The Strongest Thing in the Room
Viltrumite!Mark Grayson x Cosmic Powered!Reader
(The most recent episode of invincible being all in space got me thinking way too much about space and the cosmos lol so enjoy)
The Viltrumites arrived on a Tuesday.
Most apocalypses, you'd found, had terrible timing.
You were above the Himalayas when the fleet dropped out of warp, seventeen ships, wedge-shaped and dark, punching through the atmosphere like thrown knives. You felt them before you saw them. The fabric of space-time dimpled under their transit the way water dimples under a stone, and you'd spent enough years with your hands buried wrist-deep in the universe's infrastructure to recognize the signature of something that had crossed a very long distance very quickly and did not care about the mess it left behind.
You stretched your senses out. Counted the energy signatures aboard. Did the math.
Then you said something deeply impolite and went to go stand in the way.
They sent one ahead of the fleet. A scout, or a warning, or both.
He came down through the clouds like a missile — all white Viltrumite Uniform, dark-haired, moving at a speed that would have been genuinely impressive if you didn't regularly race light across open vacuum for fun. He pulled up hard when he saw you hovering there, and for a moment the two of you simply looked at each other in the thin cold air above the world.
He was young. That was the first thing you clocked. Younger than you'd expected from something that hit the atmosphere at that velocity. Maybe twenty, with a jaw like a sentence that didn't leave room for questions and dark eyes that were doing a rapid and surprisingly thorough assessment of you.
Viltrumite eyes. You'd read enough to recognize the calculation behind them.
"You're in my way," he said. His voice carried the particular flatness of someone who did not expect to have to say things twice.
"Observant, are we?” you quipped. "You're with the fleet."
"I'm ahead of the fleet." He crossed his arms. The motion was casual in the way that things are casual when they're actually a display look how relaxed I can be, look how little you register as a threat. You'd seen it before. You'd seen it on beings twice his size with twice his years. "Move."
"No."
He blinked. Just once, barely perceptible. You got the impression it had been a while since anyone said that to him.
"I won't ask again."
"I know," you said pleasantly. "I'm counting on it. Talking's boring. If you're going to do something, do it."
He moved. He was fast… genuinely, honestly fast, the kind of fast that turned air into a shockwave, the kind of fast that had probably ended most confrontations before they really started. His fist connected with your forcefield at approximately Mach 8 and the resulting crack rattled every window in a fifty-mile radius.
Your forcefield held. Barely. You felt it — not pain, exactly, but acknowledgment. Your power noting that something had pushed back hard.
You looked at him. He was staring at his fist, and then at you, and the calculation in his eyes had been replaced by something else. Something that walked a very thin line between anger and interest.
"Huh," you said. "You actually committed to that. I respect it."
"What are you?" he asked.
"Annoyed," you quipped. "Increasingly." You raised one hand and the space between you rippled — a visible distortion, gravity bending light the way it bends around something massive. "Call the fleet off. I'll say this once."
"The fleet takes orders from the Empire. Not from—" He looked at you, assessing all over again. "Whatever you are."
"The fleet," you said, "is currently being held in a localized gravity well approximately four hundred kilometers above the Pacific. They're not going anywhere I don't let them go." You watched his expression shift. "I did that while we were talking. I'm very good at multitasking."
He looked up. Then back at you. The anger was more straightforward now, at least — less calculated, more real.
"Release them."
"No."
"I will—"
"What?" you asked, genuinely curious. "You'll hit me again? You're welcome to. You've got good form, I'll give you that. But we've established that doesn't work, and you know it, and I know you know it, so what are we actually doing here?" You hoped he was thrown off enough by your force field holding to not recognize your very well shrouded bluff. If he continued to strike your field, it would shatter- you’re sure of it.
His jaw set. There it was — the Viltrumite stubbornness you'd read about in every archived account that mentioned them. Not stupidity. Something more interesting than that. A refusal, bone-deep and apparently structural, to accept that a situation was not winnable.
It was almost admirable.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"For your fleet to turn around and go back to wherever it came from."
"That's not going to happen."
"Then we have a problem." You let the gravity distortion drop from between you — a show of good faith, or at least a show of something. "What's your name?"
He looked at you like it was a trick. "Why?"
"Because if we're going to argue about the fate of a planet for the next several hours, I'd like to know what to call you."
A long pause. The wind moved between you. Below, unaware, eight billion people went about their Tuesday.
"Mark," he said, finally.
"Y/N," you said. And then, because you could and because something about his face made you want to see what it did: "You're younger than I expected."
"You're less dead than I expected," he said flatly. "So we're both surprised."
You laughed. You didn't mean to — it came out before you could decide whether to let it. Mark's expression flickered, a fast and almost involuntary shift, like he'd seen something he hadn't been prepared for.
"Come on then," you said, nodding upward toward the held fleet. "Let's go argue properly. I'll even let your ships breathe a little."
"You're not afraid of me," he said. Not an accusation. Something closer to a question.
"Should I be?"
He considered this with an unsettling seriousness, like he was actually running the numbers. "Most things are," he said.
"I'm not most things." You started moving upward, not particularly fast, a clear invitation. "You coming, or are you going to hover there being ominous?"
He came.
The argument lasted four hours.
You held the fleet. Mark held the line. You went back and forth across a thousand feet of sky with the kind of sustained, grinding verbal combat that left both of you slightly hoarse and no closer to agreement and somehow — inexplicably — less willing to actually end it.
He was not what you'd expected. You kept revising the file in your head. He argued like someone who'd been told what to believe and was in the process of deciding whether he actually did — not with the full certainty of the Empire behind him but with something more personal and therefore more difficult to argue against. He listened when you talked, which was more than you'd gotten from half the cosmic entities you'd negotiated with. He pushed back on every point, which was annoying, but he pushed back with reasons, which was almost worse.
"You can't hold them forever," he said, hour three. The sun had moved. You'd barely noticed.
"I can hold them for approximately eighteen days before I'd need to eat something," you said. "Can your fleet say the same?"
"We have provisions."
"Do they include something to do? Because trapped in a gravity well with nothing but space and each other sounds—" you tilted your head — "diplomatically complicated."
His mouth did something. Not quite a smile. The refusal of one.
"You're enjoying this," he said.
"Little bit," you admitted, crinkling your nose. "I don't usually get to hold seventeen warships and have a conversation. It's a nice change of pace."
"This isn't a game."
"No," you agreed, and let the lightness drop from your voice. "It's not. That's why I'm still here instead of just folding your fleet into a star and calling it done." You held his gaze. "I'd rather not do that, Mark. I'd rather you take your ships home."
"I can't do that."
"Can't or won't?" You retorted.
The distinction landed. You watched it land.
"The Empire—" he started.
"Isn't here," you said. "You are. The call you make in the next ten minutes is yours, whatever you tell yourself later." A pause. "You're not the Empire. I've spent four hours talking to you. You're something else."
"You don't know what I am."
"I know you've said 'the Empire' fourteen times and your own name once." You watched something move behind his eyes. "That seems relevant."
Silence. The fleet hummed in its gravity cage above you, patient and furious and helpless. Mark looked at you with an expression you couldn't categorize, something complicated that he hadn't bothered to hide in time.
"Forty-eight hours," he said finally. "I'll pull them back. Forty-eight hours."
"To do what?"
"To argue with the people I report to." His jaw was doing the thing, tight and set. "I'm not promising anything."
"Forty-eight hours," you said. You released the fleet. The ships drifted free, immediately rearranging into a holding pattern — still present, still threatening, but no longer pressed. "I'm leaving a fold anchor in this system. If they move toward atmosphere, I'll know."
"I know." He looked at you steadily. "You're very good at multitasking."
You recognized the echo of your own words and felt, against all professional judgment, that warm inconvenient shift in your chest again. You'd smothered it six times in four hours. It kept resurfacing.
"Forty-eight hours," you said again.
"Yeah." He held your gaze one beat longer than necessary. "I'll—find you. When I know something."
"You don't know how to find me."
"I'll figure it out." Said with absolute Viltrumite certainty, like the fact of his intention made it already accomplished. Under any other circumstances that would have driven you insane.
Under these specific circumstances you noted, unhappily, that it did not.
"Fine," you said.
You folded space. You left.
You did not think about the way he'd said I’ll figure it out for more than forty minutes, which was a personal best. You also did not think about the jawline that could cut glass.
He found you in thirty-six hours.
You were in low orbit, doing maintenance on the fold anchor you'd seeded in the upper atmosphere, when you felt the displacement of air that meant something very fast had just arrived beside you.
"I reverse-engineered your fold-anchor's EM signature," Mark said, like this was a normal thing to say. "Took most of the night."
You looked at him. He looked back. The Earth turned below you, vast and blue, and the fleet was still holding its position beyond the moon, and he had apparently spent thirty-six hours on a math problem so that he could tell you something in person rather than waiting for you to reappear.
"The Empire's not pulling back," he said. "I argued. It didn't change anything." A pause. "I'm telling you because you should know, not because—" He stopped. Started again. "Not because I'm here to give you a chance to surrender or whatever. I just thought you should—know what's coming."
"You argued with the Viltrumite Empire on behalf of a planet you were sent to conquer," you said, not quite a grin on your face.
"I argued because I—" His jaw. The thing with his jaw. "It doesn't matter why."
"It matters a great deal, actually." You retorted, tone slightly teasing.
He looked away. Looked back. "They'll send someone stronger. When they realize I'm not handling this."
"I know." You let the fold-anchor work continue in the background — your power running quiet and constant the way breathing ran quiet and constant. "Will that be you? Handling it?"
"No." Said simply. Without a lot of ceremony. "No, it won't."
The space between you felt different than it had four hours into an argument at thirty thousand feet. Less adversarial. More like standing on the same side of something and looking at the same problem.
"You could go back," you said. "Tell them it's defended. That the cost isn't worth it."
"They'd know I'd made a choice." He said it levelly. "They don't forgive choices."
"And if you stay?" You dared to ask.
He looked at you, and for once the calculation was entirely absent — just something direct and a little unguarded and considerably more honest than anything that had come before it. "I'm not sure what that looks like yet."
"Neither am I," you admitted.
The Earth kept turning. The fleet kept waiting. You were both hovering in the gap between those two facts with no particular resolution in sight, and it should have felt like a standoff, except that it didn't. It felt like the moment before something.
"You said I'm not the Empire," Mark said.
"I said you're something else." You agreed.
"What?"
You thought about four hours of argument. Eight billion people below, none of whom knew you were up here. The way he'd said I'll figure it out and then, apparently, done exactly that.
"Undecided," you said. "Which is more interesting."
"That's not an answer," Mark stated flatly.
"It's the one I have." You pulled the fold-anchor taut and sealed it — a small, precise motion, your power settling like a key in a lock. "There's going to be a fight."
"Yeah."
"When it comes—"
"I know what side I'm on," he said. Steady. Certain in the specific way you were starting to distinguish from Empire-certainty, which was rigid, and Mark-certainty, which was something he'd actually decided.
You looked at him for a long moment.
"Don't get in my way," you said, feinting nonchalance.
"Don't disappear," he retorted, his eyes holding a slight sparkle in them.
A beat. Two.
"Forty-eight hours was generous," you said. "For what it's worth."
"It wasn't enough."
"No," you agreed. "It wasn't."
You stayed where you were. So did he. Below, the world turned, ordinary and enormous, and neither of you folded space or flew away, and that was, you thought, a start.
