[M&C Hotel, September 2010, 10:00 PM]
[A Few Hours Earlier, Top Floor Living Suite]
The flash of green light faded, leaving behind it the ordinary warmth of an ordinary room that had no idea what the people standing in it had just been through.
Ethan opened his eyes first. He then looked at each of them in turn — Jean, Anna and Elizabeth — with the quiet, measuring attention of someone who needed to confirm the answer before he could let himself relax.
"Are you all right?" he asked. "Do you remember what happened in the other timeline?"
He already knew his Chronokinesis had done its job. The protection he had woven into each of them before the Flashpoint reset was precise work, and he trusted his own precision. But suspecting was not the same as knowing, and when it came to Jean and Anna and Elizabeth, knowing was the only thing he was willing to settle for.
Jean considered for a moment, her eyes moving inward. Then her expression cleared. "Everything is there. I can recall all of it."
Anna crossed her arms. "Same. Clear as anything."
Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and gave a small, certain nod.
Only then did Ethan exhaled.
Anna tilted her head with a grin pulling at the corner of her mouth. "You know, sugar, you're so strong and so ridiculously charming that even death had to fall for you." She gestured loosely at the air around them. "What exactly is time going to do to a man who bends it under his heel?"
Jean considered this with a straight face for approximately two seconds. "That sounds weird," she said. "But accurate."
Ethan smiled, and the tension in his shoulders dissolved.
He was immune to temporal paradoxes and causality loops by the nature of what he had become, so his own condition had never been the concern. His concern had been standing right in front of him, and it was fine. They were fine.
He let himself settle into that fact for one quiet moment. Then his eyes went gold.
Genesis Awareness spread outward from him like a tide finding its natural shoreline, his perception threading through the city, the country, the world, touching the pulse of everything that existed in this universe and measuring it against his memory of how it had been before he left.
The Flashpoint had a way of leaving fingerprints. Timeline resets were rarely as clean as the people who initiated them believed, and Barry Allen's in particular had come with enough complications to make Ethan genuinely curious about what had survived intact.
He was also, if he was being honest, running a very specific check.
'If I find out the Joker is alive and well in this universe because of Barry, I will personally make sure the Flash regrets every step he ever took,' he thought as his awareness sweeping through Gotham.
He found Gotham but didn't find the Joker.
Barry, it turned out, had gotten lucky.
'Good for him,' Ethan thought. 'For his sake.'
He found everything else and measured it against his memory, city by city, institution by institution. Lena Luthor, still in the acting CEO chair at Aeon Biotech. Eve Teschmacher, still at her side. Pamela Isley, still running Bio-Organic Research with the particular intensity she brought to anything involving plants and science.
Ethan's awareness began to retract, satisfied.
But suddenly his eyes shifted from gold to a deep, luminous green as his attention narrowed onto the structure of time itself, the way it moved through this universe relative to where it had been.
The timeline flow was different. Not dramatically, not in any way that would register to most observers, but Ethan's relationship with time was not that of most observers. He turned the calculation over, confirmed it and confirmed it again.
Time dilation between the Marvel and DC universes had equalised. One day in each universe now corresponded to one day in the other. Previously the ratio had been one day in DC to one week in Marvel, a gap he had long since adjusted his planning around.
He considered this for approximately three seconds and filed it away without ceremony. For a man who treated time as a material he could work with rather than a current he was carried by, the change was a footnote.
'Huh,' he thought. 'Pleasant.'
"What is it?" Jean asked, reading the shift in his attention.
"Nothing concerning," he said. "The timeline is clean. Barry managed not to break anything significant." He glanced at Anna. "Lena, Eve, and Pamela are all in their positions. The company, Hotel are intact and the People we knew are same."
Anna's expression was satisfied. Jean's was quietly relieved.
But his awareness, still partially extended, had caught something at the outer edge of its reach. Not a threat nor a disturbance. More like the feeling of being watched from a very specific direction by a very significant number of very powerful eyes.
Previously, before the fight with Galactus, before Genesis Awareness had fully opened his perception, the watching had registered only as a vague pressure at the edge of his senses. Something or someone noting his presence. He had filed it away as a problem to identify later.
Later had apparently arrived. Now he could identify them clearly.
The Endless. The siblings of Didi, his girlfriend who wore the face of Death herself. Several of them, and not only them — other entities too, cosmic presences of a weight that most beings in this universe never interacted with and never knew existed. They were watching him with the collective attention of people who had found something worth watching and had settled in comfortably.
He could sense them—the moment he entered this universe.
Some had already been here when he arrived during the Flashpoint timeline. Others had come and gone, as if periodically checking in on something that had caught their interest.
And beyond them—farther out—there were other presences.
Cosmic entities. Ancient, immeasurable beings that existed on scales far beyond human comprehension.
They regarded Ethan with a peculiar kind of attention… the kind reserved for something that did not fit into any known category.
As if he were a serialised story they were following between other obligations.
The thought arrived with a mild edge of irritation, 'My life is apparently a television programme. And perhaps some of them are watching it on their phones.'
He raised a hand, but not dramatically. The gesture was conversational, the kind of wave you gave to someone you had noticed watching you from across the room.
"Good evening," he said pleasantly with the tone of someone addressing neighbours across a fence. "I appreciate the interest," he said, "but this constitutes a violation of personal space. I have plans for this evening and I would like to enjoy them without an audience." He paused. "Please."
The presences did not respond in words. Several of them withdrew. The quality of attention in the room changed, the way a room changes when people who were watching quietly step outside.
Ethan nodded, satisfied, and let his awareness fully retract.
Jean and Anna were looking at him.
"Who," Anna said slowly, "were you just talking to?"
"Some individuals with too much free time and not enough boundaries," he said. "They were watching. I asked them to stop." He considered whether to elaborate and decided the full explanation was a conversation for tomorrow. "Jean, if you were in your White Phoenix form you could sense them yourself. As it stands, just take my word for it."
Jean's expression said she had several follow-up questions. She filed them for later.
He turned to Elizabeth who had been standing quietly through all of it and before she could press further, and his voice shifted into something warmer. "You should rest. We can talk tomorrow."
He moved to the phone and called down to the front desk. The staff member who answered was audibly startled to hear his voice after months of absence, and the recovery from that surprise was admirably swift.
Within minutes, arrangements were made for Elizabeth to have a top-floor suite of her own, fully prepared and waiting.
Elizabeth thanked him quietly. She looked, for just a moment, at Jean and Anna and then at the room around her.
She had barely fought. She had barely moved. But she had watched a world end and had asked a man with the power to stop it to choose kindness instead, and that kind of witnessing had its own exhaustion.
"Tomorrow," she said softly, and excused herself.
The door closed behind her.
Ethan stood in the quiet of the suite for a moment, and then something surfaced in his memory that tightened his expression with a different kind of purpose.
"Give me a minute," he said to Jean and Anna. "I'll be right back."
He opened a portal and stepped through before either of them could ask.
Jean and Anna stared at the space where he had been. Then they looked at each other.
A slow, identical grin spread across both their faces. They turned toward the dressing room with the unified energy of two people who have just been handed an opportunity and intend to use it.
...
The street was quiet in the way that residential streets are quiet at night — parked cars, drawn curtains, the distant sound of a television through an open window somewhere.
Ethan stood outside an ordinary house and looked at it for a moment before turning to the man standing beside him.
Rudy Jones looked like someone who had been living a normal life for just long enough to be grateful for it, a man in his late thirties with the particular quality of someone who had been through something large and survived it without fully knowing what it was.
"Rudy Jones," Ethan said quietly. "It is time you earned your peace. I am sorry it took this long."
Rudy had served as the battery that powered the Omni-Watch through circumstances Ethan was not proud of having left unresolved for as long as he had.
When the Monarch of Giants had replaced him in that role, Ethan had healed him, erased the memories of what had been done to him, and now sending him home.
But healing and erasing were not the same as settling the debt, and Ethan was a man who kept careful track of what he owed.
Rudy's eyes went bright. Whatever he felt in this moment, it was genuine and it was large and he did not try to contain it. He thanked Ethan in a voice that did not have much steadiness in it, and then he stepped back inside his home and closed the door.
Ethan stood on the empty street and exhaled slowly.
"I will make sure your family is settled for life," he said, to the closed door and to the man behind it and to the particular debt he had been carrying. "Because of what happened to you."
He opened a portal and stepped through into his suite and came to a complete stop.
Jean and Anna stood in the center of the room in bathwear, wearing the satisfied expressions of two people whose plan was going exactly as intended.
"We were thinking," Anna said, "that you might want to join us for a shower."
Ethan looked at them, looked at the room and looked back at them.
He crossed to them in three easy steps and gathered both of them into his arms.
"I would be insulting myself," he said, "if I said no to that."
They laughed, and for several hours, they lost themselves in each other's company, sharing loud and intimate moments.
...
[The Next Morning]
The ceiling was familiar.
Ethan opened his eyes and looked at it for a moment, letting awareness return at its own pace. The room was quiet. Pale morning light came through the gap in the curtains and lay across the floor in a long, still stripe.
He turned his head to the left. Jean was asleep on his left, her hair across the pillow, her breathing deep and unhurried. He turned his head to the right. Anna lay with one arm across his chest, her face carrying in sleep the contentment that she deployed with considerably more control during waking hours.
He smiled and considered going back to sleep himself. It was a reasonable thought, and he held it comfortably for the span of approximately four seconds.
Then something in his awareness shifted.
It was small. Barely a flicker in his Genesis Awareness, a life signature so new it barely qualified as fully formed yet. He would have missed it if he had not been paying attention.
It was coming from inside Jean.
Ethan lay perfectly still and stared at the ceiling.
The silence in the room was absolute.
"Oh my God," he said.