[A/N]: Happy Holi, everyone!!
"You gave Jay a coin, right?" he said.
The words stopped her cold.
"A quarter, yes" she said, after a moment.
"Yes." He raised one enormous hand, and the air between them lit up. "Where you see a gesture, I see a galaxy's worth of roads. Allow me to show you what I have observed."
She saw it immediately. The café. Blue's, that say when she'd been testing whether Jay could copy her powers, and he'd been frustrated by something he wouldn't tell her about, and she'd watched him draw his arm back and hurl the quarter through the window with everything he had. She remembered thinking he was being dramatic. She remembered the coin spinning silver against the streetlight before it disappeared.
Uatu showed her where it went.
The coin bounced off a fire escape in Hell's Kitchen and came to rest on the sidewalk where Matt Murdock's cane found it on an evening walk. She watched Matt pick it up, test its weight, pocket it with a slight smile. Watched him hand it to a little girl named Maria Santos outside the courthouse, who needed twenty-five cents for her lemonade stand and whose heartbeat had been nervous and determined in equal measure.
Maria lost it through a fire escape grating three days later, pressing her face against the metal and watching it disappear into a storm drain with the specific devastation of a child who'd been given something precious and couldn't hold onto it.
The coin washed through underground water into the Morlock tunnels, where a pale twelve-year-old named Leech picked it up from the dark and held it like it was made of gold. Watched him surface in Harlem for the first time, blinking in the sunlight, using that quarter to buy his first Snickers bar from a shopkeeper who charged him less because she recognized the look in his eyes.
She watched the quarter travel through Ms. Chen's register and into Frank Castle's change, watched Frank hand it to his son to give to a hollow-eyed veteran outside, watched that veteran trade his week's coin collection for a twenty-dollar bill so he could get a haircut and look presentable for job interviews.
Luke Cage dropped it at Dapper Dan's barbershop the moment Jessica Jones walked through the door, which was honestly understandable. Dr. Samuel Sterns picked it up running seventeen minutes late for a meeting with Bruce Banner, a delay that moved their venue from one laboratory to another, putting both men in exactly the wrong position when General Ross's soldiers kicked the door in.
She watched Bruce's transformation tear his shirt apart, scattering Sterns's possessions across the floor. Watched the coin come to rest under a workbench and then get swept up in Bruce's hurried collection as the helicopters arrived. Watched it travel in Bruce's pocket through the Hulk's rampage across Manhattan until the shirt finally couldn't contain the transformation anymore, and the coin went flying.
It bounced off General Ross's polished boot. Ross kicked it instinctively. The Hulk, turning to face new attackers, swatted at what he perceived as a projectile.
Twenty-five cents became a bullet, moving at impossible velocity. It ricocheted off an office building corner, shot through three apartment windows, bounced off a fire escape, careened off a water tower.
It crashed through the reinforced windows of the Baxter Building's forty-second floor.
And struck Victor Von Doom directly in his exposed face.
Domino watched Doom stagger. Watched the plan he'd been executing with cold precision collapse because a quarter had interrupted it at exactly the right moment. Watched Jay, motionless in the enhancement chamber with a piece of twisted metal in his abdomen, survive because Doom's attention had fractured at the critical second.
Her coin.
Jay, who had been hurt and unconscious and completely helpless.
Her luck, embedded in a piece of metal, followed him through twelve pairs of hands across weeks of ordinary human life that he'd touched in some ways, doing exactly what she'd always hoped.
Keeping the people she loved alive by being in the right place.
Her lips quivered and her eyes became misty as the weight that lifted from her chest was something she hadn't known she was carrying. She'd been holding it since the first breakup with Jay, this quiet guilt about her powers, this belief that her usefulness was conditional, that she couldn't control what she was, that she was a liability dressed up as an asset. The moments when people around her got hurt and her luck seemed absent. The spiral she'd gone into that had convinced her she was more danger than protection to the people she loved.
But the coin had been there.
Not responding to her conscious direction. Not following her tactical thinking or her probability calculations. Just doing what luck did when it was genuine, finding the path through twelve ordinary lives and arriving at exactly the moment it was needed.
She hadn't been a liability. She'd been there the whole time. She just hadn't been there to see it.
She exhaled. Long and slow.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Okay."
Uatu lowered his hand and the vision faded.
"You understand now," he said.
"I understand that I've been carrying something I didn't need to carry." She was quiet for a moment. "That doesn't mean I'm going to stand here and tell you fate is a plan and everything happens for a reason. A kid named Leech had to grow up underground and experience sunlight for the first time just because my coin ended up in the right sewer. That's not a plan. That's a cascade."
"Yes," Uatu said simply. "And I believe in this universe, as in every other, hope never dies. As long as someone keeps their good eye on the bigger picture."
"But the cascade got Jay through something that would have killed him." She looked at the Earth. "Which means the cascade matters. Which means what I do next matters. Which means I need Vormir's location."
Another silence filled the space. This time, a longer one.
She'd spent enough time seeing cosmic entities in the past twenty-four hours to have developed a functional sense for what their silences meant. This one wasn't refusal. It was the silence of a being who had spent eternity as an observer genuinely weighing whether the wall of non-interference had a door in it somewhere.
"I observe," Uatu said finally. "But observation without wisdom is merely voyeurism. I have watched your family be built across every chapter of its story. I have watched Jay stand in places where the galaxy converges on a single mortal, and I have watched him refuse to fall. I have watched you become something that the universe's architects did not account for when they drew up their designs. It is elemental. It is the foundation of what comes next."
In the wall of the balcony behind her, the stone dissolved. A doorway formed, and beyond it she could see a distant landscape, rust-red and dead, lit by a star that looked nothing like the sun.
"The coordinates will not help you," he said. "Vormir moves. So instead, I offer transit. One time only. What you find when you arrive there is your affair."
Domino stared at the doorway. Felt the cold coming through it even from here, something deeper than temperature.
"Thank you," she said. "Genuinely."
"Go." He turned back to Earth. "And Domino."
She paused at the threshold.
"The coin was not the only thing you gave him," Uatu said. "You gave him a reason to be human. I have observed this universe since before your sun had a name. That is rarer than luck. That is rarer than almost anything I have recorded."
She walked through the door, taking his words to heart.
Vormir looked like the universe had gotten tired and given up.
The sky was a permanent bruise, deep red shading toward near-black at the horizon, no clouds because there was nothing in this atmosphere to form clouds from. The landscape was rubble and cliff-face and bottomless gorges, like someone had taken a planet and run it through a grinder set to desolate. Wind moved across the surface in patterns that sounded like breathing, slow and cold and rhythmic, the respiration of something ancient that had stopped caring about being alive centuries ago.
Jay had described Vormir once in the months when he'd been obsessively cataloguing cosmic threats in case any of them became relevant. He'd described it the way he described most things, with dry precision layered over genuine unease.
"Soul Stone's definitely located on Vormir. Nice place it chose."
She was starting to understand what he meant.
The portal had deposited her at the base of a cliff that rose several hundred feet before becoming something even less hospitable. She had her suit's environmental systems running at capacity, warming her from the inside, and she was still cold in a way that felt spiritual rather than physical. Like Vormir itself was trying to convince her that warmth was an aberration, a temporary malfunction in the universe's natural state of loss.
She walked. Her quantum strings spread ahead of her, reading the terrain, adjusting the probability of footholds being solid and edges holding weight.
The path became obvious after the first mile. There was only one direction that made probability sense, one thread that led somewhere rather than nowhere. She followed it past rock formations that looked arranged by something with an aesthetic preference for grief, past crevasses deep enough that her sensors couldn't find the bottom.
She'd been walking for twenty minutes when she saw the figure.
Ahead, at the edge of a plateau that overlooked a drop so dramatic it made her stomach do something involuntary, a robed figure stood with its back to her. Hood up. Still. The posture of someone who had been standing in that specific spot for a very long time and had made their peace with it.
Red Skull. She knew he was here. The confluence point for the Soul Stone's guardian was one of the first things she'd remembered when building her plan. Johann Schmidt, keeper of the Stone's terrible price, condemned to haunt this place and guide the worthy toward the exchange that would let them claim it.
She almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
"Finally," she said, crossing toward him. "I never thought I'd be relieved to see a nazi with a red skull, but here we are."
She put her hand on the figure's shoulder to turn him around.
And stopped.
The shoulder was not the right size. Not the right shape. It belonged to someone significantly larger than any human man, built on a scale that suggested the sculptor who designed them had been working in units of magnitude rather than inches.
Domino's hand still rested on the shoulder. She removed it with the specific care of someone defusing something that might be sensitive to sudden movement.
The figure turned.
He was taller in person. That was her first genuine thought, stupid and immediate and accurate. The accounts she'd read described him well enough: the jaw, the chin, the eyes that carried the specific weariness of someone who had decided they were right about something fundamental and had spent decades executing on that conviction without deviation. The scythe in his hand glowed with energy that her Death Stone recognized and resonated with, a harmonics of finality that made the violet pulse on her finger stutter.
He looked at her without surprise. Like he'd been expecting exactly this, at exactly this moment, and had arranged his schedule accordingly.
"I know what it is to lose," he said, his voice a low rumble that the Vormir wind caught and distributed in all directions at once. The voice of a being that had killed gods and weighed the arithmetic of it afterward without flinching. "To feel so desperately that you are right, yet to fail nonetheless. To pursue what must be done across every obstacle the universe places in your path, because the universe, in its current state, requires correction and there are very few willing to provide it." He tilted his enormous chin down, measuring her the way a man measures a door before deciding whether to walk through it. "Dread it. Run from it. Destiny arrives all the same."
The winds took a pregnant pause.
"And now it is here." His head tilted, just a fraction. "Or should I say. I am."
Domino stared at him for three full seconds.
Then, with the tone of someone who had spent an extremely long day dealing with cosmic entities and was running critically low on patience for dramatic timing:
"Oh, for the love of," she said. "Thanos?!"
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