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 be safe 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.
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 'I am the one who holds it open'.
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."
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