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Mortals were so fun to play with, she thought.
Of course, immortals---the Celestials, even---they were fun, too; just not in the same manner.
After all, she could never claim someone who couldn't die.
And that was another matter:
She'd deemed that half the life in the universe needed to end for there to be a balance
In the fifteen billion years since she'd been reborn into this universe—a veritable irony, considering who she was—none had come along that would carry out her plan, for none had been worthy enough, powerful enough, heartless enough, or ruthless enough to see it through.
Until he came into existence.
Thanos.
What a coincidence that the very name of the Mad Titan would sound similar to a personification of death of one of the many mortal cultures found in the vast cosmos!
The moment of his conception, she shivered in pure ecstasy.
Yes, she’d thought. this will be the one to cull the universe from overflowing by half.
His bloody birth, his mother’s attempt at immediate infanticide of him—all things that sealed his fate as the one to carry out her will.
She'd 'met' him in the guise of a young child—a girl— on the planet Titan, and there his feelings of emptiness from being different were fostered.
His vivisection of his mother and countless other Titans had been the initial bricks that built his highway of bodies.
So for years she’d played upon his emptiness and insecurity as though a harp, creating a macabre melody of notes that were the screams of the dying’s agony.
Even the wetwork of Ego — The brain of the Dreaming Celestial, stripped of his body and memories and forced to drift in the cosmos as punishment for some long-forgotten crime—had been mere child's drawings compared to the magnificent crimson fresco her Thanos had painted in both of his long, long lives.
He was perfect—all the emotional emptiness of a true sociopath and all of the ambition that marked him for great things.
And then, quite unexpectedly, he died.
It had been sudden and unexpected, and his demise through a proverbial wrench in her plans when her dear Thanos had been killed by a ragtag bunch of misfits with a familiar glowing green stone.
These misfits—each one the last of their respective kinds—had come from the year 3000 by means of said glowing green stone and had called themselves “The Guardians of the Galaxy”, led by the great Hawk-god Stakar Ogord and his adopted sister Aleta.
This was a name not unwarranted in their eyes, and certainly merited when they killed the Mad Titan.
At the time he'd died, she'd bitterly collected his spirit and set it apart from the trillions she'd collected over her long existence.
Indeed it was many trillions.
She'd claimed many lives, all of which in turn were mere plucked threads from a ornate weaving process that, when viewed from a distance, depicted a beautiful war over the stones she’d crafted with her son, her lover, and her lover’s sister.
Of the many lives she’d claimed, there were several specific ones that had directly motivated and shaped the fate of the universe, rippling out through the cosmos from the emotional impact these lives had left.
Edwin Jarvis.
Howard and Maria Stark.
Meredith Quill.
Horvat.
Phil Coulson.
Frigga.
Django and Marya Maximoff.
Pietro Maximoff.
Yondu Udotna.
She’d taken personal relish in claiming the life of Yondu—that pathetic Centaurian whose skills with his yaka arrow had been key to the Guardians' defeat of Thanos all those millennia ago, and who had sugguested that the time stone be given to the great supreme sorcerer Agamotto for safekeeping.
Of those many lives, none were as vital to her plans as Thanos was, so she resolved that when the time came, she would revive him.
Twenty five thousand years passed, but the time to revive Thanos had never felt quite right
Finally, when she'd gone to claim the life of Johann Schmitt from his body as it floated aimlessly through the starry void, she knew it was time.
She'd brought him from the infinity well and had granted him nigh-immortality.
His first order of business was bringing the lost and bitter Kree extremist Ronan into his employ, and right from the start things had gone horribly wrong.
Ronan had committed genocide of the inhabitants of the planet Salgoud, but had bungled the job of killing a young Salgoudi named "Kamaria". rationalizing that she would be f some use to him, Thanos had "resuced" her and tasked the few remaining Titan monks of Shao-Lom with raising her.
And then he did something similar to other young children—murdering their parents and taking them from their homes, replacing parts of their bodies with cybernetics and pitting them against each other to curry favor with him.
This backfired spectacularly in the cases of the Luphomoid Nebula and the Zen Whoberi Gamora—who not only severed all ties with the mad tita, but wound up closer; bonding over their shared emotional neglect at the hands of their "father".
Thanos may have been a tactician in many areas, but his oversight regarding things that would (as some mortals would vulgarly put it) “Come back to bite him in the ass”?
Now, that truly was a major failing.
She’d practically gift-wrapped the Mind Stone for him on a silver platter after she’d, and yet he’d evidently had no inkling of its true power, as evidenced by his reckless decision to place it in a scepter and give it to a power-hungry Jotun as part of a complex gambit to gain another infinity stone —A gambit that he'd lost, given that he now had no infinity stones to speak of years later.
What poor soul Thanos had commissioned under pain of death to create the AI that had been placed as a failsafe inside the mind stone’s protective outer casing, she had no idea.
Oh well; no matter— with his recent resolve to collect the stones himself, it seemed like he was finally taking the initiative to get things done.
And with the infinity stones, nothing would stand in his way.
How quaint, she thought suddenly, only now realizing why Thanos intended to use the gauntlet and the stones to achieve her goal.
When the synthezoid Vision would inevitably be deprived of his life force—the mind stone—would not the Synthezoid's allies and friends on Earth come after thanos to avenge their comrade and get the stone back?
Didn't the other, following the demise of Thanos's own Titan-based chitauri, say that the mere act of challenging the mighty heroes from earth was to court death?
Thanos honestly thought that he could court her, to woo her?!
His mistaken belief in thinking that she, the very concept of death personified, was capable of love, was truly so laughable and sweet as to almost be pathetic.
No matter—She figured she would wait until he'd collected all the stones before she could clear up this misunderstanding.
The coming conflict was soon to come to a head, and Oh! What a spectacle it would be.
She would make clear that she would always have more power than him—ALWAYS.
After all, had she not been the one who'd gifted him with a servant, a being so strange that the only name the servant knew was simply "The Other"?
Had she not been the very one to sculpt him into the unstoppable killing force that turned him into the bogeyman of the entire Andromeda Galaxy?
Long-Lived Mortals were VERY fun to play with, it turned out.
Suddenly, something danced at the edges of her awareness. In her current skeletal form, she could’ve been smiling.
Not, of course, that it would be easy to tell apart from any other emotion expressed by a perpetually “grinning” skull.
It was time for her to appear in Asgard once again, in the avatar known as “Hela”
Mistress Death closed her metaphorical eyes and let out a metaphorical sigh as her mortal perception shifted appearance: salt-pale skin, stringy swamp-dark hair… at last, the transformation complete, she opened her grey eyes — as bleak, cold, and unforgiving as a cloudy winter’s sky.
In this flesh-and blood form, it was easy to tell she was grinning.
Oh, yes.
This was going to be fun indeed.
Meanwhile, in another universe…
Cable, once known to the world as one Nathan Summers, was pissed off for a reason he couldn’t define (which in turn pissed him off even more).
In his younger years, he’d found that target practice helped to calm him down.
Well then. Target practice it was
Currently, his target in question was a young man with a ridiculous red-and-black costume and a face not unlike Anakin Skywalker’s after Mustafar—and like the man who would be Darth Vader, this unfortunate victim of Cable’s catharsis found it extremely difficult to die.
“Aw, C’mon, man!” Deadpool shouted indignantly, the force of Cable’s .950 Caliber bullet causing his head to do a complete 180 degree turn like something out of a macabre Looney Tunes short.
“I haven’t even MET mistress Death yet!”