Thor had failed twice now.
Failed to save Loki. Failed to stop the snap. Failed to arrive before the stones were already destroyed. The rage that came out of him now wasn't the operatic fury of a god—it was something rawer and more honest than that, the kind that comes from grief that has finally found a direction to point itself.
"You're not from this world." His voice was a low, grinding roar. "You haven't lost what we've lost. You haven't felt what we've felt. So it's very easy for you to stand there and—"
"Hey—hey—" Steve Rogers had positioned himself between them with the instinctive urgency of a man who has managed volatile situations for eighty years. His hands were on Thor's shoulders. "Thor. Stop."
Thor's response to this was to attempt to move forward while Steve Rogers was attached to him, which was the kind of physics problem that only sometimes resolves in Steve's favor. He was making reasonable progress.
"Buddy!" Tony, reading the trajectory of the situation with the speed of someone who has seen it before, crossed the distance in three strides, his Ironman activating around him as he moved—nanometal flowing into position, boot jets firing for bracing—and added himself to the project of keeping one Norse god from making a point he would regret. "Jordan didn't mean anything by it! We're all in this together!"
Thor, with two supersoldiers worth of applied force restraining him from the left and right, was still making incremental progress. Black Widow and Rhodes had added their voices to the general effort, but the enraged God of Thunder had exactly one focal point and it was Jordan.
Jordan, for his part, looked up.
The planet had a moon. Half-visible on the horizon, the particular amber color of a satellite viewed through a thick atmosphere. Reasonable size. The new Eternal Titan ability had settled into his energy system overnight, and he'd been meaning to find a practical test of the upgraded energy control.
This seemed like a suitable moment.
He raised his open hand toward it.
Golden ki gathered in his palm—a deep, clean warmth that was already something different from what it had been yesterday, the Eternal Power integration having smoothed the channels considerably. He let it build for approximately one second.
Then he fired.
The beam was straight, bright, and moved fast enough that it reached the moon before anyone had processed that he'd done something. It hit. And the moon—
—became a firework.
No sound. They were in vacuum conditions for the explosion itself, so the sound never reached them. Just a silent, magnificent detonation in the sky, expanding outward in all directions—light, debris, the slow spread of radiant dust catching the star's light. Beautiful, in the way that enormous violence is sometimes beautiful when it's far enough away.
The Avengers' brains collectively supplied the sound anyway. The human mind refuses to accept that something that large simply doesn't make noise. Every person present heard, in their inner ear, the roar of a small celestial body ceasing to exist.
The debris field spread, dimming, and settled into a soft radial glow across the sky.
Jordan clapped his hands together once, casually, as if completing a minor task.
"I particularly admire a quote from a very practical man I once knew," he said, turning to look at Thor with a pleasant expression. He cracked his knuckles—a clean, deliberate sound. "The idea goes roughly like this: my strength can make an idiot speak to me calmly. My wisdom can also make an idiot speak to me calmly."
A beat.
"How about it, Hammer God? Feeling more conversational?"
The Avengers looked at each other.
Thor's expression had done something that engines do when they're abruptly submerged in cold water. All the kinetic energy, the forward momentum, the operational fury—stopped. Not defused. Just suddenly encountering a context that required a complete recalculation of the relevant variables.
He stood there for a moment with Steve on his left arm and Tony on his right, staring at the slowly dispersing remains of the moon.
He had once, in a moment of extreme anger, grabbed a stellar furnace with his bare hands—dragged himself into the heart of a dying star to complete Stormbreaker. That was one of the more impressive things he'd done. He knew it.
But that was a dwarf-built mechanism, constructed from the core of an already-dead planet, channeling the furnace's output rather than generating it. His father, wielding the Spear of Eternity with the full backing of Asgardian divine power, could have done what Jordan just did. Odin at full strength, commanding the entire power of the Nine Realms, at the height of his conquests.
Odin was dead. Asgard was gone. Thor's current access to Asgardian divine power was a meaningful fraction of what his father had commanded—a useful fraction, respectable by any standard—but not that.
He thought about this for several seconds.
Then he stopped trying to move forward.
Tony immediately released him and crossed over to Jordan with the relieved energy of someone who has successfully avoided a diplomatic incident. "Don't mind him. He's been having a rough stretch. We all have." He glanced sideways at Jordan. "You doing alright?"
"Do I look angry?"
Tony looked at the space in the sky where a moon had recently been. "I'm glad you're not angry," he said, with complete sincerity.
He put a hand on Jordan's shoulder, something in his face going quieter for a moment. The last person who'd pulled him out of an impossible situation had died in a cave in a desert, and Tony had spent fifteen years carrying that. He wasn't going to waste the second chance.
"Alright, Jordan." Steve had released Thor and come up alongside Tony, his voice shifting into the register he used when it was time to move forward. He gave Thor one long, direct look—the kind that conveyed a whole conversation without requiring one—and turned back. "Tell us. What's the plan?"
Jordan's expression shifted.
The pleasant, unhurried quality he usually wore assembled itself into something that anyone who'd grown up watching late-night informercials would have recognized immediately.
"Gentlemen," he said, "how much do you know about quantum mechanics?"
Tony and Banner looked at each other. The specific look of two people with doctorates registering the same concern simultaneously.
Tony said, very carefully, "Jordan. You're not suggesting something like... time travel."
"Science fiction," Banner said immediately, raising a hand. "The time travel depicted in last-century science fiction is not physically—"
"Don't be so hasty to close your minds," Jordan said.
New Avengers Compound, New York. Several days later.
The assembled Avengers stood on the lawn in the cool morning, waiting with varying degrees of patience.
Thor was managing his patience the way he usually managed patience, which was by continuously adjusting his grip on Stormbreaker and checking the horizon.
"How much longer?" he said. "He's been gone too long."
"Relax." Natasha glanced at him sideways, her expression the particular brand of amusement that she deployed when something was genuinely funny and she was pretending it wasn't. "Earth only has one moon. I'd like to keep it for now."
"I would never—" Thor began, with the injured dignity of someone being accused of something they had technically only almost done. "That was a completely different situation. I am not brainless—I'm perfectly capable of—" He stopped.
He had just processed something.
"Wait."