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The first thing put into the everything bagel was love.
Jobu Tupaki didn’t need it anymore. It had been the start, the cause of all of this. Love. Love for science: an ambition to strive ever onward, past danger and sense, for the unknown that might be out there. But more than that, love for her mother. Love that made her want to feel a mother’s pride. Love that bound them together. Love that made Joy Wang say yes to every experiment. Love that broke her into an infinite number of pieces, strewn across the multiverse, scattered and fragmented and now all and one at the same time. Love that made Jobu Tupaki. Love that led to the everything bagel as the only possible outcome.
The only catch was that the bagel couldn’t consume abstract concepts, so Jobu Tupaki needed an instantiation, an embodiment of love to feed to it, to cleanse it from herself, to demonstrate that Joy was no more.
Only her mother was dead, and the lab was destroyed. Nothing remained of that which had made her Jobu Tupaki to give to the bagel.
She could give her father to it, but that didn’t feel good enough. It needed to be something just between her and her mother: a symbol of how far love could push you, could hurt you.
So she chose a unpleasant, tiny, indie coffee shop instead. It was called Roasted Beans. It was stupid and hipster and played unnecessarily obscure music. Its atmosphere screamed that you’d never be cool enough to belong there. The coffee was only mediocre, the food less so.
But it was a block from the lab and the closest place that was open late and served caffeine and didn’t kick you out even if you sat there for hours. Evelyn and Joy had spent many long hours in its chairs that made it clear they were more for looks than comfort. The two of them would drink disappointing coffee and talk about physics. They pushed forward the bounds of science and didn’t care at all about what the rest of the clientele thought of them. They broke the multiverse down into theorems and equations that became a map to navigate with. Math told them how to travel across spaces that were not spaces, across the cosmic glue that bound universes together. The only flaw was the human mind that would have to be the vessel making that journey. The science was perfect; the mind, as it turned out, was not.
That coffee shop was their place, just the two of them. It was everything she’d loved about her mom and what they’d had together. It contained such a mix of good and horrible memories that she couldn’t stand the thought of it existing any longer.
Jobu Tupaki had Roasted Beans torn from the earth and thrown into the bagel without a second thought. The bagel consumed it instantly, and there was now one less sentimental coffee shop she associated with her mother in the multiverse.
That was the start. Entire worlds followed.
She wasn’t alone at least. She’d been surprised the first time she’d gained a follower. She was less surprised when they kept coming. Others who couldn’t take the pressure of their lives, scattered throughout the multiverse, who saw something like hope in a leader who provided a concrete ending: a black hole that could consume all. The finality of their mission spoke to them. The bagel was intended to devour everything, including all life and the very possibility of life, all matter, all thoughts, all hopes and fears, all of existence itself. Her followers helped her hunt those who strove, fruitlessly, to stop it.
She thought about giving her dad to the bagel. Her kind, funny, joyful dad, who laughed in a way that made everyone around him join in, no matter how silly or stupid the subject matter was. Her dad who had followed her mom into science, even though his abilities would never compare to hers, just so he could understand something of what she was talking about, just to share her world even partly. Her dad who was eerily good at ‘verse jumping, picking up diverse skills from countless versions of himself. He’d turned out to be shockingly adaptable, and somehow that made perfect sense. It had always seemed like he wanted to be someone else.
She thought about giving her dad to the bagel next but didn’t. She refused to look too hard at the reasons why, at first. Her father had been full of love; endless love; beautiful, earnest love. He couldn't save any of them. Then she realized his love wasn’t so eternal. When he first tried to kill her, she knew he no longer saw his daughter in her. He only saw Jobu Tupaki. So she no longer saw her father in him, and none of it mattered. She’d get to him eventually.
Meanwhile, the bagel had more important things to consume. Like all of her splintered, fractured pain.
So she went for places that were important to other Joys and other Evelyns. Across thousands of universes.
Music venues and restaurants. Parks and playgrounds. An engineering lab. A space station. A cabin in the middle of the Rockies. The airplane that they flew in for Joy’s first visit to China. Her grandfather’s house when he’d followed his daughter to America. Her and Becky’s wedding. Countless places beloved by countless versions of them: places where they’d been content and delighted and ecstatic and sad and comforted. Places that mattered.
They all went into the bagel.
There were also a ton of fucking laundromats. In some of those worlds, Joy and Evelyn were doing just fine. She hated those worlds, because they had something she never would.
The worst though, were the ones where they didn’t even exist. Worlds where Evelyn and Joy were never born, where humans never evolved, where life on Earth never happened. Those worlds were so peaceful and quiet. There was no pain or guilt or happiness or joy. She’d spend the few focused moments she had in those universes, just being but not being her. It was a fake peace, temporary and fleeting. Jobu Tupaki hated those universes the most. Eventually, the bagel consumed every one she found.
The chaos of the bagel was the only beautiful thing left to her. Its void was a promise that could only be kept. It was singular. The bagel was all she had, until she finally found someone, another Evelyn, who understood what it was like. To live every life, every possible state of existence, at the same time, always and evermore. With only the bagel as hope of an end.
The last thing put into the everything bagel was love. The love of a sort of mother for her sort of daughter (multiverse relationships were hard to define). A mirror of the love that had started this all but different, in the way each universe was, by definition, different from all the others. Jobu Tupaki saw her mom in his version of Evelyn but also, not quite her mom. Both driven by ambition, but for this Evelyn, it was always ambition met with failure. They’d led radically different lives, her mom and this Evelyn, her and this Joy, her father and this Waymond. Different yet so familiar that the hurt was still there. The bagel still called: an ending, peace.
Until Evelyn poured her love into it, and it turned out that a black hole/everything bagel wasn’t infinite, after all. Like everything that existed, it had its limits. Love filled it up, until it couldn’t hold anything else.
The last thing put into the everything bagel was love. It consumed the bagel, until it was no more.
The last thing Jobu Tupaki felt was that love, and it brought her peace.