[Kent Farm, Smallville – Afternoon]
The next two hours passed at the gentle pace of a farmhouse afternoon, unhurried and warm.
Ethan had intended to ease Kara into the Kent household, to make sure the transition did not feel too abrupt for a girl who had woken up in an unfamiliar universe with two decades of lost time sitting on her shoulders. As it turned out, he was not needed for that at all.
Martha Kent had taken one look at Kara and done what Martha Kent did with any lost soul that crossed her threshold. She had hugged her and taken her to the kitchen for more private talk.
The sound of quiet conversation drifted through from that direction now, Kara's voice still a little careful and uncertain, Martha's warm and steady around it, filling in the silences with the kind of unhurried ease that only came from someone who had spent a lifetime making people feel less alone.
Ethan listened to it with half his awareness from the living room and decided that some forces in the universe were simply more effective than him.
He, Clark, and Jonathan sat in the living room, the afternoon light lying in long, easy bands across the wooden floor.
Clark had his forearms rested on his knees and turned to Ethan and said, "I want to thank you. For finding her."
He paused briefly. "After you explained and showed us the Flashpoint timeline footage, I knew Kara existed in that timeline. But on this one..."
He shook his head. "I didn't think she would be here. The divergence from Barry's interference, I thought it would change too much." His voice dropped slightly. "I had already accepted that she wasn't coming back… but here she is. And if you don't mind me asking, how did you know that she might be alive in this timeline?"
Ethan nodded once. He had anticipated the question and had shaped his answer carefully on the way over.
"I had a suspicion," he said. "Something about the timeline felt unresolved in that direction, so I went back in time to check."
A small, honest smile crossed his face. "I wasn't certain I'd find anything. But I did find her, exactly where I thought she might be." He let the words settle before adding, "I am glad the suspicion was right."
Clark held his gaze for a moment, then gave a single nod that carried more weight than most people's speeches. "Thank you, Ethan. Genuinely."
Jonathan, who had been listening with his hands loosely clasped, turned the information over in his own way.
He was not a man who reached for words quickly, and he did not reach for them now. Going back in time to locate and retrieve a girl from the Phantom Zone was simply not a sequence of events that slotted comfortably into the mental framework of a man who understood the world through soil, seasons, and the reliable logic of a working farm.
After a long moment, he arrived at the same conclusion he usually arrived at with the things that went beyond his grasp.
Everyone was here and everyone was fine. That was what mattered.
"Dr. Carter," he said, with the careful respect of someone addressing a man whose work he recognised even if he couldn't fully account for it.
"Just Ethan," Ethan said. "Please. I'm twenty-nine. That's about Clark's age. Dr. Carter makes me feel like I should be behind a desk."
Jonathan's expression eased and a short, low sound came out of him that was as close to a laugh as Jonathan Kent usually offered. "Ethan, then."
From there, the conversation shifted in the way that conversations on farms almost always do eventually.
Jonathan asked about the fertilisers, his voice taking on the interested, grounded quality of someone talking about something he trusted because he had seen the results himself.
Ethan answered with genuine attention, and for a stretch of time the three of them talked about crop yield and soil composition and the difference the Aeon products had made to the surrounding land, and it was one of the more quietly pleasant conversations Ethan had been part of in a long while.
Eventually, he rose. "Before I go," he said, "I'd like a moment with Clark and Kara. In private, if that's alright."
Jonathan gave an easy nod and settled back in his chair. Ethan crossed to the kitchen doorway.
...
[Kent Farm – Storage Shed]
The shed smelled of dry wood and old equipment and the particular warm dust of a place that had been useful for decades. Ethan stood near the entrance with Clark on one side and Kara on the other, the afternoon light cutting in at a low angle through the slatted walls.
He reached into his jacket and produced a small drive, holding it between two fingers.
"The Kara from the Flashpoint timeline," he said, looking between them both. "She left a message. For both of you." He extended it toward them. "She wanted you to see it."
Kara's breath stilled for just a moment. She had already absorbed the outline of the Flashpoint through what Ethan had shared with her earlier, enough to understand the shape of it without being buried under every detail.
But hearing it said plainly like this, that another version of herself had existed in that broken timeline and had thought to leave something behind for them, brought a complicated stillness to her face.
Clark took the drive carefully, as though it weighed more than it should. "Thank you," he said quietly.
Ethan gave a brief nod, then turned to open a portal. The familiar shimmer of red light traced its edges across the shed wall.
A hand closed around his wrist and he stopped.
Kara's grip was light but deliberate, and when he turned back, she was looking at him with an expression that clearly surprised her as much as it surprised him. Her eyes were wide and direct, and there was a faint colour rising at the edges of her cheeks.
Clark looked between them.
Kara let go of his wrist. She pulled her hand back and held it against her side. "I..." She drew a breath. "I want to meet with you again. Properly, to thank you." Her chin came up slightly. "You saved my life. I would like the chance to say that to you when I'm not still recovering from a twenty-year sleep."
Clark's eyes shifted to Ethan, narrowing slightly as he made quiet, precise calculations.
Ethan looked at Kara for a moment, reading the sincerity in her expression with no difficulty at all. Then a warm smile settled on his face and he reached out, taking her hand lightly in his.
"I have all the time in the world," he said. "Especially when the invitation comes from someone beautiful like you."
Kara's smile came quickly and brightly, lighting up her face.
"Speaking of which," Ethan continued, "we are hosting a party tomorrow night at the M&C Hotel. My wife is pregnant and we are celebrating. Consider yourself invited. Clark already has the location, so you can accompany him. It will give us the chance to catch up properly."
Kara's smile paused and blinked. The warmth in her expression did not vanish exactly, but it rearranged itself into something more careful and uncertain. "Your wife."
"His wife," Clark confirmed, his tone making it clear he wasn't going to pretend he hadn't just witnessed what had unfolded.
"One of My wives," Ethan added pleasantly. "The party is partly being held by my other wife as well."
A brief, expansive pause later. "And my other three girlfriends will be very pleased to hear the news when I return to my home universe. So the celebrations will continue there as well." He said all of this with the uncomplicated good cheer of a man reporting the weather.
The shed went quiet.
Clark had stopped moving entirely. He stood very still with an expression that was doing several things at once and managing none of them cleanly.
Kara just stared at Ethan.
"In any case," Ethan said, "the night after the party, before I head back. We can catch up then." His expression was easy and genuine as he looked at Kara. "I meant what I said. I'd like that."
He stepped toward her first, pulling her into a brief, warm hug that she returned after a beat of startled hesitation. Then he looked over her shoulder at Clark, who was still somewhere between bewildered and resigned.
"See you both soon," Ethan said.
He stepped through the portal and it closed behind him.
The shed held its silence.
Kara stood looking at the empty air where the portal had been.
After a long moment, Clark placed a hand on her shoulder. He had seen that expression before, had worn something close to it himself once, in a newsroom, watching a woman with dark hair argue fearlessly with her editor about a story deadline.
He was still formulating what to say when Kara turned to him.
"Do you think he would be interested in me?" Her voice was direct, but there was something genuinely uncertain underneath it. "He's already in relationships with multiple women. Married to two of them."
She looked at Clark. "Is it wrong for me to feel this way? I don't even understand it myself. I only just met him." She shook her head and looked back at the space where the portal had been. "But something about him makes me want to know more. I can't explain it."
She turned back to him with slightly helpless eyes. "I don't know what to do, Kal."
Clark looked at his cousin for a long moment and he had absolutely no idea what to say.
'What exactly did Ethan do,' he thought, somewhere between amused and genuinely baffled, 'in the span of a single afternoon, to have her looking like that?' He considered the question from several angles.
Then, as a secondary thought, 'How in the world is he managing relationships with five women when I am actively struggling to maintain one with Lois.'
He did not have an answer to either question. So, he put his arm around her shoulders instead and decided that was probably enough for now.
...
[M&C Hotel, DC Universe – Evening]
[Ethan's Suite]
The suite was quiet when Ethan stepped through the portal and dropped onto the sofa.
He let out a slow breath and let the stillness of the room settle over him. The Kryptonian technology from the Flashpoint timeline had been sitting in the back of his mind for sometime now, and after his extended observation of it until now, the framework of how to use it was beginning to take solid shape. There were several directions he could take it, each one with its own scope and implication.
But all of it could wait.
He had today and tomorrow here. The day after that, he and Jean and Anna and Elizabeth would step through a portal and go home to the Marvel universe, where a child was waiting to be born into a world their father was going to make sure was worth inheriting.
So, he decided to put all his plans on hold and spend some time with Jean.
He reached toward the telepathic link, the Nexus Mind Lattice, intending to check in with Jean, when suddenly the door opened.
Anna stepped in, glanced at him on the sofa, and her expression softened into a teasing smile.
"Look at who's here people, Ethan Carter, himself," she said, crossing her arms. "The guy who disappears first thing in the morning, the very morning after finding out his wife is pregnant, leaving her completely alone." She let the words hang in the air for a moment. "Irresponsible does not begin to cover it."
Then she crossed the room and sat down directly in his lap.
Ethan's arms came up around her without thinking, easy and immediate. "I'm sorry," he said, and he meant it simply. "I needed to take care of a few things. So that everything after this gets my full attention. Yours and Jean's."
Anna's expression softened. She leaned into him and the teasing quality in her voice dropped away. "I know," she said. "I was only teasing."
She hugged him properly then and her arms settling around him.
After a comfortable quiet, Ethan said, "How is the power sitting with you? The one you absorbed from Doomsday."
Anna considered this for a moment. "Different," she said. "Strong. It feels like I became a little more like you, honestly. The adaptive evolution is already changing things inside me."
A quiet note of wonder moved through her voice. "I had a hard time against Doomsday before I managed to pull it from him, but now..."
She paused. "I've already drained everything from him. If we fight again, with his powers in my hands along with my own, it will be a different story. And I'm interested to see how it ends."
A brief, slightly awed expression crossed her face. "His memories were already a mess, so I used the containment spell you taught me to store them safely. Still sorting through the edges of that."
Ethan's hand moved in a slow, steady arc across her back. "You'll settle into it," he said. "And every fight after this makes you stronger. That's how it works."
A quiet pride moved through his tone. "An evolution power of your own. I am genuinely proud of you."
"But… I don't know what to say. Jean's pregnant before you… even though you were the one who came into my life first."
Anna was quiet for a moment. Then she let out a slow breath against his shoulder. "I know you can already feel everything I'm feeling," she said, without any particular complaint in it. "That annoying empathy of yours."
"It isn't something I turn on deliberately," he said.
"I know." She tightened her arms slightly. "I can't hide anything from you even if I wanted to."
Another breath later. "I am happy, Ethan. About Jean, about the baby. I am so happy for her. For both of you."
A brief pause later. "But there is a small part of me that is jealous. Not badly. Just a small part, sitting there being honest about itself."
Ethan shifted slightly, bringing one hand up to gently lift her chin until her eyes met his. The look on his face was direct and unhurried.
"It isn't something I can control the timing of," he said. "But I promise you, Anna. You will be pregnant with my child. I will make sure of it."
Her eyes held his for a moment. Then the corner of her mouth curved, and the familiar glint of amusement returned to her expression. "Is that so," she said. "And how exactly are you planning to ensure that?"
Ethan smiled. "You'll find out soon enough."
He leaned in and kissed her.
Anna made a small sound somewhere between a protest and a surrender, and then simply stopped doing anything other than kissing him back.