Even though he had that amber sunset, lit by the fires which had burned on Titan's surface for thousands of years seared into his mind, Thanos still is forced to squint when the portal the Space Stone conjures closes, and the light hits him square in the face. Since he'd first left his home, the sun had not once moved from its spot in the sky. The Titan thinks it odd. Had the Soul Stone's 'pop' halted the planet on its axis? Even then, the orbit of Titan in relation to the sun would surely have carried the orb out of view since he had last been here. Perhaps it is some illusion, born of a cosmic arbiter greater than he. Not that it terribly mattered. Soon, Thanos would outrank them all.
Air heated by the power of an Infinity Stone caresses the portions of his body his armor does not cover. He's forgotten how warm it is, how heavy and engulfing it felt in his lungs. Thanos has lived a long time, and he does not think any spit of ground in all the cosmos has ever been painted within such a suffocating sphere of orange. The lack of any hue other than that dark bronze, like the blood of the extinct Eternals had sunk into the crust of the planet, almost makes Thanos' stomach turn. The Titan chuckles. A being who already wielded enough power to lay even the gods of fabled Asgard low, sickened by a mere color.
Beyond tasteless amusement, Thanos feels nothing as he looks upon the first world he murdered, just as he did when he was young and there was a chance for someone out there to strangle the darkness inside him.
He need not stay long. Ebony Maw, successful in retrieving the Space Stone, would likely be sating his blacker passions torturing the lone Asgardian, as well as Glaive and Black Dwarf when Thanos returned. Many a time Thanos had gazed over Maw's shoulder while he inflicted horrific anguish on his brothers or sister, and this time would be no different.
'After so long you have returned! The stars would die, a million million worlds would be dragged screaming into the void, and through every one of those storms I knew that Thanos of Titan would return for me.'
Thanos' boot shifts in the firm, hot soil, and nudges something. Even after millennia of pillage and slaughter and conquest, he remembers the unyielding fire of the Soul Stone. The jewel sat next to his right foot, the ground pressed so tightly by heat and pressure that it could not have rolled anywhere since he had last known its touch.
The Space Stone had pulled him right to its brother, at the concise spot where the Soul Stone had lay. Perhaps it hid its own intelligence. He was standing in the exact spot where he'd killed his world that fateful night, and Death had put her hand on his shoulder and spoken her beautiful words in his ear for the first time.
Something nearly stirs at that revelation in Thanos' dead heart. Nearly.
The Soul Stone's voice is shaky, neurotic and distraught. Thanos has heard the same broken syllables in the mouths of the slaves and dissidents that Ebony Maw had shattered the minds of. Perchance the centuries marooned on a dead world had driven it mad. But it was an Infinity Stone. It was older than creation, had exploited more beings than all those Thanos had slain, had obliterated gods and monstrosities he could only find in his sleep. Its intelligence was unending and malevolent. But it cannot fool Thanos.
He bends down and picks it up. Wielding the other two Infinity Stones, as well as his own Deviant physiology, protected him from the cosmic fury the Stone held within it.
'Thanos? Why do you not speak? Are you overwhelmed with my beauty, as you were so long ago? I, too, longed for your arrival a great deal-'
"I am debating trying to crush you for daring to deceive me. Certainly given my own strength combined with the Stones will do the job."
All pretenses freeze and then shatter under Thanos' icy tone.
'You've grown more tenacious. I sense them within the Gauntlet. I have no doubts that my brothers would be overjoyed to be rid of me. You too, would gladly turn me to powder, if only you could. But you need me, Thanos of Titan. You need the power I wield to bring your romantic fantasties into being. Who could have envisioned it, the greatest murderer this universe will ever know, prone to flights of fancy like a lovesick child.'
The Stone is abruptly silent, as Thanos clenched the Gauntlet in a fist, invoking the awesome might of both the Power and the Space Stones. The Mad Titan feels the briefest spark out outrage in his heart before the unceasing blackness devours it again. The Soul Stone had made him angry, and rage only made Thanos' immesurable intellect work harder to gain revenge.
"Not so talkative now, are you?" He growls, smiling cruelly. "You've grown emotional in your time here. No matter. Thanos masters you all the same." With that, he dropped the Soul Stone into its slot on the Inifnity Gauntlet, lending its amber orange to the icy blue of the Space Stone.
Thanos clutches his ears, screaming in agony the instant it locks into the golden glove he wears. The Soul Stone fights back, screaming and cursing and lashing out at the insolent mortal who dared to chain it to their will. Tendrils of its agless power course through his mind, like the tentacles of some gelatinous, venomous sea beast. Each one need barely nick his mind to unleash lightning bolts of pain throughout Thanos' being. Focus breaks up the wave of anguish in his brain, and for good measure Thanos clenches the Gauntlet again, loosing Space and Power upon Soul like mad dogs.
Gradually, through clenched teeth and grated groans, the Soul Stone grows quieter, less furious in its struggles, until at last it is silent. Squirming, fuming and angry, but quiet. Thanos takes one breath in, and it is the sweetest air he has ever tasted.
The Titan takes one last look at the blasted graveyard of his home, and then conjures a portal with the Space Stone, preferring to leave his ghosts where they haunt.
Earlier . . .
The dorsal wing of the escape pod was violently vanquished by a piece of debris from its mother vessel in a hail of sparks, fire, and twisted metal.
Loki was not the best pilot.
Tesseract safe within his own personall section of the ether, the Jotun-turned-Asgardian tried his best to weave between portions of the Statesman which the larger ship giving chase had blasted away. He'd never admit it if anyone ever asked him, but Loki's heart almost gave out in relief when Thor had asked him to flee the battle. It would have been the nobler defiance to stay, refusing to abandon his brother and King in his hour of need. But the moment Loki had looked through the viewport and seen the flagship of Thanos, shame and memories flooded him in a tidal wave so powerful it might have washed away all that he was. The last time he had seen it he had been drifting through space, waiting for death that might never come, self-loathing eating at him due to his inability to gain Odin's approval. Dark were the paths Loki had traveled under Thanos' tutelage once he had been "rescued". Visions black and dire had haunted him when he woke and slept, marking him under the eyes with dark circles and flaying his mind until he spoke in prose. The last time he had seen that ship, he had led a swarm of chittering, hinge-jawed Chitauri into the ranks of the Avengers, slain the son of Coul, murdered dozens.
Loki wishes Thor's good heart hadn't rubbed off on him. He'd been both sides of the coin. Being evil was so much easier.
The greater patches of debris were behind him now, and he slows to cruising speed in proximity to a gaggle of larger escape pods meant for dozens of people, as opposed to one. The God of Mischief sighs. Going to Earth with Thor had been a horrific idea on its own. Now, with Thor's fate unknown, Loki may as well be the King of Asgard as the last of Odin's spawn. Loki, expected to be the liasion between wayward Asgard and Earth? It's as if he was put in a fistfight against the Hulk.
Pop!
"And to think you were so nearly out of my range," a soft, sweet voice from behind him drawls, and Loki's spine immediately straightens when he hears it. A bead of sweat cold as all the ices of Jotunheim breaks through his skin at his temple, almost as if they want to greet Ebony Maw.
From the moment the Titan's Seducer opens his cracked, dry, black lips, Loki is putty in his hands. How could he not be? All of the horrific futures he had had forced into his consciousness while a pawn of Thanos, Ebony Maw had lavished on him. Soft suggestion and counsel from the Maw had been like honey in Loki's soul, and his skin filled with something dark and alien that had not been there before.
"Move your pod forward. Careful! You wouldn't want to slam into your friends, would you, Loki?" Maw purrs. The God of Mischief feels trapped in his own flesh, pushing on unrelenting walls of vein and bone, yelling at someone else who lives in his brain to return control to him. He can still feel Ebony Maw's mottled, wrinkly hands on his shoulders. "Be a dear, child; bring the Tesseract out from where you are hiding it."
Unable to stop himself, Loki feels the familiar warmth of magical energy in his hand, right before he reaches into the air and the Tesseract flares into existence in his palm again. "That's it," Maw whispers, bringins his sandpaper snout centimeters away from Loki's malleable ears. "Good, good. Now go and play with your friends again. Let me take care of this."
With a stroke of rough and ugly fingers on his cheek, Loki is alone again, free will restored, and shame magnified so many times over.
Through the void of space, breaking what would have been the sound barrier were he not in a vacuum, Vision moves as gracefully as the most lithe of swimmers. He thinks it an odd thing, to be moving so swiftly through such an immesurable distance and to feel no wind on his vibranium skin, no particles of dust detected by his superhuman senses. The idea is not entertained for long. Many times, Vision had traversed this particular ocean of stars with his mistakes on his mind.
It had begun during the Avengers' "Civil War" as it was known in the world's general lexicon. Vision cannot recall a time before he fought against Steve Rogers' faction of their team when he had used his power in anger. As Steve and his friend James had tried to flee the battle, Vision lanced a control tower down to bar their way, feeling nothing but white hot fury in his body. Again, when trying to incapacitate the Falcon, the Mind Stone's yellow beam had shot from his forehead as a manifestation of rage so great it had frightened the android. Something else, something more fickle, more soft, and infinitely more powerful had taken root in him, that found its origins in the brush of Wanda Maximoff's red hair against his shoulder that day.
Much like his predecessor, Ultron, love and hate are becoming more familiar to him. Vision finds the comfortable serenity he had known since his birth stolen. Nobody had ever explained to him how he might endure such alien and disturbing things. How could he reset equilibrium, return to the balance he once had? Vision thinks he may find the answers in the silence and suspension of space.
After informing Wanda, he had left Earth far behind, passing it and its solar system by. In his long, endless travels, other queries than restoring inner peace had arisen. Of all these, one haunted him greater than anything.
What had triggered his emotions?
Vision continues onward, his course and speed shattering the lifeless planetoid in his path. Chunks of it, hundreds of miles long, fling in all directions as the android observes keenly for a moment. He thinks back to when he had told Wanda of his plans to depart Earth. Photographic memory plays in color and noise.
"You are the strongest out of all of us!" She'd exclaimed, her voice ringing from the crystalline receiver in the Mind Stone's center. Vision had wished so desperately to see her one more time before he left the planet. However, even the power of the Mind Stone couldn't pinpoint Wanda's exact location. Once Steve had broken her and the imprisoned Avengers out of the Raft, she'd vanished off the face of the Earth. Either she was keeping her thoughts in check with ungodly skill so that Vision couldn't discover where she was by reading her thoughts, or she was using her own power to block him. Both of them had been spawned from the Mind Stone after all; it lay in Vision's skull and gave him life, and it had unlocked the potential in Wanda's genes, the hidden factor that one day in humanity's mutationary race would give way to powers unmatched.
"That is precisely my point, Wanda," he'd replied, soft and nonthreatening; Vision wished that was always his way. "Would you entrust a child with the power of an Infinity Stone? You know I could crack the Earth in two."
"You are not a child. Vision, you are more wise than anyone I have ever known. Sam, Steve, Natasha, all of them. I wouldn't come to a child for advice. I never asked Pietro for any."
The ease with which she had brought up her brother, who's death she had felt in the core of her being, had signaled to Vision that she wasn't playing around.
"Wanda, these . . ." The android had felt a small crack of pain lace the Mind Stone, as if even from across the planet he is subservient to the whims of Wanda's jealous heart. "These things that I feel . . . they are something that searching through all humanity's information has taught me nothing about dealing with. You remember Ultron, don't you? Slave to all of his feelings. If I do not master my heart . . ."
The distress that had plagued her dissipated. Instead, he felt relief on her end of their connection, and Wanda had laughed softly and richly. "Тупой!" She giggles. "You want to learn to live with being human and you go to the Internet? Connection teaches you! Staying around people lets you learn by example. I know you're hanging around in the atmosphere, Vision. Come down."
Vision had known he would never convince her how much of a threat he was. He wished that it had occurred to Wanda that she would never convince him to remain where he could hurt her. Resigned, he had blocked wriggled the Mind Stone out of the net of Wanda's perception, and a few moments after that, the shining orange curve of Jupiter was just ahead.
Vision feels something in his intelligence hunger at the thought of her. It was something he knew well, his beginning and what he thinks may just be his end. It felt so strongly and so passionately it threatened to knock Vision from control of his body and cast him into the dark. But, for now, he glides through the galaxy, letting the bolts of fire that trail behind him melt his troubles away.