Chapter Three (cont'd.)

Oct 30, 2007 00:12


Title: Truth and Justice - The Third Year
Characters: Bruce Wayne/Batman, Dr. Martha Kent/Superwoman, Alfred Pennyworth, Lian Harper/Quiver, Roy Harper/Arsenal, Wally West/Flash, Clark Kent/Superman, Lois Lane, Green Lantern Grendel Gardner, Midori, Meera Buhpathi, Linda Park, Clay Kent, Dick Grayson, Koriand’r, Harvey Dent, Hal Jordan/Parallax. Special Guest Hero: Diana Prince/Wonder Woman.

Rating: R, primarily for violence and language, sexual situations

Pairings: Bruce Wayne/Dr. Martha Kent, Roy Harper/Midori, Clark Kent/Lois Lane, Wally West/Linda Park. Bruce Wayne/Roy Harper friendship.

Summary: Wonder Woman fills in for a lost teammate, Gren, Lian and Meera tread separate paths to peace and Batman finally allows himself to be happy. There’s also a wedding. Action/Adventure, Drama, Angst, Romance, Humor.
Disclaimer: I don't own any character trademarked by DC Comics or characters in this story that are derived from or inspired by them.

Chapter Three (continued)

As his thrilled colleagues chattered happily about the return of their beloved teammate, Roy squinted at the crumpled nose of the smoldering shuttle. Midori moved next to him.

“I don’t think I can save it,” she said mournfully.

Roy gave her hand a squeeze. “That’s OK,” he said. “Thirteen’s my lucky number.” He frowned at the Jav again, then said, “Tell everyone to stay here.”

He found Batman leaning against the far side of the smoking shuttle.

"What the hell?” Roy asked.

Against the blackness of his mask, Batman’s bloodless face seemed almost white.

“Is it really... is it her?” he asked, his eyes trained on the crater wall just above the patch of woods where he’d spent tortured days searching for Martha.

So that was it. Roy moved next to Batman and rested his back against the Jav’s still-warm fuselage.

“Meera's sure it is,” he said.

“Meera was sure she was dead,” Batman said bitterly.

“Thank God she isn't,” Roy said, adding, “Clark took her home.”

Batman shut his eyes and let his head drop back against the ruined craft.

The scent of pizza wafting through the bathroom door made Martha’s heart hammer. Six weeks of eating nothing but the acrid fruit of those horrible trees had her ravenous. She rubbed her hand against her wet scalp and noticed with dissatisfaction that despite a scalding twenty-minute shower and four shampoos, there was still sand in her hair. She’d have to wash it again - but after dinner.

“You’ve lost so much weight,” Lois said, hugging Martha as she stepped across the bathroom threshold. Clay, who had been lurking in the hallway alongside his mother, wrapped an arm around his sister from behind and pulled her against his chest.

“Well, I’m wearing your clothes,” Martha pointed out, reaching back to tickle Clay. Lois was right. She was only a few inches shorter than her mother, but Martha was drowning in the sweatpants and t-shirt she had borrowed from her. “But believe me, I’ll be eating one of those pizzas all by myself.”

“Well, hurry up, then.” Clark called happily from the other end of the hallway. “They’re getting cold.”

As her family started to settle around the dining room table, Martha touched her chair and stepped back. “I just have to make this phone call,” she said uneasily. It was the fourth call she’d attempted since Clark had brought her back to the apartment. He and Lois exchanged a disturbed look.

Martha could not understand it; even if no one was home at Wayne Manor - and in two years, Alfred had not once failed to pick up the phone - she was sure they had an answering machine. But again, the phone rang endlessly. Dread began to creep along Martha’s throat. Had something happened to Alfred?

“We’re going to have to tell her,” murmured Lois. Clark nodded.

“Tell her what?” Clay asked, coating the top of a slice of pizza with crushed red peppers.

Martha looked up sharply as she set down the phone.

“Tell me what?” she asked. Clark glanced at the dinner table, then reluctantly motioned for her to join him in the darkening rooftop garden.

“What’s going on?” Clay asked as Martha followed her father out into the garden. Lois squeezed his shoulder and murmured, “I’ll tell you later.”

On the other side of the sliding glass door that separated the living room from the garden, Clark, looking as uncomfortable as she had ever seen him, started to tell their daughter about Bruce’s overdose. Lois knew he would present it as an accident; she personally disagreed with this interpretation. She no longer believed Bruce had seduced Martha as an expression of contempt for her father. Rather, Lois thought that the aging vigilante had somehow developed a mid-life infatuation with her vivacious daughter and that Martha’s death, after a lifetime of violent losses, had been the one he couldn’t take. Clark would not listen to this argument and Lois was not sorry he was presenting Martha with the gentler version. Martha’s feelings for Bruce Wayne were now quite obvious and the account of his near death, no matter how sanitized, would go down badly. Lois didn’t expect to see her daughter standing on their rooftop much longer.

As Lois watched through the glass, Martha’s fingers flew to her mouth and her eyes spilled over with horrified tears. She immediately attempted to fling herself into the sky, but Clark grabbed her wrist and pulled her back, speaking even more quickly now, the urgency of his words mirrored in his earnest face.

Before Lois could make her way into the garden to comfort her daughter and to join Clark’s entreaty that she stay with them in Metropolis, Martha shook her head and stepped away from her father, bolting from the rooftop even as Clark continued urge her to reconsider.

Lois slid back the door and stepped into the garden. “You let her go.”

“What else could I do?” Clark asked. “Overpower her and force her to stay? She’ll - she’ll be back soon.”

“No, she won’t,” said Lois. “You know what’s going to happen, Clark.”

He shook his head, and she knew he was clinging to something Roy had told him a few days after the overdose. “Bruce said he believed a relationship with Martha would be wrong.”

“Maybe he doesn't anymore,” Lois said, wondering if she still did.

Clark took off his glasses and stared into a horizon towards Gotham City.

“Then why isn’t he answering the phone?” he asked.

Alfred was stirring a pot full of homemade tomato sauce when Bruce pushed into the kitchen so forcefully that the swinging door slammed into the wall behind it. Alfred took a look at the younger man’s ghostlike face and asked, “What has happened?”

“She’s alive,” Bruce said, his voice quaking.

The wooden ladle Alfred had been holding sank to the bottom of the large pot. “How can this be?” Tears glittered in his wonderstruck eyes.

Bruce shook his head. “She’s going to come here.” He looked anxiously at the old man. “And I can’t -” He held up his hand as Alfred took a few confused steps toward him.

“Please… tell her,” He struggled for the right words. “Tell her… this is the happiest day of my life… that she’s alive… but I can’t see her right now.”

The old man stared. “But, surely -”

“Please, Alfred,” Bruce said desperately, and although the elderly butler did not understand the younger man’s plea, he could sense the depths of his agitation.

“Very well,” he said, still trying to process the glorious news and Bruce’s mystifying reaction to it.

Bruce nodded gratefully and disappeared from the kitchen.

Martha had already called three times by the time Bruce burst into his kitchen and urged Alfred to keep her away, but the elderly butler had been outside picking tomatoes from the small vegetable patch he kept just outside of the kitchen. There was an answering machine in Bruce’s office, but Alfred had not activated it in years. He did not like the wretched devices, believing them to be impersonal and indecorous.

When the phone rang minutes after Bruce left the kitchen, Alfred knew it was Martha, and as hungry as the old man was to hear her voice, he was not sure whether he should answer. Bruce’s response to Martha’s miraculous survival had perplexed Alfred at first, but now he was beginning to at least somewhat understand it. He had rarely seen Bruce so emotional. It was almost a reverse of his reaction to Martha’s ‘death,’ when he had closed himself off so completely that had nearly ended up dying.

Alfred had a second motive for not answering the phone: He wanted terribly to see Martha and he knew Bruce was right in his prediction that she would come to Wayne Manor. Fifteen minutes after the bell on the phone went silent, the woman Alfred feared he would never see again stumbled frantically through the kitchen’s service door. He had barely registered her wet, windblown hair and oversized clothes before she threw herself, sobbing, into his arms.

His straitlaced upbringing had always prevented Alfred from being entirely comfortable with Martha’s casual hugs, though he eventually managed to accept them without tensing up. This time his embrace was wholehearted and strong.

“We thought that we had lost you,” he whispered into her hair as his arms tightened around her.

His use of the word ‘we,’ caused Martha to remember the other man who lived at Wayne Manor. She pulled away and asked, “Is he here?”

Alfred hesitated. “Martha -”

“Is he all right?” she asked immediately. “Where is he?”

Placing a firm hand on each of Martha’s shoulders, Alfred delivered Bruce’s message, adding as gently as he could, “But he can’t see you, Martha. Not now.”

“Why?” Hurt and fear spilled over from her wet, wide eyes and the old man felt himself close to breaking his promise.

He tried to explain. “When he thought you had died… you can’t imagine what he’s been through....”

“That’s why I have to see him,” Martha pleaded. “I have to know that he’s all right.”

Alfred ran a withered hand along her cheek. “He will be. But you must give him time.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice trembling. But she allowed Alfred to lead her to the kitchen table and pour her a cup of blue tea. And although he could see how terribly she wanted to, she did not ask to see Bruce again.

As soon as Martha flew back to Metropolis, Alfred touched a keypad next to the kitchen door and waited for a security monitor to slide out of a hidden wall panel. He studied it for a moment, saw a red dot moving in Bruce’s bedroom and headed up to the second floor.

Bruce was throwing a handful of socks into a suitcase when Alfred entered the room without knocking.

“She was here?” he asked, without looking up.

Alfred’s eyes flicked to the suitcase. “She just left,” he said. “In tears.”

Bruce struggled to keep his face impassive; it was one of the rare times that he failed. He walked across the bedroom, opened a drawer and cradled a few pairs of jeans in his free arm. The old butler watched without asking Bruce what he was doing

“Have your feelings for her changed?” Alfred asked.

Bruce pushed the drawer closed. “No,” he said. His feelings were the one thing that hadn’t changed.

“Then why are you doing this?” Alfred asked.

“I don’t know.” This was only partially true and from the look Alfred was giving him, Bruce could see that the old man knew it, too.

“She still loves you,” Alfred said.

Bruce walked back to the bed and threw the jeans into his suitcase. He had not wanted Martha to love him until she had told him that she did. Now he desired nothing else. But what would be left of her feelings for him when she found out what he had... what he had done to himself, how the ensuing scandal had affected her family?

And…. He had given up on her. He had said that he wouldn’t, when he allowed Roy to drag him out of the woods for her funeral, but he had not searched for her again; had never considered the possibility she was somewhere else - in another universe or another time. He had abandoned Martha, and started to rebuild his life without her. How could she see that as anything but a betrayal?

“Where are you going?” Alfred asked.

“Tim’s going to check in occasionally, make sure you’re OK,” Bruce said, closing the suitcase.

“I do not need anyone to take care of me,” Alfred said indignantly.

Bruce gave him a short smile. “But I do.”

“Then I want it to be Dr. Kent,” Alfred said, his frustration overcoming his attempt to understand the younger man’s feelings.

Bruce zipped the suitcase and set it on the hardwood floor. “Call her,” he said. “Once I’ve gone.”

Martha did not return to Metropolis immediately. She stopped first at her apartment, but Lian was not home and Martha no longer had a key. She headed next to the League’s upstate New York Headquarters. She hovered curiously over the damaged Javelin - it looked different than the one her father had grabbed in mid-air six weeks earlier - then slipped into the fortress-like building. Lian, Gren, Meera and Roy and Midori were in the kitchen. They had also ordered pizza. There were only three boxes, Martha noticed. Wally must have gone home.

They didn’t see her at first. She stood quietly in the doorway, savoring the sight of them, as she tried to erase the look of distress that she knew was layered across her face.

“- don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Lian was saying as she shook some garlic onto a slice of tomato pie.

“Maybe he’s off trying to kill himself again,” Gren said bitterly. Then he saw Martha, standing white-faced in the kitchen doorway, and he jumped to his feet, hastily swatting pizza crumbs from his jacket.

Lian hit her like a projectile, forgetting, in her excitement, that she had a slice of tomato pie in her hand.

“Sorry,” the redhead said as Martha brushed sauce from her mother’s t-shirt.

“It’s all right,” said Martha shakily. She looked at Gren. “It was an accident.”

He studied the floor. “Glad you’re home.”

“We all are,” Meera added, leading Martha to the table. “Have you eaten yet?”

“Not really,” Martha said. The pizza they’d ordered came from one of Martha’s favorite restaurants, a tiny pizzeria in Hudson not far from Midori’s apartment. Tonight it felt like she was chewing cardboard. She answered as many questions as she could about where she had been and what it had been like there - Lian said she could still see a few grains of sand in Martha’s hair - then listened as her teammates told her what had happened while she had been gone, presumed to be dead.

She was pleased to hear that Midori was moving in with Roy and that Lian was approaching her third week in recovery, but little else of the news was pleasant. Their account of her funeral nearly made her lose the slice of pizza she had barely managed to finish. By unspoken consensus - or maybe Meera had cautioned them telepathically - no one mentioned what had happened with Bruce, but it was clear that everyone had been affected by what they had believed to be her death.

“It’s all my fault,” said Meera, and her voice was thick with regret. “When you - disappeared - there was this blinding pain, and then nothing. When I’ve felt those things before, the person was always dead.”

“We should have kept searching,” said Roy heavily. “We should have given it more than a day.”

“I gave it almost three,” Lian pointed out. “But in my heart,” she confessed to Martha, “I believed you were - you know.”

Martha pushed her plate to the side. “What were you supposed to do?” she asked. “Even if you’d known I was alive, you couldn’t have gotten to me. I think it’s ridiculous for you to blame yourselves.”

“I might have been able to track the path of particles from the explosion,” Midori remorsefully. “Maybe -”

“You could not have found me,” said Martha firmly. They were quiet for a while, then Roy leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

“Have you heard from Kurdoon?” she asked.

Gren nodded. “They’ve got Jordan back at Oa. They’re going to try to help him.”

“They should have done that decades ago,” said Martha darkly.

“Maybe Lantern Corps needs its own shrink,” Roy said. “They can’t have ours.” Martha offered him a weak smile, then turned to Meera.

“When we were fighting Parallax, I asked you what he was planning to do with that device he had,” she said. “He told me it wasn’t a bomb.”

Meera shuddered. “It was so creepy. He can manipulate time?” She looked around the room for confirmation.

“At one point he could,” said Gren, who considered studying the League’s history a part of his training. “He tried to turn it back once and re-shuffle the universe.”

“Well, this was sort of the same thing,” said Meera. “He planned to de-evolve humanity and start all over again. With himself as sort of - a wrathful God who would make sure people behaved themselves.

“Lots of positive reinforcement for people who did the right thing,” she added. “Unimaginable consequences for those who crossed whatever lines he drew.”

“Sounds like my dad,” said Gren wryly. “Except for the positive reinforcement.”

Parallax’s mechanism would have triggered de-evolutionary process, Meera explained. The meteor that had formed Barringer crater had aggravated an earthquake fault that lay just below the edge of the basin. By planting the machine on top of the fault line, he could send its effects through the Earth’s tectonic plates, almost like a line of dominoes.

After a silent moment, Martha said, “I want to go to the California legislature and protest the rebuilding of Coast City.”

“We’ll all go,” Roy said. “But you know, most of us did that years ago, during the hearings, and no one listened.”

Martha nodded. “I want to do it anyway.” She slipped from her chair. “I should head back.”

“To Gotham?” Lian asked eagerly.

“No,” Martha said hoarsely, and everyone pretended not notice the hurt that broke across her tired features. “I didn’t see my parents for very long. I guess I’d better go back to Metropolis.”

“Come home tomorrow?” Lian asked.

Martha nodded. “I… I guess I lost my key.”

Lian promised to have another made.

Martha was near the building’s rear entrance, fumbling with her hologram projector, when she heard Roy’s voice behind her.

“One of us never gave up on you,” he said.

She could not turn around. If she looked at him, she would start to cry again.

“When Lian was a little girl,” Roy said, “I was in love with this woman. Donna Troy.”

Martha nodded. “I remember Lian talking about her.”

“When Donna was killed, Lian would spend hours sitting out in the garden, waiting for her to come back,” he continued. “Why wouldn’t she? She was four years old and half the people we’d buried had somehow managed to come traipsing back relatively undamaged. Death’s supposed to be permanent, but somehow, with us, it isn’t always.

“Then sometimes they come back all screwed up,” said Roy. “Or it seems to be them, but it isn’t. You know the first thing Bruce asked me when he saw that you were alive?”

“What?” Martha, her voice breaking.

“ ‘Is it really her?’ ” Roy said.

Martha half-stifled a sob as her hand flew up to cover her eyes.

“It’s going to be all right,” Roy said. “Give him time.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” Martha whispered.

Roy drew her hand away from her face and clasped it in his own. “Everyone’s right.”

It was almost eleven o’clock when Martha touched down on the rooftop garden. Her mother was usually in bed by then, and her father out patrolling, but both of them were waiting for her.

“Are you OK?” Clark asked. For the first time, Martha noticed a streak of gray in the stubble that peppered his cheeks.

“Yeah,” Martha said, not looking at him.

“Do you want to talk?” Lois asked. Martha shook her head.

“I stopped by headquarters,” she said. “Or I would have been home earlier. Sorry about -

you know - before.”

She stared into the thick glass coffee table and saw the reflection of her parents trading worried glances.

“We’re just so glad you’re home,” Clark said and Lois wondered through her tears when they would all stop crying.

Clay came out a few moments later and offered his sister his bedroom; Martha’s own room had been converted years before into a second office that the trio of reporters in her family shared. But as she listened with increasing sleepiness to the impromptu brainstorming session her family started to explain her return from presumed death, Martha felt herself fading away. As she cuddled against the fuzzy softness of her parents’ living room sofa, she only vaguely realized that Clark had tucked a blanket around her.

Next Chapter:  Aftershocks.

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