[Present]

Diana and Sue stood together and watched Anna drive Mephisto back another twenty feet down the block.

"When did you get back?" Diana asked Jean.

"This morning," Jean said, still working. She looked up briefly. "When did you return from your trip through the hell dimensions."

"This afternoon. The Ancient One sent me here a few moments after I arrived."

Jean’s expression did exactly one thing, a small, dry flicker. "Of course she did."

"Where is Ethan?" Diana asked.

Jean paused. "On a date with Didi. In Italy."

Diana absorbed this. "Of course he is."

Sue had gone quiet. She was looking at her hands in her lap, and both Diana and Jean recognized the expression without needing to discuss it.

Diana looked at Jean. Jean looked at Diana. They nodded once at each other and Diana moved first, sitting beside Sue and placing a hand over hers.

"Susan," she said quietly.

"It was my fault," Sue said. Her voice was steady but the steadiness was the kind that required active maintenance. "He came specifically for me. Johnny got hurt because of me. If I had been stronger, if I had learned more runes, if I had called for help earlier instead of thinking we could handle it—"

"Susan." Diana’s voice was gentle but it did not leave room for argument. "You held a Spirit of Vengeance at bay with one healing rune and a force field. You kept your brother alive long enough for help to reach you. That is not weakness. That is a warrior doing what warriors do with what they have."

Sue looked at her.

"And for what it is worth," Diana added, "Ghost Rider gave me considerable trouble in the God Slayer armor with ten days of demon-hunting behind me. You are not weak. You were simply in a very bad situation."

Jean looked up from Johnny. "She is right. And for the record, Johnny is going to be fine. In about three more minutes he is going to wake up and immediately say something insufferable and you are going to be very glad he can."

The corner of Sue’s mouth moved despite itself.

Diana straightened. "It was Mephisto who sent Ghost Rider after you. Rider confirmed it under the lasso of truth. He had specific orders to kill you in the most brutal way possible."

The quiet that followed that sentence was a different kind of quiet.

Jean’s hands did not stop moving but her eyes came up sharp. "Mephisto," she said carefully.

"Mephisto," Diana confirmed.

Sue’s expression went through several things quickly. Shock first, then anger, then something cold and calculated that sat behind her eyes and started working on the problem immediately. "Why me. What reason would Mephisto have to—"

A low roll of thunder cut across the sky above them, and every head turned upward.

The clouds had come from nowhere, thick and dark and churning in a pattern that had nothing to do with any weather system that had been forecast for New York that afternoon.

Blue lightning cracked between them in long slow arcs, branching and rebranching across the sky.

The wind had picked up, rolling fast through the streets and sending debris skittering across the pavement.

The temperature was doing something that temperature was not supposed to do, rising and dropping simultaneously, climbing in the open air while dropping near the ground, the atmosphere itself behaving as though it could not decide what it was being asked to do.

Everyone present looked at the sky and knew.

Sue pressed her lips together. The relief and the frustration arrived at the same time and she could not fully separate them.

She had almost lost Johnny. She had nearly made a deal with a demon lord out of desperation.

"I know," Jean said, reading her face without telepathy. She looked up at the clouds and her own expression was complicated. "I know, Sue. I am sorry we were not here sooner."

"It’s not your fault," Sue said. She meant it. Neither of them could have predicted this would happen out of nowhere on an otherwise ordinary afternoon. The fact that they had been nearby at all was fortunate. "I just." She stopped. "I am very glad you were close."

"We were not as close as we should have been," Jean said simply. "And that is on us."

Diana remembered the last time she had seen that particular storm pattern in the sky. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

She had recalled, after seeing the ruins of M&C Hotel and Aeon biotech branch in her universe after the Joker’s bombing, Ethan’s anger translate itself into atmospheric phenomena across the entire world.

The same rising temperature. The same blue lightning. The same sense that the sky itself was being used as a pressure valve for something that could not be contained in a human expression.

"He is coming," Diana said.

"Yeah, he’s comin’ alright," Ben Grimm said from behind them.

He walked up the block toward them, cracked and scorched and moving like a man who had been launched several blocks by a ball of hellfire and had decided to walk it off.

He stopped at the edge of the group, took in Jean kneeling over Johnny, took in the state of the street, and crossed his arms.

"Kid gonna make it?" he asked, jerking his chin at Johnny.

"Yes," Jean said.

Ben grunted. He stood there. Jean glanced up at him.

"You took significant damage as well. Let me—"

"I’m fine," Ben said. "Don’t worry about me, Red. I’m built different."

Jean looked at him for exactly one second. "Of course you are, Ben."

Then the portal opened.

Ethan stepped through it with Didi a half step behind him and crossed the distance to Susan without pausing, both hands coming to rest on her shoulders.

He looked at her face the way a person looks when the answer they are searching for is not always visible on the surface and they need to be certain they are not missing something.

"Are you okay," he said.

It was not a small question.

Sue looked at him and everything she had been holding together since the fight started, through Ghost Rider and Mephisto and Johnny burning and the stranger with the cane and his smile, cracked down the middle cleanly and completely.

She closed the distance and wrapped both arms around him and pressed her face into his shoulder and held on with the grip of someone who had spent the last hour watching her brother nearly die and quietly cataloguing every way it had been her fault.

Ethan’s arms came around her without a word. He held her and said nothing, because he understood that she needed the holding first and everything else could wait.

She pulled back after a long moment, gathered herself, and he kept his hands on her shoulders.

"I’ve got you," he said.

"I know," she said. Her voice was steady again. "I know you do."

He looked across at Jean. "You okay."

"I am fine." Jean did not look up from Johnny. "He will be fully healed in about a minute."

Ethan held her gaze for a beat longer than the sentence required and something passed between them that did not need words. Jean’s expression softened slightly at the edges.

Diana was watching this with her arms crossed when Ethan’s eyes moved to her. The warmth that came into his expression was a different register entirely from how he had looked at Susan or Jean, something more layered and more heated underneath the surface of it, and he let it show for exactly long enough to be intentional.

"Diana," he said. "You look like you just won a war."

"I did," she said.

His eyes moved over the God Slayer armor with appreciation that was only partly professional. "The God Slayer armor."

He tilted his head slightly. "I have said it before and I will say it again. You could be wearing a potato sack and still make every other person in the room feel underdressed, but this?" He let the sentence sit for a moment. "This is something else entirely."

Diana held his gaze with practiced composure. "Focus, Ethan."

"I am completely focused," he said. "On you specifically."

"Ethan."

"Alright, alright." The warmth lingered on his face as he turned back toward the group, Sue still tucked comfortably in his arms, held close at his side.

Anna touched down nearby, her white aura fading as she released the cosmic energy, and landed beside him with the particular energy of someone who had just chased a demon lord down a city block and was annoyed about the result.

"That slimy ol’ devil just up and vanished the second things started going south for him," she said, her Southern drawl thick with frustration. "Slicker than a greased catfish, I tell you what. Had him dead to rights and poof, gone like smoke."

"He ran the moment he sensed me coming through the portal," Ethan said. "He knew exactly what was about to walk through that door."

Anna looked up at him, reading the stillness in his voice correctly. "Sugar," she said, with a note of gentle warning.

"I am calm," he said.

"Ethan Carter, you are about as calm as that sky up there."

He glanced up at the churning clouds and the blue lightning threading through them and seemed to consider whether that assessment was fair. "I am calm about the people in front of me," he amended. "I am considerably less calm about the individual who sent a demon to kill Susan and then showed up personally to offer her a deal while her brother was dying on the pavement."

The group went quiet.

Anna tilted her head. "Wait, who sent Ghost Rider after Sue? Do you know who it is?"

Diana answered before Ethan could. "Mephisto."

Anna stared at her. Then she looked at Ethan. Then she looked back at Diana.

"Huh," she said.