"He'll pay for what he's done."
Thor's summary was brief. It was also all anyone needed to hear—the words landed in the group like a struck bell, resonating through anger that had been sitting compressed for days and finally had somewhere to go.
In the quiet that followed, Nebula's expression had gone somewhere difficult. Black Widow moved toward her, reading it correctly, but Nebula shook her head once.
"He raised me," she said. The words were flat, not because she didn't mean them but because she'd already worked through most of what they contained. "He also killed my sister Gamora with his own hands." A pause. "Whatever you're planning—I'm part of it."
The firmness in her voice was not the kind that needed supporting. The assembled heroes recognized it for what it was and gave it the respect it deserved.
With Tony's return, the Avengers had their momentum back.
Jordan's standing in the group formalized quietly—no ceremony, no explicit vote, just the natural settling of a situation where he'd delivered results and everyone had stopped treating him like a potential problem. The rescue across four thousand light-years had a way of resolving outstanding trust questions.
Beyond morale, the return also brought material advantages: Nebula's intelligence on Thanos's location and habits, and the Benatar itself—battered, underpowered after its ordeal, but repairable. Within three days, Tony, Rocket, Banner, and Nebula had restored the ship to full operational status, working with the focused efficiency of experts who have no patience for anything that isn't solved yet.
Rocket ran the final system check from the pilot's seat, cycling through the diagnostic panel with the practiced ease of someone who has rebuilt this particular vessel more than once.
"Space-jump system: green. Hull integrity: green. Everything else: green." He leaned back. "Honestly, it looks better than when Quill had it. Our work is excellent."
The morning of departure arrived clear and cold.
The assembled Avengers were already gathered on the launch pad when the gold-and-red armor announced itself from above—repulsor-assisted descent, a controlled shockwave on landing that everyone had learned to brace for. The nanometal flowed and contracted, revealing Tony Stark in light-colored sunglasses, carrying a large case in one hand with the studied casualness of a man who has planned something and is pretending he hasn't.
He walked directly to Steve and handed the case over.
The captain took it, felt the weight, looked at Tony's face—and opened it.
The vibranium shield sat in fitted foam, the star-pattern freshly reprinted, every scratch and scoring from the Civil War cleaned away. New surface, original metal. Howard Stark's work, returned.
Tony's expression was unreadable. His voice was neutral to the point of being deliberate about it. "I think you'll need it. Consider it on loan from Stark Industries."
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Steve Rogers understood what that sentence cost.
"...Thank you," he said, very quietly.
He lifted the shield from the case with one hand, turned it over once—feeling the familiar mass, the faint resonance of sound-absorbing metal—and seated it on his back. The magnetic fitting engaged with a soft click against the uniform. The weight of it settled into the exact position his shoulder had been missing for years.
Captain America was complete again.
He let the moment land. Then:
"Avengers." His voice was level, carrying without effort. "Move out."
A beat.
"Let's go find that son of a bitch."
Silence.
Then Tony turned to the group with exaggerated incredulity. "He swore. Did everyone hear that? He told me to watch my language at least three separate times and he just—"
"Tony," Rhodes said flatly.
"—I'm just saying, there should be some consistency—"
"Tony."
"—I want to note this for the record—"
"Get on the ship."
The Benatar lifted clean, engines running at full capacity for the first time since Titan. Rocket had taken the pilot's seat and was already cycling through pre-jump diagnostics, tabs open across the navigation panel with the focus of someone who actually enjoys this part.
"First-time space travelers, strap in." He swiveled once to address the cabin. "The jump is not gentle. There are bags in the pocket in front of you. Please use them. Star-Lord will lose his mind if he comes back and this ship smells wrong."
The Avengers—those who had never left Earth's atmosphere in a vehicle moving under its own power—received this advice with varying degrees of confidence. Thor looked out the porthole with the mild disinterest of someone who has been doing interstellar travel since before most of the people on the ship were born. Jordan, who had covered considerably more interstellar distance in the Dragon Ball world using a combination of teleportation and sheer stubbornness, settled into his seat and watched the Earth shrink.
Blue curve. Cloud bands. The whole sphere visible at once, the way it only ever looks from out here.
Even with everything that had happened, it was worth seeing.
"Hold on," Rocket said, and hit the jump drive.
The wormhole passage opened in a burst of geometric light—hexagonal aperture, the structural lightning of folded space crackling along every edge—and the Benatar hit it at speed. The sensation was not, as advertised, gentle. Several Avengers discovered that the gap between intellectually understanding that space travel involves physical forces and physically experiencing those forces was considerable.
Then they were through.
Speed dropped. Stars rearranged. A planet filled the forward viewports—enormous, vivid, banded with color, nothing like Earth.
"Wuhu!" Rocket spread his arms. "Station reached. Please settle your fares before disembarking!"
He was still grinning when the light hit them.
It came from the planet's surface—a pulse, sustained and directional, the specific quality of something releasing an enormous quantity of energy in a very short time. It swept past the Benatar and continued outward toward the universe's edge with the indifferent momentum of a phenomenon that doesn't require permission to occur.
Over in approximately one second.
The heroes blinked in its aftermath, trying to process what they'd seen.
Jordan's mind had gone very still.
This scene.
Why does this feel familiar?
He turned it over once. And then the recognition hit him with the particular cold clarity of watching something you know the ending of arrive ahead of schedule.
—It's not time for a second snap yet.
Something was wrong with the timeline. He didn't have enough information to be certain, but his meta-knowledge of how this arc was supposed to unfold was suddenly misaligned with what he'd just watched happen, and that gap needed investigating immediately.
"Everyone," he said through the Mind Network, his voice calm and direct in every skull simultaneously, "this planet appears to be experiencing unexpected developments. I'll scout ahead. Hold position."
He was already moving before anyone responded.
The scarlet cloak caught nothing—there was no wind in vacuum—but it billowed anyway, the way dramatic things do when they have a point to make. Jordan's figure compressed into a streak of black light and vanished into the planet's upper atmosphere.
Thor rose from his seat a moment later, his expression locked into something focused and grim.
"Rocket." His voice had the quality of information being delivered, not a request. "Take us down. Now."
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