*15*
He focuses on the small things. The temperature fluctuating around him as he moves in gridlike patterns farther and then nearer the harbor. The din of so many noises they crescendo into chaos, and the underlying arrhythmic pulse of heartbeats as he searches for that elusive sound he’s not even sure anymore that he will recognize. The pain building up along the back of his skull, directly affected by the auditory overload he intentionally buries himself under. The protest from the bones in his hands as he tightens them, again, into bruising fists.
Everything else, he blocks out. He ignores. He forgets.
Or pretends he does.
Things like Lois’s whisper reaching him just before he took off out of his apartment for Smallville. The panic that clawed at his throat when he saw how close to the ground she was. The fury that nearly blinded him with heat-vision red when he realized she was only manipulating him. Again. (Wanting to talk to Superman instead of Clark. Wanting to partner with him instead of be with him. Needing him instead of wanting him.)
Things like the disbelief that battered him in receding, engulfing waves as she spilled out all those desperate words that sounded so fantastical and felt too real. The even beating of her heart as she told him she didn’t take him seriously (a direct countermeasure to the rat-a-tat-tatting of fallen dice that had echoed her when she told him she wanted to try to love him). The leap of his own pulse when she said she’d wanted to save him (save him, save his legacy, while he is bleeding out right in front of her, wounded with a thousand cuts left by her caressing hands and soft lips).
The cold shiver working its way down his spine when she reached out to touch him. When she said she was sorry. When he realized none of it (the excuses and justifications and fantastical story) mattered.
He still hurt.
His heart still felt jagged and molten.
His mind still ran up against the same obstacles over and over again.
She was sorry. She’d been trying to help him. She wanted to save him. And what? Did she think that would make everything better? (Did he think that?) Erase the past torturous months? Undo that night in his apartment when his entire world came crashing down atop him? Did she think telling him it had all been a con (a lie so big he can’t, even now, fully comprehend it) would make everything magically go back to the way it was before? How could she think that? How could he have ever thought that if she had some form of explanation, he would feel better?
He doesn’t know. He can’t think. Can only react and feel, and none of this feels right. Or good. Or healing.
What had she told him when she shut the door on a future together? Oh, yes (as if he could ever forget): It isn’t enough.
Well, it isn’t. It’s not nearly enough.
She’s sorry, and it doesn’t matter. He still can’t see a future.
(Only the past, over and over and over again, rewriting it, rewatching, understanding now, finally seeing all the clues she left him that he so willfully, naively ignored.)
Which is why he’s flying over Metropolis in a specific pattern for the twelfth time in three days, on the hunt for a tiny, insignificant, specific sound. If he concentrates enough on the immediate (and not on the past, on the future, on the hypothetical), he can complete the grid four times in a day. It doesn’t leave him much time for meals or visits home or his job, but then, he’s still not sure he’s going to stay in Metropolis anyway, so maybe this will make the decision for him.
Finally finishing just over his apartment (for only the fourth time, since he varies the direction of his search), Clark stumbles when he hits his balcony. The cessation of all the noise in the city pounds into him with nearly as much force as the noise itself had, and he has to hold his head in his hands for a moment before he can regain his balance and even think of opening the balcony door.
Not that he has to do that either.
When he can manage to lift his head, drop his hands back to his sides, and look up, he sees Lois standing there. Holding the door open for him. Watching him.
She looks small. Worried. Nervous.
All such very strange, unusual things when paired with Lois Lane. But then, what’s new? Why should he even feel surprised at all to be surprised by her?
Has he ever really known her? Maybe this is what she looks like. Maybe this is what’s left when the con is over and the blinding lights are gone and the magic’s packed away for the next unwitting dupe. Maybe this is what the stranger who wore Lois’s face really looks like, beneath the dream he fooled himself into seeing.
He stiffens, slightly, makes sure that his body doesn’t betray any of the raging confusion swirling like a whirlpool inside him, bruising everything it hits, and walks past her without a word. Without a sound. Without any visible reaction whatsoever.
It’s what he’d do, after all, if it were someone he’d never seen before standing there, watching Superman land on Clark Kent’s balcony and stride into his apartment. It’s what he’d do for any stranger he wasn’t sure he could trust.
And that’s what Lois Lane is: a stranger.
At least…this Lois Lane is.
“Any luck?” she asks softly.
Because he doesn’t know what else to do (because even as awkward as this is already, he cannot quite bring himself to fold his arms across his chest as if it is only Superman standing in this Suit before her, not when he has already told her his Secret and envisioned a world where there are no lies between them), he fills his kettle with water. Places it, carefully, on top of the stove. Lets it begin to heat.
It doesn’t seem worth his time to reply to her question, not when the answer is so readily obvious.
(He wants to ask a question of his own, to demand why she is there, breaking their unspoken truce, blurring all the lines they have drawn. He doesn’t trust himself enough to speak.)
“Still nothing, huh?” The casual normalcy of her voice is so forced, so unnatural, that both of them wince away from the sound of it.
Once more, for the thousandth time, Clark has to unclench his protesting hands from their fists. Has to float a miniscule bit above the floor to keep from making a tiny crater to match the one in the living room behind him (the impact of his heart being thrown back at him).
“Clark, please,” Lois whispers (and maybe there is no crater in his floor, but there is in his soul, a scar to show where her words and the pleading tone of her voice strike and bruise). “I’ve tried to give you space, but…I have to know what’s going on.”
At that, he cannot control himself. His stiff, steel bones melt and contract so that he whips his head in her direction, levels a glare at her that is only the barest hint of self-control away from containing unearthly fire.
She needs to know what’s going on? She wants to be kept informed? How nice it would have been for him if she had thought the same thing for her partner. How much better off they would be now if she had confided in him. (How much safer he could have kept his heart if she had told him she only intended to shatter it.)
Lois recoils, and he knows she read his thoughts in his stare. (And it’s not fair, how she can still read him so well when she is a stranger he does not know and cannot read.) She shrinks inward, pales, then gives a slow, defeated nod.
“Right,” she says. “Of course. Well then…I guess I’ll be going.”
His hands are curled back into fists (he is reminded of a dead thing, how it contracts in on itself, emptied and stripped of everything that matters), but he does not turn to watch her head to the door. He does not walk her out. He does nothing.
(Better, by far, to do nothing than to entrust his heart to a stranger, confide his secrets to a con-woman, bank his future and his parents on a partner he does not know.)
But he listens. He cannot stop himself. He is, for all he has tried to sever it in the deafening chaos of a million other heartbeats, somehow inextricably linked to the steady pulse of this one stranger’s familiar heart.
So he hears it when she stops at the door, her fingers brushing against the dry paint over the knob. He hears her swallow to gather her courage and turn back toward him. He hears her say, “Don’t worry about Perry. I told him you were undercover. It should buy you a couple more days at least.”
He wants to tell her not to bother. He feels the words in his throat, ready to come out and let her know that he doesn’t need her to protect his job for him. But he says nothing. He can’t. He hasn’t been able to speak for three days, since the night she told him she cares more about his reputation than his heart. Since she stopped lying and revealed that his Secret means nothing to her, that the future she will never see is worth more than their partnership. Their friendship. Their anything.
His throat is tight, lined with cement. His tongue has become a desert, filled with the bones of whatever could not escape it, his teeth sentries that allow nothing in or out. He is silent, reduced to only a repository for the sounds constantly inundating him on every side.
The door clicks shut, her footsteps recede, and still her heartbeat taps away inside his head.
He does not know this Lois, the one who just left, the one who jumped off a building to be able to tell him she doesn’t love him (while hinting that she does, and how could she? why would she say that?), the one who shattered his heart with a hollow, expressionless look on her face.
But he cannot forget his Lois. The one he befriended and loved from a distance. The one he wrote stories with and ate Chinese with and told her he loved. The one who kissed him and gave him tickets to a magic show and told him good night and loved him.
Except…except that was the stranger-Lois, wasn’t it? Pretending, playing a part, forcing herself to be with him and counting down the days until she could cut him loose so she could go back to her life the way it’s meant to be.
There are two Loises. The one before, the one after, and that one in the middle only confuses him--the Lois who wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down on top of her and overwhelmed him to the point where he could not stop shaking, where stars exploded behind his eyes and universes erupted along his skin and the future wasn’t something to fear.
(He is shaking now, too, but for a different reason…he thinks. He hopes.)
Is that Lois the before or the after? Is she somehow both, or only a lie, or everything he’s ever dreamed of? It’s so hard to know, to differentiate them, because he wants her to be his Lois, wants it all to have been real, slivers of truth amidst boulders of deception, but he is only now realizing just how easy it is to be deceived and he does not want to fall back into that (into her) trap again so easily.
And yet…for all that, he cannot quite convince himself that her soft kisses and the look of such unfiltered affection and her quiet plea that he not hate her were all part of the lie.
It can’t be. (He doesn’t think he can survive it if it was all just an act, if she really hates him that much.)
The kettle is whistling, a shrill sound that cuts like Kryptonite through his skull. He uncurls his hands yet again to remove it from the stove, turn off the burner, and open the balcony door once again.
There’s no time for tea. Not if he wants to finish another search of Metropolis. Not if he wants to find this John Doe who threatens everything he still cares about.
(Not if he wants to drown out the sound of Lois crying, four blocks away, as she walks toward her apartment.)
*
In the end, he doesn’t find that heartbeat he’s searching for, maybe because this John Doe is ten steps ahead and never would have let him catch him unawares or maybe just because Clark’s heard literally millions of other heartbeats since he last chased that elusive pulse to Stryker’s Island. In the end, it doesn’t matter because it all goes back to Lois. (The stranger, the lover, the partner, what does it matter at all next to the staggering enormity of silence?)
She’s the one John Doe went to first, to destroy Superman and Utopia. She’s the one he used and manipulated and turned into a weapon. And she’s the one who ultimately leads Clark to John Doe in the simplest, most terrifying way of all.
Her heartbeat winks out.
Clark didn’t even know he was listening for it, to it, using it as a fixed point to keep him grounded amidst the cacophony of noise bombarding him from every side. But it disappears (she disappears, the last remnant of the Lois he loves), and he comes crashing to a halt in the sky sixteen blocks away from the Daily Planet.
She’s gone. Vanished. Dead.
He has only an instant to think that (to feel a scream building, poised to rip through his imposed silence and shatter the earth itself) before her heartbeat comes back. And back. And back. And back.
A hundred different heartbeats, all intrinsically Lois’s, all echoing and resounding against each other. All coming from the same place.
The air rends in a sonic book behind him and Clark erupts through the walls and floor and ceiling of LexTower to emerge in a wine cellar he’s fairly certain wouldn’t show up on any filed blueprints.
In the center of the cavernous room, surrounded by overlarge casks of wine that smell overpoweringly potent, overwhelmingly bitter, there’s a cage. Inside the cage, lounging against the bars as if it’s a throne rather than a prison, there’s a man--old and white-haired and wearing glasses that do nothing to disguise his arrogance and triumph.
Lois’s heartbeats skitter and build all around him (a prison of their own, caging him within their thumping metronome, fixing him to the ground), but even with x-ray vision he can find no other trace of her. Only that cage, and the man, and a palm-sized box in his hand that glows and shimmers and resonates with those hundred different, similar, familiar heartbeats.
He has her. This man (John Doe, and for all that Clark scoffed at the name, it does seem to fit him, casts a sinister edge to this man Clark already recognizes as an enemy) with a portal to other times--he’s taken Lois and who knows where (when) he’s keeping her. Who knows how Clark will be able to get her back.
And all of this (the lies and the three days in the future with Lois and the elaborate game and the scheming lies and the Clarks he dropped so carefully to keep him distracted and paranoid and always looking in the wrong direction, all of it), just to bring Clark here. Standing in front of him. Already broken, bleeding inwardly, all but defeated. All of it this John Doe’s game with Clark both the target and the pawn, the King on a chessboard with only one move open to him and all the stakes hinged on his fate.
Caution sizzles against his skin like steam, and Clark moves forward slowly, infinitely careful, more aware of his mortality (his vulnerabilities) in this moment than he has ever been before. He is rewarded for his caution by the sick dullness turning his limbs to lead and the green glow that springs up around the bars of that cage (not a throne, but a trump card). Instantly, unwillingly, he stops where he is, retreats a few inches and sees that glow recede.
“We meet at last!” John Doe proclaims, and his voice echoes all around them, marred by potent bitterness (but cannot mar the melody of Lois’s heart beating a rhythm that encases Clark’s steaming, electrified form). “Although I’m sure you’ve heard all about me by now. Lois never does like to play by the rules--nothing like her husband at all.”
His jaw has been clenched tighter than his fists and it feels like a battle just to make his mouth open, but he does it, forces his teeth to part and his tongue to move and his throat to unlock so he can say, “John Doe.” (It’s always important to name the enemy, to know it, to face it; not to shrink away or turn aside.)
His voice sounds gritty, rusted and weathered, but at least it sounds.
“A minor affectation.” The older man waves a hand through the air, the one that holds the portal, and Clark tenses as it makes the echoes of Lois’s heart (hearts? how many Loises does this man have, kept locked away while multiple Clarks tremble and shake and panic?) waver and shimmer. “The name’s Tempus, actually,” his smile is cold and poisonous and so wide it makes Clark shudder, “and yours is Clark Kent. I guess we both prefer the allure of a good disguise.” And with that, he pulls his glasses off in a showy gesture, tosses them to the side where they bounce against the cement floor and land next to a Kryptonite bar. “Never overlook the effectiveness of a simple trick, eh, Clark?”
Clark doesn’t let himself be pulled in by the barb (the implications behind it), just keeps staring at John Doe. No, at Tempus, this man from the future who may know him better than Clark could expect, but still doesn’t know everything (not if he thought Clark would ever give up wholly and completely on Lois). “Where’s Lois?” he asks, because that’s what’s important. That’s what matters most here.
(Lois, his Lois; Lois, the stranger-Lois; any Lois, every Lois, they all matter.)
Tempus raises his eyebrows in an exaggerated show of surprise. “What’s this? You still want to save her? Come on, Superman, she’s the one who broke your heart!” He lifts a finger and wags it at him, as if they are old friends, as if Clark is someone he wants to protect from himself. “Don’t try to say she didn’t--we both know that’s what Lois Lanes are good for, right? Leading Clark Kent on and breaking Superman’s heart! And once again, why overlook the effectiveness of a tried and true method.” He shrugs and looks down to his portal, tinkers with it, looks up with a sly sidelong glance that makes Clark automatically tense and ready himself for some form of attack. “That was always my problem, you know--I spent so long trying to do things in a beautifully ironic way, tripping over my own convoluted plans, when the simplest solution was always right there in front of me.” He smiles that cold smile again, a flash of white teeth against the darkness of the cellar, and throws out his arm bombastically. “Just let her do it for me. The beauty of it! No one can bring a Superman to his knees faster than Lois Lane.”
Finally that caution splinters, turns from steam to electricity, and Clark lunges forward, almost to the bars, ignoring the bruising ache in his joints. “Where is she?” he hisses.
“Case in point,” Tempus says softly, then straightens, once more the consummate showman, revealing the illusion and waiting for his applause. “I wouldn’t get much closer if I were you, Clark. Lex Luthor has never been able to really get the job done, but he sure has developed quite a few different ways of almost slaying a god. And even though I had to regretfully get him out of the way in this world, I couldn’t let this delightful cage go to waste.” At his words, the bars seem to glow brighter, pulsing waves of pain adding to the headache encasing Clark’s skull.
“You think you’re safe in there?” Clark asks scornfully (but carefully, because he is centuries behind Tempus and has no time to catch up; because this is a man who can bring Lex Luthor crashing to his knees as if he is no more than a minor obstacle). “How much protection do you think Kryptonite will give you when I tear this building down around us and watch the rubble bury you?”
Tempus’s eyes widen. “Temper, temper,” he chides. “I didn’t realize this Clark was quite so cranky. And before you set about on your remodeling, may I remind you that if you bury me in here, you also bury any hope of beating Lois’s location out of me.”
His own heart rate spikes, a quick leap that clashes discordantly with Lois’s choir of beats. “What do you want?” he demands. There’s no way, he knows (he hopes), that Tempus would have gone so far out of his way to engineer this meeting if he didn’t want something from him (that he would have killed Lois already, out of sight, without Clark there to see it).
“I want you in pain,” Tempus replies, and to contrast the chilling words, his tone is so conversational it takes an instant for Clark to process what he’s actually saying. “I want you broken and alone. I want you dead. But, well, we never get everything we want, do we? So I’ll settle for two out of three. Your choice, which two you pick.”
Clark narrows his eyes (tries not to show that all his attention is on the portal in Tempus’s hand and the distance between that hand and the nearest gap in the bars). “Why should I choose? You’re the one in the cage.”
“And you’re the one who’s still, always, so utterly predictable!” Tempus exclaims. “I don’t need to leave this cage to destroy you--all I had to do was press a button and bring one…single…thing through. Just one creature, and your whole world is gone. One lie, and your future is destroyed. One secret, and the woman you love becomes your enemy. Really, Clark, it’s almost gotten too easy!”
“What has?” Clark asks. He’s not even quite sure what he’s asking, only knows that there’s merely a foot between him and the cage and Tempus’s waving arms bring that portal closer to him with every exclamation he makes.
“Destroying you, of course! Oh, like I said, I’ve tried doing things myself,” he says dismissively, taking a step back (Clark tenses, halts the move he was making to grab the portal from him, hopes Tempus doesn’t notice the slight vibration around him), “but somehow your own brand of super luck always ensures you come out with flying colors. No, this time I decided to go a different route--not as subtle, maybe, but just as inherently satisfying.” And before Clark can even blink, he slips the portal into the pocket of his suit jacket. With his other hand, he reaches into the opposite pocket and brings out a remote.
There’s a television in a corner, tucked between wine casks. Clark hadn’t noticed it before, but when Tempus clicks it on, his focus swings to it unerringly. Immediately. Horror sweeps over him, horror and disbelief and that awful incomprehension that has stalked him since his rooftop conversation with Lois. No, since she broke up with him. Or since she came to his apartment and told him she wanted to try to love him (and if he were a time-traveler, if that were one of his powers, he would go back there to that night and tell himself to run, to flee, to get out of Metropolis and never look back; he’d tell himself, but he knows he, the idealistic and heart-bruised-but-not-heartbroken him, would never listen).
There’s a monster on the screen. And beyond that reflection of Tempus, marred by a green glow, beyond the glass, there is the image of a creature. Gray and large and spiked with what looks to be bristling bone. It’s so inhuman, so out of the blue, that Clark stares at the reflection of Tempus (measures the closeness of that pocket with the portal inside, and Lois inside that portal) without at first realizing the enormity or the danger of that creature.
Green hills, blue skies, they only make the strange creature look even more fake. Unreal. A trick to distract Clark from what really matters (Lois, Lois, Lois, pulsing with every one of her different, same heartbeats). But then the hills and skies transition--shakily, as the news helicopters try to keep pace with the creature’s sudden, bounding leaps--into a suburb that Clark recognizes all too well. And against those streets and buildings that will, eventually, lead to the very heart of Metropolis, the creature abruptly transitions from a strange oddity to a very real menace. A monster, towering over cars and people and even some buildings. Roaring out his defiance over the panicked voices of newscasters, screaming a shriek that digs deep, deep down into Clark’s bones and rattles them, sinew and muscle contracting and recoiling, veins chilling, a primal, visceral reaction to a creature that doesn’t seem fake at all anymore.
That is all too real and immediate when he reaches out a spiked hand, grabs hold of a woman running, and smashes her against the asphalt.
“No!” Clark cries out, but it’s too late. The camera goes wide, the newscaster mute with horror, and screams in the distance are drowned out by another chilling shriek from the creature.
“There are whole universes out there,” Tempus says, quietly, dangerously, the mask of humor fallen away to reveal deadly intent and a more vicious scorn. Hate. That’s what it is pouring off him in sinister waves. Pure, unbridled hatred. And soft as it is, almost conversational even, his voice is the only thing that can make even the creature’s screams seem less imperative. “Multiple words, and all of them with a Superman. Whole worlds of villains and criminals and monsters. And in every universe, for every Superman--no matter what suit you wear or name you go by--there is always this monster waiting in your future. A mindless savage beast, bred and birthed for no other reason than to kill you. In every possible future, there is always, Clark, a Doomsday.”
A chill moves through him, cold and frightening, as if the name itself is enough to strike a fatal blow he can’t avoid.
Tempus moves closer to him, wraps his hands around the bars, and smiles that awful, leering smile. “You would have run into him eventually, you know. But--and wait for it, you should be sensing a theme here--why try to reinvent the wheel? And what’s the point of waiting when I can bring it here, now, right…to…you.”
The monster hasn’t moved on yet. It stands in the middle of the street and swats away police officers as if they’re bugs, when it deigns to notice them at all. Their bullets don’t hurt him at all. A car swerves straight into him (Clark can’t tell if it’s purposeful of not, can barely think at all past the effort required to keep him locked in place) and the creature simply shakes off the rubble and leaps forward by two blocks. Ahead of him, backlit by the evening sun, the skyscrapers of downtown Metropolis form a precious, vulnerable profile.
“Where is she?” Clark asks numbly, eyes locked on the screen, on the creature, on the doom he sees approaching. He has to go face that thing, has to stop it (he should already be there, now, standing between it and his home), and Tempus’s words, the primal foreboding Clark feels in every cell of his body, makes him think that he might not be coming back here. Which means he has to find Lois first, save her now (even if she is a stranger now; even if he didn’t know her at all). “Where is Lois?”
Tempus smirks and nods to the television screen. “Doomsday knows.”
Clark clenches his jaw, takes a careful step forward. “I thought you said he was mindless.”
“Ooh, nothing gets by you, does it?” Tempus laughs. Laughs as if there is not blood staining the streets leading into Metropolis. As if Lois’s heartbeat isn’t growing more rapid, frantic. As if Clark is already dead and beaten. “All right, so he doesn’t know. But I know where she is--your Lois, not these others I’ve used to lure you here. And I will only tell you where she is if you kill Doomsday. Or, if it kills you, I’m the only one who can let her go. Think of it as a trial by fire--see how much you really love the woman who stomped all over your heart. See what exactly you’re willing to sacrifice for the person who’s hurt you worse than any other. Great drama, isn’t it?”
“Why?” Clark scratches out. “Why go after her? She’s not the hero you so despise.”
“Oh, not in so many words. But without Lois, Superman fades.” Tempus shrugs and leans back against the bars. “You’d still be a hero--even time-traveling miracles never seem to cure you of that inclination--but you’d no longer be the icon, the symbol that will shine for all things good and just and sickening for the next thousand years. Without Lois, you may be super, but you’re not the Superman.”
There’s another crater spreading out underneath him. He can’t tear his eyes from Doomsday, from Tempus, long enough to look down and see if the damage is there in the world for all to see, or if he is the only one that can feel it, a black hole sucking him down. There’s a tugging in the pit of his stomach, a lurch in his heart, that makes him feel as if a timer has started counting, descending, beating out the last moments of his life. As if all his time has run out and right now, in this moment, he is only the afterimage playing out against the brightness of his demise.
“If Doomsday kills me, how do I know you’ll really let Lois go?” he asks (and feels as if he’s reading off a script, the final pages, the last curtain call for his part). “How can I trust you?”
“Clark!” Tempus exclaims with another laugh. “I’m the bad guy! Of course you can’t trust me! In fact, you should probably just keep standing there, acting as my jailer until I starve to death. But then…uh-oh. Then I guess Doomsday will just have to roam the Earth all on his own. Did I mention he’s from Krypton too? And he hates your kind, can track them to the ends of the universe, even, which means it won’t be any problem for him to sniff you out, walk in your footsteps--or flight path, as the case may be. Killing and destroying everything that gets in the way. And Lois will starve too, while you stand there and watch me so nobly. So go ahead, Superman--keep standing there by all means. Watch him track your scent down to that hick town in Kansas. Watch him tear your parents to pieces. Do nothing...and destroy your symbol yourself.”
His parents. Clark feels a sharp, sudden spike of terror stab through him. He hasn’t called them. Hasn’t talked to them. Hadn’t been able to open his mouth or summon up a voice. Hadn’t been able to stop searching Metropolis over and over again for the heartbeat of the man who threatened them, threatened his life, and turned the woman he loved into a weapon.
And now they won’t know to be afraid. They won’t realize how much danger they’re in. They will watch the news, and they will believe that their son will be there to save them, and they will die. Smashed against the ground by an unfeeling creature. Murdered because he could not save them.
Lois’s heartbeat is all around him, the creature’s shrieks are still reverberating through his bones, Tempus is smiling that cold, amused smile, and Clark can all but hear the last sands running out of his glass.
“I’m coming back!” he says fiercely, shifting his feet. “And when I do, not even Kryptonite will stop me from taking you.”
“Oh, of course not.” Clark is speeding away, but he can still hear Tempus’s last words (his voice following him once again, distracting him, hunting him). “It won’t have to. Because in every universe, no matter when or how it happens, Doomsday is always, always, the death of Superman.”
*
He can’t hear Lois’s heartbeat anymore. He can’t hear anything but the deafening, unnerving screams of the beast. The stomp of its feet as it leaps forward in irregular lines, but always heading in the general direction of the Daily Planet. The rush of his blood in his own veins and the sonic boom following far behind him.
Tempus is a villain, he thinks, just like he admitted. He’s a monster, and a liar, and he will say anything to get under Clark’s skin. This creature might even just be a diversion, or a trick, still. It doesn’t have to be the doom Tempus has promised. It doesn’t have to be unstoppable or inevitably lethal. It might not even be mindless.
But it’s hard to remember that when Clark finally comes up on the creature and sees just how enormous it is. Sees how easily it rips a wall from its foundation and tosses it aside. Sees it stop, instantly, inhumanly still as it lifts its head to the sky. It’s hard to remember anything when it whirls to face Clark, and he finally sees its eyes, barred behind defensive spikes but unerringly fixated on Clark hovering in the sky above it.
Once again, he has to pry his mouth open and force words out (has to try even when there is not one iota of his being that doesn’t believe that this creature wants to kill him).
“Wait,” he says, and holds out his hands in a placating gesture. “Why are you here? What do you want? Surely we can come--”
It happens in a blur (and that’s strange, so very shockingly strange when nothing is a blur to Clark, who can see and process things at a rate no human can comprehend). One instant the creature is watching him, the next Clark feels a cold, terrifyingly strong hand wrap around his legs, and the next he is choking up concrete dust and lifting a wall off his back and struggling to rise back into the air. He has no time to blink away dazed numbness, no time to swallow the metallic blood in his mouth, because the monster is there, bounding over him, screaming that shriek that rattles like electricity through Clark’s bruised body.
Clark throws a punch, but he’s too used to holding back (he’s never really punched anyone before, not once in his entire life, and he doesn’t know how not to limit himself) and the creature hardly reacts to it at all. But Clark definitely feels the monster’s return strike, can feel the swoop of his stomach as he goes flying (not under his own power, and it’s so strange a feeling that he almost forgets why he’s here, or maybe that’s just because of the way he hits his head against four buildings and sees Kryptonite stars exploding in his vision), can see the searing line of bloody fire the monster’s spikes leave etched across his chest.
He’s slower to rise, until he hears a scream--not the creature’s, but a human’s. A child’s. A man’s. A crowd. People. They need him. They’re vulnerable and scared and so very mortal, and he can’t save Lois (can’t save himself), but maybe he can save these few. Maybe he can keep Metropolis’s skyline standing there against the sea and the sky, the Daily Planet building still erect and rebuilt.
There’s no time for any more reasoning, then (or for hope that Tempus was lying), only time to move faster than he ever has before, to sweep people blocks away and return to take the punches the creature means for anything in its way. Only time to finally learn how to punch with all his strength behind it, and to see the monster buckle and fall only to roar back upward with renewed strength and growing hatred.
Only time to realize that Tempus was right, after all.
This is his Doomsday.
*
