...
A universe had no physical body in any conventional sense.
It could, however, choose to wear one.
The fragile, vulnerable version of Gwen standing before Hawk parted her lips. "This wasn't what I wanted. We come from the same source."
Hawk gave a derisive snort. The universe was clearly hoping Gwen's face—and that carefully manufactured look of wounded innocence—might soften him.
It wouldn't.
Hawk loved Gwen Stacy in every universe. But the woman he truly loved was the Gwen woven into his own timeline, not some cosmic entity wearing her face like a cheap costume.
"You had a choice," Hawk replied. "You looked at him, looked at me, and decided he held the better hand. So you picked him."
His voice remained calm, but all warmth had left it.
"You let him dump the corpse of a Celestial I'd already killed into your universe. Then you allowed his attack dog, Ikaris, to enter at full strength."
Hawk's eyes narrowed. "And don't insult me by claiming my full power would've damaged you while Ikaris somehow got a free pass. His arrival weakened your dimensional barriers too."
The projection said nothing.
"You paid that price willingly," Hawk continued. "You expected Ikaris to kill me, and once he did, you planned to join the Celestials while they carved up what was left."
He held the universe's gaze.
"Go ahead. Tell me I'm wrong."
The false Gwen opened her mouth, but no defense came. Her eyes dropped instead.
"I'm sorry."
"If an apology fixed this," Hawk said, "I wouldn't have bothered coming."
"What do you want?"
"Simple." A faint smile touched Hawk's lips. "You may have started this war, but I decide when it ends. The winner takes the pot. The loser owns the mistake and pays the bill."
His smile vanished.
"I want your surrender."
The universe's borrowed face went pale. "My surrender?"
"Yes."
Hawk stared at it without sympathy. "Winner takes all means exactly that. You chose to enter the game, which means everything you have was on the table—including you."
He hadn't come merely to ask for Tiamut.
Hell, no.
He wanted Tiamut and the universe itself.
The Celestials' intervention had handed Hawk the perfect justification.
Granted, none of them had personally stepped onto the battlefield. They had fought through a proxy instead, using Ikaris as their weapon.
But nobody got a seat at a high-stakes table without putting something in the pot.
Hawk had wagered his life.
And judging by how quickly the Celestials had fled once Ikaris died, they had wagered this universe.
If Hawk had lost, they would have taken everything he possessed—including the secrets behind training the Cosmo. But Hawk hadn't lost.
That meant the pot was his.
This universe was his.
He could do whatever he pleased with it.
"In other words," Hawk said, studying the projection with open curiosity, "the Celestials sold you."
The fragile Gwen flinched.
"Honestly, I'm beginning to understand why you're stuck at the bottom of the food chain."
This universe had spent ages trapped in an endless cycle of resets. Its history never truly moved forward because it lacked a stable, linear flow of time.
Hawk often said time was a circle, but that applied to individual lives. A person's timeline formed a closed loop, with a beginning and an end that ultimately completed one another.
A universe was different.
Its time should have been a road—one stretching forward into an infinite future. This universe's timeline had been assembled wrong from the start, trapping it in a loop that kept folding back on itself.
The Celestials were responsible for maintaining the timelines of the primary multiverse. There was no chance they had failed to notice the problem.
So why had they let it continue?
Hawk didn't know.
At this point, he didn't care. The moment the Celestials threw this universe onto the table as collateral, they had provided all the answer he needed.
"Surrendering to me isn't the worst deal you could make," Hawk said. "I'll preserve your consciousness, and I'll give this universe a fresh start. Your timeline will stop eating its own tail and finally have a path toward Eternity."
The universe looked up sharply, disbelief replacing its feigned vulnerability.
"You would really do that?"
"Don't believe me?" Hawk smiled. "Take a look at Mephisto."
The universe hesitated.
"Mephisto betrayed me more times than I care to count," Hawk continued. "I still forgave him and gave him another life. If I can forgive that shameless old bastard after everything he pulled, forgiving you is nothing."
Admittedly, Hawk had once reduced Mephisto to dust—soul included.
Still, he wasn't lying.
Regret didn't come with a cure, but Hawk had Wanda. She existed at every point along his timeline, which made her the closest thing reality had to an undo button.
Hawk had killed Mephisto.
He also hadn't.
Time was fun like that.
More importantly, Hawk hadn't tried to bury the contradiction beneath a mountain of excuses. He had given the universe a living example of exactly what he was offering.
And the universe was tempted.
Ikaris had barely finished dying before the Celestials abandoned the place without so much as a backward glance. They hadn't even tried to hide the fact that this universe had always been disposable.
It had repeatedly pleaded with them to repair its broken timeline. Every request had disappeared into the void without an answer.
Now Hawk was offering to preserve its awareness and rebuild that timeline. The only price was submission.
Honestly, that sounded like one hell of a bargain.
What difference did it make who sat at the top? The universe already answered to powers greater than itself, and it had never been allowed any control over its own timeline.
Low-tier universes didn't get rights.
They got owners.
Switching to one who might actually fix the place was hardly a tragedy.
——————————
Decision made, the universe raised its head.
The fragile image of Gwen began to dissolve. Her body blurred into pale light until an indescribable radiance filled the surrounding void, revealing the universe's true form.
A gemstone hovered before Hawk.
It was pure white, almost flawless—almost.
A hairline fracture marred its otherwise perfect surface. That tiny imperfection was the price the universe had paid to let Ikaris cross its boundaries at full strength.
One man put a goddess on a pedestal. Another used her as a doormat.
The Celestials had treated this universe exactly that way.
"I offer you everything I am," the voice of the universe declared from within the gemstone. "I pledge you my loyalty in exchange for your protection."
Hawk extended his right hand and closed his fingers around the white gem.
"I accept your surrender. From this moment forward, you stand beneath my protection—by the name of the Phoenix."
A piercing phoenix cry rolled across the cosmos.
Behind Hawk, the colossal Fire Phoenix rose with a boundless universe cradled within its wings. As those blazing wings spread, its talons seemed to merge with Hawk's hand, seizing the white gemstone at the universe's core.
Phoenix fire poured over it.
The Phoenix Universe began absorbing and remaking this universe, binding Hawk's mark into its very foundation.
Once the process was complete, the Phoenix Universe would finally be anchored within Marvel's primary multiverse.
It still wouldn't allow Hawk to fully manifest his power before he completed his Ninth Sense. But from that day forward, no primary Marvel universe would ever be able to suppress or separate him from his power again.
That was the winner's reward.
And the loser's bill.
The Celestials had tried to take everything from Hawk. Instead, they had handed him an entire universe.
Talk about playing a bad hand and losing the whole damn table.
Hawk remained for a while, watching the Phoenix fire remake the universe's core and burn his mark into the white gemstone. Once he was satisfied that the process was stable, he turned his attention toward Earth, tucked away in one of the cosmos's forgotten backwaters.
——————————
By the time Hawk returned to 521A Palm Street, the house was silent.
A quick sweep of his senses found Wanda and Jean shopping at a mall in Brooklyn. Hawk smiled and left them to it.
Manhattan would normally have offered better shopping, but Manhattan had also been beaten halfway into the Stone Age. Reconstruction was underway, though rebuilding an island took slightly longer than wrecking one.
When Wanda and Jean finally returned, they found Hawk sitting on the couch with more than a dozen photographs spread across the coffee table.
They were proof-of-death photos, delivered by one of President Reed Stacy's aides.
Each picture represented someone who had participated in—or known about—the plan to kill the Demon King.
"Daddy, you're back!" Jean dropped her shopping bags and hurried across the room, her face lighting up.
"You've got good timing," Wanda remarked with a smile. "I just finished explaining everything, and here you are."
"Really? What a coincidence." Hawk looked up at her. "I was out finding you a gift."
"What kind of gift?"
"This universe."
Wanda stared at him.
"..."
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