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Thanos snapped his fingers and felt himself moved. There was red as far as the eye could see, the only thing disrupting the monotonous landscape was Gamora, the young girl he first met and later molded, standing under a simple structure. He stepped forward almost in disbelief, the thin level of water splashing as he walked.
"Did you do it?" She asked, making a point not to look at him.
"Yes."
"What did it cost you?" Gamora still wasn't facing him but clearly watching him out of the corner of her eye.
"Everything." Thanos affirmed once more and Gamora finally turned completely so she stood with her back to him.
"Not yet, but it will."
Thanos took a few steps further trying to reach this young version of his daughter, but with each step he sunk further and further into floor. He struggled in vain but only succeeding in sinking faster. He clenched his hand into a fist but nothing happened. Time and again he failed, all of his power was useless, as he tried to escape.
The gauntlet had gone dark.
"GAMORA!" Thanos screamed as bloodied hands formed pulling and dragging him under, gagging him in the process.
He wasn't unconscious, but everything was dark and his limbs felt too heavy to carry. Thanos struggled to focus through the sudden and overwhelming noise. Screaming. People were screaming. A sound he had long since grown accustom to.
A dim light shone on him as countless featureless faces swam in front of him frozen in anguish. Their screams combined drowning each other out and their strange bodies surrounded him completely immobilizing him. Thanos couldn't fight them, something was stopping him and the more he tried to fight the worse it got and the clearer the screams and shouts became.
"Murderer!"
"You killed my family!"
"You killed us!"
"Murderer!"
"It was an act of mercy!" Thanos countered, as he felt his lungs fail from the pressure on all side. He couldn't catch his breath there was no where for it to go.
He was lost in the sea of his victims, drowned out by their screams of venegence and injustice.
Slowly in the way a river creates a canyon, he lost the one thing he had left.
-
The young Gamora fell to her knees and sand swirled around her as her young facade blew away leaving a grown woman in its wake. Sobs wrecked her body as she clutched her sides in an aim to pull herself together. Thanos' poisoned dream was achieved and swept through the universe like a plague, reducing life to nothing more than ash, countless times over. Silence crept in where there had once been life.
And while his body survived, his mind had become the cost.
The Keeper had warned them, but Thanos thought he knew better. Thought he understood the cost of his dream.
Gamora just cried, allowing herself to mourn properly for the first time in her life. Mourn for her parents, and everyone else who had to die because of that man. She mourned her own death and now imprisonment within the stone.
And when her tears ran dry she was forced to face the one thing Thanos got right.
She was a survivor.