Write an alternative ending scene to Avengers Endgame, where Thanos fell in Love with Iron Man and together they defeat the universe and become parents to a lovable, purple furry.

The stones blazed across Thanos’s gauntlet.

“I am inevitable,” he said.

Tony Stark, bleeding and barely upright, looked at the enormous purple hand wrapped around his wrist.

“Then why,” Tony asked, “are you holding my hand?”

Thanos looked down.

Somewhere behind them, a Leviathan crashed into a burning hillside.

“It is a tactical restraint.”

“Sure. And the eye contact? Also tactical?”

Thanos released him immediately.

Tony’s helmet folded away. “You know, most people who are into me just buy a skyscraper near mine and pretend it’s a coincidence.”

“I have conquered worlds.”

“Terrible first-date activity. Nobody gets to talk.”

For the first time that day, Thanos seemed uncertain.

Across the battlefield, Steve Rogers lowered his broken shield.

“Is he buying us time?”

Doctor Strange slowly lowered the one finger he’d been holding up.

“I genuinely don’t know anymore.”

Thanos stared at Tony. He had expected fear. Defiance, certainly. Perhaps one last desperate trick.

He had not expected someone to notice.

“You offered me your respect on Titan,” Tony said, quieter now. “Then you threw a moon at me. Mixed signals.”

“I did not throw the entire moon.”

“See? That right there. You remembered.”

Thanos’s expression softened so unexpectedly that Tony almost missed it.

“I have thought of you,” the Titan admitted.

Tony blinked.

“Oh,” he said. “We’re actually doing this.”

Behind him, Rhodey’s faceplate snapped open.

“Tony. Buddy. Please tell me you have a plan.”

“I had a plan. It was mostly dying. I’m exploring alternatives.”

Thanos looked at the gauntlet. Six stones shone against his battered armor.

“All my life,” he said, “I believed the universe required correction.”

“Okay, first relationship note: we are not calling mass murder ‘correction.’”

A long silence followed.

Then Thanos bowed his head.

“No,” he said. “We are not.”

He opened his hand.

Tony studied him, then placed his smaller, armored palm against it.

“Undo it,” he said. “Everyone. And no more armies.”

Thanos closed his eyes.

Together, they snapped.

Everyone returned.

So did the buildings, the forests, the ships, and one extremely confused sandwich Peter Parker had dropped five years earlier.

Thanos’s army vanished from Earth and reappeared on a peaceful agricultural planet with excellent soil and absolutely no weapons.

For three seconds, everything was fine.

Then the sky split open.

A vast, luminous face looked down through the crack.

YOU HAVE VIOLATED THE FUNDAMENTAL ORDER OF EXISTENCE.

Tony squinted upward.

“Is there a customer service number, or are you it?”

More figures appeared: Eternity, Infinity, the Living Tribunal. Behind them, galaxies gathered into the shape of an enormous fist.

Thanos stepped beside Tony.

“The universe itself opposes us.”

Tony glanced at him. “Still interested?”

“More than ever.”

“Great. Let’s ruin its day.”

Their fingers interlocked around the gauntlet.

The universe attacked with collapsing stars.

Tony redirected them.

It attacked with a billion branching futures.

Thanos held them steady while Tony found the one where they won.

It attacked with the absolute certainty that two people could not defeat everything.

“Yeah,” Tony said through gritted teeth. “I get that a lot.”

The final flash turned the battlefield white.

When it faded, the cosmic beings were sitting around a conference table Tony had apparently conjured out of spite.

Before each lay a contract.

“No more predestined tragedies,” Tony announced. “No eating inhabited planets. And Earth gets weekends off.”

The Living Tribunal examined the document.

THIS IS HUMILIATING.

Thanos folded his arms.

“Sign.”

The universe signed.

Eighteen months later, Tony stood in their kitchen holding a spatula.

“Your son ate the dishwasher.”

Thanos looked up from a parenting book.

“Our son.”

“Our son ate your dishwasher.”

Beneath the table, a small purple creature sneezed a puff of sparkling smoke.

He was round, extravagantly furry, and possessed six tiny horns that Tony insisted would eventually come in evenly. His enormous ears drooped with remorse. A fork stuck out of his lavender fluff.

They had found him after the cosmic battle: an orphaned star-creature curled inside the cracked shell of a dead moon.

Thanos had picked him up with both hands.

Tony had taken one look at the way the creature clung to Thanos’s thumb and started designing a crib.

They called him Pip.

“Pip,” Thanos said gently, “appliances are not food.”

Pip considered this.

Then he reached into his fur and offered Thanos a damp detergent pod.

Tony confiscated it. “Absolutely not. Wow. We need to baby-proof another dimension.”

Pip’s lower lip trembled.

Thanos scooped him up against his chest. The little creature immediately burrowed beneath his chin and began to purr.

Tony tried to maintain his stern expression.

He lasted four seconds.

“Fine. But you’re both helping me wash dishes.”

Thanos leaned down and kissed him.

From the living room, Rhodey called, “I’m still not explaining this at the reunion.”

Pip chirped happily and coughed up the missing spoon.