Jordan let the silence settle for a moment, then added, "In my world, of course."
Natasha watched him as he spoke. Force of habit—two decades of intelligence work had turned her into a living polygraph, and right now every instrument was running. His posture, his eye contact, the micro-expressions at the corners of his mouth when he paused. Either this man was extraordinarily good at lying, which was possible, or he was telling the truth, which was also possible.
She hadn't decided which yet.
"So you're saying you're an Earthling," she said carefully, "from a different Earth."
"It does sound strange," Jordan allowed.
"It's not the strangest thing we've dealt with." Steve Rogers had the quality of a man who had trained himself to be unreadable—the diplomatic smile was textbook, perfect, and gave away nothing. "That said, Jordan, we'd like to know a little more about you." He glanced meaningfully at the rubble-strewn horizon. "Could we continue this somewhere else?"
"Of course."
The capital of Wakanda received them under a sky that felt wrong.
T'Challa was gone. Shuri was gone. Half the royal household had dissolved into ash in front of Okoye's eyes, and the general had somehow closed her face around that fact and continued functioning—because that was what T'Challa would have wanted, and she was the kind of soldier who honored dying wishes even when they cost something. She accepted the Avengers into the palace with quiet formality, directed staff, established a briefing room.
Within the hour, the group had heard Jordan out.
It took less persuasion than he'd expected. A parallel Earth was strange, yes—but these were people who counted a Norse god and a sentient raccoon among their colleagues. The threshold for fantastical had been recalibrated considerably. And Earth was a smoking ruin, the Avengers were down half their number, and Jordan had spent the last hour helping them kill things. Fresh allies were not being turned away.
"The arrival of a passing stranger from another dimension," Rocket observed from his chair, feet not quite reaching the floor, "is genuinely the best news we've had in forty-eight hours."
Nobody disagreed with him.
"Thor was out of line earlier," Steve said quietly, once the initial briefing had wound down. He glanced toward the corner of the conference room, where Thor had positioned himself with the deliberate isolation of a man who was grieving and didn't want company about it. "I apologize on his behalf."
"Don't." Jordan shook his head. "I understand."
He reached into his jacket and set a small object on the table.
The pager was old-fashioned by any standard—palm-sized, battered at the edges, the kind of device that had no business existing in the same decade as arc reactors and vibranium. Except for the symbol on its face: a red-and-blue starburst that drew every eye in the room the moment it appeared.
"I was in New York when it happened," Jordan said. "I have certain psychic abilities—I'd just made contact with Nick Fury. We barely had time to exchange a word." He paused. "He turned to dust before my eyes. But he managed to send this signal first."
The silence in the room had a different quality now.
Steve Rogers looked at the pager the way a man looks at something he'd long since given up hoping for.
The Avengers knew Nick Fury. Knew was perhaps too strong a word—the former Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a man constructed almost entirely of contingencies and secrets, and even people who'd worked alongside him for years had no real sense of how deep the architecture went. He was good, and he was thorough, and he trusted no one with everything.
Which meant somewhere out there, a piece of his plan was still running.
Bruce Banner was already bent over the device, his glasses pushed up his nose, muttering to himself. "It's transmitting. Continuously—this thing is broadcasting to somewhere outside Earth's orbit. I can't decode the content yet, but the pattern reads like a distress beacon." He looked up. "Whatever he set in motion, it's still in motion."
Natasha's mouth curved slightly. "So we might be getting a visit from Nick Fury's last resort."
Steve looked at Jordan. "Thank you for bringing this to us."
"I was just returning it to the right people." Jordan lifted a shoulder. "Seemed like the obvious thing to do."
After that, Jordan's status in the group settled into something unofficial but functional. Not quite a member. Not quite a guest. The space between, which suited everyone.
The next few hours were harder.
With Okoye's intelligence and the Avengers' own assessments combined, the full picture assembled itself on the holographic display with the patience of a verdict: approximately half of all life on Earth had ceased to exist in the moment of Thanos's snap. Half the heroes present had watched colleagues dissolve in front of them. And according to every signal they could read from off-planet—this was not a local phenomenon.
Half the universe. Gone.
The number sat in the room like a physical weight.
"This can't be real," someone said.
"It is," someone else said.
Thor said nothing. He sat in his corner and stared at nothing, and the lightning in Stormbreaker pulsed faintly with something that wasn't anger so much as the shape anger leaves behind when it runs out of places to go.
Rhodes stood up first. "So what do we actually do? What's the move here?"
No answer came.
The silence fractured.
"Nothing we do brings them back. We've already lost—"
"Don't say that—"
"Then what? Tell me what the plan is—"
"We find him and we finish it properly—"
"And then what, Rhodes? Then what?"
The argument that followed was not elegant. Voices rose, accusations flew sideways, grief weaponized itself and took swings at the nearest available target. It was ugly and unproductive and, Jordan noticed, quietly necessary—like a pressure valve finding its release. When it burned itself out ten minutes later, the atmosphere in the room was still heavy, but it was a different kind of heavy. More breathable.
He waited for the dust to settle.
"There's something worth considering," Jordan said, once the room had gone quiet enough to hear him. He kept his voice even. "The Infinity Gauntlet used the power of all six stones to erase half of all life. But that means the stones still exist. Thanos still exists." He let that sit for a moment. "If someone found him, took the Gauntlet, and snapped their fingers again—is it possible the effect could be reversed? Bring everyone back?"
The silence this time was different. Charged.
Thor raised his head from the corner.
Bruce Banner was on his feet before Jordan had finished the sentence, one hand cutting through the air. "Yes—yes, that's exactly it. The same power that erased them could restore them. We use the stones to reverse it. Get everyone back." His voice had the particular intensity of a scientist who has just seen the shape of a solution. "It's theoretically sound."
"There's a flaw in that plan," Natasha said.
The energy in the room paused.
She hadn't moved from her seat. She met the room's collective gaze with calm, almost apologetic precision. "Before we get excited—can we actually take the Gauntlet from Thanos? Because we just tried that. With everything we had. And we lost."
The silence returned. Heavier than before.
One by one, heads turned toward the two strongest people in the room.
Thor felt it. The weight of all those gazes calibrating against him, and then—almost involuntarily—sliding sideways to check where Jordan was sitting. He held the comparison in his mind for a moment, jaw tightening.
Then he stood.
"There's no problem," he said, and his voice had the particular flatness of a man reclaiming something. "This time, I will not miss." He looked at no one in particular when he said it, but everyone understood.
"I can help, if you need it," Jordan said.
The assembled heroes exhaled as one.
Thor crossed the room toward Jordan with an expression of complete blankness and stopped in front of him, arms spread slightly—a display so transparent that Jordan had it read before he even finished the gesture.
He's showing off. Obviously.
Which was fine, objectively speaking. Thor had earned the right to show off. The man had been betrayed by his brother, pummeled by the Hulk, brutalized by his sister, and killed twice over—and here he was, standing. That spoke to something genuine. Even without his hammer, even with everything the universe had taken from him, the God of Thunder was still the God of Thunder.
The lightning coursing through Thor's veins made that point rather emphatically.
Across the conference room, Stormbreaker—resting quietly against the far wall—trembled.
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