So Fate Demands - Chapter 1
This abomination is loose. To quote someone, "may God have mercy on your souls".
Rating: General
Warnings: None
Timeline: Post-series
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, obviously.
He is falling.
It is surprising how easy it is to tumble over a ledge in one’s drunken steps; shaken out of his befuddled state, his first thought is to call for the city’s savior. But it is too late. He landed on the hard concrete pavement with a sickening thud. Instantly, his already hazy vision is clouded by inescapable agony. He thought he saw a dark, winged figure descending from the heavens and for a moment, he fleetingly thought of an angel, but just as quickly, he realized it could not be.
“Forgive me, for I have sinned.” He whispered.
The figure paused and knelt next to him. Before he passed out, he could have sworn he saw a glint of blue.
The figure glided silently in the night sky, pausing often whenever a citizen is in distress of any form, including that ungrateful cat that tries to sink its claws into anything. It worked tirelessly until the first rays of the glorious yellow sun strikes Metropolis; realizing that the whole night has been spent, it hurriedly turned to the direction to Smallville. Home.
After making sure that no one else is around - not that anyone visited them nowadays - it pushed open the never-locked front door and sank gratefully into the sofa and into an unplanned slumber.
Yawning, another figure leisurely stepped down the stairs of the Kent house. Though sleep-smeared, his eyes caught a glint of gold tumbling towards the floor - and in a blur of motion, he deftly caught the plummeting helmet of fate.
Clark Kent stood in complete silence as he admired the sleeping form of Chloe Sullivan. Her shoulder-length golden hair is tousled when gravity claimed the helmet, but her unkempt beauty always mesmerized him. She was sprawled out awkwardly but he couldn’t help but stared in reverence for a few seconds at her skin so fair that it could have shimmered; and at the graceful movements of her deep, peaceful breathing. Very gently, he lift her arm and shifted her head a bit to make her more comfortable; he allows himself to indulge in three seconds of the faint smile on her lips before Superman zooms out to save the day yet again.
It was not until it he was flying across Metropolis when he remembered what Chloe has apparently spent her night on and that he is supposed to be displeased with that. Clark suddenly had a flashback of Chloe saying that whenever he wronged her, he never “stays in the penalty box”. Letting out a small sigh, he realized that Chloe Sullivan is simply the most difficult girl in the world to be mad at. Sinking deeper in another flashback, he remembered the time when he stood on the roof of the Daily Planet, trying to clear his head of the cries of help but was instead buried under an onslaught of memories from this special location. That was when Doctor Fate landed on the opposite side of the globe; his first thought was Kent Nelson before remembering his demise; besides, Nelson, while aged, still stood over six feet and this figure is at least a head shorter, and despite that its back is turned he could see it has a much slimmer build. It clearly did not expect his presence, and made a hasty exit; his curiosity got the better of him and he supersped in front of it. When it asked him to step aside, he instantly recognized Chloe’s voice despite that it is deepened both by the helmet and by choice. His first move was to remove the helmet, which might as well been electrified. Chloe seemed to consider just turning and leaving, but with a defeated sigh she took off the helmet. For several long minutes, they just looked into each other’s eyes. By this time, it seemed that words are sometimes unnecessary; they knew each other so well they often knew what they would say before they voiced it. Looking deep into those beautiful green eyes, he thought he saw flashes of determination and reluctance, even a little of pain and fear, but the greatest of them all was compassion.
Finally, she spoke. “Clark…would you come with me?” she said, extending a hand.
Clark flinched. Unbeknownst to her, this reminded him very much of a moment between him and another woman… a lifetime ago, with the roles reversed. Gingerly, he did what he was asked, and with an almost unnoticeably small shift, they drifted over the edge of the roof.
Together, they hovered above the city, lonely gods gazing down at the sprawling Metropolis below.
“Listen. What do you hear?”
He could have sworn she could see all his memories and thoughts, and know that triggering this would leave the Man of Steel trapped inside his mind where he couldn’t just escape from.
“I hear everything.” He replied in what seemed to be a trance.
“I feel everything.” She countered. “You might hear people crying out for a savior every day, but with the helmet of fate magnifying my empathic healing, I go further than that. I share their emotion. I share their pain. And now you know that, you might be able to understand my decision.”
Still lost in his own world, Clark barely felt it when she brought him back to where they come from with a gentle tug.
He shook himself out of his reverie. Soaring through the stratosphere at a safe velocity of mach ten, Superman stopped briefly to vaporise a small meteor before his infrared vision picked up a volcano spewing magma towards a small village. Carefully reducing his speed as he approaches the ground, he cools the lava into a bank of obsidian with a huge blast of super breath and throws it into the ocean for good measure.
Pondering for a moment atop the rim of the deceptively calm crater, Superman decided that, for once, he is going to take Lex Luthor’s offer, which came with a “for old times’ sake”, at face value; after all, it is not like he knows how to harm him; he allowed himself a small smile knowing that he has an ace up his sleeve. Besides, he must admit that he is curious of what Lex is up to.
“So long, Kal-El. Quid agis?”
“It’s Chloe who speaks Latin, and my name is Clark,” he retorted, slightly irritated.
“And here I am, thinking with decades of leisure time you would have extended the knowledge within your magnificent brain.”
“Unlike you, I have the world to save.”
“And that is what I am hoping to achieve.”
“If it had mattered to you, Lex, you could have saved the world years ago.”
“Ah, how I missed your sparkling intellect dispensing profound wisdom from the eternal moral higher ground.”
He looks as young as ever, Superman observed as Lex Luthor sauntered out of the shadows in his new facility. He apparently worked around the clone degeneration; otherwise, he wouldn’t have used them so wastefully.
With a flourish, Lex unveiled a large piece of machinery, surrounded by thick walls of concrete. Superman tries to see pass the outer layers with X-ray vision only to find its inner walls to be thickly lined with lead.
“A reactor employing controlled fusion of kryptonite.” He explained somewhat airily. “Of course, lead shielding has been applied for health reasons.”
“So what’s the emergency?”
“You might have noticed that while at this point, kryptonite is about as abundant as sandstone in Smallville and thus is the cheapest method of energy generation ever known to mankind and I had my team scour the town for every last piece of it, but having no known sources other than the two meteor showers, my stockpile would run out sooner or later. I figure that if anyone knows where to find them, it is the last son of Krypton. Beautiful things, aren’t they?” Taking advantage of Superman’s temporary lapse of attention, Lex plucked a shard of kryptonite out of nowhere and tossed it at him. He caught it instinctively, noting Lex’s satisfied smirk. After soaking up solar radiation of a yellow sun for many years, he has become mostly invulnerable to green kryptonite - not that he had or wanted to share with Lex.
“And I thought you have renounced your vendetta against Lex.”
“I wanted to, Bart. Clark and I gave him so many second chances, but he only came back worse than ever, so forgive me if I am a little sceptical when he decides to claim complete amnesia of everything except the earliest years when they are still best pals. Knowing Lex, everything he does has an ulterior motive, even though Clark may be too much of a boy scout not to believe him.”
He sighed dramatically. “Remind me why am I helping you to spy on Clark in the dead of the night again?”
“Because of my charming personality?” she replied absent-mindedly as she continued to stare at Clark, who just turned around, but thankfully didn’t spot them. Looking a little disgruntled, Superman launched himself into the sky. She nodded to Bart, who zoomed into the facility and returned in less than ten seconds, reporting that what Lex had is exactly as he claimed. A murky, dimly glowing green rock caught her attention. Wondering how it got there, she stooped to pick it up.
Suddenly, the pair was engulfed by thick, black smoke; Bart’s first reaction is to run, but instead got an eyeful and crashed into some crates, coughing and spluttering, cursing himself for not thinking of fanning away the gas away first. A fraction of a second later is a brief flash, and he thought he saw a shape shudder and fall. Running in a small circle just under the speed of sound, he siphoned most of the smoke away, although it didn’t help with his eyes. Stumbling towards her and futilely trying to blink away the soot, he gathered her slender form into his arms and sped away.
Superman drifted distractedly through the skies. He was tempted to call it a day, but one anguished call for help, and he dived towards it without another thought.
The red blur slows to a stop in the Kent house and set his precious cargo down on the bed. To his shock, Chloe is covered in numerous cuts and burns, and is bleeding heavily onto the sheets. Recovering from his stunned state just in time to stop himself from calling 911 - it won’t be the first time in this day that his impulsiveness get him into a sticky situation. Chloe had practically begged him not to reveal their operation to anyone in any form, no matter what.
“Even Clark?”
“Especially Clark.”
Pacing nervously, he thought of a thousand solutions, each one less sensible than the last. He knew she had a record of rising from the dead; yet he was not sure whether it would work on outside wounds, and he was not willing to gamble her life on it.
After sorting out a couple of would-be car crashes in the rush hour, Superman is surprised that the sun has already set; tempted though he is to help humans twenty four hours a day - technically, he needs no food, rest or sleep under Earth’s burning yellow sun, but the strain does mess with his finer control. He knows if he doesn’t seize this chance, when the city is relatively quiet, to retire, he won’t be able to resist working through the night.
There is nothing he could do to hide such obvious injuries; a selfish part of him wanted to hightail out of there before Clark comes home. It is not a pretty sight and he believe Clark after a long day with added Lex Luthor frustration would not be the easiest person to reason with, but he quickly berated himself for even letting that thought cross his mind.
Hanging perfectly still five miles above ground, Superman closed his eyes and allowed his super hearing to filter through the buzz of city noise, until it focused on one single, distant sound; a distinct heartbeat. Smiling to himself, he locked onto the familiar, comforting sound and cruised towards the beacon. Home.
Bart resigned to the inevitable after a single second thanks to his accelerated thinking rate. He is thankful that her back is mostly unscathed, or his carrying before would have pushed the shrapnel inwards. His gaze lingered for a moment as her chest rose and fell; feeling slightly guilty, he ripped off what is left of her clothes; forcing himself not to tip too far into super speed, he dug the bits of offending metal out of her flesh, cleaning the wounds with warm water and whatever ointment he managed to fish out of the cupboard and bandage them up afterwards.
Once again, Superman marvelled at how natural flight has become, remembering how he couldn’t do it even after witnessing about a dozen of other kryptonians zipping across the skies.
As he picked out a particularly stubborn fragment from her cheek with a pair of “borrowed” pincers, she trembled slightly and her eyelashes fluttered, petrifying him. She looked so fragile and helpless he couldn’t help but stare for a few seconds, before checking that the bandages are secure and covering her with a blanket. Bending over to wipe the blood from her face, he froze when the faint whisper of her breath reminded him how close they were. He was seized by another impulsive urge - the temptation of her motionless lips was too great. Do it, prodded a cheeky voice in his head. You haven’t hesitated with others before, not even when they are awake. In fact, he didn’t know what hindered him. He brushed a few strands of her hair off her eyelids. She won’t even know it happened, the voice nudged again. Struggling mentally, he somehow managed to stop himself with less than an inch between their lips.
Still listening to her heartbeat, Superman judged that she is probably asleep, but he decides to walk in anyway. She has insisted that he keep his two feet on the ground while indoors, claiming that the floating was eerie, and he was not one to disagree with her.
Preoccupied, Bart almost missed the muffled footsteps upstairs. Gathering himself together, he went straight for the door - only to collide with two hundred pounds of very solid kryptonian.