Shattered Glass - Chapter 3
Title: Shattered Glass
--Chapter 3 - Mired in the Misery
Author: Mariusgirl
Fandom: Superman Returns
Word Count: 3,157
Rating: T
Summary: The allure of the unattainable was was often the undoing of man...
Disclaimer: Somebody elses' sandbox, I'm just playing in it.
A plethora of Starbucks coffee cups littered the cluttered desk and surrounding floor area, tossed aside without so much as a second thought when they were drained dry of the acerbic black blood of life. Here and there a balled up sheet of paper joined the cardboard cups on the floor near the trashcan where they had been lobbed in a mock basketball moment. The part of the room that remained removed from the desk was nearly spotless except for the sheets on the bed. Still tucked neatly under the pillow and around the edges, the trifling creases that rippled through them where the only indication that the bed had been used at all.
The room’s only occupant was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back propped up against the bed as he stared forlornly out the window at the snow laden world beyond his small slice of hell. A small black cell phone lay on his lap and he idly fingered the smooth casing as he let the finality of what had occurred in the last few hours or so sink into his numb mind completely.
The morning news continued to play softly in the background, CNN proclaiming that a state of emergency had been declared in Metropolis in the wake of the ravaging storm. The death toll, estimated at almost one hundred people, was steadily rising as rescue crews worked ceaselessly to dig out stranded motorists and return power to the frozen city.
But what had driven him to his current state was a close up of a place he recognized, a place he called home. Devastated by downed trees and buried in snow, he could clearly see that half of the roof had been blown off by the hellacious winds before the snow had arrived. He tried to call home, but there was no answer. The power lines were down all over the city and he had no way of knowing where his loved ones where or even if they were safe.
He tapped the black casing of the phone impatiently, his mind reeling with all manner of sickening possibilities, each one more terrifying and nauseating than the last. A tight ball of icy dread had formed in his lower abdomen and nothing he did could dispel his ever-growing sense of apprehension.
Not knowing what else to do, he flipped the phone open and punched in a new number, silently praying to anyone who would listen that his call would go through. Five seconds later, the phone began to ring and he breathed a heavily sigh of relief. It rang twice before a too cheerful voice buzzed in his ear.
“Jimmy Olsen, Daily Planet.”
“Jimmy, its Richard -“
“Oh, hey,” said Jimmy excitedly, cutting across him. “How’s New York? I heard the storm brushed over you guys before heading south.”
Richard sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between his eyes where a monstrous headache was forming. “Yeah, that’s why I’m calling. Have you seen Lois today?”
There was a pause in which the young photographer shook his head, but, realizing that Richard couldn’t see him, cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Well, no,” he said as if this should have been the most obvious thing in the word, “I haven’t been over to the hospital yet. I only just got the news this morning when I clocked in.”
“The-where?” Richard nearly dropped the phone in shock as Jimmy’s words reverberated around in his numb head.
His heart skipped a beat before racing off in a blind panic, and all of his worst fears and earlier scenarios came crashing back with painful clarity.
Jimmy, oblivious to his friend’s plight, continued on conversationally.
“Wait, slow down Jimmy,” demanded Richard when he found his voice again. “What happened? Where’s Jason? Is Lois alright?” The questions spilled out in rapid succession without much thought.
There was an awkward pause on Jimmy’s end and Richard through he heard a sharp intake of breath. Had he been closer to his friend, he would have throttled him for making him wait.
“Well, gosh, you don’t know?” He said at last.
Richard rolled his eyes as the realization dawned on Jimmy that no one had bothered to call and tell him anything. Or that they had tried but had been unsuccessful with the downed lines and towers.
“No, tell me everything,” he retorted, emphasizing each word by slowly and clearly enunciating them one by one.
“I-I don’t know everything,” Jimmy began tensely. “All I heard was that Lois got caught in the storm. She’s in pretty rough shape, ICU rough. Superman found her.” He hesitated to laugh nervously before plunging on, determined to get it all out in the open so that he could hang up. “Go figure, huh, that it’d be Superman swooping in to rescue her. Just like old times.”
The words “Lois”, “Superman”, and “rescue” jumbled together so naturally in one sentence made Richard’s free hand curl unthinkingly into a fist. He had some unresolved issues regarding the Man of Steel, some deep seeded rage that wouldn’t die no matter how many times that man saved his life, many of which stemmed from his cavalier abandonment of Lois.
Of course. It had to be the Man of Steel.
Richard closed his eyes and rubbed gingerly at his temples in a vain attempt to curb the headache that had taken up residence in his skull.
“Where’s Jason,” he asked through clenched teeth.
“Uh…”
Jimmy’s brief pause might as well have been the news that his son was dead. It felt like it in that moment. A cold tingling sensation that started at the base of his spine spread throughout his body like wildfire and he broke out in a cold sweat. Near hyperventilating, he swallowed hard but the lump that had formed in his throat refused to budge. His hand, sweaty and trembling, barley managed to keep its grip on the slippery plastic casing of the phone. He switched it to his other hand and rubbed his clammy palm on the coarse fabric of his jeans.
“Jimmy, please, tell me.”
The fear and dread in his voice was horrifyingly palpable and he could almost imagine Jimmy squirming uncomfortably in his cushy black desk chair at the sound.
“We, uh, we don’t know where Jason is. He wasn’t with Lois and -“
Anything else that Jimmy said fell on deaf ears as the phone slid from Richard’s shaking hand and clattered with a muffled thud to the well kept carpet of his hotel room. His blood turned to ice as the room grew hotter and smaller by the second.
Lois injured. Jason missing.
Richard felt the room start to spin sickeningly and he closed his eyes to keep from falling over in the whirlwind of tormenting emotions that assaulted him. Fear, anger, guilt, dismay, they all rushed with equal ferocity through his veins leaving him numb and unfeeling until he slumped over onto the floor.
xXx
The allure of the unattainable was often the undoing of man, not only as a species but as an individual human being. Clark Kent was no exception to this rule. He was no stranger to the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions that reared their ugly head in the mist of great turmoil and awe inspiring elation. His present frame of mind was no different than that of any other person had they been in his shoes, and if he wasn’t careful he could end up hurting the people he loved; even more than he already had. Emotions that ran rampant during such a dangerous time, if not curbed and controlled, would be his ultimate downfall.
Clark was painfully aware of that simple fact as he sat in the back of a yellow cab that smelled frighteningly like the inside of his mother’s house during Thanksgiving holidays. Cinnamon and curry hung thick on the air and mingled sickeningly with the acrid burn of a cigar. He wanted to roll the window down but the cab driver insisted that the cold air would be the death of them both.
Little does he know, thought Clark ruefully as he slumped back against the worn leather and rubbed his weary face.
They had been sitting in the same spot for fifteen minuets. Traffic ahead was at a dead standstill, prompting Clark to wonder what could possibly be holding up half of the city, but all he had to do was glance sideways out of the window to know that it was a rhetorical question.
Snow still covered everything and was preventing the floundering city from finding its feet again. Here and there National Guardsmen were scattered around, directing traffic on the main roads, the only functional roads for miles.
He chanced a glance at the meter with rueful expectancy and saw that it was continuing to tick even though they were sitting still. His meager salary that was afforded to him by the Daily Planet did not stretch thin enough to cover such expenditures as extended cab fare. With each tick of the meter he could almost feel the hole in his pocket growing larger and larger with no end in sight.
Heaving a sigh, he dug into his pocket and passed his current fare through the small window to the driver before braving the icy streets on foot. At this rate, he could make it all the way to the office and back to the cab before it moved an inch.
It wasn’t until he had shoved his hands into his pockets and crossed three blocks that he found his mind wandering away from Lois and Jason to a more sinister subject. Sinister in its ability to ensnare him so completely, and disconcerting in that he knew exactly what it was that bothered him most about it.
Clark hadn’t given the warehouse where he had found Joshua much thought over the last few hours, but now that he was virtually alone he felt the familiar tug of anxiety growing in the pit of his stomach. The crates bothered him more than he cared to admit and in reality he knew that there was only one rational explanation for why they had affected him so. But even then, he could feel that something wasn’t right. There was more at play here than just the crates and whatever ominous evils that they contained. Something iniquitous was at work in Metropolis, something that made his senses scream danger.
The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that in some round about way, whatever was going on with those crates would eventually lead him straight back to his arch nemesis. And that thought, more than anything else, made his blood boil. If Lex Luther was behind any of this, he would rue the day he ever set foot in Metropolis, and before Superman was through with him, he’d wish that he had never escaped from that Godforsaken spit of land in the Atlantic.
But more than that, Clark was nearly one hundred percent certain that whatever was a foot in Metropolis, that it would surely take him far from his comfort zone. Maybe even over the edge, straight into the heart of the bleeding abyss of evil.
This wasn’t a thought that he particularly liked to dwell on, not even as Superman. And with so many dismal thoughts already drumming around in his head, he didn’t have much room left for work.
He had made it all the way to the Daily Planet and through the front doors before he realized where he was. His feet had been leading the way as his mind raced off in a thousand different directions at once. He had thought to go by the hospital and visit Lois again, but decided that it was best to put in an appearance at work lest his employer decided he was no longer interested in drawing a menial paycheck and chunk him out on the street. As his only source of income, he couldn’t afford to lose his current job.
So it was with a heavy heart that he plopped down into his desk chair, not much caring what assignment came his way as long as it didn’t involve too much thought processing or field research on his part. His proverbial plate was beyond full, it was overflowing.
“Hi, Mr. Kent,” said a cheerful voice from a few desk over.
Clark plastered his trademark goofy grin across his features and pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose as the unwanted speaker made his way across the room.
“Hey, Jimmy, how goes it?”
Jimmy shrugged as he stole a chair from an abandoned desk and settled in for a long chat. Rolling his eyes, Clark crossed his arms across his chest in irritation.
“You heard about Lois,” his friend asked in a quite voice.
Clark nodded, knowing good and well that everyone within fifty miles would have heard about Lois by now. News and secrets alike spread like wildfire in Metropolis.
“Have you been to see her yet?”
“No,” Clark replied simply, hoping that the finality of his tone would indicate that the conversation was over.
But the hint was lost on Jimmy as he plowed on in a soft, conspiratorial voice with his theory about what had really happened during the course of the storm. Clark nodded but had already begun to tune him out, occasionally giving the obligatory nod or “uh huh” where appropriate.
Something at the corner of his desk had caught his eye. It was a piece of computer paper, the kind that little Jason White used in many of his Superman drawings, but it was half obscured by a portfolio on the poverty levels in the city so he couldn’t tell what was on it. He knew there had been nothing under that portfolio when he had left the office Friday night, just before the storm hit, and couldn’t fathom how it had gotten there.
“Listen, Jimmy, that’s fascinating,” he said abruptly, “but I have a lot of work to catch up on so if you don’t mind-“
Jimmy immediately stood, shaking his head, “no, no, sorry. Hey maybe we could do lunch and finish this conversation then?”
The hopefully look on his young face was enough to make Clark hesitate for a fraction of a second, giving Jimmy all the answer he thought he needed.
“Great! How about Donner’s at two o’clock?”
“Uh…”
“Okay, talk to you then.”
And he was gone.
Clark shook his head in confusion but quickly put all thoughts of Jimmy and lunch out of his mind. The paper on the corner of his desk beckoned enticingly to him and he didn’t have the will to resist. Moving the portfolio aside, he snatched up the paper. Almost immediately he felt his heart skip a beat as all the blood in his body rushed to his head with dizzying force.
The unmistakable figure of Superman was drawn carefully across the page in bright red and blue crayon. He was holding a brown teddy bear with a red bowtie and smiling unseeingly off the page into the receding space behind Clark’s head. The words “thank you” were scrawled in bright blue in untidy five year old handwriting across the bottom portion of the page.
It was a mistake. It had to be. A coincidence and nothing more. Something that Jason had drawn and accidentally left on his desk in his haste to go home. Yes, that was it. It had to be.
His eyes flew from the paper to the space around him and he breathed a strangled sigh of relief when he realized that he was alone. Hastily folding the paper into quarters, he shoved it deep into his jacket pocket with a shaking hand while his heart was pounded out a ferocious rock song in his chest.
It was impossible that Jason could know the truth. It was inconceivable that a five year old could see through his guise when he managed to deceive every adult around him day in and day out.
But there lay the problem. Jason was no ordinary five year old and he didn’t filter the word through a prism of preconceived thoughts and beliefs. He was only a child, and he saw the world as it was, not as others had taught him to see it.
A part of him wanted this to be nothing more than an innocent mistake, but another part of him, a part that often lead him into trouble, wanted it to be true.
xXx
Somewhere nearby he heard the soft sound of a gull calling overhead, the only sign of life that proved he hadn’t dropped off the face of the earth. It wasn’t much, but at least he didn’t feel quite as alone as he curled into a tight ball on the mattress.
His head felt hot and too heavy to lift, and his eyelids were fighting a loosing battle to remain open. No matter how hard he crushed Teddy against his chest, he could barely feel the plushy bear on his numb body. The tears that had flowed so freely the night before were gone, replaced by a stony yet alarmingly pale countenance. He had utterly exhausted his supply of tears and was too sleepy to care.
A small bottle of water lay on the floor where he had dropped it, its remaining contents leaking out onto the cold stone and starting to freeze in the frigid night air that seeped in through every crack and crevice imaginable in his small cell.
He felt thirsty but even if he had the strength to crawl towards the bottle it would have been to no avail unless he wanted to lick the water off of the dirty floor as most of it had already seeped out. As it was, he merely lay prone on the mattress, his breath coming out in small white puffs as he huddled beneath the warmth of a Power Rangers comforter that had appeared while he slept the previous night.
Despite the warmth that the blanket provided, he still felt unnaturally cold. His entirely body was racked with shivers, and the cycle of hot and cold that seemed to perpetually plague his waking hours was enough to make him feel like he was going to die. Mired in the misery, he was beginning to doubt his assertion that Superman was going to swoop in and save him.
There came a point where he stopped fighting the inevitable and let his eyes droop together without prying them open. His breathing leveled out and his death grip slackened on the bear.
Somewhere in the darkness a door slammed and was followed by a string of overt expletives, but Jason White slept on. Oblivious to the danger that was lurking in the shadows just beyond the barrier of his chamber.