Summary: This follows Dawn the newly appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Wayne Enterprises (after Lucius Fox retires) and her adventures in a small town in New Mexico.

A/U: This takes place a few years after the end of Slayer Begins.

Pairing: Dawn/Thor

Disclaimer: Joss Whedon owns Buffy and Marvel (which is owned by Disney) owns Thor.

Chapter 1: A Stranger's Arrival

Dawn Summers, the recently appointed Chairman and President of Wayne Enterprises, drove through the small town of Puente Antiguo, New Mexico. She was on her way to personally check on a project devoted to studying special anomalies.

After the business with Bane; she, Bruce and Buffy had testified that John Daggett had acquired and stolen Bruce's shares in Wayne Enterprises. The shares that Daggett had bought were immediately transferred back to Bruce.

And so when Fox retired Bruce as, once again, the highest of three majority shareholders named Dawn his replacement. And since Miranda was dead the position of President was open as well and she took up that job as well.

And now three years later Dawn pulled up behind a Pinzgauer utility vehicle and got out. She walked around to the side door and knocked.

An older gentleman by the name or Erik Selvig opened the door, his eyes widening in recognition. "Ms. Summers."

"Dawn if you please, Erik. Or I will have to call you Dr. Selvig," Dawn replied.

Erik let Dawn into the Pinzgauer and she looked at the row of computer monitors and other scientific equipment that inhabited the vehicle and frowned.

"I thought we gave you money to replace all this?" Dawn asked.

"I prefer working with my own equipment," Selvig replied.

Jane looked up at Dawn with an expression that said, sorry.

"Okay," Dawn said with a sigh. "What have you got for me?"

"We were about to find out," Jane said as one of the computers began beeping. She opened the large sunroof. Stepping up on the bench built into the vehicle's side, she raised herself up and into the night. In her hand she held a magnetometer. With it, she could calibrate the position of the stars. A digital display read 00:00:19, and it was counting down.

"Here we go…" she said, excitement in her voice as she stared up at the sky. Selvig and Dawn joined her. "In three…two…one…now!"

Nothing happened.

"Wait for it," Jane said.

Still nothing.

Leaning out the front window, the intern, who also doubled as Jane and Selvig's driver—Darcy, looked up at Jane. "Can I turn on the radio?" she asked.

Jane shot her a look. "No," she snapped.

Frustrated, Jane sank back into the van. Selvig glanced at Dawn. He knew what Wayne Enterprise's research grant meant to Jane. If they failed to produce anything …

Dawn sank back into the van and watched as Jane opened a notebook full of notes and calculations.

"The last seventeen occurrences have been predictable to the second!" Jane cried. She ran a hand through her light brown hair, her usually beautiful features marred by tension. "I just don't understand."

Dawn smiled. "Jane," she said, "not all research shows results right away. Believe me I know. Not many know this. But eleven years ago I was crippled; I was paralyzed from the waist down. I was shot in the spine." Jane nodded as she listened; she had heard variations of this story. "Then came a radical treatment eight years later." She pulled her hair back and showed Jane the silver ball that was imbedded into her skin at the base of her neck. "No one even knows where this came from. And they have no idea of how to reproduce it, either. But it fixed my legs and my spine. What I am saying it will take time for results to occur, but they will occur. We're not going to pull our funding for one failed reoccurrence."

Jane smiled at Dawn and turned back to her monitors, she began to rerun the calculations, looking for an error in her numbers. Focused on the screens, she didn't notice the odd glowing clouds that had formed in the sky, but Dawn did.

Dawn stepped out of the Pinzgauer and looked at the sky. "Nightwing?" she said. "What do you make of that?"

Nightwing was the name she had given to the Skjolder unit and to herself when it had given her the ability to fight alongside Bruce and Buffy against Bane. "I am not sure," the unit's artificial intelligence told her.

"Jane?" Dawn said over her shoulder.

"What!?" Jane shouted back.

"I think I just found your occurrence," Dawn said.

Jane stuck her head out of the door and followed Dawn's gaze. Her jaw dropped.

In front of them was something unlike anything they had ever seen before. It looked as if the constellations had been sucked down from the sky and had gathered in a huge cloud. The rainbow light had grown stronger, brightening the area of the desert above which the cloud hovered.

"I'll come back for my car," Dawn said as she jumped inside closing the door behind her. "Drive!" she shouted to Darcy.

Jane turned around and grabbed a camera.

As the Pinzgauer raced through the night, Jane popped up out of the sunroof again and began filming as Dawn got up beside her. Their minds raced with the possibilities of what this could be.

The winds grew stronger. At the center of the clouds, a dark mass began to swirl faster and faster, forming a tornado. The strange rainbow light grew even brighter. "We've got to get closer!" Jane shouted to Darcy just as a huge bolt of lightning cut through the clouds and struck the ground. The Pinzgauer rocked on its wheels, and Darcy struggled to keep the vehicle level.

"That's it!" she cried. "I'm done! I'm not dying for six college credits!"

"I'll talk to your college," Dawn yelled. "Consider the rest of your education paid for by Wayne Enterprises. Just drive."

The van's headlights bounced over the desert, illuminating the form of a large man!

The man stumbled out of the storm, his clothes tattered and his eyes dazed. Looking up, Jane and Dawn only had a moment to see confusion in his striking blue eyes.

Jerking the wheel, Darcy tried to avoid him but—BAM! The van sideswiped the man, sending him flying.

"NIGHTWING!" Dawn called out as she leapt from the sunroof. Her armor appeared from wherever it was stored and surrounded her, encasing her in it. The armor itself gifted her with abilities and weapons that no one else on Earth had. Or at least no one she personally knew of anyways.

Nightwing flew at the man catching him in mid-air as the car came to a stop. As she landed with him in her arms she turned to see Jane, Darcy, and Selvig staring at her

Then, as if jolted by electricity, they all leaped out of the car, Jane in the lead. She raced over to Nightwing as she sat the man down.

"Ms. Summers?" Selvig said.

"Retract," Nightwing said and the armor returned to wince it came and she was Dawn again. "To answer your question, yes, Erik."

Dawn knelt down and looked at the handsomest man she had ever seen. His features looked as though they had been sculpted out of marble by a master, and his chest was wide and his shoulders chiseled. His long blond hair lay undisturbed despite the windy conditions, and Dawn had the overwhelming urge to run her hands through it.

"Do me a favor," Darcy said, "and don't be dead, okay?"

At the sound of Darcy's voice, the man groaned, and his eyelids fluttered. Then eyes of the deepest azure locked on Dawn, and for a moment Dawn forgot to breathe.

Shaking her head, Dawn rocked back on her heels. She needed to get a grip. She was not the hormonal teenager she had been all those years ago.

Just then the storm clouds suddenly vanished and the wind calmed. Dawn wondered if the storm clouds and wind had something to do with the man. She looked back down at him, she narrowed her gaze. Where had he come from?

0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0

A few uneasy moments passed. Then the man lying on the ground in front of Dawn sat up abruptly. Staggering to his feet, he gazed down at his clothes, then up at the sky, and then back at Dawn, who still sat on the desert floor. The stranger looked at them with a mixture of disappointment and disgust.

"Are you okay?" Jane asked, realizing even as she spoke that it was a rather silly question since he was obviously fine, though a bit disoriented.

The blond man didn't answer. Instead, he continued to scan the ground. "Hammer," he finally said.

None of them knew what to say to that. Dawn was about to respond when out of the corner of her eye, she saw odd markings etched in the sand near where the man had landed. "Jane."

Jane followed Dawn's gaze and nodded. If they were to help this man they had to find out everything they could. "We've got to move fast, before anything changes," she said. She grabbed handfuls of soil samples, hoping to run a battery of tests on the earth when they got back to the lab. Then she realized it would be good to write everything down, so she reached for her notebook.

"Dawn," Selvig said, "don't you think we should get him to a hospital?" He nodded in the direction of the large man who was wandering around the area, looking lost and sad despite his imposing size.

"FATHER! HEIMDALL! " the man screamed, raising his hands to the sky. "Open the bridge!"

Dawn nodded. "I'll take him to my car and from there to the hospital."

As she spoke, the man approached Darcy. "You!" he said, his voice booming in the quiet desert. "What world is this? Alfheim? Nornheim?"

"Uh…New Mexico," Darcy said, raising an eyebrow.

Suddenly, he whirled, his expression furious.

Darcy took an involuntary step back and reached into her pocket for the taser she always carried with her. Holding it up in front of her, she tried to keep her finger from shaking.

"You dare threaten Thor with so puny a—"

"Lord Thor, the Skjolder is at your service!"

Dawn frowned. She had never heard Nightwing speak in anything but her head.

Thor turned to Dawn. "You! Let me see ..."

He didn't get to finish as Darcy fired her taser and he fell to the ground, convulsing with the electrical jolts. A moment later, he was unconscious.

Dawn let out a sigh. "NIGHTWING!" she called out as the armor encased her. She then took Thor into her arms and at supersonic speeds ran to her car. Once she had him in the passenger's seat. She retracted her armor and then drove Thor into town. The hospital was not too hard to find.

Dawn got Thor from her car onto a gurney. Then she made her way to the admitting area. A young nurse sat behind the desk, filing her nails. Dawn cleared her throat.

Looking up, the nurse smiled. Then, in a manner that could only be described as painstaking, she began the process of admitting Thor.

"Name?" she asked, her fingers poised over the keyboard.

"He said it was Thor," Dawn answered.

The nurse typed out each letter with one finger. T-H-O-R. "And your relationship to him?"

"I've never met him before, tonight," Dawn said. "I work for Wayne Enterprises. I was with one of our researchers a few miles outside of town and he stumbled in front of our van. He seemed to be fine when he got up. But our intern tasered him. Don't ask me why I don't really know."

"I'm going to need a name and contact number," the nurse said, either too tired or not bright enough to care that Dawn had just admitted that Darcy had tasered him.

Dawn handed her card to the nurse. "You can reach me at the number," she said simply. Normally she would have waited but she wanted to get back to Jane, Selvig and Darcy and see if they could figure out possibly what was going on. She turned and walked out the door, hopped into her car and drove off. Dawn looked at the clock on the dash and noted the time. It was late; she would get some sleep before meeting Jane, Selvig and Darcy at their office the next morning.

Before bed that evening Dawn called Buffy and Bruce and told them everything that had happened so far. Though she left out the stuff on calling forth her armor in view of civilians. She knew what Bruce would say, that Nightwing couldn't do her job if everyone knew she was also Dawn Summers.

"If anyone can figure it out," said Bruce after Dawn was finished. "It's Jane Foster. She's the leading expert in astrophysics. That's why I wanted you to hire her in the first place, Dawn."

"I know, Bruce," Dawn said. "So how are my nieces doing?"

"They're both doing fine," Buffy replied. "They miss their aunt though, you know."

Dawn smiled. "And I miss them. As soon as we have this situation with Thor, whoever he is, settled. I will come home."

"Oh and Dawn," Bruce said. "The Raptor is done."

Dawn smiled. She had asked Bruce to design her something to use as Nightwing. Not that she didn't like the Bat-Pod of course. But she wanted something she could call her own. "Well I better head to bed. Good night guys."

"Good night," echoed Bruce and Buffy before Dawn hung up the phone and slid into bed. It wasn't long before she was fast asleep dreaming about Thor.

0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0

Dawn knew that when Jane and Selvig had arrived in Puente Antiguo, there had been little in the way of free office space for rent. So Wayne Enterprises had bought for them an abandoned car dealership that had been empty for years. Dawn looked up at the sign as she pulled into the parking lot. They had of course replaced the sign that had read: Smith Motors, with a new one that read: Wayne Enterprises – Foster Research Division.

She found Jane hunched over a workstation. She glanced out the windows and smiled at the view of the distant mountains before returning her attention to Jane.

Jane had not noticed Dawn's arrive as she was busy soldering a piece of equipment while a printer churned out images she had taken of the previous night's storm.

Just then Selvig walked into the building holding three cups of coffee. He must have noticed Dawn standing there and went to get another cup or he had thought ahead. He handed one to Dawn as he passed her and then placed another in front of Jane and then took a sip from his.

"We might want to perform a spectral analysis," he suggested softly.

Jane looked up, surprised. "We?" she repeated.

"Of course we," Dawn said bring Jane's attention to her for the first time. "I'm personally interested in what happened last night, especially with Thor, if that's his actual name. Also the anomalies you told me about in your email that brought me out here might signify something bigger."

Jane nodded as she looked back at an image on the monitor. It showed the giant cloud they had seen the night before." I think you might be right, Ms. Summers," she said as the image shifted, the cloud disappeared, and a blisterlike object appeared in its place. It bulged outward like a balloon, and it appeared to be covered in stars. Jane waited for Selvig to absorb what he was seeing and then she spoke again. "I think the lensing around the edges is characteristic of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge."

Dawn's eyes went wide. She had heard of the theory, any scifi movie buff would have, as it was often used to explain how to travel across the galaxy, usually instantaneously.

Darcy on the other hand, who had been doodling in her notebook while she waited for each of the pictures to print, looked up, confused.

"A wormhole," Jane explained in layman's terms.

"But the wormhole," Dawn said. "If it was one didn't open anywhere we would know of though. I mean I didn't recognize the constellations that we saw through it."

"You're right Ms. Summers," Jane agreed. "Wherever it opened was to a place unknown to any scientist or astrophysicist."

A moment later, Darcy's voice broke into Jane's thoughts. "Hey, check it out," she said.

Jane turned, about to chastise Darcy for interrupting her, but the words died on her lips. Darcy was holding up a picture of the funnel cloud of stars. And there, in the middle of it, as if being shot down from the heavens like a bolt of lightning, was the unmistakable image of a man. Thor.

All four of them were silent as they tried to process what this meant.

"I think we need to talk to Thor," Dawn said realizing she was right in her assumption that he had something to do with what happened last night.