Chapter Five: To Lay It All on the Line
Title: L'esprit de l'escalier
Note: The rest of the series can be found here.
Author: taro_twist (aka Tairona)
Timeline/Fandom: post-Superman Returns
Pairing: Lois/Clark
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: DC and the WB own everything! I'm just temporarily messing with their creations ...
Spoilers: Superman Returns, Superman II, and I guess Superman: The Movie, to be on the safe side
Word Count: 3,275
Chapter Five: To Lay It All on the Line
As far as he knew, Clark Kent had never had an out of body experience.
His several brushes with death had led to nothing more than darkness and unsettling dreams. Maybe being able to fly in real life had negated the need to hover above his body when he’d nearly drowned in the Atlantic. Or maybe the afterlife wasn’t real-the white light just random neural firing-and Kryptonian brain biology had prevented him from seeing tunnels after he’d plunged into Centennial Park.
And then there was the fact that astral projection just wasn’t one of his powers.
Whatever the reason, though, even if he had never left his physical body behind, Clark was certain that, if he ever did, it would feel something like what he was experiencing right now.
For the last ten minutes, he had managed to listen and nod and make vague noises like “mm-hmm” as Lois had related the events of the past few days. She had told him a slightly skewed version of her revelatory argument with “Charlie,” which he knew by heart. And then, she had explained her unfinished quarrel with Richard, which nearly fit with the assumptions Clark had already made about it, but not quite.
And he had managed to listen to her without ripping off his glasses, or saying, “Lois, I should have told you how much I loved-love-you.” But he was only able to do it by letting go of the part of himself that wanted to reach out to her. Piece by piece, he let that part of himself float away until, in the end, he felt that nearly all of him was hovering around the ceiling panels and emergency water sprinklers, and that only a sliver of him was still speaking with the woman sitting before him.
“Why don’t you just explain everything to Richard?” that sliver of him asked, while the rest of him watched from overhead with a kind of morbid curiosity.
“Oh, believe me, I’ve tried,” Lois laughed mirthlessly. “But things just keep getting in the way. I couldn’t talk to him while Jason was with us, of course. Then, after we dropped Jason off at day camp, he got a phone call about some political development in Venezuela, and by the time he was finished with that, we’d already arrived here. And I’d go find him now, but I can’t even stand up because of my stupid ankle.”
Lois allowed her head to drop into her hands. She massaged her temples, eyes closed, then raked her fingers through her hair and sat upright. When she opened her eyes again, something new was there.
“Clark, do you think I made the right decision?” she asked.
With a jolt, Clark fell back into himself.
“P-pardon me, Lois?” he stammered, hoping that the question he had just heard was nothing more than a hallucination.
“Was I right to choose Richard?” she asked, and this time there was no mistaking that the words were real.
“Do you think you … weren’t r-right?” Clark queried. He wasn’t sure whether he even wanted an answer, or whether he was just stalling at this point.
“When I made the decision, I was completely sure of myself,” Lois told him. “But let’s be honest-I was pretty damn pissed off. And I’m still pissed off. But I feel like I should have given myself more time to think about it.”
It’s never too late to change your mind, Clark wanted to say, but he choked back the words. “Wrong” didn’t even begin to describe this situation. All of the alien powers in the world couldn’t have given him an advantage over a human being that was as unfair as this one. If he abused his current position to convince Lois to pick him over Richard … well, one, it would never work out, because once Lois discovered the truth, never mind having a relationship with her-she would bury him alive in a coffin full of kryptonite. But more importantly, he would have abandoned everything that he had ever tried to stand for in life.
That is, if I haven’t done that already.
"Lois, with everything you just told me, I ... I think you already answered your question," Clark said, choosing his words with the same care that one would use to tip-toe through a field of landmines, fishing for some way, any way, to avoid having to give her his opinion on the matter.
Lois frowned, thoughtful. She then nodded. "You're right," she conceded. "I guess I did."
Inwardly, Clark breathed a sigh of relief that Lois didn't push the subject further. At the same time, though, his stomach tied itself in knots as he wondered what she had decided the answer to her question was. From what she had revealed over the past hour, he had a feeling that it would not be in his favor.
"Clark, could you do one more thing for me?" Lois suddenly asked, eyeing the stairwell door.
"Sure, Lois," Clark agreed. "What is it?"
"Could you try to find Richard, and tell him that I want to talk to him?" Lois requested.
Clark gulped. "Wouldn’t it be easier for you to-to call him?”
“Do you honestly think he’d answer a phone call from me?” Lois scoffed.
“I-I guess not,” Clark mumbled.
“You know I’m the last person he wants to speak to right now,” Lois reminded him. “But I don’t want to go through the rest of the day waiting to have an argument with him. I’m ready to get this over with. And besides, Clark,” she smiled, her voice sweetening a touch. “You’re so nice. I’m sure you could persuade him to come back and hear me out.”
Clark raised his eyebrows. This was getting to be too much, but at the same time, he felt that he had no choice but to ride it out. Today’s moment for telling Lois the truth had passed him by faster than a speeding bullet. When the next opportunity would come along, he had no idea. He did know, though, that revealing himself to Lois now would be akin to his newest alter ego, Charlie Bird, infiltrating Chinese intelligence only to intentionally blow his cover while in a room full of armed men. Bad idea, on too many levels to count.
Not that Clark had had any intention of “infiltrating” Lois’s inner most thoughts, but-
“Please, Clark?” Lois added, her eyes beseeching.
“Um, you-you bet, Lois,” Clark finally conceded. “Are you-you sure ... will you be all right, though, by yourself?"
"Don't worry. I'll live," Lois assured him.
"I know," Clark murmured. He then raised his eyes to the ceiling, and began scanning the floors above them for any sign of Lois's fiance. "Where-where do you think Richard might have gone?"
Lois shrugged. "Up to the office, probably."
But Clark had already checked the Planet's newsroom. There was no sign of the man there. He dropped his eyes, ready to X-ray the floors below them, but then decided that it would probably be better to conduct his search when he was no longer in Lois's presence. He already did enough strange things around her-no need to make her think that he had an unnatural fascination with office carpeting, on top of everything else.
"Oh, and Clark?" Lois stopped him as he headed towards the stairwell door.
"Yes?"
"Thank you,” she said, smiling a smile that he had seen before as Superman, but never as Clark Kent.
-----
The stairwell was empty now, the morning rush to the office having ended over an hour ago, and no one was around to see the large, bespectacled man in a baggy suit gripping the banister with such force that the metal seemed to groan beneath his fingers.
If someone had seen Clark Kent at this moment, “mild-mannered” would have been the last adjective to come to mind. His jaw was set, and even the thick lenses of his glasses could not hide the red glow that was growing in his eyes. It took him every ounce of self-control that he had to keep from ripping the banister from the wall or incinerating the entire stairwell with one burning glare. He rarely lost his temper, even when dealing with the most heinous of criminals, but today seemed like it might turn out to be an exception.
It wasn’t, though. After a few tense moments, and a few deep breaths that rattled the walls, Clark released the banister. He used his heat vision to smooth away the traces of his hand prints, and then started down the stairs, heading towards the parking garage where his X-ray vision had located Richard.
After his conversation with Lois, the grief that he had felt at the prospect of losing her forever had given way to complete blankness-an emotional vacuum that, in turn, had quickly filled with an explosive fury. He knew that it wasn’t rational for him to be angry in this situation, but then again, the situation itself had left “rational” behind ages ago. He couldn’t even comfort himself with Lois’s confession about how much she had loved him, because that only served to emphasize the fact that he had taken something that was just so good, and had destroyed it beyond all repair.
It made him want to scream, to snap the peaks off of mountains, to hurl meteors into the polar ice caps until they cracked, to fly low through the streets of Metropolis, breaking the sound barrier, shaking the buildings and bursting their windows with sonic boom after sonic boom. It made him want to race back to Lois, to tell her all of the things that he had kept from her with both of his disguises, to make her see that, when everything else was stripped away, he was just a man who had made a mistake. A man who surely needed her more than the Earth would ever need a Superman.
Not until he reached the end of that train of thought did he realize that, in his daze, he had actually turned around and had started bounding back up the stairs, not at super speed, but fast enough as it was, taking them two at a time. He didn’t know what had possessed him, but he did know that, suddenly, finally, he was ready to lay it all on the line.
Lois had asked him if he thought she was right to choose Richard. Well, he didn’t have the answer to that. He couldn’t make the choice for her. But how could she even make the choice for herself if she didn’t know the entire truth? And not just the truth about his identity, but the truth about how much she meant to him.
Before he knew it, he was back on the sixth floor landing, his hands on the push-bar of the stairwell door. He could hear Lois’s heart beating just on the other side of the wall, he could hear-
A scream. Dozens of them.
For the second time today, Clark found himself holding onto something so tightly that his fingerprints were pressed into its surface. Gritting his teeth, he let go of the metal push-bar, and propelled himself up through the stairwell, changing his clothes as he went. He couldn’t ignore the situation that had suddenly thrust itself upon his attention. The things he wanted to say-needed to say-had waited too long already, but they would have to wait a little longer.
They would not, however, have to wait forever. The second this was taken care of, he would talk to Lois. Even if he had to do it in the middle of the Planet newsroom with the entire bullpen tape recording their conversation and a WGBS-TV camera trained on them, he would tell her the truth.
Energized by this thought, Clark shot through the door to the Planet’s roof, accelerating up to Mach ten as he arced through the sky, tracing the course of a perfect parabola whose end lay in Glenmorgan Square-the heart of midtown Metropolis. From the sound of things, a wave of terror was spreading through the place, radiating outwards like shocks from an earthquake. Clark could hear hundreds of feet pounding the earth in a massive stampede, flesh smacking flesh as people fought over taxis and shoved their way down into the Metro stations, police whistles shrilling in a futile attempt to keep order. And above it all, one cry, passing from mouth to mouth, almost chanted, like some perverted mantra:
There’s a bomb.
Glenmorgan Square was only a couple dozen blocks away from the Planet, a distance that Clark could cover in a second at his current speed. Even as he streaked forward, though, he was already scanning the area ahead, zooming in on it with his telescopic vision, then re-focusing his eyes even further so that he was observing the Square in all wavelengths from infrared up through X-ray. By the time he began his descent, he had already located the bomb and had gotten a good enough look at its insides to know that, if this thing went off, Metropolis was going to be dealing with something much worse than a crater in the middle of a tourist trap.
The device was sitting on a traffic island in the middle of Bessolo Boulevard-a large metal canister, practically wrapped in C4, with a timer that, in large red digits, showed that there were only twenty seconds left before detonation. The C4 and the short fuse weren’t the problem, though. The problem lay inside the metal canister, in the form of an oily liquid which Clark’s microscopic vision revealed to be none other than VX-one of the deadliest nerve agents in existence.
Clark dove towards the earth, decelerating rapidly at the last possible millisecond so as to avoid making his own crater in the middle of the Square. The authorities had managed to clear people out of the area directly surrounding the bomb, but the place was still seething with bewildered crowds-they would never be evacuated in time. Clark knew he could handle this, though. All he had to do was grab the bomb, fly it into outer space where it could explode safely-
But he had barely begun to reach for the bomb when he noticed that it contained several motion detectors. From the way they were placed, it seemed that they were geared to detonate the device if the explosives were separated from the VX canister, if the entire thing was moved, or if it was even touched. And if the motion detectors weren’t bad enough, the bomb also had temperature sensors. So much for trying to disarm it with heat vision, Clark thought, although he hadn’t even gotten far enough along in his mental calculations to figure out how that would have worked.
Somehow, though, part of Clark found a moment to feel immensely relieved that no one else in the Square had come into physical contact with the bomb, accidentally or otherwise. At the same time, another part of him realized that the panicked crowds had started to take notice of his presence, that the pounding feet were coming to a standstill, that people were halting in their flight to watch him. It was the exact opposite of what they should have been doing, but Clark didn’t have time to tell them to keep going, to get away-not that they would be able to get away in-
Fifteen seconds left.
Clark briefly considered using his breath to blow the people out of Glenmorgan Square, but he knew that was no good-it would only hurt them. He had to focus on the bomb. Stopping it was the only viable option.
But how could he do that? His mind raced through possible courses of action. The more he thought about it, the clearer it became that there was no way he could defuse the bomb, no way he could prevent it from detonating here, on the ground. What he had to do, then, was to contain it once it went off. He could use his body as a shield against the blast, but that didn’t solve the problem of the VX, which would be vaporized by the heat of the exploding C4, and dispersed as a gas. He would have to inhale the deadly vapor, fly into space, and release it there.
Five seconds left.
Clark scanned the bomb one last time. He already had his plan, but he was hoping that there was something he had missed, something that could aid him. And that was when he realized that he had missed something, but it wasn’t going to be helpful in the least.
Four seconds to go, and the base of the metal canister was made out of lead. Lead. He had noticed it earlier, and it should have screamed to him that maybe, just maybe, this disaster wasn’t only designed to hurt the citizens of Metropolis, but him as well. In his rush to figure out a way to save the city from the bomb, though, his mind had jumped right over the issue of the lead base, brushing it off as coincidence, never pausing to think that he couldn’t stop the bomb if the bomb stopped him first.
Three seconds, and he couldn’t believe that, after everything that he had been through, he still wasn’t wary enough. That he could be so protective of others’ lives, but so careless with his own.
Although it could be nothing. A bluff. A scare tactic. After all, the government had made a special effort to clean up all of the kryptonite left over from Luthor’s continent...
Two seconds, and Clark shook the thoughts from his head. He knew that it wouldn’t do any good to worry about the lead compartment, or his own fate in this situation. Regardless of what might be hiding in that lead base, he had a duty to perform. He couldn’t abandon Metropolis to save himself from a threat that wasn’t even fully substantiated, but only suspected.
He couldn’t abandon Metropolis again period.
One second. While he waited for the coming explosion, Clark looked up from the bomb that he was kneeling in front of. To him, the whole Square appeared to be in a kind of suspended animation. People frozen in mid-gesture, wind-blown pieces of litter hovering above the ground, a flock of pigeons crawling through the air instead of swooping, as though they were flying through gelatin. One of the police officers on the scene who had come running up to Clark was just finishing off the tail end of the question, “What do we do, Superman?”, and the last syllable to emerge from the man’s mouth seemed to stretch on for hours, before an urgent beeping cut him off.
Zero.
In the brief pause before the bomb detonated-a pause that was brief even by Clark’s standards, as electrons whizzed through wires at nearly the speed of light-he found himself wondering, for god knows what reason, whether Lois would be upset with him for going back on his promise to talk to Richard for her. He didn’t get the chance to come to any conclusions, though.
Time was up.
Note: The rest of the series can be found here.
Author: taro_twist (aka Tairona)
Timeline/Fandom: post-Superman Returns
Pairing: Lois/Clark
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: DC and the WB own everything! I'm just temporarily messing with their creations ...
Spoilers: Superman Returns, Superman II, and I guess Superman: The Movie, to be on the safe side
Word Count: 3,275
Chapter Five: To Lay It All on the Line
As far as he knew, Clark Kent had never had an out of body experience.
His several brushes with death had led to nothing more than darkness and unsettling dreams. Maybe being able to fly in real life had negated the need to hover above his body when he’d nearly drowned in the Atlantic. Or maybe the afterlife wasn’t real-the white light just random neural firing-and Kryptonian brain biology had prevented him from seeing tunnels after he’d plunged into Centennial Park.
And then there was the fact that astral projection just wasn’t one of his powers.
Whatever the reason, though, even if he had never left his physical body behind, Clark was certain that, if he ever did, it would feel something like what he was experiencing right now.
For the last ten minutes, he had managed to listen and nod and make vague noises like “mm-hmm” as Lois had related the events of the past few days. She had told him a slightly skewed version of her revelatory argument with “Charlie,” which he knew by heart. And then, she had explained her unfinished quarrel with Richard, which nearly fit with the assumptions Clark had already made about it, but not quite.
And he had managed to listen to her without ripping off his glasses, or saying, “Lois, I should have told you how much I loved-love-you.” But he was only able to do it by letting go of the part of himself that wanted to reach out to her. Piece by piece, he let that part of himself float away until, in the end, he felt that nearly all of him was hovering around the ceiling panels and emergency water sprinklers, and that only a sliver of him was still speaking with the woman sitting before him.
“Why don’t you just explain everything to Richard?” that sliver of him asked, while the rest of him watched from overhead with a kind of morbid curiosity.
“Oh, believe me, I’ve tried,” Lois laughed mirthlessly. “But things just keep getting in the way. I couldn’t talk to him while Jason was with us, of course. Then, after we dropped Jason off at day camp, he got a phone call about some political development in Venezuela, and by the time he was finished with that, we’d already arrived here. And I’d go find him now, but I can’t even stand up because of my stupid ankle.”
Lois allowed her head to drop into her hands. She massaged her temples, eyes closed, then raked her fingers through her hair and sat upright. When she opened her eyes again, something new was there.
“Clark, do you think I made the right decision?” she asked.
With a jolt, Clark fell back into himself.
“P-pardon me, Lois?” he stammered, hoping that the question he had just heard was nothing more than a hallucination.
“Was I right to choose Richard?” she asked, and this time there was no mistaking that the words were real.
“Do you think you … weren’t r-right?” Clark queried. He wasn’t sure whether he even wanted an answer, or whether he was just stalling at this point.
“When I made the decision, I was completely sure of myself,” Lois told him. “But let’s be honest-I was pretty damn pissed off. And I’m still pissed off. But I feel like I should have given myself more time to think about it.”
It’s never too late to change your mind, Clark wanted to say, but he choked back the words. “Wrong” didn’t even begin to describe this situation. All of the alien powers in the world couldn’t have given him an advantage over a human being that was as unfair as this one. If he abused his current position to convince Lois to pick him over Richard … well, one, it would never work out, because once Lois discovered the truth, never mind having a relationship with her-she would bury him alive in a coffin full of kryptonite. But more importantly, he would have abandoned everything that he had ever tried to stand for in life.
That is, if I haven’t done that already.
"Lois, with everything you just told me, I ... I think you already answered your question," Clark said, choosing his words with the same care that one would use to tip-toe through a field of landmines, fishing for some way, any way, to avoid having to give her his opinion on the matter.
Lois frowned, thoughtful. She then nodded. "You're right," she conceded. "I guess I did."
Inwardly, Clark breathed a sigh of relief that Lois didn't push the subject further. At the same time, though, his stomach tied itself in knots as he wondered what she had decided the answer to her question was. From what she had revealed over the past hour, he had a feeling that it would not be in his favor.
"Clark, could you do one more thing for me?" Lois suddenly asked, eyeing the stairwell door.
"Sure, Lois," Clark agreed. "What is it?"
"Could you try to find Richard, and tell him that I want to talk to him?" Lois requested.
Clark gulped. "Wouldn’t it be easier for you to-to call him?”
“Do you honestly think he’d answer a phone call from me?” Lois scoffed.
“I-I guess not,” Clark mumbled.
“You know I’m the last person he wants to speak to right now,” Lois reminded him. “But I don’t want to go through the rest of the day waiting to have an argument with him. I’m ready to get this over with. And besides, Clark,” she smiled, her voice sweetening a touch. “You’re so nice. I’m sure you could persuade him to come back and hear me out.”
Clark raised his eyebrows. This was getting to be too much, but at the same time, he felt that he had no choice but to ride it out. Today’s moment for telling Lois the truth had passed him by faster than a speeding bullet. When the next opportunity would come along, he had no idea. He did know, though, that revealing himself to Lois now would be akin to his newest alter ego, Charlie Bird, infiltrating Chinese intelligence only to intentionally blow his cover while in a room full of armed men. Bad idea, on too many levels to count.
Not that Clark had had any intention of “infiltrating” Lois’s inner most thoughts, but-
“Please, Clark?” Lois added, her eyes beseeching.
“Um, you-you bet, Lois,” Clark finally conceded. “Are you-you sure ... will you be all right, though, by yourself?"
"Don't worry. I'll live," Lois assured him.
"I know," Clark murmured. He then raised his eyes to the ceiling, and began scanning the floors above them for any sign of Lois's fiance. "Where-where do you think Richard might have gone?"
Lois shrugged. "Up to the office, probably."
But Clark had already checked the Planet's newsroom. There was no sign of the man there. He dropped his eyes, ready to X-ray the floors below them, but then decided that it would probably be better to conduct his search when he was no longer in Lois's presence. He already did enough strange things around her-no need to make her think that he had an unnatural fascination with office carpeting, on top of everything else.
"Oh, and Clark?" Lois stopped him as he headed towards the stairwell door.
"Yes?"
"Thank you,” she said, smiling a smile that he had seen before as Superman, but never as Clark Kent.
-----
The stairwell was empty now, the morning rush to the office having ended over an hour ago, and no one was around to see the large, bespectacled man in a baggy suit gripping the banister with such force that the metal seemed to groan beneath his fingers.
If someone had seen Clark Kent at this moment, “mild-mannered” would have been the last adjective to come to mind. His jaw was set, and even the thick lenses of his glasses could not hide the red glow that was growing in his eyes. It took him every ounce of self-control that he had to keep from ripping the banister from the wall or incinerating the entire stairwell with one burning glare. He rarely lost his temper, even when dealing with the most heinous of criminals, but today seemed like it might turn out to be an exception.
It wasn’t, though. After a few tense moments, and a few deep breaths that rattled the walls, Clark released the banister. He used his heat vision to smooth away the traces of his hand prints, and then started down the stairs, heading towards the parking garage where his X-ray vision had located Richard.
After his conversation with Lois, the grief that he had felt at the prospect of losing her forever had given way to complete blankness-an emotional vacuum that, in turn, had quickly filled with an explosive fury. He knew that it wasn’t rational for him to be angry in this situation, but then again, the situation itself had left “rational” behind ages ago. He couldn’t even comfort himself with Lois’s confession about how much she had loved him, because that only served to emphasize the fact that he had taken something that was just so good, and had destroyed it beyond all repair.
It made him want to scream, to snap the peaks off of mountains, to hurl meteors into the polar ice caps until they cracked, to fly low through the streets of Metropolis, breaking the sound barrier, shaking the buildings and bursting their windows with sonic boom after sonic boom. It made him want to race back to Lois, to tell her all of the things that he had kept from her with both of his disguises, to make her see that, when everything else was stripped away, he was just a man who had made a mistake. A man who surely needed her more than the Earth would ever need a Superman.
Not until he reached the end of that train of thought did he realize that, in his daze, he had actually turned around and had started bounding back up the stairs, not at super speed, but fast enough as it was, taking them two at a time. He didn’t know what had possessed him, but he did know that, suddenly, finally, he was ready to lay it all on the line.
Lois had asked him if he thought she was right to choose Richard. Well, he didn’t have the answer to that. He couldn’t make the choice for her. But how could she even make the choice for herself if she didn’t know the entire truth? And not just the truth about his identity, but the truth about how much she meant to him.
Before he knew it, he was back on the sixth floor landing, his hands on the push-bar of the stairwell door. He could hear Lois’s heart beating just on the other side of the wall, he could hear-
A scream. Dozens of them.
For the second time today, Clark found himself holding onto something so tightly that his fingerprints were pressed into its surface. Gritting his teeth, he let go of the metal push-bar, and propelled himself up through the stairwell, changing his clothes as he went. He couldn’t ignore the situation that had suddenly thrust itself upon his attention. The things he wanted to say-needed to say-had waited too long already, but they would have to wait a little longer.
They would not, however, have to wait forever. The second this was taken care of, he would talk to Lois. Even if he had to do it in the middle of the Planet newsroom with the entire bullpen tape recording their conversation and a WGBS-TV camera trained on them, he would tell her the truth.
Energized by this thought, Clark shot through the door to the Planet’s roof, accelerating up to Mach ten as he arced through the sky, tracing the course of a perfect parabola whose end lay in Glenmorgan Square-the heart of midtown Metropolis. From the sound of things, a wave of terror was spreading through the place, radiating outwards like shocks from an earthquake. Clark could hear hundreds of feet pounding the earth in a massive stampede, flesh smacking flesh as people fought over taxis and shoved their way down into the Metro stations, police whistles shrilling in a futile attempt to keep order. And above it all, one cry, passing from mouth to mouth, almost chanted, like some perverted mantra:
There’s a bomb.
Glenmorgan Square was only a couple dozen blocks away from the Planet, a distance that Clark could cover in a second at his current speed. Even as he streaked forward, though, he was already scanning the area ahead, zooming in on it with his telescopic vision, then re-focusing his eyes even further so that he was observing the Square in all wavelengths from infrared up through X-ray. By the time he began his descent, he had already located the bomb and had gotten a good enough look at its insides to know that, if this thing went off, Metropolis was going to be dealing with something much worse than a crater in the middle of a tourist trap.
The device was sitting on a traffic island in the middle of Bessolo Boulevard-a large metal canister, practically wrapped in C4, with a timer that, in large red digits, showed that there were only twenty seconds left before detonation. The C4 and the short fuse weren’t the problem, though. The problem lay inside the metal canister, in the form of an oily liquid which Clark’s microscopic vision revealed to be none other than VX-one of the deadliest nerve agents in existence.
Clark dove towards the earth, decelerating rapidly at the last possible millisecond so as to avoid making his own crater in the middle of the Square. The authorities had managed to clear people out of the area directly surrounding the bomb, but the place was still seething with bewildered crowds-they would never be evacuated in time. Clark knew he could handle this, though. All he had to do was grab the bomb, fly it into outer space where it could explode safely-
But he had barely begun to reach for the bomb when he noticed that it contained several motion detectors. From the way they were placed, it seemed that they were geared to detonate the device if the explosives were separated from the VX canister, if the entire thing was moved, or if it was even touched. And if the motion detectors weren’t bad enough, the bomb also had temperature sensors. So much for trying to disarm it with heat vision, Clark thought, although he hadn’t even gotten far enough along in his mental calculations to figure out how that would have worked.
Somehow, though, part of Clark found a moment to feel immensely relieved that no one else in the Square had come into physical contact with the bomb, accidentally or otherwise. At the same time, another part of him realized that the panicked crowds had started to take notice of his presence, that the pounding feet were coming to a standstill, that people were halting in their flight to watch him. It was the exact opposite of what they should have been doing, but Clark didn’t have time to tell them to keep going, to get away-not that they would be able to get away in-
Fifteen seconds left.
Clark briefly considered using his breath to blow the people out of Glenmorgan Square, but he knew that was no good-it would only hurt them. He had to focus on the bomb. Stopping it was the only viable option.
But how could he do that? His mind raced through possible courses of action. The more he thought about it, the clearer it became that there was no way he could defuse the bomb, no way he could prevent it from detonating here, on the ground. What he had to do, then, was to contain it once it went off. He could use his body as a shield against the blast, but that didn’t solve the problem of the VX, which would be vaporized by the heat of the exploding C4, and dispersed as a gas. He would have to inhale the deadly vapor, fly into space, and release it there.
Five seconds left.
Clark scanned the bomb one last time. He already had his plan, but he was hoping that there was something he had missed, something that could aid him. And that was when he realized that he had missed something, but it wasn’t going to be helpful in the least.
Four seconds to go, and the base of the metal canister was made out of lead. Lead. He had noticed it earlier, and it should have screamed to him that maybe, just maybe, this disaster wasn’t only designed to hurt the citizens of Metropolis, but him as well. In his rush to figure out a way to save the city from the bomb, though, his mind had jumped right over the issue of the lead base, brushing it off as coincidence, never pausing to think that he couldn’t stop the bomb if the bomb stopped him first.
Three seconds, and he couldn’t believe that, after everything that he had been through, he still wasn’t wary enough. That he could be so protective of others’ lives, but so careless with his own.
Although it could be nothing. A bluff. A scare tactic. After all, the government had made a special effort to clean up all of the kryptonite left over from Luthor’s continent...
Two seconds, and Clark shook the thoughts from his head. He knew that it wouldn’t do any good to worry about the lead compartment, or his own fate in this situation. Regardless of what might be hiding in that lead base, he had a duty to perform. He couldn’t abandon Metropolis to save himself from a threat that wasn’t even fully substantiated, but only suspected.
He couldn’t abandon Metropolis again period.
One second. While he waited for the coming explosion, Clark looked up from the bomb that he was kneeling in front of. To him, the whole Square appeared to be in a kind of suspended animation. People frozen in mid-gesture, wind-blown pieces of litter hovering above the ground, a flock of pigeons crawling through the air instead of swooping, as though they were flying through gelatin. One of the police officers on the scene who had come running up to Clark was just finishing off the tail end of the question, “What do we do, Superman?”, and the last syllable to emerge from the man’s mouth seemed to stretch on for hours, before an urgent beeping cut him off.
Zero.
In the brief pause before the bomb detonated-a pause that was brief even by Clark’s standards, as electrons whizzed through wires at nearly the speed of light-he found himself wondering, for god knows what reason, whether Lois would be upset with him for going back on his promise to talk to Richard for her. He didn’t get the chance to come to any conclusions, though.
Time was up.