Watching his army, his generals, and his mobile throne be annihilated in a single photonic bloom, Thanos showed no grief.
He couldn't afford it.
The Vajra chains had locked his life-force to a thin, stuttering trickle; what vitality he had left was leaking out through his wounds faster than his Eternal physiology could try to clot them shut. Every breath cost him. Every heartbeat was a negotiation.
And his one good eye, weak as it was, stayed fixed on Jordan. Not pleading for himself — he had stopped pleading for himself somewhere around the meteor impact. Pleading, still, silently, for the young woman bound in chains at Jordan's other side.
Gamora, across that same vacuum, was experiencing something considerably stranger.
She was wearing a standard tunic, open sleeves, no helmet, no pressure suit. And she was still breathing. No frostbite eating across her skin. No hard radiation frying her eyes. No vacuum-bloat trying to rupture her lungs from inside.
Which, by every rule she had ever been taught, should have killed her within the first two seconds of exposure.
Jordan had thought of it, of course. The instant before the Final Flash had gone off, he had woven a palm-sized pocket of livable atmosphere around each of his passengers — warm, pressurized, radiation-shielded. Gamora wasn't going to freeze into a statue inside of ten seconds. That would have been wasteful.
"Alright." Jordan tucked his hands behind his back, adopting the voice of a gentle philosophy professor. "Can't always rest on past laurels. Got to learn to look forward in life."
He patted the Mad Titan companionably on one armored shoulder, smiling benevolently through the molten glare he caught in return.
"Also, by the way. You're welcome."
— You — !!
"Come on. We still have places to be."
Golden lines of law spun open in front of them again, and a Dimensional Gate unfolded into a circle almost too wide for the eye to take in all at once. On the far side of the ring hung a planet.
A desolate planet.
Roughly a third of it was wrapped in a dusty nebula shroud. The rest, naked under a crimson sky, stretched in endless sunbaked salt flats and red sand to every horizon. And at the center of all of it, a black stone mountain shaped too much like a castle for anyone to call it natural, crowned with two symmetrical obelisks that stood up out of the peak like gateposts to whatever hell the locals had believed in.
Gamora saw the horizon and felt the blood drain out of her hands.
She had helped Thanos hunt the Infinity Stones for most of her adult life. She had personally compiled most of the intel on the sixth. She recognized this landscape from the classified files she had been very, very careful never to send up the chain to her father.
Thanos, struggling against the weight of his own dying body, looked at Jordan with a question he couldn't form into words.
Something — is — here.
Gamora had not, in fact, reported everything she had uncovered. Which meant Thanos, the Mad Titan who had spent a lifetime stalking these six stones across the galaxy, had never known — until this exact moment — that this planet even existed.
They arrived at the foot of the mountain. A rugged, switchbacking path wound up its face, plainly difficult by design; pilgrims were expected to demonstrate their sincerity by climbing on their own knees.
Jordan flicked two fingers.
The scenery around his companions smeared sideways for half a second — and then re-focused at the summit, two kilometers higher.
A black-robed figure stood waiting, mist curling around him the way steam curls around a corpse. He turned on his heel, and his voice, when it came, was pitched for whatever acoustics demons prefer.
"Welcome. Thanos — son of A'lars..."
"Gamora — daughter of Thanos..."
"Jordan—" The black-robed guardian's rhythm broke. He paused. "...hm."
He tilted his cowled head.
"Strange Earthling," he said, genuinely baffled. "Why can I not see your past?"
Behind the chain still sealing his mouth, Jordan felt his own smile crease.
Years of MCU fandom placed the figure in front of him before the sentence had fully ended. Black cloak, whispered delivery, Vormir duty — the canonical Ghost of Vormir was a Hydra officer who had lost the Tesseract to Captain America in 1945, been teleported to this rock as the Tesseract's final indignity, and had been serving out a nearly-seven-decade sentence as unwilling guide to the Soul Stone ever since.
Perhaps, Jordan thought, his natural aptitude for the darker varieties of power had gotten him personally selected for the role.
Jordan stepped closer. Leaned in. Put his mouth beside where the cowl should have hidden a human ear.
"Can't see it?" he whispered. "Good."
Then, warmly:
"Hail Hydra."
Red Skull: "..."
A beat of genuine silence hung between them. The wind around the peak felt very long.
"Ahem." The guardian's voice returned, one click less sepulchral than before, a quick clearing of the throat papered over as ritual pause. "It seems you know something of my past, Jordan. That is... all in the past. I am merely a guardian now. Or, more accurately, a guide — eternally bound to this place, leading you and everyone else who would seek the Soul Stone."
And in the silence after that sentence, Thanos understood.
The reason he had been dragged here. The reason for Gamora.
The Soul Stone — the one Infinity Stone that had eluded him across a lifetime of searching, the one he had burned worlds to try to locate — was here. On this forsaken rock. And he had been brought to its threshold in chains.
He still could not fathom, though, why Gamora.
If the young man wanted the Stone for himself, why his daughter—
"Come," Red Skull said, turning. "What you seek is in front of you. What you fear is in front of you as well."
Milder, Jordan noted internally, than canon. Nearly seven decades of eternal duty had evidently softened the old Hydra officer's bedside manner somewhat.
With Thanos and Gamora in tow, Jordan followed him to the mountain's final ridge. The two tall rock towers turned out to form a gate. Beyond the gate, an ancient magic circle had been inscribed into the stone — and beyond that, the road simply ended.
A cliff dropped straight down into a chasm so deep that the bottom vanished through the crimson gloom into darkness.
Jordan leaned over the edge and looked. No spatial distortion. No reality-fold. Just an ordinary gravity-accelerated pit — ordinary meaning anyone without flight would not be surviving the bottom of it, regardless of species.
Behind him, Red Skull continued, dutiful as a wedding officiant:
"To obtain the Soul Stone, you must lose that which you love. An eternal exchange..."
"A soul, for a soul."
The words landed on Thanos and his adopted daughter the way stones land in still water.
Jordan snapped his fingers. The crisp sound rang off the canyon walls. The golden chains sealing their mouths dissolved into air.
"If you have any farewell words," he said, patting the Mad Titan lightly on one shoulder, smile mild, "go ahead. This particular parting, after all — is forever."
Thanos said nothing. His jaw was set.
"Wait."
Gamora, ignoring her father's heavy gaze entirely, turned to face Jordan fully. Green eyes narrowed. Tactical mind already running.
"Jordan. That's your name. I heard you called it."
"That's right."
"Our host was very specific." She tipped her chin back at Red Skull. "To claim the Soul Stone, one sacrifices someone one loves. And — look at the three of us."
Her voice dropped, cold.
"I don't know you. And I don't love the creature who burned my planet."
She shot one glance at Thanos and her lip curled.
"As for him — the entire universe knows he doesn't love anyone."
Thanos didn't speak. The silence was, in its way, the most honest answer he had ever let sit against an accusation.
Jordan folded his hands behind his back. Walked up to Gamora, expression easy.
"The truth," he said, "is a little different than that."
She lifted an eyebrow.
"Besides the cosmic lady he'll be chasing in his next life," Jordan said, "the person this man loves most in this world — is you. His daughter."
"That can't be—"
She opened her mouth to flatly deny it.
Jordan reached up and tapped one fingertip, very lightly, against the center of her forehead.
"Here. Watch the movie yourself."
Between one blink and the next, Gamora's pupils dilated. Her gaze went glassy and distant, as though she were watching something at an impossible remove. For a full beat, she stopped breathing entirely.
Mind Network flared invisibly between Jordan's fingertip and her frontal cortex — a clean, packet-sized transfer of a memory that didn't belong to her, pulled out of Jordan's past-life recall of a film from a world she had never lived in. A perfect-fidelity playback rendered inside her own skull: a crimson sky. A black mountain. The same cliff under her feet right now. A purple-skinned giant lifting his adopted daughter up to that edge in grief — and letting her fall.
"What did you do to her?!" Thanos's voice tore out of him at a pitch his broken body should not have been able to produce.
Jordan said nothing at all.
Gamora, in the middle of watching her own death at her father's hands — in a world that was and wasn't this one — raised one trembling hand halfway to her mouth. Her lips moved without sound. Moved again.
"No," she whispered. "No, this is impossible..."