[Castle Doom, Latveria, 28th September 2010]

The throne room of Castle Doom was exactly what it was designed to be. Dark stone walls rose thirty feet to vaulted ceilings hung with iron chandeliers. Torches burned in their brackets along the walls, casting long shadows across the banners of Latveria that hung between them.

The throne sat at the far end of the room on a raised dais, solid and immovable, and the man in the grey armor and green cloak who occupied it had the posture of someone who had been expecting this visit and had spent the intervening time preparing for it.

Ethan looked around the room with the mild interest of someone taking in a space they had not visited in a while, then settled his gaze on Doom.

"It’s been a while," he said. "At least from where I’m standing. For you it’s probably been about ten days."

Doom said nothing. His masked face gave nothing away, as it always did, and his gauntleted hands rested on the arms of the throne with the stillness of someone who was being very deliberate about not moving yet.

"Time is a strange thing," Ethan added. "I keep finding new ways to be reminded of that."

Doom did not ask what he meant. Ethan had not expected him to.

The fact that Ethan could travel between universes was something that no one outside of his own household knew, and Ethan had every intention of keeping it that way. If Doom had noticed the oddness of the statement, he filed it without comment.

Then his hands moved.

The green glow came first, building in both gauntlets simultaneously, a clean and precise magical construction that Ethan recognized the architecture of immediately.

The No Magic Zone that had been woven into the castle’s foundations since Ethan stepped through the portal pulsed outward from its anchor points in the walls, and then the runes activated.

They were good runes. Ethan could see the craftsmanship in them the way a teacher recognizes their own methodology in a student’s work.

Several of them fired in sequence, each one triggering the next in a cascade that was more sophisticated than anything Doom should have been able to build in ten days, and then the chains came.

Greenish-grey, forged of condensed runic energy, they wrapped around Ethan from every direction at once and locked him in place with the specific intention of keeping him there regardless of what he tried.

Ethan looked down at them.

"Huh," he said. He turned one wrist as much as the chains allowed and examined the construction of the binding closest to his hand. "These are actually impressive, Victor. I gave you the basics ten days ago and you built this."

He looked up. "I am genuinely impressed. That is not something I say lightly."

Because it was true. Ten days ago, at the wedding reception, Ethan had watched Doom circulate among the sorcerers present with the carefully managed hunger of a man who wanted something and was not going to ask for it directly.

He had tried to draw knowledge of the Mystic Arts out of Wong and several others, probing for any crack in their professional discretion.

But the Ancient One had apparently given standing instructions on this particular subject, and every door Doom knocked on stayed closed, which had produced a very specific quality of irritation in a man who was not accustomed to doors staying closed for him.

Ethan had found it more productive to redirect than to watch the situation fester.

Since, Doom’s mother’s grimoire contained material on runic systems and he had the magical talent and the intellectual capacity to develop it into something real. Ethan had shared a framework of rune knowledge, they had exchanged several words on the underlying complexity of the systems involved, and Doom had taken the knowledge away with the focused attention of someone who intended to do something serious with it.

Apparently he had.

’I taught him the basics and he built a prison. I genuinely cannot decide if I should be flattered or annoyed. Probably both.’

It was true. Ethan knew the full depth of what Asgardian runes could become in the hands of someone who understood them completely. Doom had taken a foundational primer and in ten days had produced something that was already operating above what most practitioners managed in a year.

The intelligence that had always made Victor von Doom dangerous had simply found a new direction to point itself.

The No Magic Zone pulsed again as Doom adjusted the working. Ethan felt the suppressive field pressing against his access to his powers, not eliminating them entirely, he was too far beyond the threshold for that, but creating friction, slowing response times, requiring more effort than usual to reach what he needed.

And layered underneath it is a second system. A modified power-siphoning harness built into Doom’s armor, originally a separate device but now integrated directly into the suit.

Doom had modified it so that only his own aura signature was exempt from its suppressive field. Everyone else inside the castle’s perimeter was operating at reduced capacity. The device had been designed to siphon powers from others, and in its modified form it ensured that as long as it was active, no one except Doom could access their abilities freely.

Around the room’s perimeter, additional workings sat woven into the stone. Exit-sealing spells. Dimensional anchors. The specific runic signatures of a man who had thought through the problem of keeping a particular kind of guest from leaving and had prepared answers for each scenario he could anticipate. Multiple spells layered across the entire castle ensured that no one could leave without Doom’s permission.

Doom had spent his ten days well.

Ethan stood in the chains and the suppression field and the No Magic Zone and looked at Doom with an expression that was thoughtful rather than alarmed.

Ethan looked at all of it calmly. His eyes moved across the room, cataloguing each layer, each working, each point of suppression. His expression remained unhurried.

Then his eyes stopped at the corner.

Mephisto stepped out of the shadow there wearing the same body he had presented to Susan Storm.

The well-dressed man in his late thirties with the carved cane and had a comfortable smile of someone who had arrived at the end of a long piece of planning and found everything exactly as intended.

He looked at Ethan wrapped in chains and chains and smiled nicely.

Doom rose from the throne. He descended the dais steps without hurry and crossed the floor toward Ethan, stopping a few feet away. Even at this distance the mask gave nothing away.

"Let me guess," Ethan said. "The reason you’re standing against me, despite knowing how futile it is, is because he’s holding something over you."

His expression shifted—not into sympathy exactly, but into that sharp, focused attention that meant he was taking this seriously.

"Your mother," he continued. "Cynthia Von Doom. Mephisto used her to blackmail you, didn’t he?"

Doom’s silence was its own confirmation. His gauntleted hands were still but the green glow at them had not faded.

"It doesn’t matter which path leads to her freedom," Doom said. "The destination is the only thing that matters."

Ethan held his gaze for a moment, reading what was behind the words. There was something in Doom’s voice that he recognized, the specific flatness of a person describing a wound they had stopped expecting to heal but had never once stopped trying to treat.

The sound of slow, appreciative clapping interrupted the moment from the corner of the room.

Ethan turned his head to Mephisto.

"Your intelligence continues to astound me, Carter," Mephisto said pleasantly.

He had been watching this exchange with visible enjoyment and strolled away from the wall toward the throne and settled into it with the ease of someone occupying a seat they had always considered rightfully theirs, his cane resting across his lap.

A glass of dark red wine appeared in his hand from nowhere, the crystal catching the torchlight as he turned it slowly between his fingers.

"Now," Mephisto said pleasantly, "before you two begin cooking something between you, let me be direct."

He crossed one leg over the other. "There is no escape from this place once you have entered it. I have used my power alongside Doom’s to make this castle into a perfect seal. Every contingency has been accounted for, including the Power Cosmic you carry."

His smile did not waver. "As long as you are inside these walls, nothing leaves without the permission of both myself and Victor. And since Victor’s cooperation is already secured, I think you understand the situation."

Doom said nothing. He stood where he had stopped and watched the exchange with his hands clasped behind his back.

Ethan looked at Mephisto with an expression that was calm in a way that had nothing to do with being relaxed.

"You said it yourself. No one leaves without permission from both of you. That cuts both ways. If Doom and I joined forces inside this room, and this room is already designed to prevent escape once entered, the room itself becomes the perfect prison for you. We contain you here permanently. That option also exists."

Mephisto looked at him with mild amusement. "It would, yes. Except for the small matter of what happens to Cynthia Von Doom the moment Victor raises a hand against me."

He took a slow sip of the wine. "I have linked my life force to her soul. Any damage dealt to me travels directly to her. Every wound. Every application of force. None of your Powers like Pheonix force, Power Cosmic, the little time manipulation will do anything about it. I make sure none of the solutions available to someone of your considerable resources apply here."

He raised one hand and the air beside him rippled, and through it came the sensation of something that was not in the room but was absolutely present nonetheless, a soul, connected by a thread that Ethan could feel even through the suppression, pulsing faintly with the specific signature of something ancient and innocent and entirely at Mephisto’s mercy.

He swirled the wine in the glass. "Victor will not trade his mother’s soul for a tactical advantage. I have known him considerably longer than you have, Ethan. I was confident in this variable."

Doom’s gauntleted fist tightened at his side. He remained still and said nothing.

Ethan let the information settle. His eyes moved to Doom briefly. Something passed between them in that glance, brief and quiet. Then Doom’s hands moved behind his back and two small precise sounds came from the direction of his gauntlet. Buttons, pressed in sequence.

Both Ethan and Mephisto registered it. Neither addressed it immediately. Ethan had no reason to object. Mephisto noted it, understood what Doom was doing, and decided it was irrelevant to his purposes. The recording could exist. It would not matter.

Ethan was quiet for a moment.

’Of course. Of course he linked the mother. Because why use a simple trap when you can use someone’s love as the lock.’

Mephisto leaned back in the throne and took another sip of wine with the air of someone settling in for the most enjoyable portion of a story he had written himself. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Let me explain how we arrived at this moment," he said. "I have been watching you, Carter. From the shadows. For some time. Without your knowledge and without your awareness until recently when your power spiked off the charts."

He let that sit for a moment. "I am patient when patience serves my interests."

Another sip. "But I have to admit, you are a fascinating subject, Ethan Carter. The ability to adapt to anything and absorb the essence of what challenges you. A fragment of the Phoenix Force raised to a level that rivals the original host and perhaps exceeds it. And a soul."

He paused, turning the wine glass slowly. "A soul that is older than its body. A reincarnation, if I am reading the signature correctly."

Doom’s eyes widened as he turned, meeting Ethan’s narrowed gaze. Ethan said nothing, but the silence spoke volumes.

Doom’s expression remained hidden behind his armor, yet the truth had shaken him far more than his mask allowed anyone to see.

Mephisto continued. "I grew curious about where you disappeared to on occasion. There are windows of time in which you simply cannot be located anywhere in this universe. I found that very interesting. I wanted to understand you completely, you see. Your mind. Your body. Your soul. All of it."

He uncrossed and recrossed his legs. "I wanted to own all of it."

The chains around Ethan made a sound. A low, barely audible groan of stressed material as faint cracks appeared along the nearest links. New chains emerged immediately from the existing binding and covered them, the old material repairing itself at the same time.

"Calm yourself," Mephisto said, without urgency. "I am still in the middle of explaining."

The expression that crossed Ethan’s face was specific and immediate. It was the expression of someone who had just heard something that registered as deeply, fundamentally wrong in a way that bypassed analysis and went straight to instinct.

It was, in its particular combination of revulsion and flat refusal, remarkably similar to the face Tanjiro Kamado made the first time he encountered Zenitsu’s approach to women.

Nobody in the room commented on it.

Mephisto chuckled and moved on without acknowledging it. "I waited for your honeymoon. The window when you and your two wives would be absent from this universe together. Then I moved."

Susan Storm had been the chosen target for a specific reason.

"Of all the people connected to you in this universe," Mephisto said, with the tone of someone explaining a logical sequence, "she represented the most structurally damaging loss. Not merely grief, though there would have been considerable grief. But the specific fracture that comes from losing someone who is still in the process of becoming part of the foundation."

He tilted his head. "The timing was calibrated."

He set the wine glass on the arm of the throne. "The plan had two branches. Branch one: send the Spirit of Vengeance after Susan Storm. Kill her. Break you. A grieving man is a compromised man."

He laced his fingers together. "Branch two: in the event you somehow returned before branch one was complete, which I admit I considered a low probability, Victor’s preparations would be waiting for you here."

"It is a stupid plan," Ethan said.

Mephisto raised an eyebrow and took the wine glass for a sip.

"You are supposedly the master of deception," Ethan continued, with the tone of someone delivering a fair and honest critical assessment. "The ruler of one of the most significant hell dimensions in this universe. I expected considerably more structural elegance from you. This is workmanlike at best."

Mephisto studied him for a long moment. Then he laughed, genuine and warm, the laugh of someone who found the critique entertaining rather than insulting. "You are truly remarkable," he said. "Even in chains."

"I try," Ethan said.

Mephisto smiled with genuine patience. "The plan succeeded, Ethan. You are standing in chains in Victor’s throne room."

Then he set the wine glass on the throne’s armrest and leaned forward. His smile had taken on a new quality, the specific pleasure of someone about to reveal the card they had been saving.

"There is one more element," he said, his voice dropping into something smoother, "It is the insurance."

He let a beat pass. "Your new girlfriend. The one with the gothic aesthetic and the recently opened establishment."

He tilted his head with theatrical consideration. "What is her name again. Right. Didi."

The room shifted.

Doom’s head turned toward Ethan.

"Or perhaps," Mephisto continued, his smile widening with the deliberate pleasure of someone landing exactly where they aimed, "I should call her what she actually is. The incarnation of Death from another universe."

Doom went very still. The mask showed nothing. But the quality of his stillness communicated an expression clearly enough. He turned to look at Ethan, and the question in that look required no words.

"Is this true," Doom said.

"Yes," Ethan said.

Two seconds of silence.

"How in the name of everything rational," Doom said carefully, "did you manage to seduce Death."

Ethan’s expression settled into something that sat precisely halfway between a smirk and something genuinely, specifically irritating. "My charming face," he said. "And my pure heart."

’That is going to bother him for the next decade. Minimum.’

Doom made a sound that was not quite a word and turned back to face the front of the room with the posture of a man filing something away for later.