[Aeon Biotech – Chairman's Office, DC Universe]
The red portal sealed shut behind him without a sound.
Ethan stepped into the chairman's room of the Aeon Biotech branch with his hands easy at his sides, the faint residual warmth of the portal already fading from the air.
The office was spacious and clean, all polished surfaces and large windows overlooking the city below, the kind of room that communicated quiet authority without needing to shout it.
Lena and Eve were already inside.
Both of them turned at the sound of his arrival, and their expressions shifted from focused to delighted in the span of a second.
Lena rose from behind the president's desk in a single fluid motion, her composure briefly overtaken by something genuinely warm. Eve, standing at her side with her usual composed attentiveness, let a bright smile cross her face.
Anna had already called ahead and they both knew.
"Ethan," Lena said, stepping around the desk to meet him. She extended her hand first, then seemed to reconsider and reached out to grip his arm instead, her smile wide and sincere. "Congratulations. Truly. You are going to be a father."
"Congratulations, Mr. Carter," Eve added, bowing her head slightly, her smile carrying the quiet warmth of someone who meant it completely.
Ethan smiled back at both of them, unhurried and genuinely pleased. "Thank you. Both of you."
He glanced around the office, taking in the state of things with the passive ease of his Genesis Awareness brushing lightly over the building. "How is everything here?"
Before Lena could answer, the door swung open.
Pamela Isley stepped through with the particular energy of someone who had been moving with purpose and arrived exactly where she intended to be. Her green eyes found Ethan immediately and her entire face broke into a wide, radiant smile. She crossed the room in quick strides and took both of his hands in hers, squeezing them firmly.
"I just heard," she said, and her voice carried a reverence that sat somewhere between genuine emotion and the particular devotion she had developed for him over time. "Congratulations, my lord. The son of the god of plantation is going to enter this world." Her eyes shone with real feeling. "I cannot think of a more worthy occasion."
Ethan looked at her with quiet amusement pulling at the corner of his mouth. 'God of plantation. That is the title now.' He turned the thought over once. 'I wonder how far beyond that is going to go before it stops.'
He decided not to dwell on it.
"Thank you, Pamela," he said. "I'm glad you're here. I wanted to see all three of you."
He moved to the main chair at the head of the table and settled into it. Lena returned to the president's seat. Pamela and Eve took chairs across from him, and for a moment the room held the easy quiet of people who were comfortable in each other's presence.
"How is the company doing?" Ethan asked, his tone direct. "Any problems worth knowing about?"
Lena folded her hands on the desk, her expression shifting into the focused composure she wore when discussing business. "Better than projected, honestly. The fertilisers, seeds and related products are moving extremely well. High demand, low cost, and the market is only growing. The next few months should push us into a significantly stronger position than we are already in."
Ethan gave a satisfied nod. "Good."
"There is one thing," Lena added, and a slight crease formed between her brows. "Lex. I have been watching for anything unusual from his side and I have found nothing." She paused. "Which is, itself, unusual. The silence concerns me more than activity would."
Ethan leaned back in the chair and considered that for a moment. "He'll move eventually," he said. "But don't let him occupy too much of your attention. Keep the focus on the company. Development, expansion and reach. That is what matters."
Lena gave a small nod before her expression settling.
"Pamela," Ethan said, turning to her. "Your side?"
"Everything is running smoothly," she said. "The greening initiative in the eastern sectors has exceeded expectations. The soil recovery rates are ahead of schedule." A quiet pride moved across her face. "Your formula truly is something miraculous."
"Good." He let a beat pass, then said, "There is one more thing I want to handle while I'm here. The employees across this branch, all of them, are receiving five years' worth of their salary. Today."
The room went quiet.
Lena's composed expression cracked slightly. Eve blinked. Pamela's eyes went wide for just a moment before something almost worshipful settled back over her face. "As expected," she said softly. "He is generous beyond measure."
"Ethan," Lena said carefully, leaning forward. "That is an extraordinary sum. The logistics alone, the sheer monetary volume required..."
Ethan smiled. It was a patient smile, the kind that preceded something that rendered the concern entirely irrelevant.
"Lena," he said. "You keep forgetting who you're talking to."
He raised one hand, and a red portal tore open in the centre of the room without ceremony.
What came through it was not subtle.
Gold. Raw diamonds. Dense bars of platinum and silver. Precious metals in quantities that had no business existing in one room, pouring through the portal in a continuous, unhurried stream.
They piled across the floor, stacked against the walls, filled the open space between the chairs with glittering, impossible abundance. It did not stop for several seconds. When it finally did, the room looked like the interior of a vault that had forgotten its own limits.
Lena stared. Eve stared beside her. Pamela looked at the mountain of wealth surrounding them and simply closed her eyes for a moment, as though offering a silent prayer to whatever cosmic force had placed this man in her life.
"If you can't convert all of it to liquid currency in time," Ethan said evenly, "give the raw materials directly to the employees. Equivalent value. It is easier that way." He looked at the gleaming pile without particular interest. "If this isn't enough, tell me and I'll send more."
'Matter manipulation,' he thought, with a quiet, private satisfaction. 'A single thought and any material in existence becomes whatever I need it to be. And the cleanup operation back in the Marvel universe alone gave me enough raw minerals to bury this entire city.'
Lena recovered herself in stages. Her expression returned to its professional sharpness and she straightened in her chair, already mentally cataloguing the work ahead of her. Pamela was already on her feet, moving toward the piles with the energy of someone who had shifted seamlessly from awe into action.
Ethan rose from the chair. "I'll leave this with you," he said simply. "You both know what to do."
He crossed to the window, opened it with a gesture, and stepped out into the open air above the city.
...
[Above the City]
He climbed until the buildings shrank beneath him and the noise of the streets dissolved entirely, until there was only the wind and the wide, open quiet of altitude.
Then he stopped, hovering, and closed his eyes.
A pulse of green light expanded from his body in a slow, silent wave, washing outward and then pulling inward all at once, like a breath drawn from somewhere deeper than the physical. When he opened his eyes, the world he saw was not the one anyone else could see.
He was floating in the void.
Countless green threads stretched before him in every direction, each one a living timeline, each one carrying its own weight of cause and consequence. They pulsed with quiet light, some dimmer, some burning with activity, an endless tapestry of possibility and history suspended in silence.
'It has been a while since I looked at this many at once,' he thought.
He did not linger on the view. He moved with purpose, scanning the threads until he found the one that belonged to this universe, this specific pocket of DC reality. It pulsed with a distinctive bluish-green light, faintly irregular, like a heartbeat under mild strain.
He reached into it and traced back through it carefully, following the thread with the practiced precision of someone who had learned that time was not a river but a fabric, and that careless hands left marks.
He moved to a specific point, a kitchen, a woman alone, a night that would shatter more than one life before it was done. It was Nora Allen.
He paused time there. The thread froze beneath his touch, holding perfectly still.
He stepped into the paused moment like stepping through a doorway, the world around him suspended in absolute stillness.
Nora Allen stood in her kitchen, unaware and unhurt, her expression carrying the ease of an ordinary evening.
Ethan moved quietly and carefully, drawing a few drops of her blood into a small vial with a precision that left no mark and no disturbance. He stored it, sealed the moment back exactly as he had found it, and stepped out.
'If my plan works,' he thought, 'she will not have to die that night. Barry will not have to carry that wound for the rest of his life. Some things deserve to be corrected.'
He moved forward through the thread again, not stopping to linger, not seeking out anything more than what he had come for.
Then he found a pod, launched from a dying world.
Krypton shattered across the thread in a cascade of light and grief that even he, watching from outside time, felt the weight of.
He watched the pod tumble, watched it drift off course, watched it get drawn into the grey, crushing gravity of the Phantom Zone before it could reach its destination.
A system failure and a planet's death rippling outward and catching something small and precious in its wake.
Kara Zor-El. Superman's cousin. Sleeping inside a pod that had been lost to the void while her infant cousin grew up without her on a world she had never seen.
He then placed a detection spell on the pod with a quiet touch, let the thread resume, and pulled himself back to the sky above the city.
'That's enough for now,' he thought. His awareness brushed the cosmic currents lightly and he pulled it back in deliberately. 'I am going to be a father soon. This is not the moment to start drawing the attention of every celestial observer in the multiverse by rewriting timelines.'
He opened a portal directly into the Phantom Zone.
...
[The Phantom Zone]
The Phantom Zone had no colour worth describing. It was the grey that existed before colours were decided, a featureless expanse that pressed against the edges of perception without being anything solid enough to push back against. Sound did not behave correctly here. Distance meant very little.
Ethan activated the detection spell and followed its pull without hesitation.
It took seconds. The pod was exactly where the thread had told him it would be, drifting in absolute stillness, its outer hull scratched and cold.
He opened a second portal, positioning it carefully in the outskirts of the city, far enough from the population centre that a blonde girl waking up in unfamiliar atmosphere would not immediately be overwhelmed.
He raised one hand. The front section of the pod dissolved cleanly, atoms dispersing without drama, the edges of the opening smooth as though it had been built that way.
Inside, a young woman lay in peaceful, dreamless sleep.
She was perhaps eighteen or nineteen by appearance, her blonde hair fanned loosely around her face, her expression completely undisturbed. Her features were clean and striking. Ethan studied her face for a moment with quiet recognition.
'She looks different from the Flashpoint variant,' he noted. 'A few small differences in the lines of her face.'
A smile settled on his lips without effort. 'But she is more beautiful than that version, if anything.'
As if sensing the change in pressure around her, Kara's eyes opened. And immediately filling with the disorientation of someone waking up in a place they did not recognise, in the presence of someone they had never seen, with no anchor point whatsoever.
Her eyes widened. She pulled in a sharp breath and looked around, her body tensing with the instinct to act, to flee, to fight, to do something.
Ethan smiled. He extended his hand toward her, open and unhurried.
"Welcome back to Earth, Kara," he said.
She froze. Her eyes fixed on him, wide and searching, the fear in them competing with the confusion of hearing her own name from a stranger's mouth.
Before she could form a word, Ethan's voice remained even and calm. "It's alright. Take a breath. I know you have questions and I am going to answer all of them."
"Let me show you what happened. It will be faster than explaining."
His telepathy reached out and he gave her everything she needed to know in a single, carefully assembled current.
What had happened to Krypton. What had happened to her pod. How long she had been adrift. What Earth was. Who her cousin was now. And who Ethan Carter was.
He did not rush it. He let the information settle into her mind the way light settles into a room, gradually and without force.
Her expression moved through shock, grief, disbelief, and then a fragile, unsteady kind of stillness as she processed it all.
She looked at his extended hand for a long moment. Then she took it.
...
[Kent Farm, Smallville]
The farmhouse had the particular warmth of a home that had been lived in with genuine care. The wooden furniture carried years of use without apology. The walls held photographs and small, ordinary things that collectively said more about the people who lived here than any formal introduction could.
Martha Kent sat on the sofa beside Jonathan, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes moving between the young woman seated across from her and the man who had brought her here.
Clark sat nearby, still in his civilian clothes, his broad frame slightly forward in his seat, attentive in the quiet way he became when something mattered.
Ethan sat beside Kara with his posture relaxed. He had just finished delivering the full account of everything through a careful burst of shared telepathy, compressing hours of explanation into something that took under a minute to receive and a few minutes to absorb. The room had gone still.
'Telepathy,' he thought with quiet satisfaction. 'The single most efficient communication tool in existence. An explanation that would take an hour by mouth takes few seconds and leaves no room for misunderstanding.'
He had done the same for Kara on the way here. Had walked her through Krypton's end, through the malfunction that had sent her pod drifting off course, through the phantom zone and the decades lost inside it.
Had shown her the infant she remembered growing into the man now sitting across the room from her. Had given her Earth's languages, its cultures, its basic geography, all of it delivered directly into her mind with the care of someone who understood what it meant to wake up in a world that had moved on without you.
She had been shaken and had been quiet for most of the journey here.
Now the silence in the farmhouse held a different texture. The weight of everything that had just been understood settling over each person in the room at their own pace.
Jonathan Kent looked at Kara with the careful, measuring expression of a man who said very little but felt a great deal. Clark looked at her the way someone looks at a piece of a world they had given up on ever seeing again.
Martha Kent stood up and crossed the room without a word, stopped in front of Kara, and pulled her into a hug.
Kara stiffened. Her shoulders came up and her hands hovered at her sides for a moment, uncertain and unprepared for this. Then, slowly, something in her gave way. Her arms came up and she held on.
Ethan watched from his chair, 'Leave it to the women of the house,' he thought. 'Hand them any situation, no matter how large or complicated, and they will find the human centre of it without breaking a sweat.'