Work Text:
Pain.
For a lifetime, for a thousand lifetimes, there was nothing except searing pain, washing over and through his body. Heat that flooded through his veins like ice water, freezing and crisping and numbing in exquisite agony. He was beyond shock, beyond reason, beyond all thought except: why am I not dead?
This wasn’t meant to be a punishment. It was meant to be the end. Torn between loyalty to the only god he’d ever known and the only family he’d ever known, there was never going to be a happy ending for him.
And when, right at the most critical moment, it came down to the choice between Sersi’s or Arishem’s wishes, he’d balked.
Caught in a sickening whirlpool of nausea, fear and horror, he watched Sersi turn a Celestial (a god! One of those who made them! One of the ones who formed him from formless void, granted him strength, and flight and power and life without end!) into nothing but a mass of stone.
This should never have happened. None of it. He should have prevented it, somehow. If he was worthy of all of the gifts given to him, he would have been able to tear the rot out of his soul, to banish the insidious creeping sentimentality, to destroy the team before they found out how Celestials were made.
Ikaris, unable to stop the woman he loved, but unable to live under the anguish of failing the god he followed, chose death. He had set his sights on the sun and hadn’t looked back. Death was the only answer, the only way he could pay for the gifts given to him.
The pain was receding, Ikaris realized. Slowly enough that he could feel the growth of sinew, re-anchoring muscle to bone, forming his heat-blasted body into what it once was. Even if he’d wanted to, he could not summon the energy to complete his penance by flying further into the sun. Vision returned. The cosmos was sprawling in front of him, grainy and in grayscale at first, and then the full depth of the spectrum was revealed, tilting on its axis - but maybe he was the one tilting?
All at once, Ikaris realised that he was being turned. His field of view was filling with red. Eight blazing red spheres towering over him, focusing on his regenerating body with detached interest.
Arishem the Judge.
Ikaris said nothing. There was nothing to say. He was a creature of loyalty, but that loyalty meant next to nothing if it was divided. A traitor would accept a traitor’s due. He closed his eyes, expecting death.
“Ikaris. You have been selected for Judgement”, a deep voice resounded in his newly formed skull. “You have been entrusted with powers beyond compare, yet you refused to use them to complete the purpose for which you were created. Why?”
Ikaris realised he had closed his eyes. It made no difference. Tears streamed continuously down his face. He couldn’t see. Great sobs shook his whole body as he tried to find the words to explain that he couldn’t deal death to his friends, his friends who were his family, his love . He had been tested and found wanting.
“I see.” Arishem brought him closer to his massive face. “It is a poor workman who blames his tools. You were created in your shape, with your abilities, to carry out my will. The loyalty you feel is part of what I have instilled into you. Without it, you would not have been able to do your work in the past; without it, you will be unable to do your work in the future.”
What?
“I made you as you are, and I have not erred. You are not disloyal; your choice to cease existing rather than living a divided life demonstrates this. You will be my emissary. When I return with the Judgment for your friends, I will elevate you.”
Ikaris was moving. He was shooting backwards, to a small blue bubble which increased with amazing rapidity. Heat started to blaze along his back, his arms and legs, his head. As he re-entered Earth’s atmosphere (did Arishem throw him?) he could still hear that booming voice: “Loyalty is an asset which we will use. It is time for an assessment of the current Eternals team. Rest now.”
As he fell, a blazing star hurtling towards the middle of the Pacific Ocean, he heard “This is my Judgement.”
As he smashed into the water’s surface, the world went dark.
“There is more than one way to create a Celestial.”