Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The satellite streaks through the sky like divine fucking retribution. The center-mass loses cohesion, fragments burning brighter than bolides, streaking towards Metropolis’ commercial core. The sight is breath-taking--the most horrifyingly beautiful thing Bruce Wayne has ever seen. 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 Financial, but Bruce has already mentally calculated the point of impact: ground zero will be twenty meters west of where the surviving employees are clumped.

Plus or minus.

He takes a moment to register disbelief (two figures grappling as they fall from the sky; men? gods? aliens?) and stores that information for later. Twenty years patrolling Gotham, the instinct is deeper than bone: protect the citizens. Even if they aren't his, they are Wayne Enterprises’ people, they're vulnerable, and the Bat will not fail them.

Bruce is already in motion, screaming to the helpers to evacuate the area, as fast as you can, the tower won't survive another hit, cradling 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. Underground.

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; civilians might have sheltered in these buildings during the attack. Voice 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 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?”

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.

“No,” he says, because it’s true. They’re out of time. “Jae, brace for impact. Like this.” He mimes hunching into a ball. “Now. Brace now.”

Jae doesn’t look scared anymore. Determination fills her face, and she repeats Bruce’s gesture. 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 a sudden pressure. It feels like he’s holding up the weight of a star.

The shock wave slams into their cover, vaporizing the masonry. Lightning and ozone, an acrid burning smell peels off his flesh.

--The guttural cry dies in Bruce's throat when he realizes that they’re still there. Him and Jae. The explosion has ripped apart steel and concrete 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, no worse for wear from the inferno that had passed around them. The man--alien, alien, alien--has a beatific expression on his face. Bruce swallows convulsively, shutting down the word that’s on a frantic loop in his mind, trying not to believe this is how an angel would kneel on Judgement Day, before hell and all of its demons break loose.

Spotting them on the ground, in the path of the shockwave, while he falls at 65,000 mph through the earth’s atmosphere? Miraculous. Well. Nearly miraculous. He and Zod had smashed into the Grecian columns of City Hall, and had begun round three of their brawl when, out of all of the voices crying out in Metropolis, a whispered prayer cuts into his consciousness like a brand.

Heart of the city, protect us.

He focuses his vision through three deserted city blocks, and sees the edge of a massive exothermic flow heading towards two figures who hadn’t made it out of the evacuation zone. Clark is sick of the screams that he couldn’t answer while Zod destroyed the city around him, but now his enemy’s strength flags, and Clark gains the upper hand.

Clark grabs the side of Zod’s skull, and smashes it into the side of a building. He hurls the General as far as he can into the evacuated zone, and takes off faster than a speeding bullet, faster than he’d flown before. In the next instant, he hovers next to his two rescues; the two figures are a man and a child, huddled together under an unstable configuration of concrete slabs. The girl’s staring out at him, her eyes impossibly wide. The man’s turned away, shoulders hunched to take the full force of whatever’s coming, no thought to protecting his own life.

A father and child? Clark wonders, and his chest constricts in remembered pain.

Time has slowed to a crawl, but it is too late to whisk them out of the blast zone unharmed. Clark curls his body around them and he prays that Zod is slow enough, not familiar with his powers enough, to give him the precious seconds needed to save their lives.

Fire roars around them, the fury of the earth in upheaval against a celestial intruder. Clark barely feels the heat as his cape flares around them. He’s pressed chest-to-groin against the man’s back, and one of his hands is on the girl’s cheek. He keeps up the skin contact until the pressure subsides.

Clark… hadn’t known for sure that he could extend his body’s bioelectric field. In the eye of the World Engine, his body had shifted his gravity to withstand the immense pressure of the terraforming signal. He had hoped his body’s instinctive reaction to the shock wave would be enough to trigger the field’s extension again. Actually doing it--saving someone’s life with it--he feels as elated as when he first flew.

Clark relaxes his grip and rocks back on his heels; the man and the child are safe; here’s living proof that he can save someone. He’s not sure his absolute relief translates onto his face, but he feels dumbstruck with the sheer awe of his revelation: he can save them, all of them who are left. His hand lingers on the man’s back, loathe to let go.

But the man twists in his grasp, and is giving him a murderous look. (To be fair, maybe Clark’s hand is a little inappropriately close to his waist.) He's handsome, graying at his temples, dirt feathering his high cheekbones. A wariness runs through him, as though he expects to be recognized; but the joke's on him, Clark hasn't so much as glanced at a magazine cover during his seven years of self-imposed exile. Fingers slip out of contact with the broad muscled back, and Clark’s bioelectrical 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 however long he’d defended Metropolis against Zod in anything bigger than a whistle-stop or a fishing town.

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, two titans grappling for the fate of the planet; the sonic boom from their punches sweeps across the city, rattling panes of glass that haven’t already been blown out in their struggle. Fighting in the city without destroying anything is so difficult; the skyscrapers are fragile compared to a kryptonian's strength, but Clark tries to minimize the damage, tries to confine their battle to the evacuation zone around the satellite impact zone. When Zod tries to fly out into the populated zone of the city, Clark grabs the General’s shoulders, and launches upward in a massive arc, twisting them through the air like a crazed corkscrew.

“Submit, Zod!” Clark yells, and he grabs onto the side of the General’s face, unerringly pressing into the three tender junctions where the kryptonian heat vision channels are closest to the surface of the skin. A flash of excruciating pain and confusion crosses Zod’s face, as he shoves Clark’s hand back.

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 that Zod has fought short, decisive battles. Whatever edge his training gave him is waning, and only sheer bloody-mindedness keeps him on his feet. Clark doesn’t smirk, but he knows he has the upper hand now. The General may have trained to control his senses, but he trained on Krypton. And Clark had a lifetime of learning his body on this world.

Clark spots an opening. Lightning fast, his arm is at Zod’s throat choking him, pinning him to the ground as the General bucks wildly in the grip. Zod torques the hold, as if to throw him off and take to the air; the exact moment when Zod realizes his strength won't dislodge the son of El, his face contorts in blank fury. Clark knows his rescues are close--prays they've taken shelter somewhere else--but he can’t see where, exactly, until Zod wrenches in Clark’s arm to face them. The man’s crouched down in the street, still 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, his feet hovering off of the ground, his cape in glory around him--like he means to depart, and his darting eyes tell him that wherever he’ll go, it’s--it’s not good for him to leave like he is. It’s a reverse of their earlier tableau; for an alien, his body language read incredibly human. Bruce even knows this one, the bleakness and vulnerability of it (Bruce promises himself to think about when after this is over).

The impact, the fight, Wayne Financial 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 a war zone. 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 down to earth 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 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 half-frowns he’s seen. Jae pinches Bruce’s leg hard.

It hits Bruce then: they’re alive. Twice today they (all three of them) faced death. Bruce sprinted through the city playing Batman in his waistcoat and ridiculously well-tailored pants, and somehow didn’t pull a seam. Someone is looking at him like he’s a puzzle worth solving.

Against all odds, Bruce finds himself with his own half-crooked smile, as Jae scowls at him like they’re family.

Surreal. That’s the word for it.

The alien’s searching gaze melts into something that looks closer to gratitude, and his arms circle his shoulders tentatively; Kal returns the hug with 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.