Sorry for the double post, folks. The first attempt ate a huge chunk out of the middle.
*-*-*
The satellite streaks through the sky like divine fucking retribution. The center mass loses cohesion as it plunges towards the city, fragments igniting into fireballs. It’s breath-taking for anyone not in their immediate path. In a world where atmospheric reentry had happened at a more favorable angle, devastation wouldn’t rain down a second time on the husk of Wayne Tower, but Bruce has already mentally calculated the point of impact: ground zero will be twenty meters west of them. Plus or minus. Bruce takes a moment to register his disbelief (two figures grappling as they fall from the sky; men? gods? aliens?) and stores that information for later.
Twenty years in Gotham, the instinct is deeper than bone: protect the citizens. They're vulnerable, and even if they aren't his, the Bat will not fail them.
He’s already in motion, screaming to the helpers to evacuate the area, as fast as you can, the tower won't survive another hit. He cradles the girl to his chest as he sprints through the dust-choked street. He doesn't have to outrun the debris; he just has to reach cover that won't be pulverized in the shock wave. Something underground.
A clap of thunder rends the air, and wind stirs up the smoke. Something has struck ground ahead of the debris… he can’t care about that right now.
Breathing’s hard. The girl coughs. “Hold your breath,” he barks at her, ignoring his own advice. His lungs burn from the soot, but he gulps in more air and puts on a burst of speed.
The streets appear deserted from the first evacuation, but Bruce takes nothing for granted. Who knows who might have sheltered in these buildings after the first attack? Carrying over the eerie calm, Bruce shouts. Evacuate the area, get out of here, Anyone who’s left, take cover.
A fluorescent subway sign juts out of the twisting wreckage. He changes direction. "This way!" he bellows, in case anyone has followed them through the ash.
He skids to a halt in front of the sign, and god help him, if he hadn’t been angry before, he’s angry now. The distinctive green stairs of the subway are buried under rubble; Metropolis Bank’s shoddy LexCorp construction has splintered on impact, completely blocking off the underground entrance. A tri-city meeting about building codes flashes before Bruce’s eyes. Lex’s extremely bored face and who-me? eyeroll, and he sees red.
Bruce crouches down, drops the girl as gently as he can, and wrenches a steel beam out of their path.
Not enough, he's not enough.
Then there’s a second set of hands on the next girder (thick as a tree, no amount of adrenaline is going to help him move this), hands so small that his heart clenches involuntarily.
Locking eyes with the girl, Bruce offers the best approximation of calm authority he can manage under the circumstances. “What's your name?” he grits out.
“Jae,” she says. “Can we move it?”
“No,” he says, because it’s true. They’re out of time. “Jae, brace for impact. Like this.” Bruce mimes hunching into a ball. “Now. Brace now.”
Jae doesn’t look scared anymore, she looks determined. Hunching into a ball, they seek cover in a small junction of concrete slabs. Bruce doesn't even bother to protect his neck as he tucks Jae into the meager shelter of his body.
He feels the hot exhale of impact on his neck.
This is it.
The Bat bitterly regrets not wearing the undersuit today; even a thin layer of Nomex might insulate the girl better than a goddamn waistcoat. A dark part of Bruce that he thought buried in Nanda Parbat demands that he turn, face his death honorably, but Gotham's trained him for this, too.
*-*-*
The air changes. His body feels lighter, somehow, stripped of everything but certainty and terror.
Bruce Wayne is certain he is going to die.
Bruce Wayne is terrified that he will die here, now, when the world will need Batman the most.
He can feel Jae shaking in his arms.
He hasn’t kept in touch with the faith of his parents; beyond the streets there would either be some transcendental meaning, or only the earth.
An old scrap of poetry floats into mind, the best prayer he can summon. “Heart of the city, protect us,” he mumbles. Melodramatic last words, but he’s got nothing else.
*-*-*
Jae gasps. She’s twisted in his arms, staring out over his shoulder. Chunks of mortar shutter, then levitate. Bruce grunts wetly under the shockwave’s pressure. It feels like he’s holding up the weight of a star.
The shockwave slams into their concrete shelter, and vaporizes the masonry. Lightning and ozone, an acrid burning scent peels off his flesh. Bruce cries out in pain--
--The guttural cry dies in Bruce's throat when he realizes that they’re still there. Him and Jae. The explosion has ripped apart their meager shelter and--passed around them?
Bruce jerks his head just in time to see a red and blue body slide off of his, cape spread around them like wings… and the alien kneels before him, like an angel kneeling on Judgement Day, before hell and all of its demons break loose.
*-*-*
Clark relaxes his grip and sits back on his heels; the man and the child are safe. He’s not sure, but he probably looks dumbstruck to them. Clark… hadn’t known he could do that before he’d tried.
In the eye of the World Engine, his body had altered his gravity field to withstand the immense pressure of the terraforming signal. Extending the field through touch? Spotting them on the ground, in the path of the shockwave, while he fell at 65,000 mph through the earth’s atmosphere? Miraculous.
Clark had had to fling Zod far enough away to give him the precious seconds to save lives.
Clark’s loathe to let go, but the man is giving him a murderous look. Fingers slip out of contact with the broad muscled back, and Clark’s bio-electrical field contracts with a gentle pingpingping on the edge of his enhanced hearing.
He forgets himself for a moment, and meets the man’s thin, hard grimace with a lopsided grin.
The man actually frowns in response.
Maybe corporate types don’t understand the concept of smiling, Clark thinks. What did Clark know; in his life, he’d only ever spent approximately minutes (or however long he’d defended Metropolis against Zod) in a big city.
Zod catches him upside the head with a steel girder, and, yeah, that was going to hurt.
“Excuse me,” he says weakly to his rescues, and then he’s back in the thick of the brawl with Zod.
They collide in the air, across the city, twisting through the air like a crazed corkscrew. Time slows as they move faster than the human eye can process. Seconds later, they return to the scene of Clark’s save. Zod lunges sloppily. For all of his talk of the soldier’s life, it’s clear to Clark that Zod has fought short, decisive battles. Whatever edge his training gave him is waning, and it’s sheer bloody-mindedness keeping him on his feet.
Clark spots an opening. Lightning fast, his arm is at Zod’s throat choking him. Bucking wildly in the grip, Zod tries to throw him off. Clark knows his rescues are close, but he can’t see where, exactly, until Zod wrenches in Clark’s arm to face them. The man’s crouched down, but blocking the girl, and he is as still as stone.
“Krypton is dead,” Zod rages at Kal-El. “You KILLED it.”
“You can stop,” Clark says, feeling the bones in the General’s neck grind under his hands.
"If you love these people so much,” Zod hisses, “you can mourn them."
Heat drenches Clark’s hands as the Zod’s heat vision crackles beneath the skin of his eyes, erupting in a fountain of scarlet that Zod angles inexorably towards the two huddled humans. Clark understands that Zod means to kill them, to show him just how futile his efforts to save humanity had been.
No, Clark cries out harshly. Stop. You can stop. Zod!
“This is the fate you chose for all of them, when you chose Earth,” Zod screams.
And then there’s no choice left. And then. And then it’s over. Zod’s lifeless body slips to the pavement.
*-*-*
Was that how he’ll die, Bruce wonders, crushed by a god in view of his shattered tower? That made him laugh, out loud and helpless: you're so fucked, he whispered to himself. Or the alien, who knew.
The being known as Kal-El looks down at him, a reverse of their earlier tableau. For an alien, his expressions read incredibly human. He knows this one, the bleakness and vulnerability of it (Bruce promises himself to think about when after this is over).
The explosion and all of its aftermath feel distant, as though Bruce is running a red-level event simulation at his workstation in the Batcave, not protectively sheltering a child in the middle of Metropolis’ commercial core. Compartmentalizing his own tangle of emotions, he turns his focus to the problem at hand: one super-powered alien who might be an enemy or an ally, but who was certainly capable of killing.
“Kal-El,” he says. His voice sounds like shit.
The alien stares through him.
“Kal-El,” he repeats, then stops.
The alien makes a small broken noise, then closes his eyes, tips his head back, and pours his grief and rage into the sky. And Bruce gets it, crystal clear. The present runs away from us, fast as it can, towards some vanishing point; and it takes everything--(your concentration, your love, your dedication, your family)--everything not to lose sight in the mad scramble for the future.
The alien, Kal-El is sobbing like a man who has lost everything.
His grief makes him seem so impossibly young.
A crack appears in that mask Bruce pulls over his emotions. “You tried, son,” quieter than anyone should have been able to hear. But the alien looks at him, shocked.
Bruce stands up, and pulls Kal-El into a rough hug. A few moments later, he feels Jae wrap her arms around both of them at waist-height. Kal-El allows himself to indignity of this rough and somewhat snot-filled touch (Jae is sobbing. Bruce’s eyes are suspiciously watery, the nerves of the day finally catching up with him). The alien does not bring up his arms to return the gesture. Bruce doesn’t let go. None of the questions that he’d use to soothe a grieving person seem to apply, and those that he might want to use seem incredibly insincere in a city that’s still smoking from his battle.
“Where are your people?” Bruce tries, hoping the answer will be better than the one Jae gave him earlier about her mother.
“I exiled them. We’re--safe. We’re all safe.” Kal says numbly.
“You chose Earth,” Bruce repeats, slotting that answer into place.
“Why are you hugging me,” Kal asks, finally.
“Frankly?”
Kal nods, his face losing a small bit of its abstraction.
“Because you can destroy buildings with your eyes,” Bruce says earnestly. “I thought it’d be a good strategy to make nice while I’m not fireproof.”
Kal rears back in his grip, and gives him one of the most bewildered looks he’s seen. Jae pinches Bruce’s leg, and gives him a sour look.
It hits Bruce then: they’re alive. Twice today they faced death.
It’s all so surreal that Bruce finds himself against all odds, with a half-crooked smile, as Jae scowls at him like they’re family.
Whatever the alien’s looking for in his face, he finds it; Kal’s disbelief melts into something that looks closer to gratitude, and his arms circle his shoulders tentatively. Kal returns the gesture with an incredible gentleness. Today must be a day of miracles, as Bruce Wayne discovers that he is someone who can embrace a grieving god, and mean it.
FILL - Welcome to my world (1/??) - Clark/Bruce: AU Clark Saves Bruce & the girl (FIXED)
*-*-*
The satellite streaks through the sky like divine fucking retribution. The center mass loses cohesion as it plunges towards the city, fragments igniting into fireballs. It’s breath-taking for anyone not in their immediate path. In a world where atmospheric reentry had happened at a more favorable angle, devastation wouldn’t rain down a second time on the husk of Wayne Tower, but Bruce has already mentally calculated the point of impact: ground zero will be twenty meters west of them. Plus or minus. Bruce takes a moment to register his disbelief (two figures grappling as they fall from the sky; men? gods? aliens?) and stores that information for later.
Twenty years in Gotham, the instinct is deeper than bone: protect the citizens. They're vulnerable, and even if they aren't his, the Bat will not fail them.
He’s already in motion, screaming to the helpers to evacuate the area, as fast as you can, the tower won't survive another hit. He cradles the girl to his chest as he sprints through the dust-choked street. He doesn't have to outrun the debris; he just has to reach cover that won't be pulverized in the shock wave. Something underground.
A clap of thunder rends the air, and wind stirs up the smoke. Something has struck ground ahead of the debris… he can’t care about that right now.
Breathing’s hard. The girl coughs. “Hold your breath,” he barks at her, ignoring his own advice. His lungs burn from the soot, but he gulps in more air and puts on a burst of speed.
The streets appear deserted from the first evacuation, but Bruce takes nothing for granted. Who knows who might have sheltered in these buildings after the first attack? Carrying over the eerie calm, Bruce shouts. Evacuate the area, get out of here, Anyone who’s left, take cover.
A fluorescent subway sign juts out of the twisting wreckage. He changes direction. "This way!" he bellows, in case anyone has followed them through the ash.
He skids to a halt in front of the sign, and god help him, if he hadn’t been angry before, he’s angry now. The distinctive green stairs of the subway are buried under rubble; Metropolis Bank’s shoddy LexCorp construction has splintered on impact, completely blocking off the underground entrance. A tri-city meeting about building codes flashes before Bruce’s eyes. Lex’s extremely bored face and who-me? eyeroll, and he sees red.
Bruce crouches down, drops the girl as gently as he can, and wrenches a steel beam out of their path.
Not enough, he's not enough.
Then there’s a second set of hands on the next girder (thick as a tree, no amount of adrenaline is going to help him move this), hands so small that his heart clenches involuntarily.
Locking eyes with the girl, Bruce offers the best approximation of calm authority he can manage under the circumstances. “What's your name?” he grits out.
“Jae,” she says. “Can we move it?”
“No,” he says, because it’s true. They’re out of time. “Jae, brace for impact. Like this.” Bruce mimes hunching into a ball. “Now. Brace now.”
Jae doesn’t look scared anymore, she looks determined. Hunching into a ball, they seek cover in a small junction of concrete slabs. Bruce doesn't even bother to protect his neck as he tucks Jae into the meager shelter of his body.
He feels the hot exhale of impact on his neck.
This is it.
The Bat bitterly regrets not wearing the undersuit today; even a thin layer of Nomex might insulate the girl better than a goddamn waistcoat. A dark part of Bruce that he thought buried in Nanda Parbat demands that he turn, face his death honorably, but Gotham's trained him for this, too.
*-*-*
The air changes. His body feels lighter, somehow, stripped of everything but certainty and terror.
Bruce Wayne is certain he is going to die.
Bruce Wayne is terrified that he will die here, now, when the world will need Batman the most.
He can feel Jae shaking in his arms.
He hasn’t kept in touch with the faith of his parents; beyond the streets there would either be some transcendental meaning, or only the earth.
An old scrap of poetry floats into mind, the best prayer he can summon. “Heart of the city, protect us,” he mumbles. Melodramatic last words, but he’s got nothing else.
*-*-*
Jae gasps. She’s twisted in his arms, staring out over his shoulder. Chunks of mortar shutter, then levitate. Bruce grunts wetly under the shockwave’s pressure. It feels like he’s holding up the weight of a star.
The shockwave slams into their concrete shelter, and vaporizes the masonry. Lightning and ozone, an acrid burning scent peels off his flesh. Bruce cries out in pain--
--The guttural cry dies in Bruce's throat when he realizes that they’re still there. Him and Jae. The explosion has ripped apart their meager shelter and--passed around them?
Bruce jerks his head just in time to see a red and blue body slide off of his, cape spread around them like wings… and the alien kneels before him, like an angel kneeling on Judgement Day, before hell and all of its demons break loose.
*-*-*
Clark relaxes his grip and sits back on his heels; the man and the child are safe. He’s not sure, but he probably looks dumbstruck to them. Clark… hadn’t known he could do that before he’d tried.
In the eye of the World Engine, his body had altered his gravity field to withstand the immense pressure of the terraforming signal. Extending the field through touch? Spotting them on the ground, in the path of the shockwave, while he fell at 65,000 mph through the earth’s atmosphere? Miraculous.
Clark had had to fling Zod far enough away to give him the precious seconds to save lives.
Clark’s loathe to let go, but the man is giving him a murderous look. Fingers slip out of contact with the broad muscled back, and Clark’s bio-electrical field contracts with a gentle pingpingping on the edge of his enhanced hearing.
He forgets himself for a moment, and meets the man’s thin, hard grimace with a lopsided grin.
The man actually frowns in response.
Maybe corporate types don’t understand the concept of smiling, Clark thinks. What did Clark know; in his life, he’d only ever spent approximately minutes (or however long he’d defended Metropolis against Zod) in a big city.
Zod catches him upside the head with a steel girder, and, yeah, that was going to hurt.
“Excuse me,” he says weakly to his rescues, and then he’s back in the thick of the brawl with Zod.
They collide in the air, across the city, twisting through the air like a crazed corkscrew. Time slows as they move faster than the human eye can process. Seconds later, they return to the scene of Clark’s save. Zod lunges sloppily. For all of his talk of the soldier’s life, it’s clear to Clark that Zod has fought short, decisive battles. Whatever edge his training gave him is waning, and it’s sheer bloody-mindedness keeping him on his feet.
Clark spots an opening. Lightning fast, his arm is at Zod’s throat choking him. Bucking wildly in the grip, Zod tries to throw him off. Clark knows his rescues are close, but he can’t see where, exactly, until Zod wrenches in Clark’s arm to face them. The man’s crouched down, but blocking the girl, and he is as still as stone.
“Krypton is dead,” Zod rages at Kal-El. “You KILLED it.”
“You can stop,” Clark says, feeling the bones in the General’s neck grind under his hands.
"If you love these people so much,” Zod hisses, “you can mourn them."
Heat drenches Clark’s hands as the Zod’s heat vision crackles beneath the skin of his eyes, erupting in a fountain of scarlet that Zod angles inexorably towards the two huddled humans. Clark understands that Zod means to kill them, to show him just how futile his efforts to save humanity had been.
No, Clark cries out harshly. Stop. You can stop. Zod!
“This is the fate you chose for all of them, when you chose Earth,” Zod screams.
And then there’s no choice left. And then. And then it’s over. Zod’s lifeless body slips to the pavement.
*-*-*
Was that how he’ll die, Bruce wonders, crushed by a god in view of his shattered tower? That made him laugh, out loud and helpless: you're so fucked, he whispered to himself. Or the alien, who knew.
The being known as Kal-El looks down at him, a reverse of their earlier tableau. For an alien, his expressions read incredibly human. He knows this one, the bleakness and vulnerability of it (Bruce promises himself to think about when after this is over).
The explosion and all of its aftermath feel distant, as though Bruce is running a red-level event simulation at his workstation in the Batcave, not protectively sheltering a child in the middle of Metropolis’ commercial core. Compartmentalizing his own tangle of emotions, he turns his focus to the problem at hand: one super-powered alien who might be an enemy or an ally, but who was certainly capable of killing.
“Kal-El,” he says. His voice sounds like shit.
The alien stares through him.
“Kal-El,” he repeats, then stops.
The alien makes a small broken noise, then closes his eyes, tips his head back, and pours his grief and rage into the sky. And Bruce gets it, crystal clear. The present runs away from us, fast as it can, towards some vanishing point; and it takes everything--(your concentration, your love, your dedication, your family)--everything not to lose sight in the mad scramble for the future.
The alien, Kal-El is sobbing like a man who has lost everything.
His grief makes him seem so impossibly young.
A crack appears in that mask Bruce pulls over his emotions. “You tried, son,” quieter than anyone should have been able to hear. But the alien looks at him, shocked.
Bruce stands up, and pulls Kal-El into a rough hug. A few moments later, he feels Jae wrap her arms around both of them at waist-height. Kal-El allows himself to indignity of this rough and somewhat snot-filled touch (Jae is sobbing. Bruce’s eyes are suspiciously watery, the nerves of the day finally catching up with him). The alien does not bring up his arms to return the gesture. Bruce doesn’t let go. None of the questions that he’d use to soothe a grieving person seem to apply, and those that he might want to use seem incredibly insincere in a city that’s still smoking from his battle.
“Where are your people?” Bruce tries, hoping the answer will be better than the one Jae gave him earlier about her mother.
“I exiled them. We’re--safe. We’re all safe.” Kal says numbly.
“You chose Earth,” Bruce repeats, slotting that answer into place.
“Why are you hugging me,” Kal asks, finally.
“Frankly?”
Kal nods, his face losing a small bit of its abstraction.
“Because you can destroy buildings with your eyes,” Bruce says earnestly. “I thought it’d be a good strategy to make nice while I’m not fireproof.”
Kal rears back in his grip, and gives him one of the most bewildered looks he’s seen. Jae pinches Bruce’s leg, and gives him a sour look.
It hits Bruce then: they’re alive. Twice today they faced death.
It’s all so surreal that Bruce finds himself against all odds, with a half-crooked smile, as Jae scowls at him like they’re family.
Whatever the alien’s looking for in his face, he finds it; Kal’s disbelief melts into something that looks closer to gratitude, and his arms circle his shoulders tentatively. Kal returns the gesture with an incredible gentleness. Today must be a day of miracles, as Bruce Wayne discovers that he is someone who can embrace a grieving god, and mean it.