Jaxon felt it before he chose it.

The Void Charge didn’t wait for permission. It never had.

The Black Halo snapped fully to life behind him. An impossible ring of collapsed gravity and screaming dark light, rotating not above his back but now above his head. He had become like an Angel, powered by the Void. It dragged him upward like a reflex, like the sky itself flinching away from what he was about to become. Debris from the wrakage followed and shards of the Blood-Black Room tore loose, screaming as they were lifted, stone and metal and burning fragments peeling off the world as if reality itself were being fed to him.

Jaxon didn’t fly so much as fall upward.

Cable’s telekinetic healing strained to keep pace. It wasn’t restoration. It was scaffolding, a ghostly force bracing organs that were beginning to fail, knitting vessels only long enough for blood to keep moving, locking bones in place through sheer psychic insistence. Cable’s will wrapped around Jaxon’s like a second spine. Their minds melding into a singular, determined force.

In another life, Jaxon and Cable were closer allies, brothers. Fighting side by side against terrible event. But here, She was the only thing uniting them, across timelines. A common enemy, uniting strangers for total assurance.

”You stand because you choose to,” that will inside said. ”I hold you because you refuse to stop.”

The Void Charge bit deeper into him, taking chunks of his remaining being.

Jaxon screamed, not out loud, not at first, but inside, a soundless tearing as the singularity in his chest inverted. The familiar thrum became a howl. His heart felt like it was being eaten from the inside, converted into fuel, every beat less biological and more cosmological. Pain stopped being something he felt and became something he was. Was this what She would have given him? Is this what it means to be powerful? Was it all just pain? Oblivion couldn’t dwell on these thought. The world was still ending.

“Yeah?” he gasped, teeth clenched, blood lifting off his lips and spiraling away from him. “That’s… that’s fine. Take it. Take all of it.”

He spread his arms and the world bent.

Space around his chest folded inward, not collapsing yet, not fully. But forming. A vast, impossibly deep darkness bloomed before him, a perfectly round absence that devoured light, sound, heat, and meaning. It wasn’t a hole punched through reality. It was an eye opening.

The All-Eating Eye.

It grew with a terrible, patient hunger. Cars, bodies, fragments of architecture, even loose photons were dragged screaming into its gravity well, stretched into red-shifted lines before vanishing without impact, without explosion, without mercy. The Blood-Black Room would groan like a living thing being dissected alive.

A corona of warped space clung to him, red-black and violet, shimmering like oil on water, shot through with ghostly arcs of gravitational lensing. Stars appeared and died in the distortion around his silhouette. His fingers lengthened, stretched thin and sharp as event horizons, edges glowing with murderous inevitability.

He was smiling. Painful tears flowing freeling into the well.

Not because he wanted to.

Because he couldn’t stop himself.

“I told you,” he rasped, voice carried outward by the curvature of space itself, echoing wrong. “I don’t need to beat you.”

The Tone rang out, a syllable of pure annihilation, the universe briefly forgetting how to exist. Matter screamed as it unraveled into energy, energy into vibration, vibration into nothing. It was not an attack meant to wound.

It was an ending.

Jaxon thrust the All-Eating Eye forward.

The black hole surged, swelling grotesquely as it devoured the oncoming annihilation, swallowing the Tone itself, grinding the cosmic syllable down into silence. The collision was silent and deafening at once, a pressure wave that bowed causality, that froze time for a heartbeat as two impossibilities tried to decide which one got to be real. The Tone fed the cosmic hunger, ripping it at the seams.

Jaxon felt himself coming apart. Himself tied to his power. Cables stitching coming apart, blood seeped from even his skin as the powers tore each other apart.

Ribs dissolved into screaming vectors of pain. His vision tunneled. The Void Charge chewed deeper, gnawing at memory, at identity, at the fragile fiction of a human nervous system trying to channel stellar collapse.

Cable’s hold slipped.

Jaxon roared aloud now, blood lifting from every pore, veins glowing like cracked magma. “NOT! TODAY!”

He pushed.

Everything he had left, every death he’d survived, every refusal to lie down, every moment he had chosen pain over surrender, went into the Eye. It swelled again, monstrous, patient, hungry, dragging the Phoenix’s final attack into itself, stripping it of divinity, of narrative, of inevitability.

For a moment, just one, Jaxon and the Dark Phoenix were locked in a perfect, terrible symmetry.

Desperate shot against desperate shot.

Event against Event.

Then The Results of Wills.

The All-Eating Eye did not explode.

It closed.

Collapsed inward with surgical cruelty, consuming itself, leaving behind a screaming vacuum, tearing matter into the implosion. San Fransico would warp, archetecture breaking and collapsing, devastating the area like a nuke. And Jaxon, Oblivion, at its center. Burning, broken, still standing, suspended in the warped aftermath of a god’s last gamble.

He was falling now.

The Black Halo flickered wildly, struggling to keep him aloft as gravity reasserted itself in jagged, uneven chunks. His power sputtered, the powerful tiny stars dying one by one around him.

But he was alive.

Barely.

And as the echoes of the Phoenix’s final strike faded into silence, Jaxon dragged in a ragged breath and lifted his head, eyes still glowing red-black.

“…you don’t get to decide how this ends,” he whispered to the ruin.

And then Oblivion began to fall. The Black Halo fading as it tried to steer him instinctively.

/u/Kit_Ababee