Into the Void
Chapter Two
Into the Void
As his body faded around him, dust floating on an unfelt wind, Bucky turned to Steve. He took a step, two, and then his legs gave out. He had seconds before it was over, and somehow, he sensed it. He called out, and Steve turned. For the briefest of moments, their eyes locked. And then Bucky pitched forward into the void.
That final image of Steve’s face, open and confused, the look in his eyes reflecting the building panic in Bucky’s chest, burned itself into Bucky’s brain and stayed stuck long after the rest of the world went dark.
The next sensation Bucky was aware of was a gentle, creeping cold. It slid icy fingers down his spine and over his face. Breath like winter ghosted across his throat. He woke up—if that was even the right word for it—and sat upright. Or at least he tried to. Strangely, his body didn’t respond. His eyes, however, opened.
If he’d been breathing, the sight before him would’ve taken his breath away.
A plain of endless gray stretched toward a pencil-line horizon. The sky was a dull red-orange, cloudless and devoid of stars. Bucky’s first thought was that this must be it felt like to be a bug caught under a plastic cup. Disoriented, he looked around. He was lying spread-eagle on the oddly flat, textureless ground. He ran the fingers of his new arm (the metal one, its fingertips as sensitive as a cat’s whiskers) over the strange surface and was astonished by its incredible smoothness.
With great effort, he sat up. Feeling returned to his body, a rush of sensation from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet. The clearer his thoughts, the more real he felt. Pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes, he steeled himself to face the vast, unending reality of what had happened. I’m dead. He repeated the words in his head, over and over. Rolling them around, testing them out. Eventually he concluded that being dead wasn’t a huge shock. The real miracle was that he’d managed to stay alive so long. But if I’m dead, he thought, then where am I?
He opened his eyes again. Pushing himself to his feet, he stood stock-still, turning in every direction until he was sure it all looked the same. Then he started walking. He had no idea why, or where he was going. Just that he was. After all, he’d get nowhere standing around forever.
He made it half a mile (in reality, if it even was reality, he had no idea how or if distance was measured in this place, so he figured miles would do) before anything remotely interesting happened. And then, half a mile in, there was a flash of lightning in the far distance. Well, not quite lightning, because it spread and filled the entire sky. A brilliant flash of green that lasted half a second, maybe less, and then faded.
Bucky stopped. He held his breath (not that he needed to breathe, but it was the principle of the thing) and counted the seconds. Sure enough, five beats later a tremendous rolling boom echoed out over the gray plain. Bucky tilted his head back, then turned in a circle. He lowered his head and did it again. No matter where he looked, nothing seemed different or out of place. Try as he might, he couldn’t figure out where the sound had come from, or what had caused the flash of light that had preceded it.
Resigning himself to the situation, Bucky set his shoulders and kept walking. If he was dead, he told himself, then he had an eternity to figure out where he was, and why he was there. No rush.
But then the mental image of Steve, blonde hair messy and clotted with dirt and blood, blue eyes wide as they met Bucky’s, forced its way into his head. In a moment of heart-rending agony, he realized he didn’t know if Steve had survived. Involuntarily, his fists clenched. He set his jaw and walked faster. Soon, he was running full-tilt, headed for the horizon.
“I’m coming for you!” he called out into the void. As if Steve—dead, alive, or otherwise—could actually hear him. “I’m telling you right now, Rogers, I refuse to be dead without you.”
The vast, breathless landscape swallowed Bucky’s echo whole.
. . . . .
Several hundred miles away, Stephen Strange, Peter Quill, Drax the Destroyer, and Mantis woke up on the flat gray plain.
Of the group, Strange was the only one unaffected and unsurprised by their surroundings. He stood up slowly, doing his best to hold on to the careful calm he’d cultivated in his mind just before The Fade. He watched with a neutral, unassuming expression as the others slowly came to their senses. This place was familiar to him. Of the fourteen million possible futures he’d seen, he’d ended up here in over half of them. Death, to him, was an old friend.
“…this sucks,” Quill said, finishing the sentence he’d started back on Titan.
“What is this place?” Mantis said after blinking awake, her face open and full of awe. She looked at her hands, wiggled her fingers, and then placed them both beneath her shoulders. In one graceful, flowing movement, she folded into a bridge pose and then flipped herself upright. For a moment, she looked utterly amazed. And then, in a voice filled with unrestrained glee, she said, “I’m not dead!”
Strange watched, unimpressed and not afraid to show it, as Quill tried to copy Mantis’s graceful maneuver and ended up twisted into an uncomfortable upside-down U. He gave up and fell back, then rolled over and pushed himself to his feet. He straightened his stance and held his head high, as if to say: Yeah, I totally meant to do that. But then he winced, grimacing. “Ah, man,” he said. He pressed a hand to his lower back. “I think I just fucked up my spine. Can you even fuck up your spine in the afterlife? I’m just sayin’, but that seems a bit unfair.”
“We’re not dead,” Mantis told him, smiling enthusiastically. “Look!” She wiggled her fingers in front of Quill’s face. “If I were dead, could I do that?”
Quill frowned. He turned to look at Drax, who was still lying on the ground, staring unblinkingly at the sky as if in some kind of trance. “What about him?” Quill said. “He looks pretty dead.” He looked around, clearly searching for some small, throwable object to chuck at Drax.
Strange took this as his cue to interfere. He gave his head a tiny shake to recalibrate. As many times as he’d witnessed this outcome, it had never occurred to him just how irritating it would be to be stuck in the afterlife with the newly-deceased Guardians of the Galaxy. At the least, it would take some getting used to. Rolling back his shoulders and taking a deep breath (not out of necessity, but for dramatic effect), he made an announcement.
“We are dead,” he said, without preamble. There was no point softening the blow. They all knew what had happened, whether they wanted to admit it or not. “This is The Manifest. The Soul Stone’s realm. It’s where you end up when you’re killed by the Infinity Gauntlet.”
Quill snapped to attention at the mention of the Soul Stone. His expression hardened. The grief, fresh and raw, bloomed in his eyes.
Strange continued. “I know this might be very hard for you all to accept, but—”
He was cut off by Drax, who sat up as suddenly as if someone had poked him with an electrified rod. He looked around, clearly confused. But when he saw Quill and Mantis, he grinned broadly. “Quill,” he said in a deep, booming voice, “I knew you were lying!”
Mantis smiled just as widely as Drax. She looked at Quill, inquisitive. “Lying about what?” she asked.
Drax pointed at Quill as he slowly pushed himself into a crouch. “He told me he can’t die,” Drax announced. He rose to his full (and rather intimidating) height. “You owe me fifty credits.”
“Dude, no way,” said Quill, putting up both hands, palms out, like a buffer between himself and Drax’s accusation.
Drax frowned. “Why not?”
“One, we’re dead. Two, we agreed drunk bets don’t count. Three, four, and five, we’re dead!”
“We never agreed to that,” said Drax.
Quill threw up his hands. “It’s like talking to a brick wall.”
“Ha!” said Drax. “That makes no sense. Brick walls are inanimate. They can’t talk.”
Quill turned to Mantis with a can-you-believe-this-shit look on his face, and Strange fought the urge to facepalm so hard he’d knock himself into another (hopefully quieter) dimension. But, because the fate of the universe was at stake, he steeled himself and soldiered on. “As I was saying,” he continued, through clenched teeth, “the first time you die can be disconcerting. You lot, however, seem to be doing just fine.” He hoped his words didn’t sound as sarcastic as they were.
Mantis closed her eyes for a moment, head tilted to one side. “This place is empty,” she said, frowning. “There’s no feeling.”
Strange inclined his head. “Yes,” he said. “That’s because there’s so much feeling. Essentially, the nothingness you feel is due to the blending of an infinitely large, ever-changing mix of emotions that, when combined, cancel each other out.”
“Like when we play all of Quill’s songs over the intercom at once,” Drax said sagely. “Only not as loud.”
Quill shot Drax a look. “Dude, that was you doing that? That time in the asteroid field? Seriously uncool!”
Mantis smiled. “He thought it was the ship malfunctioning,” she told Drax, who let out a sharp, ecstatic bark of laughter. And then, cheerfully, she added, “We could have died!”
Strange stared at her, perplexed by her sunny tone. “Excuse me, but right now we are dead, and the universe as we know it is about to end. Does anyone here care even remotely about that?” This did get their attention (or enough of it, anyway) and he plowed on while he had the chance. “Half the life in the universe is gone. Unfortunately, half of everything in the universe is also disappearing. At a slower rate than the organic lifeforms, but disappearing nonetheless. And when it does, the expansion of the universe will accelerate, planetary systems will fall apart, galaxies will unravel and, eventually, the universe will spread its heat and energy so thin that heat death with occur.”
“Cool,” said Quill. “Good luck with the whole saving-the-universe thing. But if I’m dead, the first thing I’m doing is finding Gamora.” Without further ado, he turned and started walking away across the flat gray expanse.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Strange called after him. A rhetorical question—of all the trillions of souls now trapped in the Soul Stone’s realm, he was among the handful or so who knew how to navigate it.
Quill ignored him. Mantis and Drax watched him go for a moment, then started after him side-by-side.
With a soul-deep sigh (although, given the fact that Thanos had reduced him to just a soul, technically any sigh would be a soul-deep one), Strange followed them. If he was going to get his plan to work—his only plan, his one-in-fourteen-million chance—he needed Quill. Like it or not, they were going to have to stick together.