Gardens of Wayne Manor: Sea Rescue (11/37)
Title: Chapter Eleven: Sea Rescue
Pairing/Characters: Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne
Rating: PG
Warnings: None needed
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2300Summary: Bruce and Clark explore a haunted house and rescue a drowning man.
Bruce heard Clark sneeze sharply behind him as dusty air assailed them. He unclipped the flashlight from his belt and let its beam play across the splintered walls and musty furniture.
"Some people say this house is haunted." Clark's voice quavered a bit in the darkness. "That's...that's nonsense, of course."
Bruce moved the flashlight beam along the floor. "Unless ghosts wear boots," he said. "Look. There are tracks in the dust."
"Okay, no ghosts," said Clark. "Just real men in boots skulking around somewhere. That's very reassuring."
Bruce was far too caught up in the mystery to notice Clark's reluctance to continue. He raised his voice and addressed the dark house: "Are you all right? Do you need help?"
Silence.
"The tracks go through here..." He followed the prints in the dust into another room with a canopy bed, swathed in cobwebs now. Out the window glimmered Gotham Bay, drowned in dusky shadows and sunset light. On the wall hung a picture of a middle-aged man in old-fashioned clothes with a beaky nose and beady eyes. "Egbert Cobblepot, I presume," Bruce said, reading the plate.
The dust in the bedroom was stirred up in every direction. Bruce opened a closet and Clark jumped as if he expected a skeleton to leap out, but there were only heavy coats sheathed in black plastic. A quick inspection of the rest of the house revealed the other rooms were undisturbed. "That's odd," said Bruce. "No footprints in the kitchen or the library at all. Why just the bedroom?"
"Can we think about this mystery outside?" Clark's head was swiveling back and forth with the wavering beam of light. "There's no one here that needs help and...I think this is trespassing."
"Hrm," said Bruce, but made his way out of the house.
"Maybe it was just the wind," Clark said when they got back to the telescope. "Maybe we imagined it."
"There is no wind," Bruce pointed out. "And we didn't imagine it. No, it's a mystery, all right." He puzzled over it, scratching at a mosquito bite on his arm. In the bay, below the bluffs, two small motorboats were zipping around, cutting white ribbons into the shadowed water, one following the other. Bruce watched them, his eyes slowly narrowing. "Something's not right down there. They're driving too fast, and--"
Over the water, the sound of a gunshot drifted up to the two boys, eerily distinct in the silent air. Then another.
Bruce swung to meet Clark's eyes, his own wide and startled.
"That was--"
"What do we--"
As their voices overlapped, someone below shouted something indistinct. Clark could see a tiny figure in one of the boats stand and throw something toward the boat ahead of them. There was a strange dull thud, a gout of flame, and the boat exploded into debris and black smoke.
Both boys were moving before the sound stopped ricocheting off the bare bluffs, hurling themselves down the steep slope, shale and rocks slipping under their feet. Clark found himself at the foot of the bluffs on a tiny, pebbled beach nestled between jagged rocks. Beside him, Bruce kicked off his sneakers and plunged into the water without a moment's hesitation. "Bruce!" Clark's cry was swallowed up in the sound of surf; Bruce was already surprisingly far from the shore, kicking strongly against the waves, his strokes sure and economical. Clark stared across the blazing wreckage bobbing in the water and saw the other boat roaring away, a white dot on the horizon. Whoever was shooting guns and throwing grenades from the boat didn't seem to realize there had been witnesses.
Bruce was almost to the wreckage now. Clark saw him suddenly surge forward and come up supporting a figure; Clark had his own sneakers off and was floundering toward the two swimmers with his pathetic crawl stroke by the time they turned toward the shore.
He met them halfway out. Bruce was struggling to keep a man above water; the man's head lolled, unconscious and bleeding. Clark got his shoulder under the man's body and tried to support both of them a little. Bruce was gasping and sputtering, his motions no longer sure but heavy and dragging. Clark wasn't certain he'd be strong enough to help get them safely to shore. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling cold riptides dragging at them, greedy and demanding. Be strong enough, he told himself, as if it could possibly make a difference.
Somehow it was enough to get all three of them to the rocky beach.
Staggering to his knees, Bruce turned the man onto his side. He coughed and gagged water, half-conscious; then his eyes slid closed again with a groan. He was in his thirties, with a reddish-brown mustache and matching hair plastered to his scalp. Clark heard Bruce take a deep, shaky breath. "This is a policeman."
"Huh?" Clark looked at the injured man. One sleeve was slowly turning red. "He doesn't look like a policeman."
"He is. I know him. His name's Gordon."
Clark was starting to shiver in the deepening shadows of the bluff. "You know a lot of policemen?" he asked, trying to break Bruce's fixed look a bit. "Are you in trouble a lot?"
Bruce shook his head but didn't answer. He reached out and brushed the man's hair aside, probing. "The head wound isn't as bad as it looks."
"The arm is bad," said Clark.
Bruce nodded.
Clark stared up the shale-slippery slope. "We have to get him up somewhere safe. What if those guys come back?"
Bruce stood. He was shivering too, but hardly seemed to notice. "Let's get him up to the top."
Using a backpack as a makeshift travois, the two boys managed to haul Gordon to the top of the bluff. The policeman groaned when his arm was jostled, but otherwise showed no sign of consciousness.
On the grassy opening, they stopped to catch their breath. The Cobblepot cottage loomed nearby, empty-eyed and unwelcoming. "Farmhouse...down the road," Clark wheezed. "Maybe someone there. With a phone."
Safely on level ground, they were able to lift Gordon and carefully carry him back toward the farmhouse. Clark was terrified that he'd drop the wounded man, but he managed to keep going, keep his end of the burden aloft.
There were lights on in the farmhouse, although the porch light was off. Clark and Bruce carefully eased the still-unconscious Gordon down and Bruce went to knock on the door.
The door was opened by a skinny man with a shock of pale hair. He looked at the body on the porch and his eyes widened. "What--"
"He almost drowned," Clark gasped, "He needs help. Please--call an ambulance."
The man was still staring when someone in the room behind him said, "What's going on, Clarence?"
Clarence glanced over his shoulder. "It's, um...two kids and a guy. He's hurt bad."
"Well, by all means, show them in."
There were four men in the house, and between them they soon had Gordon on a sofa. Blood from his arm was staining the fabric of the sofa, but it was already a mass of stains already, so Clark wasn't sure one more would matter.
The whole farmhouse was extremely run down, as were three of its inhabitants. The fourth--the man who had instructed Clarence to let them in--was a stocky man with a long nose and sharp eyes. His face looked somehow familiar, but Clark couldn't place it, distracted by the sight of the police officer bleeding on the couch.
"What should we do, boss?" Clarence asked, looking at the fourth man.
"Do? Why, we call for an ambulance, of course," said the man sharply. He didn't look happy about Clarence calling him "boss." "George, go dial 911."
One of the other men nodded and went into the kitchen. Clark could hear him on the phone: "Um, yeah. I need to report a guy who's hurt bad." A silence, just a bit too short to be an actual question on the other end. "Some kids brought him half-drowned, yeah...."
The long-nosed man was looking at Clark and Bruce as Clarence dabbed at Gordon's wound. "You saved this man? How very heroic of you, Mister..."
Bruce cleared his throat. "My name's Alfred. Alfred Kane. And my friend here is Robin Arthur." He said it so smoothly and surely that Clark blinked at him for a second before realizing, with a rush of relief, that he wasn't alone in feeling suspicious and unsure.
"Nice to meet you, sir," he said to the man, who was smiling at them, an oily smile that made Clark even more uneasy.
"So how did you nice young lads manage to find this poor soul?"
"We were exploring the rocks and found him washed up on a little beach," Bruce said. Clark smiled and nodded, trying to look a bit simple and letting Bruce take the lead so their stories wouldn't get tangled. "Maybe he was fishing and fell in?"
George came back into the room. "They said they'd send an ambulance, um...real soon now." His eyes darted to the "boss" as if for reassurance.
George was a terrible liar.
"Oh good," said Bruce. "Well, it's getting dark and Robin and I should be getting home. Thanks so much for helping."
The men didn't suggest the boys stay to explain the incident to the rescue team; they looked relieved to see Bruce and Clark go. "Have a safe walk home, boys," said the boss, smiling his unctuous smile.
The two of them walked down the driveway to the road, now totally swallowed in darkness. At the road, Bruce turned right, toward Gotham.
"Your telescope--"
"--Forget the telescope," Bruce hissed. He was still smiling, almost strolling, careless and relaxed. Only his voice was strained and urgent. "We have to get to the police!"
Once they were out of sight of the farmhouse, they both broke into a run. "What do you think--is going--on?" Clark asked around the stitch in his side.
"I don't know--but it's not good," Bruce gasped back. "Couldn't do anything there--got to get help--"
Headlights cut through the night, coming along the curving road toward them. Bruce grabbed Clark's arm and hauled him off the road into the bushes. They crouched there like rabbits, shivering in their sea-soaked clothes, as a car drove past them slowly. The driver, George, was scanning the side of the road. As the boys shrank deeper into the underbrush, Clark could see in the back seat the beaky silhouette of the "boss."
As the car disappeared, Bruce let out a long, slow breath. "They covered up their license plate, of course." He scrambled to his feet. "I'm betting Gordon was in the trunk of that car. And we could have been too."
"Do you think he's...still alive?" Clark asked, hearing the quaver in his voice.
"I don't know." Bruce was staring after the car. "I don't know." He started to jog down the road again. "He has to be. We have to save him."
: : :
They finally reached the Manor what seemed like hours later, panting and winded, their clothes crusted with sea salt. They breathlessly explained what had happened to Alfred, who immediately called the police. Soon a Detective Hansen was at the door and flashing a badge, her short curly hair tucked under a police cap. She sat in the library and took notes while the boys spilled out the story, their voices overlapping. Sometimes she would stop them and make them go back over some piece of information: she seemed especially interested in their description of the man who had seemed to be in charge.
"And why did you think this man you saved was one of our officers, Mr. Wayne?" she said after Bruce and Clark ran out of things to say.
"I...met him. Six years ago."
"And you remember him so well?" The woman's eyebrows arched.
"Yes." Bruce's mouth set in a hard line. "It was the night my parents were murdered. I remember everything from that night."
"Oh." The detective had the grace to look chagrined. "I'm sorry."
Bruce shook his head. "I just want to help him."
"Can you...tell us what's going on?" Clark said.
Hansen shook her head, her lips set in a tight line. "Most certainly not. I'm sorry, but the less you know, the safer you are."
"Will you at least tell us if he's okay? Or..." Bruce's voice dropped away into nothingness.
The detective gave him a sympathetic look. "I'm sure he'll be fine, kid," she said.
"I...I hope so." Bruce sounded close to tears. "Please, please find him." The woman smiled gently and stood. As she did, Bruce got up and threw his arms around her in an awkward hug. "Thank you," he said in a stifled voice. "For listening to us."
The detective patted him on the back with the hand not holding her clipboard, looking uncomfortable. "Don't worry, kid," she said.
Bruce and Clark watched her car go down the long, winding drive into the night. Clark sneaked sideways glances at Bruce, wondering if he was okay. He'd never seen Bruce cry before: not when he broke his arm, not at his parents' funeral. To see him so close to tears now was unnerving. Just how depressed was his friend? He reached out a tentative hand, let it drop again. "Bruce. I need to go home or my mother will worry, but--"
Bruce swung around, his eyes shining with a dark gleam that startled Clark almost more than the vanished tears. "Clark," he said urgently, "Can you come back after and spend the night here?"
"Um. Sure," said Clark, feeling suddenly like he didn't know where to put his hands, like his feet were too large. "But--"
"--It's important," Bruce said, putting his hands on Clark's shoulders and giving him a gentle, conspiratorial shake. "Really important.
"I've found a clue!"
( Chapter 12)
Pairing/Characters: Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne
Rating: PG
Warnings: None needed
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2300Summary: Bruce and Clark explore a haunted house and rescue a drowning man.
Bruce heard Clark sneeze sharply behind him as dusty air assailed them. He unclipped the flashlight from his belt and let its beam play across the splintered walls and musty furniture.
"Some people say this house is haunted." Clark's voice quavered a bit in the darkness. "That's...that's nonsense, of course."
Bruce moved the flashlight beam along the floor. "Unless ghosts wear boots," he said. "Look. There are tracks in the dust."
"Okay, no ghosts," said Clark. "Just real men in boots skulking around somewhere. That's very reassuring."
Bruce was far too caught up in the mystery to notice Clark's reluctance to continue. He raised his voice and addressed the dark house: "Are you all right? Do you need help?"
Silence.
"The tracks go through here..." He followed the prints in the dust into another room with a canopy bed, swathed in cobwebs now. Out the window glimmered Gotham Bay, drowned in dusky shadows and sunset light. On the wall hung a picture of a middle-aged man in old-fashioned clothes with a beaky nose and beady eyes. "Egbert Cobblepot, I presume," Bruce said, reading the plate.
The dust in the bedroom was stirred up in every direction. Bruce opened a closet and Clark jumped as if he expected a skeleton to leap out, but there were only heavy coats sheathed in black plastic. A quick inspection of the rest of the house revealed the other rooms were undisturbed. "That's odd," said Bruce. "No footprints in the kitchen or the library at all. Why just the bedroom?"
"Can we think about this mystery outside?" Clark's head was swiveling back and forth with the wavering beam of light. "There's no one here that needs help and...I think this is trespassing."
"Hrm," said Bruce, but made his way out of the house.
"Maybe it was just the wind," Clark said when they got back to the telescope. "Maybe we imagined it."
"There is no wind," Bruce pointed out. "And we didn't imagine it. No, it's a mystery, all right." He puzzled over it, scratching at a mosquito bite on his arm. In the bay, below the bluffs, two small motorboats were zipping around, cutting white ribbons into the shadowed water, one following the other. Bruce watched them, his eyes slowly narrowing. "Something's not right down there. They're driving too fast, and--"
Over the water, the sound of a gunshot drifted up to the two boys, eerily distinct in the silent air. Then another.
Bruce swung to meet Clark's eyes, his own wide and startled.
"That was--"
"What do we--"
As their voices overlapped, someone below shouted something indistinct. Clark could see a tiny figure in one of the boats stand and throw something toward the boat ahead of them. There was a strange dull thud, a gout of flame, and the boat exploded into debris and black smoke.
Both boys were moving before the sound stopped ricocheting off the bare bluffs, hurling themselves down the steep slope, shale and rocks slipping under their feet. Clark found himself at the foot of the bluffs on a tiny, pebbled beach nestled between jagged rocks. Beside him, Bruce kicked off his sneakers and plunged into the water without a moment's hesitation. "Bruce!" Clark's cry was swallowed up in the sound of surf; Bruce was already surprisingly far from the shore, kicking strongly against the waves, his strokes sure and economical. Clark stared across the blazing wreckage bobbing in the water and saw the other boat roaring away, a white dot on the horizon. Whoever was shooting guns and throwing grenades from the boat didn't seem to realize there had been witnesses.
Bruce was almost to the wreckage now. Clark saw him suddenly surge forward and come up supporting a figure; Clark had his own sneakers off and was floundering toward the two swimmers with his pathetic crawl stroke by the time they turned toward the shore.
He met them halfway out. Bruce was struggling to keep a man above water; the man's head lolled, unconscious and bleeding. Clark got his shoulder under the man's body and tried to support both of them a little. Bruce was gasping and sputtering, his motions no longer sure but heavy and dragging. Clark wasn't certain he'd be strong enough to help get them safely to shore. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling cold riptides dragging at them, greedy and demanding. Be strong enough, he told himself, as if it could possibly make a difference.
Somehow it was enough to get all three of them to the rocky beach.
Staggering to his knees, Bruce turned the man onto his side. He coughed and gagged water, half-conscious; then his eyes slid closed again with a groan. He was in his thirties, with a reddish-brown mustache and matching hair plastered to his scalp. Clark heard Bruce take a deep, shaky breath. "This is a policeman."
"Huh?" Clark looked at the injured man. One sleeve was slowly turning red. "He doesn't look like a policeman."
"He is. I know him. His name's Gordon."
Clark was starting to shiver in the deepening shadows of the bluff. "You know a lot of policemen?" he asked, trying to break Bruce's fixed look a bit. "Are you in trouble a lot?"
Bruce shook his head but didn't answer. He reached out and brushed the man's hair aside, probing. "The head wound isn't as bad as it looks."
"The arm is bad," said Clark.
Bruce nodded.
Clark stared up the shale-slippery slope. "We have to get him up somewhere safe. What if those guys come back?"
Bruce stood. He was shivering too, but hardly seemed to notice. "Let's get him up to the top."
Using a backpack as a makeshift travois, the two boys managed to haul Gordon to the top of the bluff. The policeman groaned when his arm was jostled, but otherwise showed no sign of consciousness.
On the grassy opening, they stopped to catch their breath. The Cobblepot cottage loomed nearby, empty-eyed and unwelcoming. "Farmhouse...down the road," Clark wheezed. "Maybe someone there. With a phone."
Safely on level ground, they were able to lift Gordon and carefully carry him back toward the farmhouse. Clark was terrified that he'd drop the wounded man, but he managed to keep going, keep his end of the burden aloft.
There were lights on in the farmhouse, although the porch light was off. Clark and Bruce carefully eased the still-unconscious Gordon down and Bruce went to knock on the door.
The door was opened by a skinny man with a shock of pale hair. He looked at the body on the porch and his eyes widened. "What--"
"He almost drowned," Clark gasped, "He needs help. Please--call an ambulance."
The man was still staring when someone in the room behind him said, "What's going on, Clarence?"
Clarence glanced over his shoulder. "It's, um...two kids and a guy. He's hurt bad."
"Well, by all means, show them in."
There were four men in the house, and between them they soon had Gordon on a sofa. Blood from his arm was staining the fabric of the sofa, but it was already a mass of stains already, so Clark wasn't sure one more would matter.
The whole farmhouse was extremely run down, as were three of its inhabitants. The fourth--the man who had instructed Clarence to let them in--was a stocky man with a long nose and sharp eyes. His face looked somehow familiar, but Clark couldn't place it, distracted by the sight of the police officer bleeding on the couch.
"What should we do, boss?" Clarence asked, looking at the fourth man.
"Do? Why, we call for an ambulance, of course," said the man sharply. He didn't look happy about Clarence calling him "boss." "George, go dial 911."
One of the other men nodded and went into the kitchen. Clark could hear him on the phone: "Um, yeah. I need to report a guy who's hurt bad." A silence, just a bit too short to be an actual question on the other end. "Some kids brought him half-drowned, yeah...."
The long-nosed man was looking at Clark and Bruce as Clarence dabbed at Gordon's wound. "You saved this man? How very heroic of you, Mister..."
Bruce cleared his throat. "My name's Alfred. Alfred Kane. And my friend here is Robin Arthur." He said it so smoothly and surely that Clark blinked at him for a second before realizing, with a rush of relief, that he wasn't alone in feeling suspicious and unsure.
"Nice to meet you, sir," he said to the man, who was smiling at them, an oily smile that made Clark even more uneasy.
"So how did you nice young lads manage to find this poor soul?"
"We were exploring the rocks and found him washed up on a little beach," Bruce said. Clark smiled and nodded, trying to look a bit simple and letting Bruce take the lead so their stories wouldn't get tangled. "Maybe he was fishing and fell in?"
George came back into the room. "They said they'd send an ambulance, um...real soon now." His eyes darted to the "boss" as if for reassurance.
George was a terrible liar.
"Oh good," said Bruce. "Well, it's getting dark and Robin and I should be getting home. Thanks so much for helping."
The men didn't suggest the boys stay to explain the incident to the rescue team; they looked relieved to see Bruce and Clark go. "Have a safe walk home, boys," said the boss, smiling his unctuous smile.
The two of them walked down the driveway to the road, now totally swallowed in darkness. At the road, Bruce turned right, toward Gotham.
"Your telescope--"
"--Forget the telescope," Bruce hissed. He was still smiling, almost strolling, careless and relaxed. Only his voice was strained and urgent. "We have to get to the police!"
Once they were out of sight of the farmhouse, they both broke into a run. "What do you think--is going--on?" Clark asked around the stitch in his side.
"I don't know--but it's not good," Bruce gasped back. "Couldn't do anything there--got to get help--"
Headlights cut through the night, coming along the curving road toward them. Bruce grabbed Clark's arm and hauled him off the road into the bushes. They crouched there like rabbits, shivering in their sea-soaked clothes, as a car drove past them slowly. The driver, George, was scanning the side of the road. As the boys shrank deeper into the underbrush, Clark could see in the back seat the beaky silhouette of the "boss."
As the car disappeared, Bruce let out a long, slow breath. "They covered up their license plate, of course." He scrambled to his feet. "I'm betting Gordon was in the trunk of that car. And we could have been too."
"Do you think he's...still alive?" Clark asked, hearing the quaver in his voice.
"I don't know." Bruce was staring after the car. "I don't know." He started to jog down the road again. "He has to be. We have to save him."
: : :
They finally reached the Manor what seemed like hours later, panting and winded, their clothes crusted with sea salt. They breathlessly explained what had happened to Alfred, who immediately called the police. Soon a Detective Hansen was at the door and flashing a badge, her short curly hair tucked under a police cap. She sat in the library and took notes while the boys spilled out the story, their voices overlapping. Sometimes she would stop them and make them go back over some piece of information: she seemed especially interested in their description of the man who had seemed to be in charge.
"And why did you think this man you saved was one of our officers, Mr. Wayne?" she said after Bruce and Clark ran out of things to say.
"I...met him. Six years ago."
"And you remember him so well?" The woman's eyebrows arched.
"Yes." Bruce's mouth set in a hard line. "It was the night my parents were murdered. I remember everything from that night."
"Oh." The detective had the grace to look chagrined. "I'm sorry."
Bruce shook his head. "I just want to help him."
"Can you...tell us what's going on?" Clark said.
Hansen shook her head, her lips set in a tight line. "Most certainly not. I'm sorry, but the less you know, the safer you are."
"Will you at least tell us if he's okay? Or..." Bruce's voice dropped away into nothingness.
The detective gave him a sympathetic look. "I'm sure he'll be fine, kid," she said.
"I...I hope so." Bruce sounded close to tears. "Please, please find him." The woman smiled gently and stood. As she did, Bruce got up and threw his arms around her in an awkward hug. "Thank you," he said in a stifled voice. "For listening to us."
The detective patted him on the back with the hand not holding her clipboard, looking uncomfortable. "Don't worry, kid," she said.
Bruce and Clark watched her car go down the long, winding drive into the night. Clark sneaked sideways glances at Bruce, wondering if he was okay. He'd never seen Bruce cry before: not when he broke his arm, not at his parents' funeral. To see him so close to tears now was unnerving. Just how depressed was his friend? He reached out a tentative hand, let it drop again. "Bruce. I need to go home or my mother will worry, but--"
Bruce swung around, his eyes shining with a dark gleam that startled Clark almost more than the vanished tears. "Clark," he said urgently, "Can you come back after and spend the night here?"
"Um. Sure," said Clark, feeling suddenly like he didn't know where to put his hands, like his feet were too large. "But--"
"--It's important," Bruce said, putting his hands on Clark's shoulders and giving him a gentle, conspiratorial shake. "Really important.
"I've found a clue!"
( Chapter 12)