The problem with fighting a warmonger who'd been using Violence longer than most civilizations had existed was that they knew things about fighting you hadn't learned yet.

  Domino figured this out somewhere around the fortieth minute of what came after Thanos raised the scythe with three Infinity Stones in it, and the information arrived the way knowledge usually does in a fight: too late to be fully useful and accompanied by the sound of her own ribs cracking.

  She'd fought well. She knew she had. Against three Stones she'd held ground, found the fault line in the handle, driven Thanos back twice and landed cuts that had taken real minutes to close. But after a while, as Thanos adapted to the Stones, all of that had simply stopped mattering like a door being shut.

  The Reality Stone changed the geometry of every string she laid before it touched him. She'd calculate a probability line, her luck would sing a true angle, and then the angle would be different because he'd decided the laws of reality between them should be different. Nothing she could do about that then just accept it and recalculate. Except recalculating took a tenth of a second and he was inside her guard in a tenth of a second.

  The Worst was that Reality Stone completely nullified her reality warping, her biggest arsenal.

  The Power Stone amplified everything. His healing, which had already been frustrating, became essentially instant. The force behind each scythe swing became something that didn't just push through her string lattice but tore through the strings themselves, probability threads snapping like overstretched rubber, the snap-back feeding feedback through her hands that made holding onto anything difficult.

  The Soul Stone kept her Death Stone in check while Reality Stone, amped by Power Stone, nullified her reality warping to a null. Having no experience with Time and Mind Stones, she was just sitting ducks.

  And underneath all of it, the corrupted death energy in the weapon kept eating.

  Not at her strings. At her.

  She understood it now, hour mark into the worst fight of her life. The Death Stone on her finger was carrying Didi's modification, the balance of transition and ending, the gentle door rather than forcible stop. What Thanos was wielding in that scythe was the other thing, raw undiluted Marvel version, Lady Death's essence without any of Didi's tempering. The two energies knew each other the way mirror images know each other, recognizing the same fundamental nature and trying to resolve the contradiction.

  The resolution felt like being taken apart at a cellular level. Slow, specific, deeply and architecturally wrong.

  Her Death Stone was burning at maximum trying to counter it.

  It wasn't enough.

  The scythe came down and she got her arm up in time to deflect the blade rather than receive it center-mass, but the deflection sent her sideways off the cliff.

  She fell down tumbling and tired.

  Quantum strings, last reflexive act of a body that had been doing this for months without conscious direction, found rock and held. She hung above a drop she couldn't see the bottom of, shoulder screaming where the impact had wrenched it, strings fraying under death-energy leaching through from the scythe's edge.

  Her healing factor was working. She could feel it. Just working slower than he was taking things apart.

  Thanos looked down at her over the plateau's edge with that expression she'd come to understand over the last hour. Not hate, not cruelty exactly. The expression of a man who'd decided this was necessary and made his peace with necessity.

  "You fought well," he said, and she believed him, which made it worse. "My Mistress will honor that. When I return her Death Stone to her brother, she'll know it was taken from someone who didn't run."

  He raised the scythe.

  She looked at the three Stones pulsing in the blade, Reality and Power flanking Soul on either side, corrupted death energy flowing through the crack she'd put in the handle like blood through a wound that refused to close. She thought briefly about what it was going to cost to let go of the rock. About Luv alone in the Dimension of Manifestations, crying with no one who knew him anywhere near.

  About Jay and what he'd do when he found out she'd needed help on Vormir against Thanos.

  He'd probably understand. He'd been reasonable about FURY eventually.

  She closed her eyes because the alternative was watching it happen.

  The wind moved across Vormir in that slow rhythmic pattern, the breathing of something ancient.

  Then something touched her hair.

  It wasn't the scythe. It was gentle. A hand, fingers moving through her hair with unhurried care of someone who had all the time in the world because they were the concept time was measured against.

  Domino opened her eyes.

  She wasn't on Vormir.

  The Garden In-Between

  The garden was exactly as she remembered it. The blanket with aged Gruyere and white cheddar still out, wine bottle between them with maybe two glasses left, small purple wildflowers scattered at the blanket's edge. Afternoon light, warm and amber and unhurried, filtering through leaves that made the air smell like late summer and the good kind of green.

  Didi was cross-legged beside her, one hand in Domino's hair, her expression carrying warmth and concern.

  "You cut it close," Didi said.

  "I noticed." Her voice came out steady. She was grateful for that. But less grateful for the way her hands were still shaking, which she suspected Didi had already noticed and chosen not to comment on. "I had a plan."

  "You had three Stones and excellent instincts, which is most of a plan. Not quite all of one."

  "The Death Stone should've been stronger. I had Thanos backtracking twenty minutes ago with half this output, then he added Power and Reality and it stopped mattering." She heard the frustration in her own voice and let it stay. "Why? What does Lady Death's scythe and Cloak have that my Stone doesn't?"

  Didi's hand stilled in her hair.

  "Do you know what happens to a house when no one holds the door?"

  Domino waited.

  "Do you remember what I showed you last time we were here? The souls piling up. The rot spreading through the spiritual plane with no one to guide them, no door being held open, the trapped ones screaming in grey spaces."

  "Yes."

  "The Death Stone carries the aspect of death as I modified it. Transition, release and the door. But the door can only function at full capacity when the house it belongs to is in order." Didi looked at afternoon light through leaves. "When Lady Death was imprisoned, the spiritual plane began to rot. Lost souls finding nowhere to go. Every moment she's been bound, the backlog has grown. The majority of what was her power has been diverted automatically to manage it, to hold the worst of the rot back, to prevent gaps from growing large enough for things to enter through them."

  Domino was quiet for a moment. "Things."

  "Unnamed things. Many-Angled Ones. Abominations that exist outside the boundaries of this multiverse, in the Outer Void where Oblivion broods, who by the way, is behind this little scheme going about. Things that even the One Above All finds easier to keep out than deal with once they're in." She paused. "What you've been using against Thanos is a fraction of what that Stone should carry. The power you've been wielding is Lady Death's sliver. The rest is occupied."

  Domino looked at her hands. Steady now, mostly. "And the scythe."

  "The scythe was Oblivion's before it was Lady Death's. Oblivion predates even her, he is the non-existence from which she and Eternity and Infinity all emerged, the Nothing Which Watched the Birth of Everything. His scythe carries what he embodies: cessation rather than transition, the ending without release. It doesn't need the house to be in order because it doesn't care about the house. It simply removes inhabitants." Didi's voice was precise and even. "You've been fighting Marvel's Death with less than a tenth of her power. He's been fighting with an instrument that predates her entirely, given to him by an enraged sis-con."

  The afternoon light continued as a leaf drifted down and landed on the blanket's corner.

  Domino thought about Luv playing with bonk, tongue poking out to make silly faces, not knowing the cave smelled like safety precisely because they'd built it that way. Because two people who'd never had safety decided their kid was going to have it and made it true through sheer stubbornness.

  She thought about Jay's face the morning they'd dropped Luv at Kamar-Taj, how he'd kissed her slow and said in that voice with weight behind it. The weight of having something to lose.

  She thought about Bonk's roar echoing through Kamar-Taj as teleportation light took him somewhere he couldn't follow, and how he'd gone anyway because Luv was in it and that was simply where Bonk went.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She looked at Didi.

  "You're going to ask me to be 'The Death'?" she asked despite knowing the answer.

  "I don't need to. You already know the answer." Didi met her eyes. "Will you be the last Guide to the lost ones? Will you be the Eternal Mother to those afraid of the Dark? Will you be the kindest of all? Will you be Death?"

  Domino was quiet for three seconds, which was long enough to feel the weight of it and short enough that it wasn't the silence of someone who needed convincing.

  Then she looked at Didi.

  "Yes."

  No hesitation or conditions. Just the word, clean and complete, the way she'd said yes to Jay once in a different garden, on a different blanket, with different wildflowers she'd also never learned the name of.

  Didi smiled.

  It was the smile of someone who'd been waiting for a specific person for a very long time and was genuinely glad the waiting was over, the smile that lives at the intersection of joy, relief and pride.

  She reached up and took the ankh from around her own neck, the simple black and silver loop that Domino had seen before and understood now for what it was. The key to every door. The authority of the final guide. The symbol that said '.

  She held it out.

  "A new Death has risen in the Omegaverse. May she be kinder than the last."

  Domino took it.

  The weight wasn't physical. Or rather it was physical and everything else simultaneously, the weight of every death in the universe landing in her palm like a stone, like a key, like a small child's hand. She felt the spiritual plane open to her perception all at once and it was vast and full of people and they were confused and afraid and so relieved when they felt someone notice them that it broke something open behind her sternum she hadn't known was sealed.

  She'd deal with that later. She had a fight to finish.

  "Go," Didi said, and her voice had shifted into warmth made sound, the absolute unconditional kind that doesn't require anything in return. "He's still standing, calling for you. Don't keep him waiting."

  Vormir reassembled itself around her.

  The rock under her fingers. The drop below, bruised sky above, even wind like old breathing.

  Thanos with the scythe raised, three Stones blazing in the blade, about to bring it down on a woman he thought was already finished.

  The ankh materialized between them.

  It appeared in the air between the scythe's blade and Domino's body and burned with light that wasn't black and wasn't white but both simultaneously, the light of the threshold, the illumination that exists at the precise moment between one state and the next. Thanos's arm stopped forcefully. Because the light touched the corrupted death energy in the scythe and the energy froze, recognizing authority it hadn't encountered in a very long time.

  Domino took the ankh.

  Her hand closed around it and the Death Stone on her finger responded instantly, violet light deepening into something richer and stranger, a color she didn't have a word for, the color that exists at the boundary between all colors and none. The lockets at her chest burned warm, Mind Stone and Time Stone resonating but differently now, not the strained resonance of a mortal pushing against limits but something settled, something that recognized the authority of the hand holding them.

  She didn't look different exactly. But there was something in how she stood, the way a room looks like itself when you clean it properly and all the furniture is back where it belongs, except the room was her and what had been returned to its place was something she hadn't known was missing until it arrived.

  Her hands had stopped shaking. They were finally very still.

  The transformation took approximately three seconds and used no energy she could feel. That was the point. You don't strain when you're doing the thing you were built for.

  She stood up.

  Thanos looked at her and for the first time in the entire fight, she saw something in his expression she'd given up expecting. He looked uncertain. Not afraid, not yet, he'd lived too long and believed too much for simple fear. But uncertain, the way a devotee looks when something enters the sanctuary wearing the vestments of the god they've been praying to and the face of someone else entirely.

  "That's not... you're not..."

  "No. I'm not her. I'm what comes after her, which is worse for you because what comes after her knows exactly what you've been doing and doesn't have the decades of complicated feelings about the specific mortal who stopped her that she did."

  She looked at him properly, the full attention of what she now was turned toward him. She saw the soul inside the purple skin and ancient muscle and centuries of conviction, and underneath all that, something much smaller and much older. A boy on Titan who'd been afraid of a cave and a girl who'd taken his hand and led him into the dark and never once let him leave. She'd been in him that long. She'd been the architecture of him since before he understood what architecture was.

  She saw all of it, but still looked at him anyway.

  He swung the scythe.

  The swing was everything it had been before. Three Stones blazing, Oblivion's ancient cessation energy driving it forward, the total accumulated power of a being who'd spent millennia preparing for something like this.

  She stepped into it.

  The scythe's blade passed through the space where she stood and the corrupted death energy in it dissipated on contact, the way fog dissipates when wind changes direction.

  Resolved, the way a knot resolves when you find the right thread to pull.

  Thanos stared at the blade.

  Then he looked at her.

  "Mistress Death," he said, and his voice had the quality of a man saying the name of someone he'd loved for so long that the syllables had worn smooth, but what they were landing on now wasn't what he'd aimed them at and he knew it and the knowing was its own devastation. "My Mistress. You're here."

  Domino let the silence sit for one breath. She looked at him and didn't look away because he deserved to be looked at when he heard this.

  "No. She's imprisoned. That's why I'm here. Because someone had to hold the door and she can't do it from a cosmic prison and the rot was spreading and there were people who needed to be let through." She looked at him, the full weight of what she now was looking at him, and she saw the soul inside and what it was made of and what it had cost and what he'd built it into and what had been done to it from outside. "She never loved you, Thanos. She took a child who was afraid and she put her hand in his and led him into a cave and made herself the only thing in the world that was kind to him, then she made him need her. She built a devotee. She didn't love a person. Those aren't the same thing. She can't. She's the cessation. She doesn't love anything, she just ends it."

  "You're lying."

  "I'm Death. I know every soul I ever have to guide. Yours included, when the time comes. I know what's in it, what she put in it, what was already there before she touched it." The ankh was warm in her hand, steady and specific. "She built a devotee. She didn't love a person. Those aren't the same thing."

  Thanos's face did the thing she'd only seen it do once, in that brief unguarded moment when he'd talked about balance and what it actually cost. It opened. All the architecture of conviction and patience and carefully reasoned certainty, and underneath something that had never been reasoned at all, something that had been there since long before the mathematics, that had looked at Death and understood only that it wanted to be near her.

  "Then everything I did..."

  "Was for something that used you. Yes."

  He stood with that for a moment. One full breath, maybe two. She let him have it.

  The fight that followed wasn't a fight. It was three minutes of a man who'd already lost trying to find a way not to have lost, which is different from trying to win and considerably sadder. He used all four Stones and the scythe and the full accumulated power of someone who'd spent centuries making himself into an instrument of cosmic purpose, and she walked through it the way Didi walked through things, through the authority of her own nature.

  She didn't use Mind Stone or Time Stone. Didn't need to. They were still in the lockets at her chest and the thought of reaching for them felt like reaching for a lockpick when you were holding a master key.

  When she finally ended it, she was gentle. Or as close to gentle as the situation allowed.

  The ankh touched his chest.

  The corrupted death energy in the scythe recognized true authority and released him. The Infinity Stones' light extinguished one by one, Soul Stone's amber going last, fading like a candle at the end of a wick. And Thanos, Thanos who'd moved through the universe for centuries like conviction given flesh, Thanos who'd killed his daughter and broken a planet and carried corrupted death in a weapon because a being who couldn't love him had told him this was love, came apart quietly.

  Not violently. Not the way the scythe had been built to make things end.

  His soul separated from what had housed it with the ease of something that had been holding on very hard for a very long time and had finally been given permission to let go.

  Domino held it for a moment, this piece of him that had been all the things centuries hadn't managed to wear down. The part that had stood at the edge of a cliff and watched something he loved go over it and believed, genuinely, that it was the right thing. She held it with the care she now understood was the entire job.

  Then she let it go.

  It dispersed into the universe the way things do when they're released properly, when someone holds the door open at the right moment, not violently, not as cessation or ending, but as transition. It joined the larger thing that all of it joined eventually.

  The scythe fell.

  The three Infinity Stones lay in the rubble of Vormir's plateau, still glowing faintly, no longer anyone's.

  Domino stood on the plateau and breathed.

  Vormir did its breathing around her, slow rhythmic wind, bruised sky. Same as when she arrived. Same as when she'd leave. The place didn't care. The place had stopped caring about anything long before she'd shown up and it would continue not caring indefinitely, which was its nature and she respected it for having one.

  Her hand was still around the ankh.

  She looked at it for a moment, this simple black and silver loop that contained an office she hadn't applied for and a responsibility she hadn't sought and that she was, she realized with something that was simultaneously surprise and complete absence of surprise, ready to carry.

  She thought about Jay. About Luv. About a cosmic courtroom full of beings who'd decided a five-year-old's right to exist needed to be put to a vote, and about every person in her contact list who was currently not knowing where she was.

  She closed her eyes.

  The spiritual plane opened to her perception fully, all of it at once, and she let it because she was what she was now and this was the job. Somewhere in the enormous weight of it she could feel the lost souls she'd been shown in Didi's garden beginning to find their way through, doors opening as she turned her attention toward them, grey spaces brightening as she acknowledged them.

  Later. She'd do the full work of it later. Jay and Luv come first.

  She reached out.

  Not through comms or technology. She reached through the thing she now was, the thread connecting her to every living person she'd ever known well enough to matter to, and she let them feel it. The presence of her, alive and changed and with a very specific request.

  The Ancient One felt it in her mind, her hand stilling over morphed architecture, her head coming up with the expression of someone who'd just understood something they'd been thinking about for a long time.

  Reed Richards felt it on the flagship, mid-calculation, and looked up from his screens with wet eyes he blinked away before Sue could notice, except Sue had already noticed.

  Wade Wilson felt it in whatever situation he was currently in and immediately said something inappropriate out loud to no one in particular, which was how he processed most significant information.

  And across various locations of people she'd recruited and fought alongside and trusted with different parts of the job over her life, the message arrived.

  She was more herself than ever. She knew where they were. And she knew how to get there.

  And when she opened her eyes and looked at the three Infinity Stones in the rubble at her feet, the Death Stone on her finger, the lockets at her chest and the ankh in her hand, she felt, for the first time since Arishem's warning had turned everything upside down, the sensation of having enough.

  Just enough to go get her family back.

  Vormir breathed around her, cold and old and indifferent.

  She crouched and collected the three Stones from the rubble, one at a time.

  Soul Stone, which had watched a father throw his daughter off a cliff and kept the weight of it.

  Power Stone, which had cracked a planet from the inside.

  Reality Stone, which had turned a museum full of living beings into soap bubbles and paper cranes and found it amusing.

  She held them in her palm for a moment and felt their weight and texture.

  Then she pocketed them because she had somewhere to be.

  The Dimension of Manifestations was waiting.

  And so were they.