"LUVVVVVVVVV!"
The scream tore out of Jay before his conscious mind caught up. It scraped raw from the bottom of him and hit the impossible tiers of the gallery like a stone shattering still water.
The gallery, which had been murmuring in the particular way that cosmic entities murmur when something interesting is happening, went quiet. The sound was loud, yes, but that wasn't why several beings who had watched civilisations rise and fall did something they hadn't done in eons: they flinched.
Then from the terrified boy standing alone in the center of the court came the voice Jay had been screaming for.
"Dad!"
Luv's face broke. The word came out halfway to a sob. He scrambled up from where he'd been kneeling next to Bonk, the small dinosaur lying too still against the floor, scales gone pale, each breath rattling wrong in his chest. Luv's legs started moving before he finished standing.
"Dad, Bonk is hurt! Please, you have to help him!"
Jay was already running.
He'd covered half the distance when the chains erupted from nowhere.
Golden and thick as his forearm. They came from everywhere at once, floor and air and the spaces between things, snapping around his wrists and ankles and torso and finally his throat, yanking him to a stop so hard his teeth cracked together. He knew these chains. The same ones that had held Lady Death in the Amalgam Verse. The restraints the Three Judges of Three Worlds had used when they found her guilty. He'd watched those chains hold The Death Entity and sworn nothing short of that would ever need them again.
Jay looked up at The Living Tribunal, floating above the dais with all four of his faces carrying the same expression. He'd never been in a hurry. Why would he be? Consequences eventually arrived.
"Outsider Jay," The Living Tribunal said. "You have been summoned as a witness in the trial for this being known as Luv, trial concerning his right to existence. As such, you shall not be allowed to interfere."
Jay didn't think. He just moved.
He burned every channel open at the same time. Tachyon Field, Elemental Force, and even his raw reality warping he usually kept reserved for the harshest of battles. He actually bit into the chains with his teeth, which did nothing but made his point clear. He pushed raw universal energy into the golden links until they started softening at the edges, started dripping, and whispers moved through the gallery like wind through grass. No one had ever used their powers through the Tribunal's suppression field. Not once. Not ever.
Jay didn't notice. He was already losing ground. For every half link he dissolved, two more snapped into place, then three, then more until breathing took active effort.
Luv had stopped a few feet away. Close enough that Jay could see the dried tear tracks on his face, the careful stillness of someone who has been very frightened for a long time and has learned that stillness is safer than showing it. Bonk lay behind him, scales matted, chest moving wrong. Too shallow, too careful, like every breath cost him.
Jay looked at the dinosaur. Looked at his son. Then back at the Tribunal.
"He's five," Jay said. His voice came out flat, emptied of everything except the fact itself. "He is five years old and his dog is dying and you put a line around him."
"The child's age is noted," Equity said.
"The child's distress is observed," Necessity said.
"Jay," Vengeance said, patient as always, "it would be wise to follow the court's decorum."
Jay had four of the vilest words loaded and ready, words that Domino had specifically taught him for situations that deserved them.
The pressure arrived before he could use them.
Gravity got personal. It pressed down through his shoulders and chest and into the floor. His knees hit the ground before he understood it was happening.
"I always find it amusing," said a voice behind him, rough and deliberate, like someone who had rehearsed this. "How these outsiders come to our world and make themselves at home in our affairs. They meddle with our abstracts, steal from our dead, breed with our inhabitants. And when their transgressions are brought to light, instead of having the decency to acknowledge their errors and accept the appropriate consequence, they raise their voices at us. At the rightful residents of this multiverse." A pause, timed perfectly. "As though their entitlement has no ceiling. As though they built something here. As though they belong."
Jay turned his head.
Oblivion stood at the edge of the gallery directly opposing The Living Tribunal, wrapped in shadow that moved wrong, less like darkness and more like the space before light existed. He was the guardian of the multiverse's outer edges, the force that stood between existence and the void beyond it. Jay had understood the weight of that once. Had respected it.
Now he watched Oblivion survey the court, survey Luv standing small and frightened next to Bonk's unmoving body, and whatever respect remained died quietly.
Jay was quiet for one beat.
"You know what's funny?" he said. "The accent always stays the same. 'You don't belong here. You're disrupting the natural order. You should be grateful for the correction.' Doesn't matter if it's a pub landlord in Surrey or the literal primordial void having a tantrum because someone touched his sister's things. The speech is always the same. Same self-righteous bollocks dressed up in cosmic language. Same small-minded bigotry wearing a bigger hat. You're a racist, Oblivion. A garden-variety xenophobic cunt who's mad that the help fucked someone outside the approved list."
Oblivion's head turned toward him, slow and deliberate.
"Watch your tongue, outsider."
"I have been watching it for months," Jay said, "and it keeps saying things that apparently need saying, so I've given up managing it. Here's what it's saying now: you're a xenophobic piece of shit hiding behind cosmic procedure, and every being in this gallery knows it. You don't give a single fuck about balance or order or protecting the multiverse. You want your sister back so you can go back to being her favorite Big Brother, and you're willing to murder a five-year-old to make it happen. That's what this is. That's all this has ever been."
The gallery went so quiet Jay could hear his own heartbeat.
The Living Tribunal's gavel handle touched the floor.
The sound wasn't loud but it didn't need to be. It reached every corner, silenced every voice.
Now we begin.
"We are gathered here," The Living Tribunal said, "to adjudicate the case of the being known as Luv." He gestured toward the boy, toward Jay's son, five years old and trying with shaking hands to work the golden chains off his father's wrists. "It has been brought to this court's attention that this child is an anomaly, born from the combined genetic material of the Harbinger of the Ninth Cosmos and the Mutant Shaman. He exists outside the parameters of established cosmic law due to an outsider's influence."
"Don't mince your words, Tribunal."
Oblivion's voice cut across the proceedings. His throne floated forward, and the shadow came with him.
"This child," he said, and the word came out sharp enough to cut, "is an abomination. Formed from the stolen essence of the most exceptional humans this multiverse will ever produce. That alone would be crime enough." He let it sit a moment. "But compounding this, the creature was being raised by the Outsider. And worse still, raised alongside the woman who willingly debased herself by accepting an outsider into her bed as if the boundaries of our multiverse were an inconvenience."
The veins in Jay's neck stood out like cables.
"You motherfucker!"
He stopped trying to melt the chains and pushed everything outward at once. The sphere of golden restraints groaned. New chains erupted to replace what he was destroying. The whole construction tightened around him until drawing a full breath required concentration. He didn't stop pushing.
Jay's voice came out strangled. "You're really going to stand there… You absolute fucking coward… and slander a woman who has more courage in her little finger than you've shown in your entire parasitic existence, while simultaneously condemning a child for the crime of being born? That's your argument? That's the hill you're dying on?"
Luv went still.
He stood with his hands at his sides, the reaching forgotten. He didn't understand all of the words but he understood the tone. He'd understood that tone since before he had language for it. His face went very still, very careful, the way it did when he was trying not to cry.
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