The Beyonders stepped back.
Franklin watched with satisfaction, then he jogged toward Sue Richards across the arena, and when he got close his expression went younger than the rest of him.
"Mum." His voice caught on it. "You look so good. And that's Dad? It's weird seeing you both without the grey."
Nate smacked him between the shoulder blades.
"You're doing it again."
"I was just saying she looks good, relax--"
"You absolute bellend, stop meddling with the Timeline."
Franklin had already reached where the Fantastic Four were positioned and Sue had been mid-fight when she turned at a voice she almost but couldn't quite place. She found herself looking at a young man with her husband's build and her coloring, looking at her with an expression she understood before words could form. Around them the arena continued its attrition, bodies down, powers spent, the long ugly math of a fight that'd been going too long, and none of it touched the ten feet of quiet that opened up between them.
"Hey, just--" Franklin gave up on the sentence and hugged her instead, arms around her shoulders, careful but complete, the hug of someone who'd been waiting to do this for longer than any normal measure of time covered.
Sue had fought cosmic entities without flinching and she went still for one second. Then her arms came up.
"Franklin." Not a question. Just the word landing exactly where it needed to.
"Hey Mum."
Reed had turned and his elastic face moved through its stages, calculation, recognition, and then something he was very carefully not letting destabilize him because the trial was still in session and he needed to stay functional. Then he looked at his son's face twenty years older than it should be, and the calculation stopped. It just stopped.
"Hi Dad." Franklin's voice got smaller. "I know it's a lot."
"It's a lot," Reed agreed. For three seconds he held his son while the fight kept going around them, and neither of them moved.
Nate had been working his way toward Jean and Scott with the careful movement of someone approaching something they've been rehearsing for a long time, still not sure the rehearsal covered it. Jean's telepathy would've already read the bio-signature, almost identical to Cable's, the psionic pattern that Mr. Sinister had engineered out of their combined genetic architecture, the one that lived in the Age of Apocalypse version of them like an echo of a son they'd never had. She would've already known before she saw his face.
He stopped in front of them and he found them coming toward him through the chaos.
"Secret's out," Nate said, and the resignation in it was quiet, the resignation of someone who'd been carrying something a long time and was finally allowed to set it down. He looked at his parents, younger versions of them, versions that didn't know him yet, and his face did something he clearly hadn't planned for. "Hey Mum. Hey Dad."
Jean's hand went to her mouth.
Scott didn't move for a moment, then he stepped forward and put his arms around his son, who was taller than him by two inches now, and Nathan held on with both arms. Neither of them said anything. The arena swallowed the sound around them.
Both pairs of parents turned, because you turn when there's a child watching something this large with that particular quality of attention, the one that means they've already felt it and they're waiting for the adults to confirm what it means.
Luv was watching all of them with his eyes wide and his weight shifted forward onto his toes.
Franklin crossed the space between them first, crouched to Luv's level and his voice dropped to the register you use for someone you've known since they were new.
"Don't worry, big bro." His voice went warm. "We're here to help. Been hearing about this fight for years, you never shut up about it, to be honest with you."
Luv's face did something complicated.
"Big brother?"
"Yeah," Nate said, from behind Franklin. Simple. Final. The way you say something true.
The situation with Mephisto had gone past the point where talking would fix anything about four minutes ago.
Mephisto had been reigning in Hell since before humanity had anything worth confessing. He'd been the Lord of Lies, the Dread Persuader, the Foul Pact Maker, the being who'd tortured the soul of Cynthia Von Doom for centuries as a trophy, who'd unmade Peter Parker's marriage, who'd manufactured Ghost Rider out of a desperate boy's grief and called it commerce. He'd been doing this since the Stone Age Avengers, since the first human being looked up at something larger than themselves and felt want. He wasn't a combatant, he was an institution, and you didn't fight Mephisto, you negotiated terms, and the terms were always his.
He'd miscalculated Domino.
What Domino did about it wasn't technically something with precedent and the Death Stone gave her authority over transitions between states of being, the line between alive and not, between existing and being resolved into something else. She'd used it carefully until now, with full awareness of what it meant to be the one holding the door.
Mephisto had pushed on that door one too many goddamn times.
He'd stood in his pocket dimension calling Jay's suffering "interesting" and angled for his soul with the patience of something that'd done this ten thousand times and expected to do it ten thousand more. He'd leaned on the door like it was his door, like everything was his door, like the architecture of endings was just another territory to expand into.
What she did was lethal and decisive and the Death Stone could make shadows longer than the things casting them and could reach into the space between what a being was and what it chose to present as, then pull those two things apart until the gap was wide enough to climb into.
She pulled Mephisto's own shadow and pinned him there, converting the Lord of the Splinter Realms, the Hell-lord who'd laughed at Eternity's petitions and made deals with Thanos himself, into a shadow slave. Full recognition of what he was doing, zero control over it, eternal awareness of every moment he spent in the shadow he now occupied, every battle happening around him that he couldn't touch, couldn't angle, couldn't work. The architect of corruption, preserved perfectly so he could watch everything he'd tried to take continue without him. Deposed in a war he'd assumed he couldn't lose to a woman he'd assumed was a piece on someone else's board.
And the beautiful thing, the thing that made it perfect, was that he felt it all. Every second. Every loss. Every moment of helplessness as the universe moved on without him, and he couldn't do a goddamn thing about it except watch.
Several beings in the arena saw this happen and several of them quietly reconsidered whether approaching Domino was something they wanted to do in the next several minutes.
She turned and Luv was already looking at her through the crowd with blue eyes wide, two strange older boys standing beside him with the kind of ease that meant they weren't strangers.
She blinked over to his side, put herself between Luv and the newcomers, and looked at them the way she looked at everything that appeared near her son, with the attention of someone who'd recently become the person in charge of death in this multiverse and was fully prepared to use that authority on anything that gave her a reason.
Then she actually looked at their faces.
The brown-haired one had a white streak that matched the one in Nathan Grey's hair from the photographs Jean had shown her when Luv first met the babies. The blond had Sue's cheekbones and Reed's height and was looking at her with recognition and an emotion he was barely keeping below the surface, the kind you feel when you've been waiting to see someone for longer than you'd like to admit.
She looked at Luv and he was looking at these two young men with that expression kids get when they've felt something important and are waiting for the adults to confirm what it means.
"Aunt Dom." Franklin got it out before Nate could physically stop him, which Nate had clearly been attempting to do for the last several seconds. "It's been so long. It's been ages since Uncle Jay took you and little Za--"
Nate's elbow connected with Franklin's ribs. Hard.
"Aunt Dom?" Domino repeated.
"For once in your life," Nate said, with the precision of someone who'd given up on hoping and moved on to damage control, "shut your mouth."
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