Chapter Text
What was photography, if not the delicate art of salvaging splinters of truth from the chaos of the world? A pile of fragments pressed against the creased parchment of massacres and coronations. A cradling of the mundane with reverence: the glint of a leaf floating in a puddle, a paper plane caught midflight, a child's chalk drawing dissolving in the rain.
To Esther Park, photography was supposed to be a way of reminding people to truly look at what they always missed. It was meant to be beautiful, but reality was rarely as picturesque as the dream.
Blüdhaven didn't run on sunlight; it ran on scandal, and Esther had a knack for sniffing it out. For the first few years of her career, she found herself stalking shadows for gossip rags and tabloids that cared more for the sordid than the sublime. Her uncanny instinct for secrets made her indispensable to such industries, and though it paid the bills, it was a far cry from the wild places she'd once imagined. There were no snow-dusted peaks or silverback gorillas in her viewfinder. No ethereal landscapes to haunt the soul either. Just cheap parking lots, dim alleyways, and public figures caught mid-lie or mid-lust.
Her photographs didn't preserve beauty; they exposed rot, making her existence an antithesis to the one she'd envisioned for herself.
Then came the job offer from the shining city of Metropolis, at a publication that didn't hide behind slanderous clickbait. For Esther, it was a lifeline hurled from the heavens, and she was determined to hold on with both hands. The Daily Planet would be her chance to capture moments of history, and if it meant risking her life, then so be it.
She threw herself into the work without hesitation, wedging herself beneath the bellies of overturned cars and balancing on the crumbling ledges of rooftops, all to frame the impossible. Metropolis, after all, had no shortage of chaos. Alien attacks, rampaging metahumans, and mysterious tech from the stars—all of it turned the city center into a battlefield with surprising regularity. But Esther knew how to survive the unpredictable. After years of crawling through dingy motel lobbies, she'd learned how to make bad lighting sing and how to time her breath with the beat of a hidden moment. Burning buildings, truthfully, were not so different—they both reeked of smoke, and neither offered second chances.
The novelty of Esther's photographs was proximity. They were unforgettable because they were uncomfortably close. The kind of images that made you both recoil and lean forward, unsure whether to flee or feel. It might have been invasive, but it was also honest. She wanted people to feel the heat of the blaze, and to do that, she had to be there. Not across the street with a long lens, but within reach of the splintering wood and rising flames. A photo of a fire only scorched the viewer if you took it from its core.
So she went to the core and made herself part of the debris. A building collapse, a chemical spill, a creature streaking down from the sky—she dove into every moment like it was her last, because the only photos worth remembering were the ones that felt like they could have cost her everything.
In the past, getting up-close shots of leering celebrities sneaking out of back doors or catching the blur of a criminal exchange in some grime-slick diner had carried its own kind of danger, steeped in the threat of retaliation, but Metropolis was something else entirely. This city's danger was elemental, and there was a certain thrill to it. Or maybe Esther was just an adrenaline junky who lived for the electric pulse beneath her skin that made her hands steadier in the face of peril.
Snap a picture of a crime lord slipping cash to an informant in a junkyard bar before he noticed and shot you where you stood. Snap a picture of a collapsing bridge just before it buckled and came down upon your head like judgment. It was all the same, and afterward, she would hold the image in her hands as proof of her mortal existence.
The only difference now was the nuisance in the red cape. The city's favourite saviour had a maddening habit of swooping in mid-shot, and plucking her out of danger to set her down somewhere inconvenient, often before her shutter could snap. He thought he was rescuing her, but really, he was just ruining her work, no different from an overzealous motel clerk shooing her out of the lobby before she got the perfect image. But she'd never let anyone stop her before, and she wasn't about to start now, not even for Superman.
Nonetheless, she tried to make herself part of this new world. She made efforts with her colleagues, even if she often felt like an outsider dressed in borrowed professionalism. Everyone knew she came from the gossip circuit, which meant her version of journalism involved snooping on drunk B-list actors on their worst nights. It wasn't easy to outrun that kind of reputation, but she made an effort to be the kind of person people would want around. She stayed late to help format articles she didn't write, laughed at jokes that weren't funny, and brought in pastries every Friday morning, all with the unwavering dedication of someone trying very hard to belong.
Which is why Clark Kent's aloofness baffled her.
He wasn't rude exactly. She'd seen him around the office, always with an earnest smile, helping lift a box of malfunctioning equipment, rewiring a stubborn fax machine, or offering to proofread someone's article in a pinch. He had that Midwestern humility, that big brother steadiness that put people at ease. Everyone seemed to like him, and he was the kind of man who offered his umbrella to interns even if it meant he'd go home drenched.
That said, Esther was the exception to his goodwill. He was too gracious to scowl at her outright, but his eyes hardened ever so slightly every time she was in his vicinity. It was as if she'd offended him somehow, but she couldn't imagine how she'd done that when she hadn't said more than two words to him since joining the team.
Perhaps it was due to her previous work, then. Her mind spiralled into the archive of libel she'd helped print, and she imagined Clark stumbling upon one of those pieces in some dusty corner of the internet, categorizing her as the sort of lowlife who carved stories from the bleeding edges of people's lives because she hadn't yet learned that some truths weren't hers to share.
Did he think he had her all figured out, filed neatly under "parasite" or "tabloid leech," or whatever polite name someone like him would use to mean the same thing? It made her feel like a stain no amount of scrubbing could erase.
Regardless, she would have been content to spend the rest of her days trying to ignore his presence, but a lull in hard-hitting stories and the overzealous vision of a new content lead brought about an unexpected shift at the Daily Planet: the launch of a new lifestyle column, which both Clark and Esther had been assigned to.
The Vows would be a weekly feature chronicling real Metropolis weddings, and Esther now had to spend her time trailing behind a man who seemed to barely tolerate her, attending event after event, and capturing triumphant kisses beneath canopies of string lights.
It was everything she had once wanted—documenting beauty in its most earnest form. However, while watching strangers promise forever and composing frame after frame of joy so vivid it bordered on holy was entertaining enough, doing it all beside someone averse to her presence wasn't how she imagined living her dream at all.
Despite her reservations, she still smiled when they crossed paths and held the elevator when she saw him approaching. She told herself his disapproval didn't matter, but of course it did. Esther Park was nothing if not someone who cared too much, even when she pretended not to, and she hated the thought that somewhere, locked behind those kind blue eyes, Clark Kent might already have decided she wasn't worth knowing.