The words hit Jay like a step into cold water.
Panic surged through him hard and fast, adrenaline spiking, his danger sense roaring back to life with the specific urgency it reserved for situations where the wrong response ended everything. The instinct to apologize came up immediately, to explain and justify and if necessary to grovel, because he had just said something that might have offended an entity that contained literal galaxies and the social math on that was not in his favor.
He stopped himself.
Breathed.
Forced his mind to actually work instead of react.
He remembered what Death had done. Not the abstract cosmic entity, but the specific choices she had made, the specific damage she had pursued. FURY sent to slaughter thousands of innocent people just to draw him out of cover. Domino threatened with annihilation as punishment for existing in his life. His son's existence used as leverage against him. Every attack calculated and personal and directed at the people who couldn't fight back.
His jaw set. The panic didn't disappear but it moved, rearranged itself into something colder and more useful.
He met Eternity's gaze directly. Looked into eyes containing stellar nurseries and refused to look away even though it felt like trying to outstare the sun.
"I'm a simple man with simple needs," Jay said, and his voice came out carrying more conviction than he'd known was in him. "But I have people to protect. Friends who depend on me. A woman I love more than I have words for. A son who deserves to grow up in a world that isn't trying to use him against me." He felt his hands tighten at his sides. "If being heartless is what it takes to keep my family breathing, then I will be heartless without hesitation and without apology. If being vicious is what stops threats before they reach the people I love, then I will be the most vicious thing this cosmos has ever had to deal with." He didn't look away. "I'd rather be called a monster by beings who have never had anything to lose than let the people I love suffer because I hesitated when I shouldn't have."
The silence that followed was total.
The lake's surface went absolutely still, every ripple freezing in place at the same instant. The galaxies rotating in Eternity's chest paused mid-spiral. The temple itself seemed to hold whatever passed for its breath.
Eternity studied him with the eyes of something that had watched civilisations complete their entire arcs from birth to dark, and Jay stood under that scrutiny without flinching, though it cost him something to manage it.
Then Eternity smiled.
It transformed his cosmic features in a way that made him seem almost human for one single heartbeat, recognizably warm, recognizably pleased, recognizably proud in the way that something immeasurably large can be proud of something very small doing something exactly right.
"Ah," he said, and the warmth in his voice was genuine and complete. "The most dangerous being in all of reality." A brief pause. "A family man. Of course."
The weight of those words settled on Jay like something he hadn't known he'd been waiting to hear.
The tension that had been coiling in him since he crossed the threshold released all at once, leaving him slightly unsteady but upright.
"Well then." Eternity's form shifted, galaxies realigning as he gestured at the space between them with hands that contained solar systems in their palms. "Shall we proceed to the matter at hand? You know, from the knowledge your previous world gave you, that anyone who reaches my temple first in their respective universe receives a wish. One request, granted by Eternity itself, within the bounds of what even I can accomplish."
He paused, and something moved through his expression that mixed genuine amusement with something that looked remarkably like exasperation.
"The One Above All must really be pulling a fast one on me with this arrangement."
Jay blinked. His brain briefly stuttered at a cosmic entity casually complaining about the literal God of creation, and then he forced himself to focus, because there was something in front of him that needed his full attention.
A wish from Eternity.
His enhanced mind kicked into overdrive, processing at the pace it reserved for situations where being slow cost everything. A wish from Eternity. The implications unfolded faster than he could fully track them, each possibility branching into consequences that branched into further consequences. He could ask for power beyond anything he currently possessed. For knowledge of what was coming. For the destruction of every threat that had ever pointed itself at Earth. For safety so complete it never had to be earned again.
Every option carried risk. He knew that. The more powerful the wish, the wider the blast radius of unintended consequences. He'd read enough stories to know how this went when you stopped paying attention to the shape of what you were asking for.
He opened his mouth. Words forming carefully after several seconds of deliberation.
"What more could I want than a hom"
"Stop."
Eternity's voice cut through the air with a single syllable that resonated through dimensions, made the lake's surface rupture with violent ripples and the temple walls shudder in ways that suggested the building itself had flinched. The word landed everywhere at once.
Jay's mouth closed.
Eternity's expression had shifted completely. The warmth was still there but behind it now was something urgent, something that had reached forward from wherever Eternity kept his genuine concerns and put itself plainly on his face. His eyes fixed on Jay with an intensity that made the mortal feel transparent, like Eternity was reading him at a depth that skin and bone and conscious thought didn't obstruct.
"Be very, very careful about what you're about to ask for."
Each word placed deliberately. Each one carrying more weight than the one before it.
"This opportunity is rarer than a black hole and white hole existing simultaneously in stable orbit. Rarer than consciousness itself emerging from pure chaos." He leaned forward, and reality bent around the motion, space warping to accommodate the shift. "Use every tool you have. Every ability you've taken, every skill you've built, every enhancement running in you right now. Think carefully. The fate of more than just yourself depends on the words you choose next."
Jay's danger sense exploded.
Not the sharp immediate warning of something about to hurt him. Something else. His enhanced perception screaming that he was standing at a place where paths diverged in ways that didn't converge again, where the wrong choice led somewhere with no road back.
He closed his eyes and went inward.
He ran his intended words through every analytical system he had. Task Master's pattern recognition working them from every angle. Sage's processing running probability trees. Every borrowed ability contributing what it could to a single focused question.
What more could I want than a home.
Innocent. Simple. The request of a family man, exactly the kind of man Eternity had just identified him as. A place of safety. A sanctuary where his family could exist without the multiverse reaching in to take pieces of them.
So why had Eternity stopped him?
Jay's hands started trembling before the answer arrived. His analytical mind turned the words over and over, and the more he turned them the colder he got, because he could feel the shape of the trap even before he could see it clearly. A home was a location. A fixed point. Something that could be found by anything looking for it, something that could be threatened, something that could be taken.
He had asked, without meaning to, for a target.
He opened his eyes. Sweat was running down his temples. His heart was doing things against his ribs that he would need to have a conversation with it about later.
"At least give me a hint," he said, and the frustration in his voice was real and unmanaged and he didn't bother trying to clean it up. "You can't expect me to solve this completely blind."
"I am bound by my role," Eternity said, and the regret in it was genuine. "I cannot directly interfere with mortal choices." A pause. "But I will say this."
He waited, and in that wait, Jay felt the weight of the entire temple holding still around them.
"You are a family man. Remember that above everything else. That truth, that fundamental truth about who you are, must be what guides you."
The emphasis landed differently than the first time he'd said it.
Jay closed his eyes again.
He reached for his power theft ability and used it differently than he normally did, channeling the accumulated stolen potential of every power he'd ever absorbed into a single focused amplification of his danger sense, pushing it past the ceiling it normally operated under and into something that felt closer to cosmic awareness than anything he'd previously managed.
The effect was not subtle.
His danger sense stopped being a warning system and became something that perceived threats the way Eternity perceived time, all of them at once, layered over each other, near threats and distant ones and threats that didn't exist yet but were building themselves from available materials. His family moved through every vision. Luv. Domino. The people he had gathered around himself in the time he'd been here. Every threat that was coming for them from directions he couldn't currently see, dangers too large or too strange or too patient to register through ordinary perception.
He understood what he needed to ask for.
He opened his eyes. The sweat on his face was cold. His hands had stopped shaking, replaced by a stillness that came from knowing exactly what you're about to do.
He met Eternity's gaze and held it.
"Protect my family."
The words came out with everything he had behind them, love and desperation and the absolute unambiguous conviction of a man who has identified the one thing he will not negotiate on.
"I wish for you to protect my family. Domino and Luv. Keep them safe from the threats I can't see yet, from the dangers I can't predict, from the cosmic forces that are beyond anything I can currently counter." He took one breath and finished it. "Whatever is coming. Whatever I don't have the perception to understand yet. Whatever exists beyond my current reach. Protect them from it."
Eternity was quiet for a moment.
Then something moved through his cosmic form that Jay had no precise word for. The galaxies in his chest aligned into perfect spirals, every arm settling into its correct position at the same time. The nebulae in his eyes bloomed with color that hadn't been there before. His entire form pulsed once, deeply, with something that looked exactly like what it was.
Pride. Satisfaction. The expression of something ancient and vast that has just watched a mortal arrive at exactly the right answer by exactly the right path.
"So shall it be done."
Eternity brought both hands together.
The sound wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It moved through every dimension simultaneously, through the temple and through the space between dimensions and through the fabric of the multiverse itself, and where it passed it left something changed in its wake, a promise woven into the structure of things, permanent and without conditions.
Reality itself had just updated.
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