The sky over Wakanda had not finished screaming when the second sun appeared.
Steve Rogers felt it before he saw it, a wrongness in the air, a pressure against the eardrums. Half the line of defenders had already turned to ash, drifting away on a wind that carried no comfort. Thanos was gone, fingers still warm from the Gauntlet, slipped between dimensions to savor his work alone. And in the silence he left behind, the world split open like a struck egg.
A shaft of crimson light burned a circle into the heavens. Through it stepped a figure who made even the surviving Avengers fall back: tall, gray as cooled iron, armored in old menace. His eyes glowed with twin lines of fire, and the ground frosted where his gaze fell.
"Darkseid," Vision would have said, had Vision still drawn breath. Instead it was Thor who lifted Stormbreaker, jaw set.
"Another one," the God of Thunder growled. "There is always another one."
But the breach was not finished. Behind the gray god came others, and these the Avengers did not know either, though they recognized the shape of hope when they saw it. A man in blue and red landed with a thunderclap of his own, fists planted in the broken soil, cape snapping. A woman in gold and crimson dropped beside him, sword drawn, eyes ancient. A shadow detached itself from the treeline and resolved into a figure cowled like a bat, jaw grim.
"We followed the breach," said the man in blue, rising. "Darkseid opened a door to your world. He felt the same thing we did. A weapon that can erase life with a thought."
"You're too late for half of it," Natasha said quietly.
The Kryptonian's face went pale beneath the sun. "How many?"
"Everyone," said Steve. "Half of everyone."
Far above, in a pocket of folded space, two beings regarded one another. Thanos sat upon a rock that had no business existing, the Gauntlet steaming on his ruined hand. Darkseid stood before him, unimpressed, the Omega Sanction crawling behind his eyes.
"You have done what gods only dream of," Darkseid said. "And then you stopped. You balanced. You rested." He spat the word like rot. "I do not balance, Titan. I subtract. There is only the Equation, and at its end, all knees bend or break."
Thanos turned the Gauntlet over. "You want it."
"I want everything," Darkseid said. "Your trinket is merely a beginning. Give it to me, and I will let your universe live as my farm. Refuse, and I will take it from your ashes."
Thanos smiled, weary and infinite. "You misunderstand me. I am not a conqueror. I am a mercy."
"There is no mercy," said Darkseid. "Only Darkseid."
The two collided, and reality folded in around them like burning paper.
Below, the heroes of two worlds took the measure of each other in the space of a held breath.
"You're soldiers," said the Bat, studying the wreckage, the shield, the dead. "You held a line. Good. We're going to need it." He looked at Steve. "You command here?"
"When there's a war," Steve said. "There's a war."
"Then here's what I know." The detective's voice was flint. "Darkseid doesn't want to wipe out half. He wants to own all of it. He'll take Thanos's gauntlet if he can, and if he gets it, there's no snap that brings anyone back. There's just him, forever."
Tony Stark, armor cracked, blood at his mouth, laughed once without humor. "Great. So the genocidal grape upstairs is suddenly the reasonable one."
The woman with the sword stepped forward. Her presence quieted even Thor. "My name is Diana. I have fought gods who wished to unmake the world. They share a sickness: they believe love is weakness. It is the only thing that has ever beaten them."
"Touching," said Tony. "Does love punch through Kryptonian-grade armor?"
"No," said the man in blue, and a smile broke across his open face despite everything. "But I do. Clark. We help where we can. Right now, that's here."
The sky tore again. Thanos came through it backward, hurled like a stone, the Gauntlet sparking. He struck the earth and gouged a trench through it. Above him descended Darkseid, Omega Beams already glowing.
And then, impossibly, Thanos lifted his hand toward the Avengers. Not to strike. To beckon.
"He is not a god," the Titan rasped, blood like oil on his lips. "He is a glutton. My work has purpose. His has only appetite. If he claims the Stones, your dead will never return. Neither will mine."
Steve looked at Diana. Diana looked at Clark. Clark looked at the man in the cowl, who gave the smallest nod.
"One enemy at a time," Steve said. "Today, the bigger one."
What followed had no proper name. Thor and the Kryptonian rose into the burning sky together, lightning braided with heat-vision, and struck Darkseid as one. The gray god staggered, and for the first time in ten thousand years, surprise crossed his face.
Diana and Captain America fought back to back, shield and sword turning aside the storm of Parademons that poured through the breach in shrieking clouds. "You fight like one who has lost much," Diana called over the din.
"Everything, mostly," Steve answered, hurling his shield through three at once. "You?"
"The same. We keep getting up anyway."
"Yeah," he said. "We do."
The Bat moved through the chaos like a rumor, planting charges, hauling the wounded to cover, finding the angle no one else could see. He reached Tony in the rubble. "You build things," he said. It was not a question.
"Best in the world," Tony wheezed.
"Then build me a way to close that breach before more come through. I'll cover you."
Tony grinned through cracked teeth. "I like you. You're the worst, but I like you."
Darkseid found his footing and unleashed the Omega Beams, lines of fire that curved through space to find their targets without fail. They sought the Kryptonian, sought Thor, sought the heart of every hero on the field. And Diana, sword raised, deflected them. Then Steve's shield, ringing like a bell. Then Thanos himself, lifting the half-charged Gauntlet, catching the beams in a fist of impossible energy and holding them, screaming.
"Now!" Thanos bellowed. "While I have him bound!"
Clark and Thor drove into Darkseid with everything left in them. The Bat's charges detonated beneath the breach. Tony's hastily-rigged field collapsed the tear in space, severing the flow of monsters, sealing the gray god's road home.
Darkseid, beams turned back upon himself, stumbled into the closing wound. His burning eyes fixed on Thanos. "You would die for a universe you tried to kill?"
"I would die," said the Titan, "so that what I built is mine to undo, and no one else's."
The breach snapped shut on a single, world-ending scream, and then there was silence again, and the smell of ozone, and the slow drift of ash on the wind.
Thanos fell to one knee. The Gauntlet was spent, its stones dim. He looked at the heroes of two worlds, and something almost like respect moved behind his eyes. "This changes nothing between us," he said. "You will hunt me. You should."
Then he too was gone, slipping sideways into the dark.
Diana sheathed her sword. Clark touched down beside Steve, and for a moment the two of them simply stood, looking at the place where their friends had been.
"We'll find a way to bring them back," Clark said. "In my experience, death rarely sticks for people like us."
Steve almost smiled. "In mine too." He held out his hand. "Thank you. For the door swinging both ways."
Clark shook it. Behind them, the Bat was already studying the air where the breach had been, calculating how to find it again.
"Next time," the cowled man said, "we close the door before they get through."
"Next time," Steve agreed.
The sun, the only sun now, rose over Wakanda, and the surviving few of two universes stood together in its light, and did not fall.