[Carter Residence, New York – September 28th, 2010]
[Living Room]
A pulse of white light filled the living room and faded as quickly as it had come, leaving four figures standing in its wake.
Ethan opened his eyes first. The familiar dimensions of the living room settled around him, the furniture, the wide windows, the particular quality of light that belonged to this apartment and no other. He closed the Omni-Watch, felt the soft click of its casing, and returned it to his inventory.
Beside him, Anna had already moved.
She crossed the distance to the sofa in three quick steps and dropped onto it with the unburdened satisfaction of someone reuniting with a beloved companion.
She ran both hands across the armrest with genuine affection. "Oh, I missed you," she said to the sofa. "Don't let anyone take you away from me."
Jean turned to look at her. "You're talking to the sofa."
"The sofa understands me," Anna said, without looking up.
Jean laughed quietly from where she stood.
Elizabeth had not moved from her spot. She was looking around the room with her eyes moving slowly from one detail to the next, her expression carrying a particular attentiveness, as though she was cataloguing everything and finding it more than she had expected.
Jean noticed and moved to her side. "This is it," she said. "Our home."
"Ethan Sama's house," Elizabeth said softly. She took a step forward, her gaze lifting to the ceiling height, then dropping to the details of the walls. "I had imagined it but..." She shook her head lightly, lost somewhere between wonder and reverence. "It is wonderful."
"Come on," Jean said. "I'll show you around."
She guided Elizabeth toward the hallway, and their voices faded into the interior of the apartment.
Ethan walked to the window. The city below was exactly as he had left it. People moved along the street with the particular purposeful energy of New York, each one absorbed in their own direction, their own urgency, their own version of an ordinary Tuesday.
The digital calendar on the wall beside the window read September 28th.
Ten days. That was all that had passed here.
He looked out at the street and let his mind do what it had been quietly itching to do since the warp back. It opened up, stretched out, began sorting through the list of things waiting for his attention.
'Kryptonian tech first,' he thought. 'I've inspected the mothership and what Zod had on it is extraordinary. Blueprints for almost everything. Advanced machine designs, structural frameworks, entire engineering philosophies that Earth hasn't reached yet.'
He turned the knowledge over. 'And I have the master key, which I took from Zod when I put him down. With that comes the full access to everything on that ship.'
He had already begun forming a rough picture of what the technology was capable of. But understanding the principles and applying them were different things, and he wanted to be certain before he committed to a direction.
Then there was Nora Allen. He already had her blood stored carefully. The plan to keep her alive was taking shape. He needed to refine it before he moved on it, but the foundation was there.
And Ben Grimm. The watch design for Ben's transformation had been sitting half finished for months before the honeymoon trip. Runes carefully laid into the mechanism, a way to work with Ben's altered physiology rather than against it. He wanted to complete that soon.
Then the Kryptonian technology opened a new door in his mind and he stepped through it without entirely meaning to.
Mars.
'Mars,' he thought again, slower this time, turning it over.
He had been thinking for a while about the problem of Earth. He was doing everything he could for it. Aeon Biotech was greening it. The recovery was real and measurable.
But Earth was still damaged in ways that would take generations to fully undo, and the humans living on it were not making the process easier. He was not going to abandon the planet. But his children deserved somewhere that was not starting from a position of accumulated damage.
Mars had none of that history. A few drops of his blood could rejuvenate a barren landscape. He had seen what it did to dying ecosystems on a continental scale. What would it do to an entire planet given time and intention?
'And with the World Engine,' he thought, 'terraforming isn't a fantasy. It's engineering... On planetary scale.'
He could seed the atmosphere. Reshape the terrain. Turn that red, dead expanse into something that breathed and grew. Make it a second home. A real one, built from the ground up, for his people and his children.
He paused. 'Do I want to use workers and manpower for the construction? I could do the whole thing myself. But...'
He considered that honestly. 'Where is the satisfaction in that? A project like this deserves to be built, not conjured.'
Then again, doing it himself meant it was done correctly and done immediately, with no security vulnerabilities and no external eyes on something he was not ready to reveal yet.
He would think about it.
Then ideas began arriving faster than he could fully process them, each one connecting to the next with the particular momentum that happened when a plan found its own logic.
Infrastructure. Population. A kingdom built on a world no one had claimed, governed by someone no one could challenge.
The Genesis Chamber, the Scout Ship, the Codex that Zod had recovered before his defeat, the genetic archive of an entire civilisation.
'I could create new Kryptonians,' he thought.
That gives rise to Kryptonians. An army of them, raised on a world bathed in yellow sun radiation from birth, growing up in the gravity and atmosphere Ethan had built for them.
His eyes widened slightly.
The image that assembled itself behind them was vivid and completely uninvited.
A vast throne room. High vaulted ceilings of stone and light. An empire that had been built by intention and will rather than inherited by accident. And on the throne, himself.
Jean on his left with her red hair catching the light. Anna on his right, her arm resting against his. Didi behind him as her arms draped loosely over his shoulders and crossed at the front, her chin resting lightly on top of his head. Diana seated at his side with the composed grace of a warrior at rest. Susan on his lap, her blonde hair falling forward as she leaned back against him.
And in front of them, spread across the open floor of the throne room, children were playing. His children. Running and laughing in the uncomplicated way of children who had never had to question whether they were safe.
Outside, across the skies of a green and living Mars, a legion of Kryptonians flew their patrol routes. Behind them, the scaled silhouettes of dragons by the millions, an army that owed its existence to his will, moving in perfect formation against the colours of a terraformed sky.
A few silver-coated beings rose from the planet and glided into space, riding shining surfboards that cut through the void.
The whole architecture of a kingdom that did not yet exist but absolutely should, formed in his mind like a clear, vivid picture.
Ethan's smile spread slowly across his face.
'That,' he thought with complete and unhurried certainty, 'is what I want. And I am going to make every piece of it real.'
He made himself the promise then, quiet and absolute, the kind he only made when he already knew the outcome.
"You've been standing there for five minutes and your face has been doing something very specific."
Anna's voice came from just behind him. He felt her arms wrap around him from the back, her chin settling on his shoulder as she leaned into him.
"You get this look," she said, "when something has taken hold of your brain and you've stopped noticing the rest of the world."
Ethan's smile stayed. He turned within her arms and pulled her properly into a hug, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "I'm planning a home," he said. "A good one. For our kids."
Anna's expression softened. She stayed where she was for a moment, then tilted her head up to look at his profile. "How are you planning to do that?"
"I'll show you when it's ready," he said.
A warm, private smile stayed on his face. "I want it to be a surprise. For all of you." He turned enough to meet her eyes. "Trust me. You're going to like it."
"That sounds extremely suspicious," Anna said.
"It sounds like something worth waiting for," he corrected.
Anna studied him for another moment. Then her expression shifted into something warm and decided. "Fine," she said. "But it had better be worth the wait."
"When have I ever undersold anything?"
She opened her mouth.
"That was a rhetorical question," he said.
The front door opened and Didi stepped into the living room and the smile that crossed her face was immediate and genuine. She looked between Ethan and Anna, then let her eyes settle on Ethan with a particular warmth.
"Well, well," she said. "Look who's finally back from their honeymoon trip." She crossed the room with unhurried steps. "My boyfriend and his wives. Back in one piece. I'm very happy to see you."
Anna shifted smoothly to Ethan's left. Didi stepped into his right side and hugged him, then tilted her face up and kissed him properly.
Ethan kissed her back without hesitation. When they separated he kept his arm around her. "I missed you," he said.
"I doubt that," Didi said, her tone light and amused. "You were with two beautiful women on a honeymoon trip. I imagine everything went extremely well."
'She is not entirely wrong,' he thought. 'But that is beside the point.'
"I still missed you," he said.
Didi looked unconvinced in the most comfortable way possible. She turned to Anna with a genuine smile. "And how are you?"
"Excellent," Anna said.
Then Didi looked toward the hallway. "Where's Jean?"
The question had barely finished when Jean's voice preceded her into the room, mid-sentence about the layout of the upper floor, with Elizabeth a half-step behind her, still absorbing everything she saw.
Elizabeth came through the doorway and looked up. "The house is much larger than my home castle," she said, with the plain certainty of someone making a factual observation.
Jean laughed. "I think that says more about the castle than the house."
Elizabeth's brow furrowed slightly as she considered whether that was a compliment.
Jean caught sight of Didi standing in the curve of Ethan's arm and her expression brightened. They moved toward each other and embraced with genuine warmth.
"I'm glad you're back," Didi said, and she meant it simply.
"I'm glad to be back," Jean said.
Didi's gaze moved to Elizabeth, who was standing a polite distance away with a slight flush still working its way out of her cheeks from whatever Jean had said in the hallway. Didi studied her for a moment with an expression that was friendly and amused in equal measure.
"Is this one of my sisters?" she asked, directing the question broadly to the room. "It seems like Ethan picked up another beauty while he was away."
Elizabeth's composure scattered entirely. The colour that rushed to her cheeks was immediate and thorough. She pressed both hands together in front of her and shook her head with an urgency that was both earnest and slightly desperate. "No, no, no. It is not like that. I am not... we are not..."
Laughter moved through the room from every direction. Anna covered her mouth. Jean gave up entirely. Even Ethan's expression cracked into something warm and amused.
Elizabeth looked around at all of them, flushed and wide-eyed, realised that the laughter was not unkind, and her expression slowly settled into something that was mortified but surviving.
"Not what I meant," Didi said, her smile gentling into something genuinely warm. "Welcome. I'm Didi."
"Elizabeth," she managed. "Elizabeth Liones."
"Come, sit down," Didi said, in the tone of someone who had been welcoming people into rooms for a very long time. "All of you. I believe we have much to discuss about your trip."
Ethan glanced at Anna and Jean. They both smiled.
"Yeah, we have some news to share."
...
They settled into the living room in the configuration that seemed to arrive naturally without anyone directing it.
Didi took her place on Ethan's lap with her arms looped easily around his neck. Jean and Anna occupied the sofa on either side of the space, both of them with coffee cups in hand. Elizabeth sat nearby, a little more composed now but still visibly taking in the room with quiet interest.
Ethan held a glass of red wine. He took a measured sip and looked at Didi.
"So, it seems ten days passed here," he said. "Tell me, What did I miss?"
Jean glanced at Anna. "It's interesting, isn't it, that only ten days passed here while we had weeks over there."
Anna nodded over her coffee cup. "Time is not consistent across universes. I think I'm still adjusting to that."
"You'll get used to it," Ethan said. He turned his attention back to Didi.
Didi reached over and picked up his wine glass, took a slow sip from it, and then held it thoughtfully between her fingers.
The look on her face was that of someone deciding where to begin with a story that had more than one good starting point.
"Hm," she said. "Many things happened." She settled more comfortably against him. "Let's start from the beginning."