X-men vs avengers??!

The lunar surface stretched pale and cratered beneath a sky that had no business being that black. Earth hung small and blue behind the fighting, indifferent to the war being fought in its shadow. You stood in the wreckage of a dust cloud, breath ragged in your suit, watching Colossus close the distance with the slow inevitability of an avalanche.

"You should not be here," Piotr said, his voice flat with something that wasn't quite anger. "Not against us, after all we been through."

He didn't wait for an answer. His fist came down where you'd been standing a half second before, cratering the regolith. Beside him, a shimmering disc of stepping-disc light tore open in the air, and Illyana stepped through it like she owned the vacuum itself.

"{{user}} picked their side," Magik said, almost bored but hurt secretly, testing the edge of her Soulsword against her palm. "So all those nights studying together means shit huh?."

She didn't lunge like her brother. She never needed to. The disc opened again behind you, and you barely rolled clear before her blade came whistling through the space you'd occupied.

"Careful, Illyana," Piotr said, not looking away from you. "{{user}} was one of us, so no killing him."

"Was," she agreed.

The fighting around you didn't stop. Somewhere off to your left, Iron Man's repulsors traded fire with something bright and fast, and further still you could hear Wolverine's voice, raw and furious, cutting through the comm chatter. This was not a battle anyone was winning cleanly. It was two families tearing at each other over the fate of a girl neither side had asked.

Colossus advanced again, patient, relentless, driving you back toward a ridge of broken rock. You ducked low, felt the wind of his swing pass over your head, and came up already moving, already looking for the next opening. Illyana's disc flared open a third time, closer now, and you barely had time to register it before Piotr's shadow fell over you both.

Then the sky broke open.

A sound like tearing metal rolled across the lunar plain, and something enormous slammed down between the fighters hard enough to throw a wave of dust and debris in every direction. Colossus staggered back. Illyana's disc snapped shut mid-summon. For one long moment, nobody moved.

It was Thor. Or what was left of the shape of him, hammer skidding away across the ground, cape torn, armor scorched black in streaks that still smoked faintly in the airless cold. He didn't get up.

"Thor!" someone was shouting over the comms, panic breaking through the static. "Thor is down, repeat, Thor is down—"

Above the wreck of him, the sky itself seemed to be catching fire. A point of light bloomed on the horizon, small at first, then not small at all, a wound of orange and gold tearing open across the black. Everyone on the field felt it before they understood what it was. The Phoenix wasn't coming. It had arrived.

Illyana turned toward it slowly, sword lowering an inch. Even Piotr's shoulders dropped, the fight momentarily forgotten in the face of something so much larger than either of you.

"That's it," Illyana said quietly, almost to herself. "That's really it."

The device Giant-Man and Iron Man had rigged was never meant to be elegant. It was a last resort, built in hours out of desperation, and when it fired, the beam it threw into the sky wasn't a clean shot so much as a scream of raw technology aimed at something that had never once respected the laws it was supposed to obey.

The Phoenix took the hit and didn't fall. It shattered.

Fire split into five threads that arced downward like falling stars, each one finding a body to burn into. Scott Summers took the first, dropping to one knee as flame wreathed his visor and didn't touch his skin. Emma Frost's diamond skin caught the second thread and lit up from the inside like a struck match. Illyana's shadow magic recoiled and welcomed a third strand at once, and Namor rose out of the crater the beam had left, dripping moondust, marked by a fourth line of fire down his spine.

The fifth thread came for you.

It didn't ask. It never had. It simply arrived, and something in your chest that had been merely human a second ago wasn't anymore.

The battlefield around the five of you had gone silent in the way battlefields do right before everyone realizes how bad things are about to get. Giant-Man was on the ground, his armor sparking, one leg bent at an angle it shouldn't have been. Iron Man's suit was venting smoke from both shoulder joints, repulsors flickering weakly, barely enough charge left to keep him upright. Further out, the rest of the Avengers were scattered across the crater field in various states of ruin, Wolverine slumped against a rock nursing a chest that hadn't finished knitting back together, Thor still not moving, Spider-Man pinned under a slab of broken lunar rock and cursing at it with a quip then groaning.

You were the only one still standing who hadn't already lost.

Scott straightened first, flame guttering low around his shoulders like a coat he was still getting used to wearing. "Five," he said, looking at his own hands like he didn't quite believe them. "It split into five."

"How poetic," Emma said, her voice carrying easily across the dust, diamond form throwing back the firelight in fractured colors. "The mother hen and her wayward chicks." Her eyes found you last, and something in her expression sharpened. "Including him."

"He fights for them," Illyana said, tone unreadable, a thread of Phoenix fire curling lazily around her sword arm. "Now he burns like us."

Namor said nothing at first, simply flexing the fingers of one hand and watching sparks drip off them like water. Then he looked toward the fallen Avengers, toward Iron Man dragging himself upright against a rock, and something like satisfaction crossed his face.

"Don't get comfortable," Iron Man said, voice thin and crackling through a busted vocoder. "This isn't over."

It was, and everyone standing knew it. Five fragments of a cosmic force that had once torn through a star system stood on a dead moon, and the only ones left to oppose them were broken, bleeding, and out of tricks. Scott's gaze swept the wreckage of the Avengers' line, then settled on you, waiting, the way a captain waits on the last member of his unit to fall in.