giantsofold

Fanfic: Line, 3

2009-03-17T04:47:50Z

Title: Line
Characters: Kal, Captain America, Ms. Marvel, and Iron Man.
Rating: PG-13.
Continuity: Tentative.

Note: Crossover, DC/Marvel. Please don't hurt me. Sequel to Shore.

Line, 3

When Captain America asked him, “How did you end up on Langaan?” Kal found no reason not to say, “I don't know.”

The Tower was a tri-cornered spire of shining metal, gleaming in the light of downtown New York. Kal watched it approach through the walls of the quinjet, a tall, implacable shape against the city skyline. When he closed his eyes and turned away, he seemed to see it still in his mind, a slate-hued tower against an unceasingly dark night full of stars and orbiting spheres, its walls coruscant with solar reflection. The sight—vision? Memory?—ached in his head, and Kal opened his eyes to clear them.

Ms. Marvel glanced at him, where he sat in the seat next to hers. “Where are you from?”

A shrug, much like the shrugs with which he answered most questions. “I don't know.”

A brow lifted. “You don't know?”

Kal put a hand to his head.

Captain America looked over his shoulder. “How did you end up on Langaan?”

“I don't know.” He shrugged one shoulder, and then closed his eyes. “I woke up, and I was there.”

“Do you remember anything?” Ms. Marvel's look was incisive. “Of your life before?”

“No.” Kal was leaning forward now, head lowered, the restraints stretched against his body. The motion of the quinjet took a downward tilt and Captain America was saying, “Tower, we're three and one passenger.”

“Kal?” Iron Man.

“No,” said Kal, “it's—”

My purse! Somebody, please, my purse—

Shut up, man, just shut up! You think you can rat on me—

Mommy? Mooommy! Mommy!

—thinks he can get away with anything, thinks he can do this to me, let's see now, see him look at this and say—

—bitch! You whore! It's your fault, all your fault!

“—nothing.”

Fanfic: Axiom

2009-03-17T04:26:08Z

Title: Axiom
Characters: The Boy, You, Flash, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, and Green Lantern.
Rating: PG
Continuity: None.

Axiom

They show him the suit.

His eyes (blue, too blue, bluer than the world or anything in it) widen. “That...?”

“That's you, Big—uh, guy.” The Flash winces, then grins. “That's Big Blue, the Man of Steel—Superman. You.”

The boy (because he is a boy, he is not your—) looks at the suit, at the floor, the suit. He looks a bit sick. “Me? That's what I wear?” Not quite a whisper, not quite a gasp.

Now it's becoming obvious, the nausea in his voice. Wonder Woman glances, sharply, at him, while Manhunter examines him without comment. Even Flash loses his exuberance.

The boy is staring, staring at that suit, the blue, red, and yellow. His eyes trace the shape of the shield on the chest.

“Then, they—” His head lowers. “Them. My powers. They don't...they don't ever go away.”

Flash's eyes widen. So do Green Arrow's.

The boy's shoulders are stiff.

“I'll never be normal,” he says, and you don't have to be Batman, you don't have to be the Detective, to hear, in that broken whisper, the shattering of all someone's hopes.

Nobody knows what to say. They stare at him, Diana, Wally, Oliver, J'onn—you.

You stare at him, and wonder that you didn't see this in him before.

The boy sits—or collapses, if you want to be more accurate, his legs folding as if they've been cut out from under him.

His eyes (his eyes, you can't help but see, his eyes after all, only younger and more honest) close and he lowers his head.

The boy puts his head in his hands, on his knees in front of an empty suit.

And you see how much, once, long ago, Clark Kent wanted to be anyone—anything—but the man he was born.

Fanfic: In Numberless Forms

2009-03-12T02:42:26Z

Title: In Numberless Forms
Characters: Him, You, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Flash, and Green Lantern.
Rating: PG-13.
Continuity: None.

In Numberless Forms

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
in life after life.
Rabindranath Tagore

He is not Clark.

—but he's the one that's there.

He glances, with the barest slant of his eyes, at you. “I see,” He says—but no, He's not talking to you, He's talking to Diana. His eyes are holding hers. “Then we have a common purpose—to retrieve the Eye of Rao from our enemies.”

“You mean the Infinity Mirror,” Diana corrects stiffly. “Yes. That is what we intend.”

“Call it what you will,” He says, and Clark never possessed that low, precarious tone, that cool, edged civility.

Diana's stiff back becomes even more rigid, and J'onn puts a hand to his head, the line in his brow something like—distress.

You keep still, silent. You don't want to look at this—this thing, this wrongness—but you do, because that's who you are. You don't turn away from something just because it makes you uncomfortable. Makes you sick.

Makes you want to die.

He's talking. “He is someone important to you,” He is saying, in a slow, contemplative sort of way. “This man you have lost.”

“He isn't lost,” Flash breaks in, affront vibrating off of him. “He's just—misplaced. We're getting him back.”

“And the man who took him,” He says, His—not His, not really—blue eyes, the impossible blue of nothing human, level on Flash, “the one you call the Vandal. He will resist you.”

“Doesn't matter,” throws in Green Lantern, “if it's Vandal or anyone else. We're getting him back.”

He doesn't react, except to fold His hands together in front of Him, long sleeves settling over His wrists.

Clark doesn't do that.

He stands there, looking at you and everyone else, and it's nerve-wracking. That expression doesn't belong on that face, and that sharp, impassive stare, those cold blue eyes that give nothing away—they're wrong, they're impossible, they go against everything that you hold (though you never admitted it before, not ever) as basic, unchangeable truths—

“It was in his place that I came,” He says. “In his place that I stand here.”

No one answers, because no one wants to, or needs to. You want to dig your fingers into His throat, scream at Him that He is in no one's place, that He doesn't belong here, that He is a mistake—

“We're not exactly overjoyed about it either,” mutters Flash.

Something. His mouth moves—the look in His eyes softens. You nearly gasp with pain as the ghost of another face glances out of His.

But it's gone again, extinguished in the next heartbeat, though not before you feel, somewhere in the back of your mind, a whisper of J'onn's agony.

“Yes,” He says, “your terms are tolerable. I accept your parole and will aid you in retrieving the Eye—ah. The Infinity Mirror. I will help you in using it to bring back your misplaced brother. Perhaps, if we have been successful thus far, I will even lend you my arm against the Vandal. Then you will...allow...me to use the Mirror to return to my own reality.”

Diana lowers her chin almost imperceptibly, the most aloof gesture you've ever seen her make. “Your calm acceptance of the situation commends you.”

Those focused blue eyes—He hasn't blinked since you've seen Him. “I do not condone or forgive your behavior towards me, Terran, but I do not have the time to negotiate. I would return to my lord's side as soon as possible.”

Diana—narrows her eyes. “Your lord?”

A chill of premonition crawls down your spine, and you don't know if it's yours or J'onn's.

He turns His head—and His blue, blue eyes are cold and empty.

“The High and Glorious Dru-Zod,” He says, and there is nothing in His voice, nothing. “My Lord and Patriarch, to whom I, Kal-El of the House of El, privileged beyond my lineage, was given in my infancy, to serve as his Servitor and Consort.”

The look in His eyes.

You think, as Diana pales, as Flash gasps, as J'onn's mind contracts with abrupt, depthless fury—as you swallow the bile that rises in your throat, as you try to breathe—

Of Kal-El's face in front of you, stripped of everything alive.

Of Zod's face, the distant memory of an enemy you'd thought long vanquished.

Of Vandal, who'd thrown aside the Kryptonite even as he dragged Clark through the Mirror by a fistful of black hair.

Of Clark, and the last thing

(It's not love, Clark. If that's what you wanted, you came to the wrong person.)

you said to him.

Fanfic: Schemes

2008-06-10T00:27:02Z

Title: Schemes
Characters: Clark, Lois, Dick, Alfred, and Bruce.
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: Negotiable.

Schemes

1

Clark woke up to fifteen missed calls and three messages on his answering machine.

He deleted them all.

When he went to get his newspapers, he found a card between two of them, the envelope of which probably cost more than one of his suits.

Clark took it to the stove and set it on fire, leaving it to burn to ashes in the sink.

By the time he was ready to leave for work, the phone had rung twice. On his way out the front doors of his apartment building, he was stopped by a delivery boy holding a huge box of at least twelve long-stemmed white roses, who asked him, “Man, do you know where 3B is? I got a delivery for Clark Kent.”

Clark mumbled something along the lines of “uh” and “um” and “no habla ingles” and then escaped by tripping and falling down the front steps.

The subway ride to the Planet was as crowded and awkward as he had always thought it would be. Gripping a ceiling handhold for his life, Clark tried to find an article to read in his newspapers that wasn't about LexCorp's shocking and unexpected endorsement of the movement to legalize gay marriage. Unfortunately, the rest of the news was all about the three days Superman had been missing, which was worse.

Exiting the subway station nearest the Planet, Clark was alarmed to see a familiar steel-gray Mercedes-Benz at the curb. The moment he noticed it, the driver's side door opened and Mercy Graves stepped out. She laid a hand on the hood of the car and smiled encouragingly at him.

Clark turned on his heel, barreled into a white-haired woman carrying a small black thing that couldn't possibly be a dog, and managed to make his stammering apologies last all the way to the front door of the Daily Planet building.

Upstairs, Lois was bright-eyed and newly dedicated to her mission of making his life difficult. “Morning, Smallville. How about you tell your boyfriends I'm not your secretary? You've had twenty-three calls since Friday. I stopped writing them down after the second one.”

“I don't have any boyfriends,” said Clark. He pushed rather ineffectually at the masses and masses of flora currently occupying the surface of his desk, trying to make room for himself.

“Fine,” said Lois. “Tell your not-boyfriends to stop calling and sending flowers.” She sniffed at a branch of artfully hanging orchids, the contemptuous arch of one eyebrow indicating how impressed she was. “Kent, these things by themselves are at least a grand. You realize that now that I know you have a sugar daddy, I am never paying for coffees or lunch again.”

“Is that supposed to imply that there was once a time when you paid for anything?” Clark regretted it even as his mouth was still moving. He wasn't usually this mean, but lying wide-eyed in bed listening to his phone ring for eight hours had left him peckish.

“Miaow, Kent,” said Lois, seemingly more intrigued than anything else. “Trouble in kept paradise? Poor baby. I'll let you cry on my shoulder if you want to whisper sordid details in my ear.”

Clark felt a chill down his back. Lois smiled the way Lilith must have smiled when she'd seduced Adam. “I'm not sleeping with anybody,” he said. Even to himself, he sounded entirely too defensive.

“Right.” Lois was searching through a box of sunflowers, looking absurdly out of place against the cheery yellow petals, like a Dali painting or something. “You're not sleeping with anybody and I don't own a vibrator. Kent, no one sends thousands of dollars worth of flowers to anyone unless bodily fluids or charities are involved, and while everyone here knows that dating you is the social equivalent of Jacob's Ladder, the opportunity to see you naked is hardly charity work. Now why don't you just go ahead and admit who you're giving it up for every night before I find some way to blackmail it out of you?”

“I'm not sleeping with anybody,” repeated Clark, which was when Mercy walked into the bullpen.

The look on Lois's face could have been the expression of a cat that had just eaten the canary and then framed someone else for it. “Oh. Clark. Clark, Clark, Clark.”

“It's not what it looks like,” said Clark, even as he hurried to his feet. Panic was making it extremely difficult to negotiate what used to be a familiar and uncomplicated chair. “And it's only a coincidence that I have to talk to Perry right now.”

“I'll play interference for you,” said Lois, completely matter-of-fact, tossing her hair and smiling like a woman in love. “Be strong, Kent. Hold out for diamonds.”

Clark rushed into Perry's office without knocking, which startled Perry so much that the man forgot to yell. Instead he sat, staring, as Clark tried to pull himself together.

“I have to leave town,” gasped Clark, breathless. “I mean, go out of town. I have to go out of town for a while. A week. Two.”

Perry stared at him. Clark glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Mercy had been brought to bay by his desk, Lois a regular haute couture Gandalf.

“I'll use my vacation days,” pleaded Clark. “HR called the other day to complain that I had too many.”

Perry opened his mouth. Closed it. His face turned pink.

“I'll e-mail the rest of my assignments,” said Clark, and rushed back out the door. Cowering behind the secretary's desk and then using a passing mail cart as cover was a bit embarrassing, but Clark was rapidly discovering the depths to which he would sink when he couldn't use his powers.

Back on the street, Clark caught a cab. He clung to the back window practically the entire way home, terrified by every steel-gray car he saw.

The taxi left idling at the curb, Clark made a dash up to his apartment. From the closet he grabbed his old gym bag and filled it with just about anything that came to his hand, flinging socks and underwear left and right. Laptop under his arm, he was downstairs and back in the cab not ten minutes after he'd gone up.

By the time they reached the train station, he was almost calm.

Dick wasn't sure who he was expecting when he answered the front door, but an out-of-breath Clark Kent wasn't one of them.

“Oh, hello, Dick,” said Clark. He looked nervous. “Is Bruce around?”

“Uh.” Dick tried to close his mouth. “Yeah, I...I think so. Is—is it an emergency?”

“No,” said Clark. “Not exactly.” He fidgeted.

Dick flung himself back from the open door, gesturing. “Come in! Please! Um, can I take your coat? Your bag?”

Clark shook his head and smiled, and Dick had to resist the urge to sigh as he closed the door behind Clark. “Thanks, but no. I was just hoping to talk to Bruce.”

“Talk to me about what?” asked Bruce's voice, and Clark and Dick looked up to see Bruce descending the stairs toward them, Alfred in tow. They both looked alarmed. “Clark? What's happening?”

“Nothing,” said Clark, “I mean, something, but...not something.”

Bruce looked—confused? Or maybe just irritated. Alfred raised an eyebrow.

“I've been reading the papers,” said Bruce, his voice subtly changing, hanging on the very edge between Bruce and Batman, “and J'onn contacted me yesterday. Why haven't you been—”

“I've lost my powers.” It spilled out in a rush. “Lex knows. He's out to get me. Can I stay here for a while?”

Dick would remember the expression on Bruce's face for the rest of his life.

“Oh, dear,” said Alfred, taking the gym bag from Clark. Clark surrendered it meekly. “The same room as before, sir?”

“Thanks, Alfred,” said Clark, smiling again, brilliant with relief. Dick couldn't help but sigh just a little.

“Wait.” Bruce's eyes narrowed. “You've lost your powers. Luthor knows.”

“I don't know how,” said Clark. “I only lost them the day before yesterday, and I didn't tell any—”

“He's out to get you,” said Bruce, another precarious decibel lower.

Clark groaned piteously. “He sent me flowers, Bruce! Flowers!”

Bruce...paused. “Flowers?”

“So many flowers!” Clark began to pace. “He won't stop calling. He's left nearly fifty messages. He's got Mercy stalking me at home and at work. I only got away today by throwing Lois at her. I've refused three exclusive interview offers. Um, please don't tell Perry that I did that. Last night, Lex came to my apartment and stood outside my door for two hours! Two hours, Bruce! He left when I threatened to call the cops and then he wouldn't stop calling. All night! I—”

Clark threw himself down on the bottom three steps of the stairs, his head in his hands. “I can't figure out what he's trying to do!”

Silence. Dick, staring at Clark, was vaguely aware of Alfred placing one firm index finger over his own lips.

When Bruce spoke again, it was in a tone Dick had never heard before.

“How,” said Bruce, “do you know he knows?”

“Because,” said Clark. When he looked up at them again, his face was so tearful that Dick had to resist the urge to hug him. “He told me.”

Bruce's eyebrow went up. “He told you.”

“When he came over,” explained Clark. “He said, 'I know everything, Clark. I know what you aren't anymore. I know everything there is to know. Now come have dinner with me.'”

Bruce's other eyebrow went up. “He said to go have dinner with him.”

“Yes.”

“Did you?”

“No! I slammed the door and hid in the bathtub.”

Another silence. Alfred and Dick watched, transfixed.

“And your powers,” said Bruce. His voice had changed again, and this tone sent shivers down Dick's spine, “you've lost them.”

“I don't know how,” said Clark tearfully. “I woke up and they...they weren't there.”

That face! Dick wanted to hold Clark's hand and rub his back, tell him Everything's going to be OK, which was more than weird because yeah, Superman. Beside him, Alfred was muttering, “Chocolate chip cookies.”

Bruce just looked at Clark for a few moments, not saying anything. Dick couldn't see his expression. “I...see.”

“I didn't know what to do, Bruce,” said Clark, hanging his head. “I didn't want to bother the League with this, but I can't figure out what Lex is trying to do and my powers haven't come back. I thought...I just didn't know where else to go.”

This, understood Dick, was not Superman. This was Clark Kent, and he was adorable. Dick couldn't decide if what he was feeling was his crush intensifying or a separate infatuation altogether. It was so hard crushing on someone with MPD.

“I thought if anyone could help me, it would be you,” said Clark. The look he gave Bruce then was so heartbreakingly trusting that Dick wondered how Bruce wasn't immediately smote down into Hell to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity.

“Don't worry, Clark,” said Bruce, that tone still in his voice, and put his hand on Clark's shoulder. The physical contact seemed to throw Clark, who blinked down at it. “I'll figure this out. You...did the right thing.”

“Master Bruce,” Alfred reprimanded under his breath. “Really!”

Bruce gave both Alfred and Dick a warning look, and then said to Clark, “Come on.” Almost...coaxing. “You'll stay here. It's probably not safe in Metropolis right now. Perry give you any trouble?”

“No,” said Clark, letting himself be guided up the stairs. “And, thanks, Bruce. I really appreciate this.”

Bruce's hand sort of—tarried, Dick thought, on Clark's back. “It's nothing.”

Dick and Alfred watched them go. When Dick glanced at him, Alfred was frowning.

“Poor Master Clark,” tsked Alfred.

“I feel kind of bad,” said Dick, “just watching this happen, I mean. Should we try to warn him or something?”

“It is rather like watching a lamb come to the lion for protection from the wolf,” agreed Alfred. “However, I do believe this is indeed the lesser of two perils, and Master Bruce would hardly take kindly to any interference now.”

“He just walked into it, though,” protested Dick. “I mean, there's naive and then there's Clark. I feel dirty just letting this happen. He's so—so Clark, isn't taking advantage of him like—”

“Criminal?” suggested Alfred, and went to the kitchens to very pointedly not prepare the guest room.

Fanfic: Rites

2008-06-05T06:16:09Z

Title: Rites
Characters: Kal-El, Hiroim the Shamed, Caiera the Oldstrong, Bruce, and the narrator.
Rating: R
Continuity: Blown out of the water.

Note: Marvel/DC crossover, specifically the Planet Hulk series. You don't have to have read Planet Hulk to get this story, but things suddenly make a lot more sense if you do. Besides, Planet Hulk is worth reading by itself. Kneel before Greg Pak!

Dedication, Maybe: I happened to hear recently while skulking around that it was jen_in_japan's birthday, and I really wanted to write something for her. For some reason, the first thing I came up with was ritual sex. I hesitate to make it an official dedication, though, just in case it turns out this actually sucks and I end up offending her. So let's just say that if she likes it then it's a present and if she doesn't I just skulk away again in disgrace.

Happy Birthday, Jen. I stand openmouthed in worship of you.

Rites

It is the ninth hour of night, the holy hour.

The Broken Moon hangs still and white in the darkness of the night sky, trailed by her sister Aakar, the Small One. Below us, the Crown City stretches over the brown earth, subdued and silent, between the tall, bleak shapes of the city walls. Only the lights of the Temple still shine, where a hundred Saka priests and thirteen Shadows keep prayer.

In the Imperial Palace, a hush fills the halls, the chambers. The Imperial Guards exchange no greetings tonight, no murmurs, their muffled steps as much grudging noise as they permit themselves to make. The servants gather in their quarters, the stewards, clerks, and counselors. The ministers retreated at twilight, the highborn and the senators an hour earlier. They took themselves into their own residences, they sit at their tables and they whisper, confer, and plot. They worry, discourse, and they plan.

They pray. They grieve.

The rooms here are as dark as the city, and as silent. The other attendants have all been dismissed, for they are exhausted, sleepless for nearly three days, and I commanded them home to rest.

I alone keep vigil.

The floor of the terrace is wide and white under the glow of the Two Moons. I keep watch by a single glasslight, covered to keep the glare from interfering with my sight. It sits on the floor beside me where I kneel, and it seems to me a newborn star, this single glasslight, an infant star sent by the Prophet to solace and guide me.

In front of me, Kalkuel lies dying.

The wind is cold this night, a wind blowing from the north. It smells of trees and stone, the burnings of the Maw. I place my hand against the graystone slab on which he lies, and it seems to me that the stone, a piece of the Mawkaw Mountains themselves that Korg the Kronan brought here on the tenth day to be the Whiteskin's bier, is hot beneath my palm.

He does not look ill. He is not sickened. His brow is not damp with sweat, his body not tight with fever or pain. His skin has paled over the weeks, now as white as the whitestone of the terrace floor, the walls, but I cannot tell if this means anything to one of his race. He is not wounded, he does not bleed, he does not weep. His face is a face in repose, and he lies there, eyes closed and breathing slowly, changelessly, despite all we try to wake him, a sleep as unassailable as the turning of the world.

He has become gaunt. The long, muscular limbs, the consummate body of a flawless male, now no more. In his sleep he is devoured, his body consuming itself from inside. I fear he will grow thinner and thinner, his flesh more and more wasted, until he is nothing but his bones and then perhaps whatever it is that keeps him living though he neither eats or drinks will finally be extinguished, be forced to let him die.

For thirteen days, he has lain here, and for twelve he has taken neither food nor water. We bathe him from bowls with soft cloths and our own careful hands, and there is no life in the body we touch. Though Caiera lifts his head and puts the spoon to his lips, his mouth remains closed. Though Hiroim takes that black-haired head into his hands and whispers an endless litany of prayers, his gray-blue eyes looking nowhere but into Kalkuel's face, Kalkuel does not waken.

I press a cloth to his face, drip water onto his lips. Undisturbed, he sleeps.

Kalkuel collapsed on the very steps of the throne itself. We screamed to see him fall, the soldiers, the servants, the priests and the courtiers, all of us who were slaves and freed at his hand, to see him lying there, as white as a corpse. It was Hiroim who caught him up, Hiroim with his silences and his fearless and fearful eyes who seized Kalkuel and carried him into the chamber, who called for the priests and the physicians in a voice like the death howl of a devil corker. He held Kalkuel to his breast as if he held a child, some small, fragile thing, until the other attendants and I had managed to lay out what bedding we could in the open space of the balcony. There Hiroim laid him down, that white face turned toward the glare of Tayo, and there he sat, waiting, for eleven hours, until Kalkuel opened his eyes and turned his head away from the proffered cup for the first time. Then it was that Kalkuel again closed his eyes, though Hiroim held his face and whispered his pleas in Kalkuel's ear, and not opened them since.

From the Temple drifts the sound of voices, a hundred voices raised in prayer. I know the words as well as any other Imperial woman. I whisper them in my heart. Sakaarson, hear my cry.

The city is choked with fear. Men and women, old and young, go about their work and their leisures in whispers and silence, the children no longer playing but going urgently about their errands or sitting quietly in doorways. Only the workbeasts make their common noises, grunting and groaning, and even that seems somehow muted, indifferent, as if even those brutes understand the peril on the edge of which we wait.

A hundred times a day, each man, woman, and child turns their face toward the Imperial Palace. Their eyes seek out that highest spiral, the tower in which Kalkuel lies dying. A hundred times a day, their lips form the holy Saka prayers. A hundred times a day, the people hope, with their hands and their whispers, for Kalkuel to open his eyes and live.

A hundred times a day, we, the attendants of Kalkuel, his body servants, who were given the task of first caring for his needs and then of watching helplessly over him, lower our heads and pray for his life.

The Warbound stalk the halls of the palace, savage in being able to do nothing. In the early days, they threw themselves into his chambers, raging and pleading for Kalkuel to drink, to eat, to get up. Miek the Unhived knocked Kalkuel into three walls in his panicked violence before Korg the Kronan and the Brood restrained him. Elloe Kaifi and Lavin Skee heaped abuse on his head and implored him in turns, crying out into his deaf ears. Only Caiera and Hiroim stood back, watching with their grave, expressionless eyes.

Now they no longer go in, unable to bear the sight of their Kalkuel's life draining away, and stand at the door, unable, in the end, to leave him while he lives.

“Why?” cried Miek, once, his anguish a cacophony of kiks. “Why he do this? What the message say? What his friends” the word, here, is a break, a crack, a fissuring gap between air and poisonous, hate-sharp mandibles “say to make Kalkuel do this?”

We none of us know why. Everyone, in palace and out, knows how this began, but not why. How is nothing. How is the ship, the same ship that brought Kalkuel, asleep and dreaming in her cold womb, to us, that had had within it a secret message, in a language no one knew but Kalkuel, a message that had remained, hidden in the hands of Imperial scientists, through all of Kalkuel's toils. How is the ship that had also been a weapon, how is the weapon that had, for no cause that anyone could tell, triggered itself awake, and how is Kalkuel, who, with his strength and his flight and his speed, had been forced to hurl the ship into space. How is the explosion of the ship's core, in the very eye of the vortex, which had closed the Great Portal forever, sealing the door back to Kalkuel's own world, sealing him here, binding him to Sakaar.

But not before. Not before Kalkuel heard that hidden message, the message for his ears alone. Not before his mouth opened, his eyes widened, his face whitened and emptied, and his heart broke within him, and he came back to the palace, head low and body staggering, and laid himself down to die.

That is the how, and we none know the why.

We wait, hour by hour, day after day. The Saka Temple echoes with the prayers of the anointed, the voices of those Shadow People who came to serve Kalkuel. The Senate has suspended their sessions, the Games are no longer held. We are paralyzed, crippled by our fear of Kalkuel's death. Kalkuel, our Kalkuel, the Savior, the Son of Sakaar, who delivered us from the Red King and brought us peace. Kalkuel, who hates killing and pain, who protects us as if we were his children, a man whose heart knows no cruelty.

Kalkuel, who freed me from the Imperial Seraglio and gave me back my life.

I lay my hand against his face. His skin is chilled, colder than it was yesterday, and the day before, and it frightens me.

When I first saw Kalkuel, how ugly I thought him. So much hair, like a woman, and skin whiter than a corpse, the chin bare, like a child or a Shadow. How hideous I found him, how repulsive. I thought that he was a monster, for surely only a monster could have defeated the Red King, one devil overcoming another.

But he was kind. He is so kind, gentler than anyone I'd ever known. I have seen him hurry to help up a fallen child, interrupt an aged Senator in order to fetch him a chair with his own hands. I have seen Kalkuel behave toward all older men as if he stood in the presence of his father, and all older women as if they were his mother. Children rush to him when they see him, bold in their adoration of a man who could break the mountains themselves with his bare hands.

And over time, it seemed to me that he was not so ugly as I had thought, that perhaps such hair was not so bad to look at on a man, that perhaps the whiteness of his skin was unusual rather than unsightly. Day by day, it seemed that he became less and less repugnant, until my eyes grew used to him, and it was more common to take pleasure in his smiles. Until I began to long to hear him laugh, something no one has ever heard him do.

No one has never heard him laugh. Now perhaps no one ever will, for Kalkuel lies dying, and it seems to me that he is the most beautiful thing in all the world, and I would pluck out my own eyes if he would only open his and smile his sad smile again.

Sakaarson, hear my cry.

The water in my bowl is stagnant. I rise, the bowl in my hands, and go into the antechamber, a small room adjoining the larger bedchamber, to refill it, feeling my way in the dark. It is while I am in there, my back to the arch, that I hear one of the outer doors open.

I hold myself very still. Before I suffered the Red King's attention, I was one of the foremost girls in the ranks of the Olympia Imperia, and I remember much of what I was taught. I make no noise when I turn, the bowl left on the table, and move back to the arch, to look, carefully, around its corner.

Caiera and Hiroim stand in the outer doorway.

I remain, feeling no urge to call out, though I am taken aback. The Oldstrong and the Shamed have not been here for three days, and I had heard they had gone out of the Crown City and into the Great Desert, presumably to ask the help of the Shadow Elders in awakening Kalkuel. I had not heard of their return, and by all rights should go out and announce myself, to welcome them back and to report Kalkuel's condition.

Yet something makes me stay where I am.

“Everything will change,” Caiera is saying. “Nothing and no one will be able to undo it.”

“I know this, Oldstrong,” says Hiroim. His voice is a whisper to her firm talk. “I have considered everything there is to consider. I will not change my mind, nor will I regret it, if it works.”

They stand then, without speaking, for several long moments. They are only black shapes against the light of the hall behind them, stone giants who entirely fill the doorway. Then—

“How long, Hiroim?” The lieutenant's voice is gentle, gentle as I have never heard it.

“For always,” whispers Hiroim, and my mouth opens without purpose at the broken quality in it. “Since the moment I saw him, there in the Imperial Arena, and I understood that he would not take an innocent life, though he himself be killed for it.”

Caiera's shadow moves as though she nods. “Then this is only as it should be, as it must. The Prophet help you in this, Hiroim.”

She turns to go, but stops when Hiroim asks, “And if I had not been willing to do this, Caiera the Oldstrong?”

A glimmer of teeth in the dark—the Oldstrong is smiling. “Then I would have done it in your place, and always thereafter thought you a fool.” A break, and then, in a tone that is almost teasing, “Or perhaps I would have instructed Lavin Skee in the ways of the ritual, and let him have his chance.”

I cannot see the look on Hiroim's face, but the tension in the chamber eases. The Oldstrong laughs, gently, quietly, and then she is gone, the outer door latching shut behind her.

Hiroim stands in the dark, breathing slowly, deeply, as if he is preparing himself for some long and difficult task. Then he turns, and goes toward the terrace, where the faint gleam of my glasslight blackens the graystone bier on which Kalkuel sleeps.

I do not know what to do. I kneel, cautiously, painstakingly, and cling to the corner of the archway.

Hiroim stands over Kalkuel, looking at him for the most endless of moments. The glasslight shines in his face, and what I see there threatens to bring tears that I cannot explain to my eyes. I cannot understand it—there is pain, and suffering, and heartache, and something else I cannot recognize, something that makes me want to avert my eyes, as if I looked upon something holy and inviolate, and I feel shame in my breast that I should witness it.

Abruptly, looking away as quickly as if whatever he saw had pained him, Hiroim lays down the blade he carries, placing it guardedly on the floor beside the bier, and puts his back to the glasslight. I cannot see what he does, but then a piece of his armor falls to the floor, and then another, and I realize he is disrobing.

I was a woman of the dead king's harem. Nudity means nothing to me. And he is one of the Shadow People, who place little distinction between clothed and bare. Yet when, once he is naked, Hiroim kneels by Kalkuel's side and begins to strip him of his clothes, I stiffen, and I am shocked.

Hiroim does not...touch Kalkuel as I thought he would. No—his hands, on Kalkuel's skin—I can barely express it. He touches Kalkuel as others would touch something fragile and made of glass, something they cannot believe is being placed in their hands for them to hold—some treasure, or an artwork—or a lover. A lover—Hiroim touches Kalkuel as if he touched a woman he had loved long and uselessly, a woman he had always desired but never had. He touches Kalkuel, his face, his hair, his mouth, like a man who has hungered and thirsted for it, who has yearned for it for so long and so futilely that, at now doing so, he fears that he is dreaming, that he will wake.

Kalkuel asleep usually wears only a loincloth. It was too hard for the other attendants and I to undress and dress him regularly, and we wanted as much of his skin exposed to Tayo as we could manage. The loincloth was only for his own modesty, for everyone knows how shy Kalkuel can be, despite a body that no male, Imperial or Shadow, would be ashamed of. Earlier today, however, I was alarmed at the coolness of his skin, and, with the help of one of the other women, put on him a sleeping robe, to keep the chill of the night from worsening it.

Now I watch as Hiroim undoes my work, pulling the robe over Kalkuel's head, his arms, dropping it to the floor. I watch as he unties the knots of the loincloth, one by one, until it, too, is on the floor, and now Kalkuel's body stretches, naked and white beneath Hiroim's hands.

I do not know what to think. I cannot believe it possible that Hiroim should take advantage of Kalkuel while he sleeps, while he lies dying, think it even less possible that Caiera should know and condone it. But now Kalkuel is naked and helpless, and Hiroim is—

—is pulling away, is kneeling, eyes closed, hands together in front of him, beside the graystone, and his lips move as he whispers.

He whispers, and I see, formed on his lips, the familiar words, Sakaarson, hear my cry.

From his discarded clothing, he picks out several things—two shallow, dark bowls, and a cloth-wrapped bundle. He takes these things back to the bier, and, both at the head and at the foot, he takes a knee. I cannot see what he is doing, but then I smell the smoke, the fumes, and I know.

And I think I understand what I am seeing.

I once thought, when I first saw the Shadow Warrior who accompanied the Whiteskin, that Hiroim the Shamed was a Saka apostate. Since then, I have heard that he is not and never was a priest, though he trained for it once and has much knowledge of the rituals and prayers. The prayers are things that all Sakaarians are at least partially acquainted with, but the rituals, of those I know barely anything. I was unconcerned with them as a child, and once I became one of the Red King's women I cared even less.

But there was one ritual that I had always heard about, especially from the other girls in the Olympia Imperia. A ritual that every Sakaarian hears of at least once in her lifetime, a ritual no longer performed anymore, a ritual that has been lapsed and lost for centuries in the Empire, a ritual now known to no one but the Shadow People, who forget nothing. A ritual that some condemn as blasphemy, that others dismiss as a childish story. A ritual of sacrifice, and purification.

A ritual born of desperation and love.

Hiroim stands beside the bier, his hand against Kalkuel's face. I see him hesitate, see the tremble that passes through him, see how his other hand clenches.

I watch as he folds one leg onto the graystone, lowers his head, and takes Kalkuel's mouth to his.

A sigh, a sigh that could be the wind, and then his head moves as he presses his mouth to Kalkuel's closed eyes, to his mouth again. Hiroim's hands are in Kalkuel's hair, on his face, on his arms. His lips trace the white skin, return again and again to that still, closed mouth.

“Kalkuel,” he whispers, the name a groan, a sigh, a plea. “Kalkuel.”

Hiroim's arms stiffen, and then he is rising back up, one foot on the terrace floor and one knee on the graystone bier, and he is lifting Kalkuel up in his arms, the white body made small by the gray, the arms loose and leaden.

“Kalkuel,” whispers Hiroim. His hands clasp Kalkuel to him, twine them together as tightly as eleha'al vines. “I take you for mine.”

Their bodies press against each other, and Hiroim's breathing becomes erratic. He lowers Kalkuel again, follows him, his foot no longer on the floor, and now they are both lying on the stone, Kalkuel's head and an arm lolling over an edge, Hiroim's white, sharp teeth and gray tongue following the line of Kalkuel's throat.

“Kalkuel, I take you for mine,” Hiroim is whispering. “By all the rights of one who loves you, I take you for mine.”

A chant, a prayer, and he whispers it into Kalkuel's ear, into his skin, his mouth. He pushes his hips against Kalkuel's, scrapes his teeth over Kalkuel's breast. They lie together, Kalkuel and his Warbound Shadow, the gray and the white, and the smoke of the ritual incense rises, dark and pungent, against the sheen of sweat on Hiroim's body.

“Kal ku El,” whispers Hiroim, “Kal ku El. I take you for mine.”

Kalkuel groans.

The sound so startles me that I almost gasp. Hiroim stills, his frame tense in the glasslight. He raises himself on his elbows, watching Kalkuel's face.

Silence.

Hiroim's face—a face I had not thought him capable of, a face soft with love and desire—suddenly, without warning, tempers to iron, to steel. “Free him, Sakaarson,” he says, and this is no tender whisper. “Free him from what holds him. O Prophet, set him free.”

I shiver against the curve of the archway. I am cold to the bone, and the night is that much darker. The sky was clear only moments before, but now I realize I cannot see the stars, nor the Two Moons. I taste fear in my mouth, and the only light is the glasslight by the stone slab, the glasslight I imagined an infant star, and its glare is excruciating.

“Sakaarson, hear my cry.” Hiroim's voice is unfaltering, determined. “My eyes are burning. My heart is cold. My night is filled with death.”

Something comes. Something comes, something black and monstrous, something jagged and filled with teeth. I think that I should be afraid, that I should hide or flee, but my eyes are on Hiroim and Kalkuel, and I cannot move.

“Cool my eyes.” Hiroim, the Shadow who was almost a priest. “Warm my heart.”

A wind. A wind like no other wind, a wind that blows over the world, and with it, on it, a tortured, angry cry.

“Let me dream again,” whispers Hiroim, and he is sitting up, a hand on Kalkue's face, his blade is in a fist.

The thing that comes is black and broken. Larger than I, but not as large as Hiroim. It forms out of the darkness of night and staggers onto the white floor of the terrace, a thing of rushing wings and jagged ears, but then it comes into the glasslight and I can see that it is not a monster but a man—a man as Kalkuel is a man, a man who looks like Kalkuel, all white skin and black hair and blue eyes—

—except he is not Kalkuel. Kalkuel's body is intact, unmarred; this man's flesh is a mass of scars and old wounds. Kalkuel's eyes are the blue of other worlds, a blue that sings; this man's eyes are cold and merciless, a blue that drowns. Kalkuel is made of heat and light and kindness; this man is cold and darkness and anger.

He comes, first a beast and then a man, out of the dark, and his eyes are on Kalkuel.

“Clark,” he calls, a word I do not know, and his voice is cold, so cold. “Clark!”

Hiroim stands to meet him.

The man stops, only a few steps away from the bier. Hiroim lifts the blade in his hand, naked and without fear.

“Move,” says the man.

“No,” replies Hiroim.

Those cold blue eyes narrow.

“You must let him go.” Hiroim stands before the graystone slab, blocking the way to Kalkuel. “He is dying.”

The man flinches as if struck, and even I can see his panic. “No. That can't be.” His voice comes to us as if from a long distance, an inconceivable space. An echo in an empty room, a breath where there is no air.

“You sent him away,” says Hiroim. “That is done. Now you must let him go.”

“No!” So much fury, so much agony. So much despair. “That was their doing! It wasn't my choice!”

“That is unimportant.”

“He was insane! There was nothing else we could do!”

“There is something you can do now.” Hiroim's voice is almost gentle. “Let him go. Let him live, though without you.”

The man cries out. “Clark!” He is shouting at Kalkuel, the panic rising, his expression almost insane. “Clark!”

“Then you leave me no choice,” says Hiroim. The blade turns in his hand, shining in the light of the Two Moons. “I am Hiroim, Warbound of Kal ku El—Kal of El!—and I will take him from you!”

The man cries out again, an incoherent sound full of rage, a curving, jagged black knife appears in his hand, and then they are in battle.

The rush of movement, the scrape of blade edges, the war cries, the whirling bodies. I despair, for though Hiroim is a Shadow Warrior, he now battles a spirit. Naked and unarmored Hiroim fights, his determination and his love like a light beneath his skin. Hiroim the Shamed, who broke his vows and wandered the desert alone for ten years, who has loved the one named Kal from the moment he first saw him, who now fights a ghost with only a single blade to wake his beloved from despair and death. My eyes burn with tears, but I do not look away. Hiroim will die before he fails, and I cannot look away. I cannot look away, no matter how much it is in vain.

They fight, and it is brutal, it is savage—there is only desperation here, the desperation of a spirit who will not yield and a Shadow who will not fail. The world is the black of unnatural night and the white of the balcony floor, a stone slab where Kalkuel lies sleeping. Hiroim bleeds from his arms and his face, but the spirit falls back before the hungry edge of the larger blade.

They fight in the space between breaths, each pass a beat of the heart. They fight, Hiroim bleeds, and it seems it will never end or that the spirit will kill Hiroim at any moment, except Kalkuel is white and still on his bed of stone, and the longer Hiroim keeps the spirit back from Kalkuel, the more the spirit seems to lose his mind, and the more distracted the spirit becomes, the truer Hiroim strikes.

“Clark,” the spirit is howling, “Clark, Clark,” the ghost wailing his madness, but Hiroim beats him back, repels him to the very edge of the terrace, and suddenly I know that I was wrong, that even spirits can be defeated if they are weak enough, and my face is wet with tears.

The spirit lunges, thrusts forward. His smaller blade fissures against Hiroim's, begins to split, catches against the hilt—

—Hiroim cries out, a single name, a single “Kalkuel!”—

—and the spirit's black, jagged blade shatters into nothing in his hand.

Hiroim smiles, his teeth sharp and white.

“I take him from you,” he whispers, and his blade strikes true a single, final time.

The spirit falls without a sound. His body breaks apart even as he falls, dissolving into air, a screeching black monster and a white-skinned, blue-eyed man. When he reaches the floor, the spirit is only dust, the scattering essence of a memory.

The night is the night. The Two Moons hang overhead, full and pale.

Hiroim groans. He staggers back, against the bier, his blade clattering to the floor. He pulls himself upright, raises his head. He lays his hand on Kalkuel's face.

“Kal,” he whispers. Tender. “Kal.”

Kalkuel's eyes are closed. His breaths come slow and deep, unvarying. He does not wake.

Hiroim's body grows rigid, tense. “Kal,” he says, louder now, “Kal, wake.”

Nothing. Kalkuel still sleeps, his body white and lifeless.

A strangled noise tears from Hiroim's throat. He digs his fingers into Kalkuel's arms, shakes him. “Kalkuel!”

The expression on Hiroim's face is terrible to see, racked with grief, anger, heartbreak. His failure sleeps on, unchanged, on the stone, and the sight seethes in him like a poison. He cries out, his face pressed to Kalkuel's hair. His blood stains Kalkuel's skin.

But the cry breaks off, cut short. Hiroim pulls back, glaring down at Kalkuel. His eyes, Sakaarian blue, are black with hopelessness.

“Wake, Kalkuel,” he gasps, a hiss forced between his teeth. “Kalkuel! Kalkuel, wake!” His voice breaks.

Hiroim pulls Kalkuel back from the edge of the slab, pushes him onto his back. Beneath his hands, Kalkuel is only a body. Hiroim's mouth finds Kalkuel's, his hands take Kalkuel's knees and spread them apart.

“Kal,” he whispers, low and despairing, distraught. “Kal, Kal, Kal.”

His pain cripples me. I am numb, I cannot feel my own body. The misery, the pain—I must stand, I must stop this, I must—I must do something, and yet all I can taste are the tears on my face—

He thrusts his hips into Kalkuel's, and their bodies rock together.

“Wake,” he whispers into Kalkuel's skin, and he is weeping, Hiroim is weeping, “wake, by the Prophet, Kalkuel, wake...”

Kalkuel's breathing—catches.

My heart stops in my breast.

Hiroim jerks up onto his hands, his eyes wide, his face pale. “Kal?” he whispers.

Kalkuel groans. His head turns, his eyes—they open, they open wide, they are—

“Bruce,” he gasps, his voice strained and weak. There is fear in it, a depthless, childish fear. “Bruce.”

His hands come up, shaking. He pushes at Hiroim, at his shoulders.

“Kalkuel.” Hiroim only holds him closer. “Kalkuel.”

Kalkuel begins to struggle, but without effect. He has slept for thirteen days, and Hiroim, though injured, has not. “Bruce!”

“Kalkuel.” Gravely, without hurry. “Kalkuel, he is gone. He is gone.”

Kalkuel stares at him, no recognition in his eyes, and it comes to me that he is disoriented, confused, still only half-conscious.

“He is gone, Kalkuel.” Hiroim's voice is inexpressibly gentle. “He is gone. Forget him, my Kal. Forget him. He cannot hurt you now.”

Kalkuel stares at Hiroim, and then I see something unthinkable, something I had never thought I would see.

There are tears in Kalkuel's eyes.

“Bruce,” he moans, and his body slackens, becomes listless as he lies back against the stone, his face turned away. “Bruce, Bruce...”

Hiroim brushes Kalkuel's face with his, and covers his mouth with his own.

They kiss, Hiroim's mouth open and devouring. Kalkuel tries to turn his head, but only once. Hiroim takes his chin in his fingers, keeps him still, and then Kalkuel opens his own mouth and it is with a sigh, from one or from both, that they taste each other, the Reluctant King and his Warbound Shadow, Kalkuel white and deceptively small beneath Hiroim's larger shape. They kiss, and Kalkuel groans as Hiroim slides his hands beneath white knees and lifts his legs, opens them to his hips, as he bites and licks at Kalkuel's skin from ear to shoulder.

“I take you for mine,” he gasps, into Kalkuel's mouth, his throat. “Kalkuel, I take you for mine, I give you myself, we are one. Be freed, be mine.”

The smoke of the charring incense drifts in the air. The glasslight is low and gray. From below, from the Saka Temple, comes a hundred voices raised in prayer. I slip away, as quietly as I can, toward the door.

The muscles of Hiroim's back stretch and contract as he thrusts, with a cry, into Kalkuel.

Who clenches his teeth, gasping, his hands groping at Hiroim's back, as the memory of the screeching black shape, the ghost of his traitorous mate, is torn, is burned from his body.

The empty hall is too bright for my eyes, and I stand, blinded, the door latched shut behind me.

“Sakaarson,” I whisper, “hear my cry. My eyes are burning. My heart is cold. My night is filled with death. Sakaarson, hear my cry. Cool my eyes. Warm my heart.”

It is the ninth hour of night, the holy hour. Hiroim the Shamed, who lies now with Kalkuel, has answered our prayers.

“Let me dream again.”

Kalkuel is awake, and all is well.

Fanfic: Gaslight, 2/?

2008-06-03T10:09:10Z

Title: Gaslight
Characters: Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne.
Rating: PG
Continuity: Possibly Gotham by Gaslight, but probably not.

Gaslight, 2

Three weeks later, Dr. Virgil Swann passed away.

Alfred presented the newspapers containing the notice to Master Bruce with breakfast. While serving the toast and eggs, he was able to discreetly watch as Master Bruce's eyes were immediately caught by the obituary, which had been given space on the front page.

He was somehow not quite as surprised as he thought he properly should have been when Master Bruce stood up from his seat like a shot, with such force that the chair was knocked over and the coffee was nearly overturned.

For a moment, all was still and neither spoke.

“Alfred,” said Master Bruce at last, carefully laying down the newspaper he had crumpled in his grip, flattening it against the table. “Today, I...”

“Sir?” Alfred waited, tactfully straightening the chair without fuss, for all the world as if the chair had leaped up and thrown itself down, as chairs were sometimes known to do at Wayne Manor. He had little doubt what his gentleman wished to say, but he supposed that in such a case as this, one wanted to be certain.

“No, nothing,” said Master Bruce after a few heartbeats. His tone was low and...resigned. “Nothing at all, Alfred.” He sat back down in the righted chair, picking up the newspaper and returning to his eggs.

Alfred resisted the urge to pointedly raise an eyebrow. One never provoked one's gentleman outright. “Of course, Master Bruce. Will you be attending any of the services, sir?”

“No, I don't think so.” Master Bruce was clearly not even reading the paper, staring instead into the gray space between the typeset. “Send a wreath, would you?”

“At once, Master Bruce,” said Alfred, and withdrew. He neglected to mention that he had already done so, having heard of Dr. Swann's death the night before.

In the silence of the kitchen, Alfred allowed his eyebrow to express the irritation he could not help but feel. He was one of those particularly blessed servants who very rarely erred into overestimating his gentleman, but this was clearly one of those few times when he was chagrined to find that he had. The unfamiliar feeling galled him, and he took a moment to carefully consider what he was about to do.

Master Bruce had obviously not forgotten the boy, which Alfred had managed to half convince himself was what he would do, at least before this morning's blatantly unequivocal behavior. Nothing had been said, and Master Bruce had given no overt sign of being distracted or preoccupied by anything, but Master Bruce was Master Bruce and even the smallest gesture coming from him tended to convey whole worlds of meaning, especially when one knew where and when to look. Alfred had watched him unobtrusively yet carefully over the past three weeks, and though there had not been much to go by before now, Master Bruce being the man he was, he had been forced, even before this morning, to come to one, unavoidable conclusion.

The boy had not been forgotten. Rather, it was the total opposite—hardly an hour went by that Master Bruce did not think of that blue-eyed youth, until what Alfred had first noticed as an unexpected, overwhelming attraction was now a borderline obsession, an obsession that Master Bruce was desperately trying to deny.

Alfred knew what obsession looked like. He had to, serving first Dr. Thomas Wayne and then his son, and it was his opinion that irrational compulsion was actually a Wayne family birthright. He remembered the near scandalous courtship that Master Thomas had conducted against the then Miss Martha Kane, a courtship that had been less like a social exercise and more like a siege. None of the Wayne men had any concept of graceful capitulation, which had always stood them well in every field they chose to engage themselves in but particularly war and business. When a Wayne could not do something gracefully, then he simply did not do, which accounted for the Wayne propensity of always getting what they wanted and never suffering a lasting defeat, for it only stood to follow that if a Wayne could not lose gracefully, he simply did not lose.

Bruce Wayne, on the other hand, was on another tier entirely, even compared to his father. Alfred knew the symptoms exactly, almost had it down to a scientific process. Master Bruce's obsessions tended to be profound, labyrinthine, and, most inconveniently of all, silent. One of his neuroses (of which Alfred was willing to admit, in the darkest corners of his own soul, his gentlemen had perhaps unjustifiably many) was his exhaustively upsetting tendency to persist in denying himself anything he wanted for his own self. Whether this was out of that old, haunting guilt, cutthroat practicality, or his own self-destructive inclinations, Alfred did not presume to theorize, though in his heart of hearts Alfred suspected it had something to do with a fear of rejection, a fear of his own feelings being unreturned, or perhaps even a fear of being somehow inadequate, although in what way Alfred could not in a lifetime have said. Whatever the cause, the result was obvious and heartbreaking—Master Bruce would suffer an agony of uncertainty, unable to either retire or proceed, struggling with his own heart, trying desperately to convince himself that it meant nothing in the one moment and then trying just as heroically to pursue his fixation in the next. He would go back and forth, hurtling between two frantic states, until he did more harm than good and exposed his soul to more pain than originally risked, at the same time causing pain where he had intended the contrary.

Alfred had no choice but to accept what was completely irrefutable: the boy had gotten into Master Bruce's head, and was not likely to leave it any time soon.

Now the question became that of what Master Bruce would immediately do about it, and the answer was one Alfred already knew: absolutely nothing useful.

Oh, he would certainly do things. Become extremely testy, for one, and unbearably moody, for another. Alfred cast a critical eye on his near future and nearly shuddered at what melancholic bouts he could see he would be hard-pressed to tolerate. A languishing Wayne was the most wretched creature in Creation, and Alfred quaked in his heart to think of enduring it all. He would, of course, stoically and without complaint, but the miseries in store for Wayne Manor were enough to make even the most English of English butlers reminisce rather fondly of his one-time aspirations for the stage.

But that was only the nonce. Eventually, Alfred knew, someday, when Master Bruce had finally overcome all his private devils, he would act on his own behalf, and when he did it would be a crushing triumph, of this he had no uncertainties. Master Bruce was as little partial to losing as his father had been, and if his feelings were true, if they were really not some passing fancy, if the look Alfred had caught on his gentleman's face meant anything at all, then, yes, someday, inevitably, all one would have to do was be patient—but that was then, who knew how long from now.

Alexander Luthor was hardly going to take a card and wait.

Oh. Alfred had to place a hand on a table to brace himself. If Mr. Luthor were to get to the boy first...! And then if Master Bruce were to learn of it, which Mr. Luthor could be counted upon to make sure that he did...!

The bravest of heroes would fall to their knees before even a suggestion of that cataclysm. Only his English dignity held Alfred upright.

This won't do, he thought, straightening his jacket, this won't do at all. Alfred highly disapproved of anything that made Master Bruce genuinely unhappy, and this was just too much. He would have to take action.

Nothing too uncommon, of course. It would certainly not be appropriate for a butler to act so interferingly on his gentleman's behalf, and Alfred was nothing if not appropriate. Besides, his gentleman's health and well-being were verily his business, and the quality of life in one's place of service was any creditable butler's top priority, and Alfred was, again, nothing if not creditable.

After all, Alfred was no longer the youthful fifty-five he had been, and had not Master Bruce himself once suggested he hire someone to help him in his regular duties? Alfred had refused to consider the notion for several years, but, really, who was he to so dismiss his gentleman's advice? Perhaps the idea had some merit, and it was about time he let himself be persuaded.

Alfred took up a tray and went to clear the breakfast things. He would clean up, send for a carriage, and request the rest of the day for an errand. The trip to Metropolis was at least two hours by train.

Fanfic: Line, 1, 2

2008-05-31T11:08:10Z

Title: Line
Characters: Kal, some machinery, some people, Iron Man, Captain America, Ms. Marvel.
Rating: PG-13.
Continuity: Tentative.

Note: Crossover, DC/Marvel. Please don't hurt me. Sequel to Shore.

Line, 1

He noticed the devices first. Machines, all sizes, all shapes, sophisticated enough to nearly escape his notice, began to infest Langaan, watching him from the trees, the water, the sand. Sensors transmitted data every second of every minute of every hour, observing him as he swam, sat, walked, reclined, as he did not eat, did not sleep, and did not exhibit other biological functions common to humans. Sometimes he attuned himself to the outgoing signals, tracing them as far back as the carriers that received them, listening to men and women talk, in every tone and manner, about the collected information, until he bored of it and listened to birds instead.

One day, Kal followed a data signal to something they called a “helicarrier” and chanced to hear Iron Man's voice.

He sat up abruptly in the sand, gripping his own arms, and tried to break contact.

No use. He heard their conversation interrupted, heard a woman's voice mentioning to Iron Man that the transmitters had just picked up on “the subject's behaving strangely.” He heard Iron Man's channeled voice request a live feed, heard them both fall silent as they presumably watched whatever visual they had been provided of him.

What did he—no, they—they—see?

Kal forced himself to relax. Lay back down, his arms outstretched, eyes closed. Concentrated on the hot, balmy touch of sunlight. Stretched, slow and unstrained, hips lifting slightly.

From the helicarrier, someone whispered “Is this free?”

“Is he sleeping?” asked the woman from earlier, the woman whose voice was iron.

“Unconfirmed,” said a man's voice. “Biofeed is working erratically at most.”

“He hasn't slept in a week,” said Iron Man. “We shouldn't discount the possibility he doesn't need to.”

“All human beings need sleep,” said the same woman.

“OK,” said Iron Man.

Line, 2

Kal—did nothing.

For five days, he did nothing. He did not sleep, did not eat, did not pass nonexistent waste from his body. He watched the water, the sand, the trees, the clouds, ignored how it all watched him back, and instead spent his time not thinking. Not thinking about how soon it would all end, this shore and this silence, the peace of the wind and the water. Not thinking about not having to think, about the space that still, even after all these months, still stretched between him and his skin.

Five days passed.

Three of them came. Iron Man, a blue-clad figure the newspapers named Captain America, and a woman in black and yellow, a red sash tied about her hips.

Kal surfaced from the frothing waves, his hair dripping in his eyes. They stood on the shore, just below the sand line, watching him as he emerged from the surf, walking toward them, three heroes, bright and shining in the sunlight.

He wore the bahag, and nothing else. The shirt had been tattered the night of the ship and the storm, by the end only scraps of white cloth hanging on by hope alone. Kal had taken it back to Langaan and burned it with his eyes, reducing to ashes one of the only two things he owned.

Kal stood, near-naked and wet, before them, and felt nothing.

“I suppose you know who we are,” said Captain America.

Kal nodded. “I know your names.”

The man raised an eyebrow at the distinction. Kal could see the muscle movement. “Will you tell us yours?”

He shrugged. “They call me Kalangitan, here. I've gotten used to it.”

They waited, but Kal said nothing else. Then the woman stepped forward. “We need to know,” she said, “who you are.”

Kal couldn't help it. He smiled.

For the first time that he could remember, Kal smiled, a jagged, knife-like expression.

He did not mean to offend them. It was only—everything. But Kal saw how Captain America stiffened, slightly, almost unnoticeably, saw the woman's jaw set.

He heard, could not help hearing, the abrupt, irregular beat of a quickened pulse, a pounding heart, muffled within Iron Man's armor.

“I'm sorry,” said Kal, still smiling. “I can't help it.”

“Maybe you could share the joke,” said the woman, sharply, displeased.

“There's no joke,” he said, and no longer felt like smiling. Why had he smiled? “There isn't anything.”

The indifference that had so briefly lifted from him now returned, and Kal turned from them. Before he had walked five steps, he heard a new voice call out to him, “Wait.”

Kal looked back.

Iron Man. “You lifted the ship.”

Another shrug.

“You saved one thousand one hundred and forty-three lives.”

Kal closed his eyes, turned half away.

“You know they're watching,” said Iron Man. “You know we have you under surveillance.”

“Yes,” said Kal. All that watching, collecting, discussing, the three hundred thirteen hours it had taken them to even approach. Such caution. “I know.”

“Why now?” Captain America's voice was...just a voice. “Why them?”

Them.

“There were so many,” said Kal, eyes still closed. “There were so many, and I could hear all of them. I stay here on Langaan because it's quiet. I can't hear the screaming. But then, that ship, there were so many, their cries were deafening. I had to go.” Something—wrenched—in his chest. “I had to go.”

He felt them look at each other, felt in the air a voiceless conversation.

Then—

“Come with us,” said Iron Man.

Fanfic: Shore

2008-05-29T10:43:22Z

Title: Shore
Characters: Kal, some children, a lost beloved, Iron Man.
Rating: PG-13.
Continuity: Shamelessly ignored.

Note: Crossover, DC/Marvel. Please don't hurt me.

Shore

Eleven days after he had woken, naked and rimed with froth, on a stretch of white, virgin shore on the edge of what he later was told was Langaan, one of the Turtle Islands of Tawi-Tawi, he plunged from the top of a hill into the sea and pulled a boy out of the tide.

The boy was small, gangly, brown-skinned, and nude. He coughed up a lungful of green seawater and then sat staring, round-eyed, up at him.

“Who are you?” he gasped, his childish voice strained with salt and nearly losing his life.

It was a question he hadn't considered, not for himself. He stopped to think, searching through the whiteness that was what he saw when he closed his eyes, and then he shrugged. His tongue formed the sounds of the boy's language as easily as his ear deciphered it. “I don't know.”

The boy picked himself up, shaking. He peered back out over the ocean, and pointed at a small, distant boat. “My...my brother...”

He needed nothing more. Tossing back his wet hair, he dove again into the water, his body cutting effortlessly through the blue, as weightless and free as flight.

Jumat named him Kanlungan.

Jumat's older brother Labay disagreed. Labay wanted to call him Kalangitan, and they bickered over the difference. He only smiled and answered to both, but Labay noticed how he seemed to answer more readily when they called him Kalangitan, which settled the issue, and in no time at all the name was shortened to Kal.

“Kal,” they'd call, pushing their boat up onto the shore, “Kal, come diving with us. Kal, let's look for pearls. Kal, come home with us, nanay wants to feed you. Kal, I want to be as tall as you are.”

Kal did not know for certain if he liked children, but he suspected he did. He often went with them to dive for pearls, which they sheepishly admitted they were not really allowed to do, and found that he worried about them if he did not, so it was very soon that he went with them everyday, and always insisted that they keep all the pearls he got for them.

They brought him something called a bahag, which they said no one wore anymore and he could keep. Kal put it on, and they told him he looked like Lapu-Lapu.

Another day, they brought their mother.

Diwata was a small, bird-like woman with a star-like smile. She tried to feed him by hand, stuffing him with everything in the basket she'd brought, and then tried to scold him into coming home with them. He smiled and let her push him about as she pleased, but he said nothing about going anywhere.

“Come to our house,” she told him again and again. “It's on this same island! Why do you want to stay here, alone?”

He wanted to tell her that he did not want to stay, that he would rather go with them, but then he would have had to explain all the things he heard when he tried to leave his particular stretch of shoreline, would have to explain the screams, the cries, the pleas. He would have had to explain to her that he heard things that he didn't know what to do about and that he was afraid would soon make him mad, crazed with the echoes of anguish, and Kal didn't want to do that, so instead he only smiled and shrugged and let her scold.

Kal noticed that she blushed when he smiled.

It was Jumat who brought up the subject of Kal being a white man.

“Are you lost?” asked Jumat, leaning against Kal's side where they sat, legs stretched out, in the sand, watching the Sun. “Did your ship sink?”

Kal could only shrug.

“Don't you want to go home?”

“I don't know,” said Kal imperturbably, and Labay, who was trying to carve a piece of whitened wood into a bird, looked gravely at Kal, his eyes sad.

“Kal,” said Jumat, touching his arm, “nanay says you have strong skin. You don't tan or burn, like other foreigners. You don't scratch, and you are never tired. Nanay says you aren't like any white man she's ever heard of.”

“Do you think you're American?” said Labay curiously. “I heard an American talking last year, when people came to look at the turtles. She sounded like you.”

Kal shrugged again. “I don't know.”

The boys looked at each other, and then at him. “Don't you want to?”

He supposed he ought to. But somewhere inside, for the first time, where before there had only been silence, he now heard a voice, small and weak, a whisper, that told him, No, no, I don't.

That summer, on a hot, clear day, Jumat and Labay's cousin came with them to see Kal.

Liwanag was a small, energetic figure, with long black hair and eyes that reminded Kal of things he saw in the sky sometimes at night if he looked really hard. She went to school and worked as a waitress in Bongao, but came home to visit every break.

When she first saw him, Kal was sitting in the sand, watching their boat come closer, preparing a basket of clams to give to the boys to take home to their mother. He watched the boys push the boat onto the sand, watched them splashing through the surf. He watched the girl, all flashing black eyes and wind-tousled black hair, jump down into the spume, throwing back her head and walking up the shore. He watched her see him, stop, the look on her face.

He watched her fall in love.

Watched—

—dispassionately, unaffected, as the small voice whispered in him, in a language he had never heard or spoken, Ah, my love, my love, where are you that your place is empty, where are you, my love, while others try to take it.

Liwanag told him he should go to the authorities.

“We'll find your family,” she insisted, “we can get you your passport, you're obviously American. If you don't want to do that, then at least come home with us. It's not healthy, living here alone. What do you eat? You can't just stay here wearing a bahag all the time.”

Liwanag spoke Tagalog, English, Arabic, and Malay, as well as a few phrases of at least five other languages. Kal found that he himself knew all of them, often much more fluent than Liwanag was, and had a perfect grasp of even those where she only knew a word or two. She listened to him, wide-eyed, as he spoke to her in fifteen different languages before becoming bored of the exercise, and told him he must have been a linguist.

“You could do anything,” she told him. “You could work anywhere in Bongao. Translators make good money, you know? Especially if you're literate, too.”

Kal shrugged. Liwanag bit her lip.

“Don't you want to know who you are?” she asked, frustrated.

“I don't know,” he said.

No, whispered the small voice, no, no, no. Never, never, never.

“Maybe,” added Kal.

They brought him a newspaper. On the front was a picture of a metal suit, which the paper called Iron Man. He was bright, colorful, and the paper said that he was a hero.

Kal flung down the newspaper, the most violent thing he'd ever done. Jumat, Labay, and Liwanag watched, shocked, as he strode along the beach, away.

“Kal!” Liwanag caught up with him, tried to take his arm. “Kal, what is it? What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, but couldn't bring himself to smile. “Nothing. I just want to be alone today.”

They questioned and questioned him, but he would say no more. Eventually they gave up, gathered the newspaper, and went home, saying they would come back tomorrow, and Kal caught the look Liwanag gave him, a look that was somewhere between suspicion and growing realization. It inspired in him an unfamiliar feeling that he later decided was irritation.

There had been other names in that paper. Captain America, Spider-Man, the X-Men. His stomach clenched peculiarly. Heroes with powers beyond the ordinary, who fought to protect and safeguard society...

The Sun was hot and golden on his skin, consoling.

No, whispered the voice, no, no, no.

The first time he laid his head down and slept, Kal dreamed.

He was flying. The world was an infinite expanse of blue below him, a world bursting with life, memory. He was flying through clouds like the froth of crashing waves, soaring as no bird could soar. He was free, he was flying, and he knew who he was.

He knew. He remembered, he remembered everything, and that small, weak voice in his head was his own, a voice that grew and grew until his entire body was only a memory of the knowledge of his beloved, a memory of blue eyes, relentless pain, and black, black hair.

He flew, faster than any mortal eye could follow, toward the one whom not even death or loss or the laws governing the existence of all the universes could make him forget.

When Kal woke, when he found himself alone, lying in the sand, his face turned up to a black sky filled with millions of stars, on a shore awash with the sights, smells, and sounds of a world inherently alien to his every mental and physical sense—

Kal remembered nothing, and absent-mindedly wiped the wetness from his eyes.

Then—inevitably, inescapably.

He was walking out of the surf, toward where the boys and Liwanag were already waiting. He wore the bahag, and something Liwanag had brought him—a long, loose white shirt that she'd said was a gift in exchange for the black pearl he'd given her earlier that week, a shirt that was airy and comfortable when dry but clung when wet.

Kal pulled his hair back with his hands, opened his eyes, and stilled.

“Kal?” asked Liwanag.

He didn't answer. He could not.

He looked at her, at Jumat and Labay, and then turned to look out over the ocean, to open water. He lowered his hands, the material of the shirt tight across his shoulders, breathed once, slowly, deeply, reminded himself with a single, silent Kalangitan, and then he lifted into the air, ascending easily, instinctively, up into the sky.

The ship was almost completely submerged, hundreds of panicked, wailing people still on board. Kal dove into the water, water black and cold, so unlike the blue waves of the Sulu Sea, and pressed his back up against the bottom of the ship.

They emerged, with a groan of stressed steel and a shriek of pouring water, out of the Atlantic, a thousand gaping throats crying out in shock. Kal lay flat against the metal, hoping against hope that no one would see, no one would notice, but then the ship was airborne, the freezing sleet was in his face, and when Kalangitan glanced, at a different noise, a different heartbeat, to his right, he saw, gleaming in the quicksilver glare of lightening, a figure of red and gold, flying through the rain, and he looked, through the cold, through the water, through the storm, into two, narrow eye-slits, glowing white in the dark.

Fanfic: Gaslight, 1/?

2008-05-28T16:15:47Z

Title: Gaslight
Characters: Alfred Pennyworth, Lex Luthor, Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Virgil Swann, and some other people.
Rating: PG
Continuity: Possibly Gotham by Gaslight, but probably not.

Note: I recently discovered Gotham by Gaslight, and this happened. Because, deep down, all I really want to do is write trashy Victorian era romance novels.

Gaslight, 1

The boy, Alfred finally decided, was simply too beautiful.

Dr. Thompkins had reached the crucial point of his lecture, growing quite impassioned as he went on at length on the impoverished state of public hospitals and sanitariums in most major American cities. Unfortunately, no one was listening except his own wife, and even Leslie Thompkins's rather distracted attention was only his by virtue of a truly heroic effort on the lady's part.

Indeed, hardly anyone seemed to even notice the lecture for which they had gathered in the first place. Everyone was too preoccupied with surreptitiously glancing, over shoulders and champagne flutes and fans and pamphlets, toward the back of the room, where a row of noiseless, motionless footmen, each in his own livery, stood against the wall, eyes lowered and completely still, as if they were statuary rather than living, breathing people.

One in particular, an extremely tall specimen in what should have been an unbearably garish red coat, came closer to resembling a sculpture than any of the others. He stood, at respectful yet self-effacing attention, at the far end of the row, farthest from the guests, distinguishable at a distance not only by his height but also by a certain uncommon straightness to his posture, his back and legs utterly erect, aligned flawlessly with the wall. Alfred himself, to whom the oft imperfect bearings of most American domestics was the tragedy of his life in service, could find nothing about which to complain.

Regrettably, this singular footman's virtues did not stop there.

“...and now, as I believe I've taken up more than my allotted share of time, and my dear wife is beginning to look quite anxious, I shall take it upon myself to ask the gentlemen into the next room, where we might continue the discussion over a glass and leave our wives to more interesting things.”

For one, aghast moment, no one moved, the end of the lecture surprising nearly everybody. Happily, Mrs. Gordon, the Commissioner's wife, remembered herself directly and began to applaud, which broke the tension and brought everyone else to their feet, and Dr. Thompkins was given a standing ovation for a lecture no one had listened to.

Without further ado, the gentlemen withdrew into the drawing room, while the ladies went to the parlor. Alfred, on his way to see to the cigars and brandy, noticed how the red-coated footman had already managed to instantly and silently appear at his master's side, leaning discreetly down to hear something whispered.

Alfred also noted, with something like disquiet, the manner in which Mr. Luthor retained his seat for yet a few more minutes while lingering over a pamphlet, his eyes most certainly not on the pages he turned.

In the drawing room, Alfred and the red-coated footmen were the only servants present. While Alfred served the brandy, the red-coated footman wheeled his master to a comfortable spot by the fire, a well-considered position in which the wheelchair would neither be in the way nor excluded, and his master could easily converse with the other gentlemen while at the same time taking advantage of the warmth. The red-coated footman had never been to Wayne Manor before, Alfred knew, and his actions, undirected by any nod of Alfred's or whisper of his master's, gave proof of a quick and rational judgment, and the certainty with which he executed them a certain keenness on behalf of his master that for some inexplicable reason pleased Alfred to no end. He firmly repressed the feeling, for a butler of his experience and rank had no business feeling anything for a footman a fourth his age but contempt.

Turning abruptly away from the boy, however, resulted in his coming, just for a moment, unexpectedly face to face with his own gentleman, and he found himself surprising an expression on Master Bruce's face that he had never seen before.

It was only for a moment, only a glimpse that, upon exposure, evaporated as quickly as a drop of water against the surface of a hot iron, but Alfred could not avoid seeing it and then remembering it and then, as the implications of it fully emerged, becoming just a touch dysphoric over it, even as Master Bruce smoothed his expression and nodded absently, holding his hand out for a glass.

Oh dear, he couldn't help but think.

“But the condition of the inmates, man, the condition,” burst Dr. Thompkins from his corner, where he was, apparently, holding forth on the situations afforded those poor souls locked up in Arkham Asylum, and both the Commissioner and Mr. Winters of the Metropolis Winters were behooved to moderate his choler by signaling for another brandy. They need not have troubled themselves; no one else was paying enough attention to Dr. Thompkins to be offended. In fact, the common center of attention in the drawing room didn't seem to be Dr. Thompkins, the speaker of the event for which they had all gathered at Wayne Manor in the first place, at all, but Dr. Virgil Swann, behind whom stood, in immaculate, eyes-lowered silence, the red-coated footman.

If the boy was at all hard-pressed, he did not show it. As a matter of note, he evinced such oblivious self-effacement that Alfred could think nothing but highly of such proper sangfroid. For a youth of, as Alfred judged, only twenty-two or twenty-three, the footman was displaying some remarkably good habits, so much so that one could only wonder if he had received his training in London, or at least from an Englishmen. Perhaps the boy was even English himself—he had yet heard him speak, which was another point for him altogether.

When everyone had taken a snifter and Alfred had largely retreated from the floor, the discourse on hygienics in modern medicine began anew, managing to distract most of the gentlemen present, for any discussion involving asylums was, in Gotham as in no other city, as much a political dialogue as it was an activist one. Still, Alfred could not help but see how several of the men present, two in particular, simply could not seem to involve themselves in anything but a head of dark, almost unsuitably tousled hair over a broad, red coat.

Mr. Luthor's attentiveness was, Alfred thought distastefully, somewhat alarming. He was not quite obvious in his regard, was circumspect enough, in fact, that hardly anyone else noticed anything, but a butler was not a butler who did not notice everything, and Alfred made it his business to notice anything and everything that went on under the Wayne roof. He suspected, had suspected from the beginning, really, the very moment that rather worrisome footman appeared on the doorstep, solicitously lifting the wheels of his master's chair over the threshold, that it was inevitable, for Luthors were notorious in their tastes for anything above the par, and especially for beautiful things. Too, he had known for quite a long time exactly where this particular Luthor's proclivities lay, and it was certainly not in any of the hapless young ladies who broke their hearts over him every evening, nor in the, shall he say, more experienced women with whom Mr. Luthor regularly kept assignations. Someone really ought, thought Alfred, to tell the boy to watch himself, but he could not quite make up his mind that it should be he who did so. Surely Dr. Swann had his own butler, who would look out for his own underlings, if for no other reason than to ward off scandal, which was always one of every butler's chief concerns.

Except.

Master Bruce, for all intents and purposes, was entirely attentive to the lecture Dr. Thompkins had half-resumed. He was all bored watchfulness, dutifully attending to the man he himself had invited, more by accident and as a result of his casual affection for Mrs. Thompkins, to speak in his own house. He did not turn his head, he did not glance anywhere but at the doctor, he did not seem even aware that there was such a thing as footmen in the world, but Alfred was not just anyone else, and he could see, as if he were watching a play, how Master Bruce could, with the kind of superhuman effort that only he was capable of, only barely force himself to look at anything but the red-coated footman.

Oh, thought Alfred. Oh, dear.

It really was a troubling turn of events. Master Bruce's rather dejecting tendency to only become seriously involved with completely inappropriate people aside, Alfred had no doubt that if it came down to a serious pursuit, Mr. Luthor would not fail. The Metropolitan was too bold, too single-minded, not to mention shameless. Master Bruce, who had never really shown any signs of anything more than a passing physical attraction to only a few women, was, as much as it pained Alfred to admit, simply outclassed in this sort of thing. In the ballroom or parlor, he was a Phoebus; in his own heart, a Quasimodo. He would balk, would think too much, would want to expose too little, would back away at inconvenient times, would hesitate at this as at nothing else, and would still be trying to think of a way to justify beginning a conversation with someone so unsuitable when Mr. Luthor had already deposited and debauched the boy in an expensive bower somewhere.

Alfred winced, imperceptibly and to himself. He really had to stop reading those penny dreadfuls.

If only Master Bruce could have avoided inviting Mr. Luthor to the gathering. Unfortunately, Mr. Luthor had happened to be at the same dinner where Mrs. Thompkins had been lobbying for the use of Wayne Manor as a lecture hall, and cutting such a social figure as a Luthor in front of everyone who was anyone in Gotham had turned out to be impossible. The attendance of Dr. Swann, on the other hand, had been something of a coup, for the reclusive gentleman, who had once been the most brilliant mind at Yale, an honored professor at Oxford, an invited speaker at the White House, and a one-time guest of Her Majesty the Queen, had not made a public appearance anywhere in nearly ten years, a fact that made this evening at Wayne Manor the Place To Be, at least for one night.

Then had come the red-coated footman, and now everything was a shambles.

There was a lively discussion going on, threatening to become just a bit out of control as Mr. Dent became embroiled in an argument with Dr. Thompkins, with the Commissioner trying to mediate, when Master Bruce finally suggested that they rejoin the ladies. However, it was already quite late, and in the parlor it was Mrs. Thompkins who suggested instead that perhaps her husband would rather retire for the night, for they had a rather early train to catch to Metropolis. It was the signal that closed the evening's entertainments, and Alfred took the opportunity to help it along by the single and irrefutable motion of presenting himself at the door.

Dr. Swann, of course, was given deference. Having been almost completely silent the whole night, the paralytic gentleman now smiled wanly and whispered with Dr. Thompkins for a few moments to congratulate him on his series of lectures and the book he had written, not to mention all the charitable work he and his lovely wife had done over the year. He looked paler than he had before, and Alfred was doubly concerned to see the red-coated footman glancing worriedly at his master, an anxious line in his brow. The boy was especially careful in pushing Dr. Swann to the door, outside which a carriage and driver waited, and made sure to tuck another blanket warmly about the man, brazenly ignoring Dr. Swann's smile and low, half-hearted protest in a manner that irrevocably endeared him to Alfred, who lived by the belief than one's gentleman's well-being ought to be the pinnacle of all efforts.

Master Bruce had followed them to the door. “A privilege, Dr. Swann.”

Dr. Swann kept that small, pale smile. “Mine, Mr. Wayne, all mine,” he whispered.

Master Bruce did not frown, but he did not quite smile, either. “Are you sure you won't allow me to press my physician on you?” he asked quietly, gently. “He has certain eastern medicines...”

“Thank you, Mr. Wayne,” whispered Dr. Swann, in a voice that was nearly overwhelmed by the chatter behind them, “but what is, is, and modern medicine has done all it can for me.”

It was a strange thing to say, and Alfred felt a chill down his back. What Master Bruce thought of it, he couldn't have said, for all he did was nod.

The footman however, hesitated, and, for a brief instant, his expression was clear for anyone to see.

There was worry, of course, the same worry that had put the line in his brow—but now with it came a shadow of something else, of something that could have been desperation, could have been fear, and beneath it a depth of emotion that was shocking in a face that had, only a moment ago, been so composed. The boy's eyes, large and startlingly, unexpectedly blue in the flickering gaslight, shone as if they'd filled with tears, and it came to Alfred in a dazed sort of way that the footman was much, much younger than he'd thought, that the boy really was a boy, and the look on his face was that of a child in pain.

A dull ache had come into Alfred's own chest. He felt more than saw the look on Master Bruce's face, the intensity of the expression, and behind him, where Mr. Luthor had come up, without warning, he heard a sharp, helpless breath, an abrupt inhalation that said more than any number of sighs.

Then the footman lowered his head again, turned to begin maneuvering Dr. Swann out the door, bracing long, black-clad legs, and the moment was gone.

“Good night, Dr. Swann,” said Master Bruce, and his voice could as well have been a sieve.

Alfred lowered his eyes, very purposefully did not look at Master Bruce's recomposed face, and offered Mr. Luthor his cloak, instead. His heart clenched painfully. That expression, the one he had just now witnessed on his gentleman's face, was an expression he had seen only once before, many, many years ago, when another Wayne had looked on another dark head, another pale face, for the first time, and it had been devastating then, too, that look, a crushing look that took no prisoners, that left no alternatives, no other choices, merciless and cruel, a look that devoured, that consumed.

Too late, then, Alfred thought, filled with quiet resignation, the same resignation he'd felt nearly three decades earlier, on the eve of a civil war, when his first gentleman, young, idealistic, and an abolitionist, had looked across a room and met the eyes of a black-haired Southern girl in white.

Mr. Luthor had stepped into his cloak, taking no notice of who handed it to him. His eyes were all for the retreating red coat.

“I should guess a week,” he said casually, perhaps to Master Bruce, beside him, or to no one in particular, “and then I suppose we'll all get to find out what he's done with his capital.” A slow baring of his teeth. “And his other toys.”

Alfred saw how Master Bruce's face did not change, betraying nothing, remaining calm and slightly bored. How his hands and arms stayed loose and relaxed at his sides, his pose insouciant.

He saw, in the way that only someone who had known Bruce Wayne from the very day of his birth could have seen, the cold, half-mad violence that turned, barely in check, behind his eyes.

Alexander Luthor smiled, coldly, suggestively, and Alfred experienced, for only the second time in his life, the beginning of a true, implacable hate.

The boy, Alfred decided, somewhere between pity and gall, was simply too beautiful.

Fanfic: A Different Face, 7

2008-05-27T08:41:10Z

Title: A Different Face
Rating: PG-13.
Warning: Messes with continuity and canon.

7. Help

She was lifting a house-sized piece of skyscraper to get to the three women and two men trapped below it in a stairwell when she saw Wonder Woman coming toward her.

Nothing had gone right. Seven dead, three from impact and four from suffocation, and still so many left under the devastation. Half the city had been leveled by the quake, and she was working as quickly as she could without causing additional damage or injuries, but it wasn't enough. She'd cleared maybe half the affected area, already pulled hundreds of dirty, frightened, half-suffocated people out of the ground and put them into the hands of emergency relief workers, but there were so many left, hundreds of pairs of lungs laboring futilely against fragile human ribcages, and the fear of losing more was worse than anything she'd ever felt before, a desperate agony that she tucked carefully away into a corner of her mind and tried to ignore.

Now, a half-ton of cement over her head, five pale, dust-stained faces looking up at her, she looked up and met Wonder Woman's eyes.

“Superwoman,” said the Amazon, nodding, and then reached down into the broken stairwell, taking a badly shaking woman by the wrist and helping her out.

Such casual acceptance, one superhero to another, but she didn't have time to think about it. One of the women was visibly pregnant and bleeding, and she tossed the debris aside into a pile she'd begun earlier and then was handing the woman into the arms of two female relief workers, their lights shining in her face.

By the time the sun finally came up, when morning broke the darkness that had been hindering the relief workers from doing anything much more than taking the victims after Wonder Woman or she had gotten them out, one more had died of a weak heart and there was no one living or dead left beneath the rubble.

The relief workers seemed to know exactly who she was. Many of them smiled briefly and nodded perfunctorily when they saw her, too busy and too urgent for anything more, but the victims, those who weren't catatonic or shell-shocked or too hurt for anything else, had a distressing tendency to catch at her hands, to kiss them, to weep or cry or sob as they whispered and gasped their thanks. It made her sick, made her want to throw up, because eight people were dead because she'd been four minutes late and she knew exactly at whose feet their deaths were laid.

In the minutes just after sunrise, when the relief workers had taken the last of the victims and loaded them into ambulances, when she'd already cleared the road to a largely unscathed hospital and straightened the worst of the mess that had once been a major Indonesian city, she paused in the emptying square that had only moments before held the most severely injured to catch her breath.

Wonder Woman landed lightly on the ground beside her. There was blood on her hands and arms.

“I don't think we've met,” said the Amazon. The tone was unmistakable, half an introduction, half a challenge.

She didn't have the energy to care.

“No,” she said, tone neutral and polite and inhuman, a tone that Clark Kent did not possess, “we haven't.”

Wonder Woman raised an eyebrow, but nodded. “The League would like to meet with you.”

Any other time, that would have been when she started getting nervous. Now, all she could do was shrug. “I'm happy to attend any public conference your organization cares to invite me to.”

At public, Wonder Woman's other eyebrow had gone up. “You don't trust us.” She sounded not offended, but genuinely surprised.

She smiled, a small, quiet, knowing smile, another thing that wasn't anything of Clark's. “Am I really in a position to?”

But she wanted to be, she really did, and she let it show in her face, in her voice. She wanted to trust the League, to be able to assent to what Wonder Woman asked, and she let it communicate itself.

Wonder Woman smiled, openly and for the first time, and she had to work hard not to catch her breath. “Then in an open place, though not in the public eye?”

“Agreed,” she said, and let the smile widen into something much more real. “Thank you.”

For a split second, she thought she heard Wonder Woman's own abrupt inhalation, heard her heartbeat jump, but nothing about the Amazon's expression changed and both her breathing and pulse were normal, so she figured she'd imagined it. “And you, Superwoman.”

Through the air came a thick, chopping noise, the sound of heavy blades whirring. She glanced up, into the sky, and high over them were three helicopters, hovering. Out of the sides hung men holding TV cameras, and she saw flashes that indicated photos being taken.

Oh, Rao. The press conference. At least six hours.

“Jackals,” said Wonder Woman. “Where were they when we could have used them to airlift the injured?”

“Flying in from Ciwandan,” she said distractedly. “I heard them take off an hour ago. Everything here has been grounded.”

She turned away from Wonder Woman's near-questioning look, a look that asked whether she'd revealed that deliberately or by accident, and lifted off the ground. “I have to go.”

“Superwoman.”

She stopped, looked back. Wonder Woman gestured, and she followed it.

Perhaps a hundred feet away, a small crowd was gathered. These were mostly the unharmed or the only slightly scathed, and they were standing there, staring at the two heroes, uncertain. At the front was a woman holding a child, a small girl, and the girl lifted her hand and waved hopefully.

“I think they have something to say to you,” said Wonder Woman, and the smile was in her voice.

Clark would have bit her lip. She only smiled—and felt the ache in her heart ease, just a little.

Fanfic: A Different Face, 6

2008-05-26T12:32:09Z

Title: A Different Face
Rating: PG-13.
Warning: Messes with continuity and canon.

6. Sound

“Not much there, really,” said Lois. “You know the history, right? The Wayne murders? Well, since then it's been gossip page after gossip page, the prodigal son, about as shallow as you can get without scraping bottom. He's basically one long string of parties and débutantes. I hear he occasionally puts in an appearance at board meetings, but it's all Lucius Fox as far as Wayne Enterprises is concerned. He keeps his hands to himself, though, so don't be afraid to corner him for questions. Just try not to get distracted and corner him for anything else, all right? We're strictly professional here in the big city.”

“I wasn't the one undressing him with my eyes,” Clark muttered, but shut up and tried to look a model of worshipful attention at the glare she got in return.

“Now, Oliver Queen, on the other hand,” continued Lois, taking a slow drag on her cigarette, “he's something else. Queen Industries has been clawing its way up in the ranks for a year or two, might give Wayne Enterprises or even LexCorp a run for their money in another. They have a building here in Metropolis, but they headquarter in Star City. I'm assuming you know all this?”

The look Lois gave her then was somewhere between suspicious and calculating.

Clark put on her unworldly face, the one she used when she wanted to unmistakably get across the fact that she'd grown up on a farm, miles away from such things as champagne and hostile takeover exposes. “I've done some fact-checking, yes.”

Lois looked...unconvinced, and as if she were filing away that particular discussion for later. “Well, don't crush on him too hard. Oliver's pretty, but he's a total playboy, worse than Wayne—at least with Wayne you always know where you stand. Oliver will break your heart as many times as you let him, Kent, so it's smarter to just not give him the chance.”

Clark glanced sidelong at Lois. There was nothing different about her expression, her voice, her eyes continuing to casually scan the roof for more people to ambush into answering intrusive questions, and Clark wondered if she was imagining the trace of bitterness in what she'd heard.

And what it had meant, back there, that Oliver Queen's pulse had jumped when she pulled her wrist out of his grip.

“Anyway, Oliver's the one to keep an eye on,” said Lois, stubbing her cigarette out in a convenient ashtray. “Wayne probably needs Lucius to tie his shoelaces for him, but Queen Industries is all Oliver.”

The crowd was breaking up, people taking their seats. The sound people were testing the microphones, and the large screen had been uncovered. The day was clear and bright, one of those immaculately blue days that only ever seemed possible over Metropolis, the kind of sky where anything could happen, the city shining under a white-hot sun. A breeze set tablecloths and skirts fluttering,

Clark shaded her eyes, looked up into that lustrous blue, and imagined herself, clad in the colors of her house, flying down toward the roof of LexCorp Tower.

“There's the senator,” said Lois abruptly, thrusting a shoulder out in the direction of the door that led into the building. “I'll be right back. Try to get a quote from the Commissioner while I'm gone.”

Then Lois was off, stalking her prey, leaving Clark suddenly that much more aware of exactly how much her JC Penny three-piece had cost. Adjusting her glasses, she glanced around, surreptitiously looking for the Commissioner of Police. One quote, then she'd go find her own seat, try to brace herself for a show and a speech to which the guest of honor was definitely not going to be showing up.

Except—

Then—without warning—

From somewhere, from nowhere, from everywhere, there came to her ear a sound like the shift and grinding of rocks.

Clark...stilled. An immense silence filled her head.

“Lose someone?”

Clark, the part of Clark that was still on the roof, press badge on her jacket, glasses crooked on her nose, realized that someone was talking to her, that she should turn and see who it was and maybe spill something on them. That Clark did turn, each movement slow and careful and impossibly far away, to her left, where someone was leaning against the railing.

The man smiled. He was bald, and his teeth whiter than the tablecloth, his teeth sharp.

“I don't think we've met before,” he glanced down, at her press badge, “Clark Kent?”

That was her cue to spill something on him, decided Clark, except she'd put down the flute of champagne a server had presented to her earlier and now she didn't know where it was.

A groan, vast and harrowing, shook the earth, threw a thousand brightly-colored different birds out of the trees, into the air.

That's an unusual name, the man said. But where Wayne's voice had carried a hint of mockery, of an insult, his was simply a comment, the opening to another question.

It's my middle name, Clark heard herself say. Without thinking.

A scream, and then another, and then a hundred more. Cries that cut, like knives, stabbed like needles, through the earlier groan, filled with fear and panic.

Clark turned her head away. She concentrated on the noise, which had filled her head and been directionless, focused on it.

Are you going to keep me in suspense? He was still smiling, but she could see how something had changed about his eyes, sharpening his look like his teeth sharpened his smile, as if something had caught his attention, really his attention, and she saw how that change revealed how falsely polite that smile had been.

There.

Clark slammed back into her head.

Lex Luthor was smiling at her.

Her mouth opened. Closed. Urgency filled her head, but that was someone else, somewhere else. Clark, the Clark who was there, was just realizing that Lex Luthor had been talking to her for nearly five minutes and was trying to decide whether or not to throw up.

“What?” she asked, faint. Maybe she could vomit all over his shoes and run away in disgrace?

“It can't be that bad,” said Luthor, and he was—taller than she'd thought. Bigger.

He sounded disconcertingly nice.

What? “No,” Clark blurted, without thinking. “No, it's not...I mean...”

He lifted an eyebrow, and Clark had never seen such an obliquely lifted eyebrow before, such casual non-interest.

Screaming. Someone was screaming, someone was being lost, and she had to do something.

“It's Lillian,” she said helplessly, facing him, forgetting to be embarrassed. “My mother named me Lillian.”

Luthor—stood very still. Something was happening to his face, something that made his eyes empty of everything fake and his smile not a smile at all, making glass of his face. His heart rate didn't change, he didn't break a sweat, he didn't even move—

—and Clark had no more time to observe anything because people were screaming and drowning and falling and being crushed and she could hear them dying, hear them suffering, she could hear the air being sucked from their lungs, and it took every muscle in her body to stop herself from flight.

“Excuse me,” she said abruptly, desperately, “my—my editor's expecting a call.”

She turned, rushed away, barely managing to keep to a decent walk. Clark thought she heard Jimmy calling her name, Lois looking for her through gritted teeth, and honestly could not care, instead counted every millisecond of the three minutes it took for her to find the emergency exit and an empty stairwell.

By the time she reached Indonesia, the quake was over, three people had died, and hundreds more were trapped in the rubble.

Fanfic: A Different Face, 5

2008-05-25T10:36:07Z

Title: A Different Face
Rating: PG-13.
Warning: Messes with continuity and canon.

5. Guess

The roof of LexCorp Tower had been converted into something between a press conference and a gala. Lois took it all in stride, as if flutes of champagne and black ties and pearls at ten o'clock in the morning were typical fare.

“There's the mayor,” murmured Lois, “and the chief of police. Hm. Stockholder, stockholder—I didn't know he was in town—stockholder. Oh, ugh, him. Kent, I don't want you hanging around anyone from the Inquisitor. They're a bad influence, and you'll probably catch something.”

“Do you think she'll come?” whispered Jimmy, shading his eyes as he examined the sky. “Do you think Luthor knows her? How do you think he got her number? Does she even have a number?”

Clark was tempted to throw herself off the edge of the roof. Would anyone even notice, especially if Superwoman happened to show up from the opposite direction at the same time?

Lois had already staked out her seat up at the front, having had to gut and leave for dead a senior reporter from the Journal to get it, and now they were mingling. Or at least Lois was mingling. Jimmy and Clark watched, Jimmy taking the occasional photo op and Clark feeling out of her depth and horrifyingly under-dressed.

Lex Luthor stood near the podium, surrounded by a mixed crowd of journalists, political figures, city officials, investors. He was the picture of charm, smiling, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. His poise was perfect. Clark almost didn't notice how his attention didn't really seem to be on the people around him but on the sky, the horizon, his eyes constantly sliding away from everything near to fix, with a certain, honed focus, on the far distance.

“Oh!” said Lois. When Clark glanced at her, her eyes were narrowing. “Would you look at that?”

On the opposite side of the roof, a tall, dark-haired man was talking to a tall, blonde man. They stood apart from the crowd around Lex Luthor, partially concealed by the podium. Clark couldn't figure out why everyone wasn't staring at them, two men so eye-catching, so tall, in similarly cut, equally fine suits, one charcoal pinstripe, one tan linen, both haircuts more expensive individually than most people's entire wardrobes.

“Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen,” said Lois, and if she'd been a purring cat, Clark couldn't have told the difference. “Someone must really like me today.”

Lois headed toward them without hesitation, prowling through the crowd. Clark looked for Jimmy but he'd gone off in the direction of the mayor. Biting her lip, she followed Lois, reminding herself that this was now her job.

“Why, Mr. Wayne, Oliver,” said Lois, stopping just behind Wayne. Tone lingering, fond. “Good morning! Was it the free champagne or the superheroes?”

Wayne turned, lowered his head, and smiled.

Clark—tripped. On nothing.

She could almost hear Lois grinding her teeth. Wayne's mouth twitched, slightly, as if he'd had to catch himself to not laugh, and Queen passed a hand over his mouth, coughing. Clark lowered her eyes, pushed up her glasses, and didn't have to work too hard at looking embarrassed and tongue-tied.

“Bit of both, really,” said Wayne. “A pleasure to see you again, Miss Lane. As always.”

His voice seemed to deepen and catch on the last word, his whole body sort of—angling—in Lois's direction.

Who smiled, invitingly, teasingly.

Clark was wide-eyed. She half-expected someone to start tearing someone else's clothes off. Behind Wayne, Queen was hiding his expression in a flute of champagne.

“Oh, but I'm being rude,” said Wayne. “Bruce Wayne, Miss...?”

He was looking at her. He was holding out his hand. He was angling at her. Lois was going to bruise her eyebrows, raising them so pointedly.

Clark waited a second longer.

“Oh,” she stammered, “I'm sorry, I...um, Clark Kent, Mr. Wayne. With the Daily Planet.”

She took his hand and let it go again in nearly the same motion.

“Clark,” said Wayne, unperturbed. “What an...unusual name.”

“Now, let's not be rude, Bruce,” said Queen then, before it could get awkward. “Oliver Queen, Miss Kent. Please,” his hand came up, took hers, lifted it to his lips, “call me Oliver.”

Clark took her hand back as soon as she could. Queen glanced at her—a flashing, questioning glance.

“Well, Oliver, I'm glad I caught you,” said Lois, overwhelming the pause. “I can finally get that quote from you about the buyout in Delhi.”

Queen shrugged. “The same as last week, Lois. Just trying to shore up our offshore assets is all.”

“Fifteen percent of a high costs arms company doesn't sound like much shoring up,” said Lois. “Were you aware that their profit margins had fallen by sixteen percent since last quarter?”

Wayne shifted impatiently, looking bored. Queen glanced at him, looked at Lois. “I don't expect it to pay off immediately. Call it a long-term investment.”

Lois opened her mouth for another question and Clark said, “Excuse me, I thought I heard fifteen percent?”

They turned to look at her, all three of them, as if they'd forgotten she could talk.

“Fifteen?” repeated Queen.

“But maybe you were only talking about the shares bought by Queen Industries proper,” said Clark, eyes wide and ingenuous. “I guess subsidiary companies file their own acquisitions reports?”

Lois closed her mouth, opened it again. Clark could almost see her work it out, tying together loose end after loose end, and reach a conclusion.

“So,” said Lois, turning back to Queen, “an imminent hostile takeover of a weapons research facility and arms manufacturer that Lex Luthor holds the majority in. Why, Oliver.”

Queen tried to back out, tried to look as if he didn't know what they were talking about and deny them their proof, but it was too late. He knew it. They knew it. Possibly the only one who didn't know was Wayne, who was looking back and forth between them, confused.

“I don't know what you mean,” he tried anyway, smiling.

“Of course,” said Lois, magnanimous in victory. “Don't worry, Oliver, I'll hold off until Thursday. As long as I can have the exclusive?”

“You've got it.”

“Deal,” said Lois. “Oh, there's the governor. I'll call your secretary about the interview.” She paused, and then, casually, threw over her shoulder, “Come on, Kent.”

Lois made for the governor, who was picking up his third flute of champagne. Clark turned to follow, relieved everything had come out so well. As she did, she heard Wayne asking behind her, “Now what was that about? You're not in some kind of trouble, are you, Oliver?”

Except, as she began to walk away, her arm was caught at the wrist, she was pulled back around, and Oliver Queen was standing there, looking down at her, suddenly much taller than he'd been a second ago. Behind him, Wayne looked mildly alarmed.

“I know I didn't leave a trail,” said Queen, voice conversational, even curious, “and I know no one talked. So how did you know?”

Clark couldn't help it—she grinned, a flash of white, even teeth.

“I didn't know,” she said. “I guessed.”

Queen's mouth opened. He looked, for the briefest of moments, completely caught off guard. “A guess...?” Then, disbelievingly, “You bluffed me?”

Behind him, Wayne turned his head, and a stranger seemed to glance out of his eyes.

Clark's slipped her wrist out of Queen's grip.

“We'll see you on Thursday, Mr. Queen,” she said, and walked away.

Lois was waiting, impatient. “I don't know how you knew that,” she hissed into Clark's ear, “but from now on, if you know something, you share.”

Clark nodded. Waited.

Nothing. Then, just before they reached the governor, because Lois was Lois, “Not bad, Kent.” Grudging. “For a college paper.”

Fanfic: A Different Face, 4

2008-05-24T22:26:12Z

Title: A Different Face
Rating: PG-13.
Warning: Messes with continuity and canon.

4. Headline

The headline read Superwoman: Metropolis's Own.

Clark...wasn't sure how to react.

While she cooked and ate breakfast, the Daily Planet lay on the kitchen table and Clark couldn't seem to look anywhere else. Even as she showered and then dressed, the headline was printed out on the inside of her eyelids, crawling over yellow-stained tile and then the sleeves of her suit jacket. It gleamed in the mirror over her own face, over the surface of the steam-dripping glass as she clumsily put her hair up.

Finally, ten minutes before she had to head out the door or risk being late, Clark picked the Planet back up and started to read.

The byline was Lois's, of course, with credits to Jimmy as the photographer. The shot, which took up nearly the whole front page, was of the front of the bank, glass shattered, doors open, police cars visible outside, guns pointed. The light coming through the windows had been pale and gray, serving to mute the colors of the police cars, the officers' uniforms, the vivid, flashing lights.

In the center of the photo, looking back over her shoulder, was a black-haired woman in blue, red, and yellow, the colors almost unbearably bright.

Clark stared. She wasn't entirely convinced that this could be her, this tall, unblinking woman with eyes so blue that even on newsprint it was hard to look at directly. Did she really look like that in the suit? That face—it was almost like looking at someone else, someone who could actually be justified in having an expression like that—fearless, confident, almost inhuman in its quiet certainty. Like nothing and no one Clark had ever known—or had ever been.

Until now?

Clark pushed that thought away, concentrating on the story. Lois had obviously been in more shock than Clark had realized at the time; her writing teetered precariously on the line between news and prose, something she'd normally never allow. The detailed descriptions of the caped hero—Superwoman, Lois had penned, the tone in the introduction almost gleeful—were enough to make Clark blush. There were mentions of the incidents following the attempted bank robbery, with quotes from both the mother of the boy Clark had found and the older woman who had almost been mugged. Numerous witnesses had come forward to say that yes, Superwoman did fly, and they had definitely seen the bullets bouncing off of her. Several policemen had been interviewed as well, and from there the story digressed a little into a discussion on vigilantism, with several state prosecutors, defenders, and judges weighing in on the matter.

There were, of course, the obvious comparisons. Does Metropolis now have her very own Wonder Woman? Lois asked at one point. The Justice League, she reported, had yet to respond to inquiries by either the press or the public, and there was nothing yet to show that Superwoman was linked in any way to the JLA. From all evidence presently available, Superwoman was another hero altogether, affiliated with no established organization.

At that point, Clark had to stop reading and put the paper down, groaning aloud. She'd known the second she'd met Lois Lane that the woman was going to be trouble, but really.

Clark couldn't read anymore. She thought she might be feeling a bit nauseous, and besides, she had twenty minutes to get to work.

Superwoman. What a name. Clark didn't want to think about Nietzsche, Zarathustra, or delusions of grandeur, and decided she was going to hold it against Lois for giving her such an elitist title.

The entire way in, from apartment to sidewalk to subway to sidewalk again, she could hear nothing but how everyone was talking about Superwoman. The landlord, the people on the street, the subway, in coffee shops, and taxis—all anyone wanted to do was discuss Superwoman. “Hey, you hear about this Superchick?” Clark heard at least three different versions of the same events in less than ten minutes. She tried to tune it out, to concentrate on the fact that she was without question going to be five minutes late to her first real day as a reporter for the Daily Planet, but it was no use. Superwoman was everywhere, and it was all Lois Lane's fault.

At the Planet, however, all plans for covert grudges collapsed in the face of Lois Lane in full, guns blazing reporter gear.

“Kent! Where have you been? You've got ten minutes before we hit the elevator. The press conference's in thirty.”

“Press...?”

“Kent, if you could have been bothered to—never mind. Lex Luthor's having a press conference about what happened yesterday. Metropolis United Bank, gunmen, Superwoman, beginning to sound familiar? Apparently, he's going to reassure stockholders and publicly thank Superwoman for intervening at the same time. Jimmy! Where is he? Kent, are you still standing there? You've got five minutes.”

“Wait—he's going to publicly thank Superwoman? Am—I mean, is Superwoman supposed to be there?”

Lois smiled the way tigers or sharks—or tiger sharks—must smile. “Who knows? I haven't heard anything, but I wouldn't put it past Luthor to have been able to get in touch with her. And even if he hasn't, I, for one, am definitely going to be there when the hottest billionaire in Metropolis looks dead into a TV camera and asks Superwoman to please come over so he can personally say thank you. Three minutes.”

This must be what it's like to be paralyzed with fear, thinks Clark, because for the life of her, she can't figure out how she's supposed to handle this. Not show up? Except that would be rude, wouldn't it, and she didn't want to give the impression that she was ungracious. Show up? Only that involved appearing as Superwoman at a press conference, of all places, and she knew there were going to be questions she wasn't prepared for, no matter how many times she'd gone over it with the AI.

Somehow, the concept of her alter ego attending a press conference on her second day out just hadn't...ever occurred. To be fair, she hadn't really expected Lex Luthor to be the one to call her out, either. Whenever she'd envisioned the scenario in her head, it had always been someone more predictable—the police chief, maybe, or even a JLA representative. There'd be a podium, she'd fly down, answer a few questions, reassure them of her good intentions, shake hands, and excuse herself. It had all seemed so reasonable.

Instead, she'd somehow gotten Metropolis's Number One Most Beautiful Billionaire, three years running.

Nothing was going the way they were supposed to.

“Smallville! Get your badge. You have got one minute.”

Lois glared. Clark scrambled.

On the way out, she saw Mr. White in his office, talking aggressively into his phone. On his desk were various stills of a red- and blue-clad blot, lifting into the air against a backdrop of the Metropolis United Bank's building front.

“I don't care what you've got to do or who you've got to run over,” Mr. White shouted at Lois as they passed. “You get me Superwoman!”

Lois...smiled.

Fanfic: A Different Face, 1, 2, 3

2008-05-24T08:32:23Z

Title: A Different Face
Rating: PG-13 for bad language.
Warning: Messes with continuity and canon.

She really wants to think it's not as bad as it seems.

1. The
She told herself she wasn't intimidated.

No use. One glance from those eyes—a glance quick and sharp, gleaming, like a scalpel coming up from the surgical tray—and Clark knew exactly where she stood.

Which was nowhere near anything that deserved even a second of Lois Lane's time and attention.

“I saw a few of your articles,” said Lois. She smelled the way flowers must be supposed to smell, and on her breath was something like French vanilla. “Not bad. For a college paper.”

To translate: You are way out of your league, kid.

“Thank you,” said Clark, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice. She was not intimidated. “I know I have a lot to learn. Um, here. From you. And...the Planet. Lots.”

To translate: Yeah, I know.

Lois shot her another look, somewhere between contempt and pity. Shaped brows arched flawlessly; her make-up really was perfectly done. “Where did you say you were from?”

“Smallville,” said Clark. “Uh—I mean, Met U. I'm from Met U.”

There it was again, only with microscopically less contempt and atomically more pity. “Smallville.” Such finality, as if that one name told Lois everything she would ever need to know.

Clark tried to think of something to say.

Lois's smile was tight, angry, and “Try to keep up, Smallville.”

Clark's was weak, apologetic, and “Whatever you say.”

Lois Lane turned on one impossible heel, her hair flipping attractively, and cut her way through the bullpen toward the chief's office, heels clicking. The noise and bedlam that had stood in Clark's way like an actual wall of big league journalism seemed to just naturally sweep out of Lois's, bad-tempered reporters and ringing phones tripping over themselves to get out of her intended trajectory.

Instead of watching Lois throw open the door to Mr. White's office and begin her tirade of protestation against being saddled with a total neophyte for a partner without even making sure the door had closed again, Clark turned back to the two desks that would, from that moment on, serve as the stage of her journalistic career.

Lois's was, of course, an insidiously organized catastrophe. At a glance, Clark's best guess was that the piles were arranged according to priority, with the most interesting projects nearest the center. The blotter was stained with coffee and cigarette ashes, though the burn marks looked a lot older than the caffeine splotches, and on the monitor of her new computer was on a completely blank screensaver asking for a password. Off of one edge hung some dry cleaning on a few hangers, still packaged, and in the chair was her purse—a sleek, buckled contraption that probably cost the equivalent of a month of Clark's wages.

The other desk...

The other desk was bare, empty, and old. It had obviously been hastily moved, wiped half-heartedly, and had a squeaky chair slammed up under it. The hand-me-down-but-still-decent computer had been placed on top of it, neither put together nor plugged in, and a single file folder lay beside it, with a note attached that said Return forms by 5.

This desk was Clark's.

Clark couldn't help the rush of hot, tingling excitement. Her desk. Her desk, in her bullpen, at her job, at the Daily Planet, the most aggressive, competitive center of investigative journalism in Metropolis.

Her desk.

“You know, I don't think we've met.”

Clark's arm swung out and she almost knocked the computer off of her desk.

Blushing, her mouth open, hands scrambling to adjust her glasses, Clark turned.

The young man standing there was biting his lip, obviously trying not to laugh. Clearing his throat, he stuck out a hand. “Jimmy Olsen.”

“Clark Kent,” said Clark, and took the hand, trying to hold it as slackly as possible.

“Really?” said Jimmy, and then it was his turn to look embarrassed. “Oh. Uh. I did not mean to...I mean—”

“No, it's OK,” said Clark. “It's actually my middle name. I just prefer it.”

He waited, but Clark put on her most oblivious expression and fidgeted with her hair instead, sweeping loose tendrils out of her face and adjusting a few pins.

“Oh,” said Jimmy. “Well, it's nice to meet you, and if you need any help with things around here—”

“Thanks,” said Clark, and smiled weakly, helped by the fact that she could hear the click of Lois's heels coming closer. “It's nice to meet you, too.”

Jimmy beat a retreat, and Clark breathed, trying to brace herself for the onslaught. As she turned, she could hear, from the direction Jimmy had gone—

“So? Does it get any better up close?”

“Come on, guys, don't be like that—”

“I think she borrowed that skirt from her grandmother.”

“Hey, is that necessary? She seems nice—”

“Lane's going to tear her up. I bet this one cries by the end of the day.”

“Guys—”

Clark opened her eyes a bit wider. Lois was in front of her, and her expression was one of resignation—and dislike.

“All right, Kent,” said Lois, “I've got an interview at City Hall. While I get ready, you can go get us some coffee. Starbucks around the corner, venti Verona if they've got it, nonfat latte mostly foam if they don't. You've got ten minutes.”

Clark breathed. Straightened her back. Tried to smile, and nodded.

2. Beginning
There were three shooters.

She hadn't intended it to be like this. Two of the shooters were on the floor, unconscious, and the third was backed up against the wall, white with fear and sweat, his hands shaking. A woman was sobbing behind a sofa, the security guard had his gun raised, uncertain who to aim at. The customers huddled against the far wall, staring, silent, the sirens screaming out front.

“Put down the gun,” she said, and her voice seemed to echo from the walls, the ceiling. “It's over.”

The shooter swallowed hard, his heartbeat like cannons in her ears. He wasn't all that old, maybe in his early twenties, and entirely unprepared to deal with a woman in a red cape telling him to put his gun down.

“What are you?” he shrieked, voice cracking. “What are you, man, what the fuck are you?”

She hadn't wanted it to be like this.

“Put down the gun,” she said, “and you won't be harmed.”

He gasped, swung down the gun, and opened—

—or would have opened fire, if she hadn't been there at the same time, her fingers closing on the barrel and crushing it to scrap. With her other hand, she grasped him by the front of his shirt, lifted him up until his feet were dangling and he was maybe a breath away from peeing himself.

“Calm down,” she said.

He looked like he was going to cry.

She glanced back, saw the security guard standing there, still looking out of his depth. “They've been unarmed,” she said. “I'll leave them in your custody.”

He...nodded. Vaguely, as if he wasn't sure he should.

She looked around, one last time. Still quiet, everyone holding their breaths, all but the woman crying behind the sofa.

Sitting against the wall, eyes wide, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen stared, her white-knuckled fingers gripping her purse, his mouth hanging open.

God. Why? Why did they have to be there? Why at the very first—

“Please stay calm,” she said, addressing everyone, all the hostages, the tellers, the bank manager. “The police have arrived and everything is under control.”

No one moved. From the back of the room, she saw the CEO of the bank sinking back into a chair, at the same time that someone next to him was standing up. A tall man, bald, in an expensive suit, his expression—

She turned on a heel and walked toward the doors, watching the police cars come screeching to a halt in front of them. They had an impressive response time, really, it had barely been five minutes—

“Wait!” someone cried, and there was a scramble. “Wait!” Lois's voice, but almost unrecognizable because she'd never heard it so...breathless. “Who are you?”

She stopped. Watched the police usher pedestrians away from the sidewalk and the street in front of the bank doors, redirect traffic.

“Someone who just wants to help out,” she said, and turned to glance, briefly, politely, back.

A flash. A bright, white flash, and Jimmy Olsen had taken a picture, the camera clutched in front of a reddening face. Behind him, the bald man had almost made it to Lois's side, his eyes fixed on—

“I have to go,” she said, and turned again, this time ignoring Lois's calls, and stepped through the doors into the gray afternoon light. Shouts, the policemen all turning toward her, guns pointed, a megaphone being placed at someone's lips—

And then a hush, whole and complete, as she lifted into the sky, the cape fluttering behind her, and flew into the sun.

3. Of
Less than twenty-four hours later, she saw him.

She actually hadn't been doing anything particular. The fire on the east side had been put out, a distracted little boy had been returned to his frantic mother, and a mugger had been delivered, unconscious, to the downtown police station, his near-victim with him, trembling and pale. Nothing much else was happening, even worldwide, so she'd taken one last patrol of the city before heading home.

Trying to forget the way they had all stared. How quiet they'd been. Trying not to think about police officers and their firearms, or the way their hands seemed to automatically go to their holsters.

Only, several blocks away from her apartment, she glimpsed something that made her drop out of supersonic flight and veer behind the nearest building.

There. The building across, on the roof. A crouching, black shape, motionless.

In her ear, she heard No sign of her. Last appearance was at the Metropolis Police Department Headquarters.

Her heart was beating so fast, she was almost afraid he would hear it. She caught and pinned her cape with one hand so that the movement wouldn't give her away.

Oh, God, she thought, cold. They sent him.

A shiver of...something. Turmoil? Nerves? She'd known this would happen, later if not sooner. Only she hadn't expected them to send him, of all people, not right off the—um. Not right away.

Can you pick anything up, Manhunter?

Scanning for her, probably. She'd seen the Watchtower, and the AI had its own diagnostics reports.

Releasing the cape, she came up, over the building's roof, and stepped lightly, casually, onto the ledge.

She watched him still. Watched him look up.

Watched him look her.

Over the lights of Metropolis, her unbound hair in her face.