradiction meant, inside a living heart.
"Gamora. My daughter."
Seeing the shift move across her face, Thanos seemed to watch the edge of his own end come into view — and, strangely, settled into something close to peace.
No fear in the Mad Titan's expression. No resentment. No plea for himself. Just a tired compassion, and something that might almost have been relief.
"Do it, young Eternal. Just... don't harm my daughter."
Gamora's pupils dilated in shock.
Jordan, on the other hand, frowned.
...Hang on. That tastes wrong.
How in the cosmos did I end up as the villain in this scene?
Thanos was putting on an act. A well-shaped one. The handsome young man was, quietly, getting annoyed.
Those who know, know, Jordan thought, recalibrating. You don't get to genocide half the universe for an ideology and a girlfriend and then collect your good father certificate at the end.
For exactly one breath, Jordan's patience collapsed in a way he usually associated strictly with a certain green-haired S-Class colleague back in Z-City. Something distinctly Tornado-flavored crested through his chest.
Grunting lightly, he hefted the Mad Titan's considerable weight and carried him one-handed to the lip of the chasm. Leaned in close. Whispered into Thanos's ear with the pleasantness of a man passing along good news.
"Don't worry. This world hasn't had its multiverse cracked open yet. Even after you die — you're not going to see your goddess."
To kill a Titan properly, you have to kill his spirit too.
And with that, under Gamora's complicated gaze, Jordan opened his hand.
Thanos fell.
"Father—?" The word escaped Gamora before she realized she'd spoken it. Tears she had not cried in twenty years rose without her permission, as something that had been knotted inside her for most of her life finally named itself. "...Father—"
Before that rising grief could fully arrive—
Two beams of golden-red light, bright enough to flare like miniature suns, lanced out of Jordan's eyes and down into the depths of the abyss.
The raw amount of ambient energy pouring off the beams was enough that Red Skull — who had been drawing breath to recite the next line of ritual liturgy — instinctively took two long steps back, cowl twitching.
"Sorry," Jordan said, rubbing the bridge of his nose, tone going sheepish. "He's a one-of-a-kind Eternal Titan. Would've been unprofessional if I didn't make sure he doesn't just climb back up after the fall."
A curse word rose in Gamora's throat — but it never got spoken. A flash of orange light, containing a quiet, boundless authority, flooded the ritual circle, and her consciousness folded in on itself and went out like a blown candle.
As Jordan watched her body dissolve into the orange glow and vanish, he understood.
The planet's magic circle had accepted the ritual. The genuine emotion between the two sacrificial parties — Thanos's real love for Gamora, Gamora's real, buried grief for Thanos — had registered as legitimate.
Even if the transaction had been brokered by a middleman.
Jordan looked further down, into the throat of the abyss.
The Mad Titan's body was gone. In its place, the hard stone floor of the chasm had been replaced by a clear, bottomless pool — deep in a way no physical depth was really equipped to describe. A figure in green was slowly surfacing from the water. The Sea of Souls, accepting what it had claimed, and returning the half of the payment it wasn't going to keep.
Jordan raised one hand. Gamora's form lifted out of the water, drifting up through the chasm toward the ridge.
As she rose, her eyelids fluttered. Consciousness came back, hazy and uncertain.
Before she had worked out where she was, a hand closed around her right fist and gently pried her fingers open. Something was lifted out of her palm.
Gamora stared at the orange gem now floating above Jordan's open hand, and her mind went briefly, reverently still — the way any living thing would go still, faced with an ancient treasure of the universe.
"This," Jordan said, "is the Soul Stone."
A figure in a vintage purple suit stepped smoothly out of his shoulder — under Red Skull's suddenly alarmed gaze — and raised one gloved hand.
The Stand ability came online.
The Soul Stone, beautiful and translucent, pulsed once with deep orange energy. Then it gave up being real — dissolving from solid artifact into pure conceptual light — and was sealed into a bright golden fantasy card that spun lazily through F-boy's fingers before settling flat.
SSR — "Soul Gem" — Get☆Daze!
[Fantasy Card: Soul Gem] Type: Item Card • Rarity: SSR Source: Ritual of Vormir. Soul Stone manifested in Gamora's palm upon her return from the Sea of Souls; claimed via Jordan's proxy-sacrifice of Thanos.
Effect 1 — Soul Energy: Commands an infinite reservoir of soul-force; capable of producing catastrophic explosive shockwaves.Effect 2 — Soul Space: Connects to a miniature pocket universe; the user may author its rules; rewrites the boundary between the real and the illusory.Effect 3 — Soul Control: Absolute authority over souls — theft, manipulation, modification, reanimation of the dead in the user's service.Effect 4 — Soul Creation: Generates souls from nothing.
As expected of a Marvel cosmic artifact bearing the "Infinity" prefix. Anyone who mastered just the first effect — Soul Energy — was essentially invincible against anything shy of another Infinity Stone.
Jordan closed his eyes for half a breath and let his consciousness slip into the Soul Stone for a walk-around. A miniature universe, modifiable at will, confirmed present. No lurking cosmic entities. No hidden liens. Clean title.
Excellent. This is why I love MCU merchandise. No strings.
One caveat he already knew, and wanted to confirm anyway: as a native artifact of this particular timeline, the Soul Stone would retain its full Infinity-Stone power only inside the MCU universe. Once it left, it would dim into an ordinary colored rock, pretty but inert.
So taking the infinite power of the Infinity Stones home with him — by way of the card system — was not going to work the simple way. A different approach would be required.
Something for another chapter.
For now, the Soul Stone still had a job to do: reverse the snap back in the main timeline. Bring half of existence home. Jordan was not, under any circumstances, pocketing this one.
Across from him, Gamora's mental discipline wasn't sufficient to perceive a Stand directly — she had only seen the Soul Stone appear to float up, flare, and vanish into Jordan's palm. The shock of the moment passed; her composure, hard-earned across a lifetime of not losing it, came back online.
"You got what you came for," she said evenly. "Can you let me out of these now?"
Jordan blinked, then realized — only then — that she was still trussed in the Vajra chains. Their golden binding had survived even the detonation of the Soul Stone's release energy, which was a rather impressive datum all on its own.
"Ah — sorry. Forgot."
A snap of his fingers dissolved the Vajra Lockdown. The chains unwound into motes of light, and Gamora — freed in open air above the ridge — dropped the half-meter to the stone with a small sharp breath, landing light on the balls of her feet.
A palm settled, casually, against her shoulder.
Her body tensed to respond. Assassin training — automatic.
Before she could pivot into a strike, she heard the tall man beside her say, mildly:
"Tell you what. I don't take from anyone for free. Call this what you earned."
"Potential Guidance Technique — activated."
Gamora experienced, as a strictly physical event, what it was like to have someone open a door inside her body she hadn't known existed.
Strength dozens of times her prior peak flooded her limbs. Chakra — though she didn't have the word — poured into channels she had never been taught to recognize. The full buried potential of the assassin-training Thanos had driven into her since childhood suddenly had the physical engine to match its ambition.
She could have — would have — assassinated a god.
Jordan, meanwhile, had already lifted one finger and was scanning the local interstellar volume for signals of habitation. He found what he was looking for quickly enough: a space-faring civilization comfortably into its interstellar age, a hundred or so light-years off.
A single step took both of them there — to the surface of it, a sprawling neon-glitter arcology metropolis of the kind that only ever got built by a civilization that had lived long enough to forget its own founding atrocities. Jordan glanced up at the skyline on the horizon without any particular expression, and turned to Gamora.
"Thanos's fleet is gone. The Black Order is a rumor. With the strength you're holding right now, you can do whatever you want."
Gamora opened her mouth to answer—
And Jordan's last words were already fading into the air as he vanished:
"Just treat it as a way to relax."
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