Chapter Text
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Clark's POV
Gotham looked like a dying constellation from above; a thousand fractures lights flickering through a curtain of storm. The rain fell in sharp diagonal streaks, each drop slicing past him as he hovered high above the city. He could feel the heartbeat of it all: millions of rhythms overlapping, the pulse of life beneath steel.
Then came the noise.
A shriek of metal cut through the clouds. Six aircraft--too small for jets, too precise for drones--broke through the storm front, leaving lines of orange fire in their wake. Each one carried a WayneTech identification signature, but the flight pattern was wrong, erratic, angry.
They shouldn't be here, he thought. They're not supposed to move like that.
He streaked downward, cape snapping like a warning flag. The air trembled around him. He reached the lead machine just as it opened fire on a hospital roof. His shoulder hit it square, metal folding under the force, and the projectile burst upward instead of down. The explosion painted the clouds white. The machines had been modified, that was obvious enough. They weren't designed to be weaponry.
"Batman," he said into the comm. Static answered. "Batman, talk to me."
Nothing. Just the roar of the storm and a dozen panicked heartbeats below.
He didn't have time to wait. The remaining drones turned toward him, sensors flaring red. He could almost hear their targeting systems, the cold mechanical rhythm of kill-commands cycling. Clark pulled the other five into view, eyes narrowing. If he burned out their cores quickly, they'd fall harmlessly into the bay.
He drew a breath, focused the line of heat, and let the light go.
The sky split open.
For a heartbeat the world was pure brightness--and then something went wrong. The drones' power cells reacted with the heat, each one blooming outward in a chain of detonations. A rush of concussive force slammed into him, driving him back through the rain. He caught himself mid air, ears ringing,
Below, a wave of orange swallowed a block of the Narrows. The sound came half a second later, a dull, endless roar.
Clark froze. He blinked through smoke, trying to count the silhouettes still moving. There were fewer with each second. His x-ray vision faltered through the heat shimmer; all he saw were outlines crumbling into stillness.
"No... no, no-" He drove through the haze, landing hard in what used to be a street. The asphalt was torn, the air thick with dust and rain and silence. He could taste iron in the air, feel the absence of voices that had been there minutes ago.
He turned once, searching for anyone. His hands shook.
The realization came slowly, cruelly clear. The chain reaction had started with his heat vision. His attempt to stop the machinery had fueled their detonation. Every calculation--every instant of confidence--had become the weapon.
He rose unsteadily, the rain running down his face. Thunder rolled overhead, but he could barely hear it. Only the echo of what had vanished.
He looked toward the skyline, where a darker shape moved among the smoke.
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Bruce's POV
From the rooftop across the street, Bruce had been tracking the drones since they breached the perimeter. WayneTech signatures--his machines. He designed their failsafes. Or so he thought.
Dick's voice cracked as they sprinted rooftop to rooftop, tight with urgency. "They're targeting medical centers. I'm rerouting evac--"
Then the sky turned to glass.
A white pulse flooded the lenses of his cowl, every system screaming overload. The blast hit a second later, blowing both of them backward. He hit the asphalt hard, the impact rattling through armor. When he rolled to his knees, the world had gone quiet except for the rain.
"Robin?" Bruce spoke up, the silence deafening before speaking more urgently. "Dick?"
A tired grunt, then, "I'm--I'm here! I'm okay." Coughing. "But the whole block's-- Bruce, it's gone. What the hell was that?"
He didn't answer. His visor was already compensating, filtering through the smoke. Heat signatures flickered and died, one after another, in rapid bursts of red fading to gray. He stepped to the roof's edge, the wind hitting him, carrying the smell of scorched metal.
Then he saw him.
"Where's Superman? Is he okay-" Dick began, but when he caught sight of what Bruce was looking at, the silence ran over the two of them.
Hovering in the ruin, cape drenched, eyes wide and lost. Superman looked less like a god than a man who just woken into nightmare. His hands hung at his sides, fingers curled as though still gripping something that wasn't there.
Robin landed beside Bruce, breathing hard, The younger boy finally seemed to find words. "Tell me he didn't," Dick whispered.
Bruce said nothing. His mind worked automatically--triangulating angles, blast radius, the origin of ignition,. The data pointed one way, and only one. The drones had overloaded in direct response to concentrated thermal energy. The source was unmistakable.
He clenched his jaw until it hurt.
"Get the rescue teams moving," he said.
"Bruce--"
"Now."
Robin nodded, reluctant, and swung off into the smoke.
Batman stayed where he was. The rain plastered his cape to his armor; drops slid down the cowl's chin like sweat. He watched as Superman descended slowly to the street, as if afraid to touch it. But before boots hit the ground, Superman knew where to look almost immediately. He watched the Kryptonian float towards the rooftop, meeting Bruce's eyes through the darkness.
"I tried to stop it," he said, voice hoarse, almost breaking. "They were going for the hospital. I-I thought I could-"
Bruce turned his head away before the rest came out. Words wouldn't fix the scene below them, and explanations were for later. The detective in him catalogues evidence; the man beneath the mask wanted to look anywhere but at that face,
He dropped from the roof, landing several meters away from Clark's hovering form above him. The ground sizzled with heat where the drones had melted it. Between them lay a crater filled with rainwater and the reflection of distant fires.
"The city was already bleeding," Bruce said quietly. "You just made it worse."
Superman's shoulders tightened. "It was an accident."
"There are no accidents with power like yours."
For a moment, the only sound was rain against armor. Superman tried to speak again, but Bruce's glare cut through him like another kind of weapon. There was nothing left to say.
Robin's voice cut through the comm--soft, shaken. "We've got survivors on the east side. Dozens dead and injured. I'll find as many survivors as possible, but-" He stopped himself. "What do we do with him?"
Bruce didn't answer immediately. He looked up, rain running over the edge of his cowl, and saw Superman still floating, just a few short feet away, rooted in the center of the wreckage like a monument to a mistake.
For a brief, unguarded instant, Bruce felt something that wasn't anger. Pity, maybe. Recognition. The look on Superman's face was one he'd seen before--in mirrors, after nights when someone else's death sat on his conscience. The difference was scale.
He shut the thought down before it softened him.
"Get the injured out," he said. "We'll deal with him later."
He turned away, cape dragging through the water. Behind him, Clark didn't move.
The Batmobile's engine hummed low as it navigated the flooded streets. Batman drove, Robin sat silent in the passenger seat. Through the windshield, the city flickered with emergency lights--ambulances, volunteers. Gotham trying, once again, to hold itself together.
"Bruce," Dick said after a long stretch of silence. "He didn't mean for it to happen."
Bruce continued driving. "Intent doesn't change outcome."
"I know that's your line," Dick muttered, "but I saw his face. He looked.. like you did when--"
That earned a slow turn of his head. Bruce's expression stayed unreadable behind he cowl. "Don't compare us."
"I'm not. I'm saying you know what that kind of guilt does. You taught me to look for it."
The silence returned. Rain beat against the car's shell. Finally Bruce said, almost to himself, "He should have known better."
From a nearby rooftop, unseen, Bruce watched the last ambulance go. Once gone, Superman vanished, a flash of blue and red into the storm, leaving nothing but a steam rising from wet concrete.
He activated his comm. "Alfred."
"I'm here, sir."
"Get me all the data on those drones. I was the signal origin, manufacturer logs, and any recent modifications."
"Yes sir. And... Superman?"
Bruce's jaw tightened. "He's gone."
A pause. "Will you tell the league?"
"Tomorrow."
He ended the call and looked down once more at the shattered street. Rain dripped from the edge of hid glove.
Gotham had seen gods before, none had ever walked away clean.