by Barry Lyga
“Where there is imbalance, I bring balance,” he told her. “Where there are worlds and people in distress, I bring relief and mercy.” He paused for just a moment. “I won’t lie to you, child. This means I kill a great many people. I don’t want to do this. I take no pleasure in it. But it must be done.”
“Why does it have to be you?”
He allowed himself a moment to enjoy her. Just a moment. She’d smoothly skipped over the issue of what he did, accepting its necessity. She was a miracle.
“Because I am the only one who can.”
“What about me?”
“I want to offer you an opportunity. To join with me. To become my right hand. Your species has a set of interesting and helpful physical characteristics. Your epidermis is more durable than a typical bipedal mammal’s, shielding you from some levels of physical harm. Your muscle tissues are denser than usual as well, which accounts for the strength you exhibit even at such a young age. This makes you a perfect candidate to stand at my side. To learn the ways of war, of death, of necessary brutality. To be the extension of my arm throughout the galaxy as I do what others are too stupid or too cowardly to do.”
“And what’s that?”
“Save the future. Through reason, preferably. But with blood and fire, if need be.”
“You want me to be a soldier?”
His eyes widened. “No!” he exclaimed. “No, no! I want you to be… my heir. You will be by my side. You will reshape worlds with me. It will be a magnificent life, child.”
“I have a question,” she said somewhat timorously.
“Of course.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
He hesitated only a moment. “Call me Father.”
She was smart and mature for her age, but still, it would take a long time for them to bond, for her to learn to trust.
That was okay. They had a long time. The distances between planetary systems were great, and even at lightspeed, it could take weeks or months to traverse those distances.
He began her training in earnest immediately, clearing out space on his cargo vessel Mercy to act as a rifle range, sparring ring, and gymnasium. She had natural talent and the advantages of youth and evolution on her side, but he was pitiless in his training. He set Chitauri on her in practice sessions, using actual battle-staves and ordered to kill her.
“It’s too dangerous,” Cha cautioned him the first time.
“She’ll survive or she won’t,” Thanos said with a stoic tone he did not completely feel. “If she does, she’ll improve. If not, she was never meant to stand at my side.”
In her first scrimmage, locked in a room and told to escape, she killed two full-grown Chitauri and injured a third. Bruised and burned by a battle-staff, she stumbled to the door, figured out how to operate the keypad, and opened it. The injured Chitauri made a last attempt to stop her; she trapped it in the door and slammed it on her way out, bashing the Chitauri’s head into paste as she collapsed in the outer corridor.
“See?” Thanos told Cha, pleased.
“Luck,” Cha sniffed.
“If so, it will wear out soon enough and we’ll be done.”
Her luck held long enough for her skill to catch up. As they traveled from world to world, slaughtering populations, Thanos continued training Gamora. She grew strong, powerful, confident.
After each session, he personally attended to her wounds with a gentleness that surprised him. He’d thought his capacity for tenderness to have been exhausted years ago. Gamora made him want to take care of her.
“I know this seems cruel,” he told her more than once. “I know I seem cruel. But everything I do, I do for you, for your generation and your progeny, and their progeny and so on. These actions will kill despair and enliven hope.”
“I believe you, Father,” she replied.
Thanos could not prevent a broad smile from creasing his face.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked, flexing her arm. She’d been cut almost to the bone in her left forearm during a fight with one of the Chitauri’s best warriors. She was almost ten years old, and her body was scarred like that of a grizzled veteran.
“There are few pleasures in my life. One of them is hearing you call me Father.”
She took his hand in hers. Her hand was larger now than it had been that first day on Zehoberei, when she’d barely been able to clutch his finger. He squeezed, felt the heat of her flesh, the thrum of her blood. His daughter.
His daughter.
“She will grow to hate you,” Cha warned later, when they were alone. “You slew her family. Right now, she is enamored of you. Your power enthralls her. Your generosity dazzles her. But as she grows more and more powerful, she will begin to wonder why she should suffer you to live.”
“In her own way, she loves me,” Thanos replied. “She strives to better herself, to better prepare to be my right hand.”
“Keep an eye on your right hand,” Cha said mordantly. “It may slit your throat.”
Thanos grunted in something like assent. If the time came that Gamora truly believed she could kill him, then that would mean only that she was truly ready and worthy to stand by his side. Fighting endless hordes of Chitauri and weaklings on the planets they razed, though, had taken her as far as it could. It was time for more.
“I think she needs a sibling,” he told Cha.
Thanos put out the word to Ebony Maw and his ilk that he needed another child, one preferably close to Gamora’s age. His studies indicated that this would provide optimal opportunities for bonding.
Maw and the others paraded before him a plethora of children scavenged from the smoking ruins of a multitude of worlds. Proxima Midnight, though, turned up a girl with disconcertingly purple-tinged blue skin, not the same as Thanos’s own, but close enough that he wondered what his life might have been like had he been born on her world, not his.
At first, he dismissed her. Her quaking form offered no challenge to Gamora, who desperately needed a sparring partner more ambitious than the endless parade of Chitauri she had taken to killing almost casually during her training sessions.
But that skin… He could not look away from her. She was small, hairless, with no pupils, and the shade of her skin was so close to purple that he thought she could almost be… his.
He crouched by her and took her chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting her face up so they gazed into each other’s eyes.
“Welcome to Sanctuary, my dear,” he told her.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE GIRLS—GAMORA AND THE NEW ONE, NEBULA—GOT along as well as could be expected. For a time, this pleased Thanos, to witness the sisterly bonds forming between them, their common experiences forging a potent and lasting welded seam of affection.
This lasted for the first month or so, at which point he realized that if the two of them thought of each other as allies, they would inevitably mount a united offense against him. Utterly counter to the point to having them in the first place. He needed them loyal to him, not to each other.
And so he began testing them against each other, manipulating them into each other’s orbits, forcing them into conflict, as often as Thanos could come up with a new test. To his pleasure, they each failed, no matter how hard they tried. They were almost evenly matched, with Gamora more often than not having the upper hand. She could best Nebula but never land the killing blow.
It was the best possible training for both of them.
“And will you be adopting more war orphans?” Cha asked with some asperity as Thanos watched them spar. “Should I retrofit Sanctuary to serve as an orphanage in addition to a capital ship?”
Thanos grunted.
“I’m serious, Thanos. When you took Gamora on, I understood. You happened upon her; you were struck. Coincidences often pave the way to finding our place in the order of the universe. And yet…”
Thanos cut off his friend with a single raised hand.
“Two of them will be enough for
now,” he conceded. “Look at them fight. As though born to the pits of hell.”
“Yes, you’ve conjured quite a pair of demons, Thanos.”
Thanos clucked his tongue. “No, no. Not demons, Cha. My daughters. They will always be by my side.”
“They would just as soon rip out your heart as shield it,” Cha warned.
“That will change in time.”
“I wish I could be as certain as you are, old friend. As it stands, I think you’re just whetting the blade that will eventually open your jugular.”
With a deep chuckle, Thanos turned away from the window into the training room. “Trust me, Cha. I’ve thought this through. The best brainwashing allows the subject a modicum of independent thought. I allow Gamora and Nebula to hate me because it makes them think they still have choices and free will. But they are too accustomed to this life now. They’ve ingested my philosophy and accepted my dominance, whether they realize it or not. They are my children, and while children may hate their parents, they rarely raise a hand to them.”
“Rarely,” Cha said drily.
And Thanos thought, unbidden, shockingly, of A’Lars for the first time in… in…
For the first time since that day, fifty stories beneath the surface of Titan. For the first time since he’d hacked the synth’s head off and smashed the hope of Titan under his boot.
He had killed the synth that wore his father’s face and spoke in his father’s voice, but he knew that he never could have done that to his true father. No matter how much he loathed A’Lars, no matter how much he despised the man for condemning Gwinth and Sintaa and Sui-San and millions of others to unnecessary death, he could not have killed him. The proof lay in the simple fact that he hadn’t. That when presented with his father’s recalcitrance, he hadn’t simply killed him and moved on with his plans, unfettered. He had been younger then, yes, and not yet inculcated by war in the ways of violence. But even in his youth, he’d known what death was. How expedient it could be. Still, he’d not killed A’Lars.
“I will be—” He paused, captivated by the sight inside the training room. Gamora had broken Nebula’s battle-staff, along with her left leg. But Nebula had managed to climb onto a stack of crates, just out of Gamora’s reach. Every time Gamora thrust her staff at Nebula, Nebula pulled back just enough to evade the blow. They were stalemated.
This is how it went, constantly. Gamora bested Nebula, who managed to find a way to keep from being thoroughly defeated. She never lost, but she never came close to winning, either.
“Do we still have the leftover biofusers from the last round of Chitauri upgrades?” Thanos asked.
Cha blinked. “Well, yes. But we don’t need—”
“Come with me.” Thanos thumbed open the door and stepped inside. Nebula saw him first, and there was a palpable sense of relief from her. He disliked that she saw him as her savior, rather than relying on herself.
Gamora sensed his presence a moment later. She turned and collapsed her battle-staff, standing at attention. “Thanos,” she said stiffly.
“Relax, my daughter.”
He held out a hand to help the injured Nebula down from the safety of her perch. She took the hand and limped her way down, finally leaning into him when she had the floor under her feet.
“What happened, my child? How did she beat you?”
“I didn’t see her—”
“Ah,” said Thanos, and jammed his thumb into Nebula’s left eye.
“Thanos!” Cha erupted, and sped to Nebula’s side. She had dropped to her knees, keening in pain, her hands clapped to the empty socket, which bled profusely.
Without shifting his attention from the motionless Gamora, Thanos spoke. “She said she could not see. We’ll biofuse an enhanced eye into her. Perhaps that will help, going forward. Take her to the medical bay for the procedure, Cha.”
He did not move or even glance away from Gamora as Cha escorted Nebula, limping on her broken leg, one hand over her socket, from the training room. A spotty thread of blood trailed her.
Gamora’s expression had not changed in the slightest during the entire exchange. He stared at her in the growing silence as she pointedly did not look back, anchoring her gaze instead off into the middle distance over his shoulder, as though he were not even present.
“Do you think me cruel?” he asked at last.
There was a great hesitation as she thought, and then finally she met his eyes with her own and said, “Yes.”
Thanos smiled. He had decided during the hesitation that had she said no or failed to look him in the eye, he would have killed her.
“I’m so very proud of you,” he told her. Words he’d never spoken or heard before.
After she adjusted to her new eye, Nebula did better in her next match against Gamora. She still didn’t win, though.
“See how she does with new knees,” Thanos instructed Cha.
CHAPTER XXXVI
IN HIS PERSONAL CHAMBERS, THANOS SAT AT AN INTERFACE desk, preparing plans for his next assault. His army no longer used gates to travel, unless they chanced upon one of the old Kalami Gates. Security around most gates made it difficult for someone as notorious as Thanos to use them. So they relied on super-lightspeed for most of their travel. Even so, the great distances between systems meant long stretches aspace, with plenty of time for thinking and strategizing.
For each world he tried to persuade, Thanos tailored his message intricately. And, at the same time, prepared for war. Because, well…
Cha signaled before coming in this time. Thanos did not look up as the door slid open. Cha was silent for too long, hovering over Thanos’s shoulder.
“Speak, my friend.”
A long pause. Then: “Is it fulfilling, Thanos?”
“Is what fulfilling?”
“The girls. What you do with them.”
“Being a father to these girls?” He cogitated on the question for a long moment, then took another. “Yes. It is.”
“Perhaps it’s time to reconsider what we’re doing, then.”
Thanos looked up from his interface desk. Cha had long ago become part of the background of the ship, one more piece in the puzzle he assembled on a regular basis in an attempt to understand and guide the universe. Now, though, looking at his old friend, Thanos thought he could see the entirety of their history together, written in the fine lines and crenellations on his face. They had been at war—at wars, really—for years now.
War had only made Thanos stronger and more certain of his path. As for Cha… Thanos could see now the weakness that roiled in his friend, the fractures in his beliefs and their relationship that had grown over time with each billion slaughtered.
“You think I would settle down, Cha? Settle for the pleasures of parenthood, when there is a universe out there in desperate need of the sort of help only I can provide?”
“Well, I—”
“I will not be derelict in my duty. I will not surrender my mission, my cause. I take pleasure in my children because they are my finest tools, the expression of my abilities and my knowledge and my destiny. Without the mission, we are purposeless and nomadic, Cha. Put the thought out of your head. Be strong.”
Cha opened his mouth to speak, but just then an alarm klaxon rang. They stared at each other. The klaxons never rang.
Thanos leaped up from his desk, and together they dashed to the bridge, where the Other sat in the command chair, hissing to himself. At Thanos’s entrance, he stood and gestured at the main screen.
“Surrounded, Lord Thanos,” he grumbled in his slow, overenunciated voice. “Fifteen of them. Nova Corps Star Blasters.”
“Should have expected this day to come,” Thanos muttered. “But we’re nowhere near Xandarian space.”
“I guess they decided to take the initiative,” Cha told him. “Prepare the Leviathans?”
“Yes. And open a comms channel to the lead Xandarian ship. I’ll stall.”
A moment later, the main screen flickered an
d flared to life. A hologram distended from it, forming into a long-forgotten, but immediately familiar, face.
“Daakon Ro,” Thanos said, almost pleased. “You never took that early retirement. Your husband must be devastated.”
Ro’s face had changed not much in the intervening years, save for some wrinkles around his eyes and perhaps a slight lengthening of his forehead. He grimaced. “My husband passed three years ago, Thanos.”
“You have my sincere condolences.”
“Somehow I believe you.”
“I rarely lie.”
“No, but you’ve managed to kill a whole hell of a lot of people since the last time I saw you. Body count is something like half a trillion.”
Thanos shrugged. “I haven’t been keeping track. I’ve not touched Xandar—your world is in wondrous balance. And the last time I checked, Denarian Ro, none of my incursions have been into any Xandarian territory. The Nova Corps has no jurisdiction over me.”
Ro shook his head. “The other systems and territories are terrified of you. They’ve requested our help under the terms of the Treaty of Mazar. And don’t ask: It was signed something like ten thousand years ago, but it’s still enforceable.”
“And so you’re here to kill me.”
“To arrest you, if possible. Come quietly.” Ro paused, licked his lips. “I heard about Titan. What happened there. Pretty horrible. But you can’t bring those people back by killing your way across the universe.”
“I’m not trying to bring them back.” Thanos caught a gesture from Cha out of the corner of his eye. The Leviathans were in place. “I’m trying to save lives.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you sure have a funny way of showing it.”
“Ro, you were kind to me at a time in my life when I needed kindness. In acknowledgment of that, I’m going to give you thirty seconds to reverse your course and go back to Xandar.”
Ro smirked. “One: I’m afraid I can’t do that. Two: I have fifteen Nova Corps ships with solar guns aimed at your shield pods and engine core.”