Chapter Text
The Space Stone
Loki held the tesseract aloft, fingertips gone bone-white with the force of grasping it. He spared a glance, but only that, to Thor, who was already beginning to look so disappointed. As if he really intended to give it up - as if he, always the traitor, always the schemer - had damned them now with a surrender.
“You really are the worst, brother.”
“Yes, well,” Loki said, lips twitching with the makings of a smirk as the blue glow of the space stone’s magic encased Thanos’s gauntlet, “Do feel free to complain on the trip out.”
The same light gleamed for less than a second around them both, before all three - Thor, Loki, and the gauntlet right off Thanos’s wrist - were shrouded in a fog-like smoke that carried them away.
His only regret was that he hadn’t the time to see the look on the Titan’s face.
The Time Stone
Mantis strained with the effort to remain perched on Thanos’s shoulders, head bowed and spine curled over as she shared his grief.
“He mourns!” She cried, and that was the precise moment at which Stephen Strange realized that their best laid plans were about to go to shit.
He was not supposed to break the natural laws - to claim mastery over time simply because he held the stone. It would be wrong. It could make him like Kaecilius. Using the Eye to stop time in a single desperate moment could easily set him on a slippery slope to villainy.
Then again, Strange thought, humans have always been good at dealing with slopes. They build stairs.
That insight was enough. He called the stone out of its safe-keeping with a precise gesture and a whisper of his desires - a mere impulse - was sufficient to still the universe itself.
The moment of chaos came to a complete pause, and stretched immeasurably. Strange imagined that this might be how higher beings felt - did it seem to them that every second ticked by only at their leisure, by virtue of their quickened mental processes? Or did time speed on with altered haste to those immortals, days blurring to years when neither had any impact on their lifespans?
He shook off that unruly train of thought, unsure of how many minutes it might have consumed had the Eye not suspended him in time. Taking a steadying breath, Stephen Strange considered the puzzle before him, studying the moment as he strode around to observe it from another angle.
Peter Quill’s face was set in a grimace, eyes narrowed with hate, jaw clenched tight by rage. His fist was balled and already pulled back, a punch halfway to being thrown despite his allies’ pleas with him to wait.
Mantis’s legs were wrapped tightly over Thanos’s chest and shoulders, but her strain was evident and hands set too low on the Titan’s forehead to be fully spared by the force of Quill’s punch, if it were to land.
The gauntlet had slipped somewhat off Thanos’s massive forearm, and now appeared to be hanging by his palm and fingers. Given a number of seconds, they could have it off.
Strange nodded to himself decisively, his surgeon’s eyes quick to find a solution to the simple puzzle. Keeping some focus on the time stone to be sure his hold wouldn’t prematurely slip, he maneuvered Quill’s body backwards a step, carefully arranging his stance so the movement wouldn’t be noticeable once time began to move again. Then, with a precise, circular gesture, a portal split space open between Quill and Thanos, providing a scenic view of what would hopefully be a calming trip to Central Park.
Content with his arrangement, Strange paced back to the spot he had previously occupied and renewed his binding spell over Thanos. Then - after murmuring a brief prayer to any well-meaning forces out there, but mostly to the intelligence of his own design - he set time back on its rightful course again.
The green glow of the Eye faded as it was locked away, and Peter Quill’s grunt cut off abruptly as the force of his punch - landing on nothing - threw his body through the portal.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” Peter Parker babbled excitedly, having taken no notice of the apparently spontaneously occurring magic in his fixation on his own task. The gauntlet slipped free just as Thanos regained control over his mind and, in his confusion, he began to reach through the portal with his newly empty hand for an off-balance Peter Quill.
Hardly needing foresight from the Eye to take advantage of such a timely opportunity, Strange quickly snapped the portal shut.
Somewhere in central park, Thanos’s hand - and only his hand - bowled Peter to the ground.
Somewhere on Titan, Thanos-except-his-hand roared with pain, and doused an entirely different Peter with his blood.
The Mind Stone
“Wanda, wait,” Vision’s words were enough to stay her hand, her red magic fading from around the gem set in his forehead. She reached out instead, quivering, eyes tearful and hands unsteady even without the strain of witchcraft.
The Titan, of course, took this opportunity to surge forward, and his hands were mere inches from Wanda’s distracted form before a blast of yellow light stopped him in his tracks.
Thanos’s eyes glazed over and he swayed with the suddenness of the mind stone’s influence. For a moment, it wasn’t clear what had happened, until the anger smoothed over from his brow and he gazed placidly down at Vision.
“I would like you to stop this, please.” Vision requested politely, as the stone centered in his forehead gleamed with power. Thanos merely looked confused as the battle came to a complete standstill around him, so Vision carried on. “No good will come of gathering the infinity stones, or of ending any further lives. You know this. You do not want that sort of power - you don’t want to do this.”
“I... do not,” The Titan agreed, taking on a plainly bewildered expression as he stared down at the gauntlet on his fist.
“You’d like to take that off.”
“Yes,” He said immediately, struggling with the glove for a moment before it began to slip free.
The Avengers were silent as the grave, frozen in mixed disbelief and fear that their movement could somehow dispel the mind stone’s work.
“Would you hand it to Captain Rogers, please?”
Vision’s tone is soft and kind, as if he were speaking to a child. And like a child, Thanos reached out to offer the gauntlet over, uncharacteristically eager to please.
Steve picked his jaw up off the floor and took the gauntlet, almost buckling under its surprising weight.
“Very good, thank you,” Vision said, the very picture of serenity and heedless of the Avengers’ slack-jawed stares.
“Now, you must be feeling very tired, after such a long day. Go on and take a nap.”
“Hey, uh,” Bucky started, as Thanos completely ignored the enemies around him to lay compliantly on the grass and rest his head.
“What the fuck just happened?”