Relative History (Part 1)
By: C. Leuch
April 15, 2025
Bruce Wayne sighed as he sat at the desk in his study. A sense of foreboding had been building in him steadily over the last several days, and one look at the calendar told him why. Tomorrow was a date that had been circled a long time ago, so long ago that he wondered what the world would be like when it finally came. He had assumed that he would exiled or dead when it did come around, but he was still here, retired from his former line of duty, and his life had instead become fuller, surrounded by his adopted family. And although he was sure Sam Wayne, the erstwhile CJ Kent and current Batman, could probably handle whatever came – he had survived death once, after all – he wasn’t so sure about the rest of them, and that brought a deep sense of worry. It was amazing how protective he had become of them, even though they weren’t his blood. That’s just what family was, he supposed, a lesson finally learned after decades of pushing away anyone who came too close.
His hand reached out and opened a drawer to his left, three from the top. Pressed up against the front was a yellowed envelope, which he gently clasped and pulled out, looking at it closely before turning it over in his hands. After a long moment, he regarded his visitor, then handed him the envelope. “This has been in my possession for 28 years,” he said, his voice taking on the same even tone that it always did when he discussed business. “It showed up out of thin air one day, placed by some invisible hand in front of the computer monitor in the cave while Dick had watched. The only clue as to how it got there was a strong gust of wind, which meant that it had to have been delivered by one of two people.”
Sam Wayne, seated in a chair opposite Bruce, nodded slowly, his eyes locked on Bruce’s. He hadn’t given the envelope more than a cursory glance yet, though Bruce was sure he would have more to contribute to the conversation once he did. “You think this came from my dad?”
“I thought maybe so at first, but at the time I had yet to even meet Superman, or the Flash, and neither should know where to find me. I puzzled over it for a while, but decided that a post-dated letter didn’t warrant that much of my time, so I put it away and forgot about it.” Its presence had caused to him to invest heavily in better security, to mistrust Superman for a while before he realized that there was no way that the envelope could’ve come from him. By all rights, Bruce probably should’ve thrown it away, but whether out of curiosity or respect for the unknown sender, he hadn’t. He also could’ve opened it, he supposed, but something held him back. So it had sat, moving from time to time from one desk drawer to the next, hanging for a time on a bulletin board before finally making its way here, to this time and place.
CJ furrowed his brow, then examined the letter more closely. The writing on the front, in slightly smudged pencil, indicated that the envelope was intended for “The Current Batman,” as if the sender knew that Bruce would’ve passed off the mantle before the delivery date, given as April 16, 2025, came. After a second he blanched, his eyes growing wide as he looked back at Bruce. “This looks like my brother’s handwriting,” he croaked, confusion evident in his features. “How could that be?”
“Maybe it’s not. Maybe it is, I don’t know. But I’m fairly certain that something is going to happen in the next 24 hours that will answer that question. For the sake of the past, we have to let whatever that something is happen. Then it looks like you have a letter to open, and probably a case to solve.”
CJ took a couple of deep breaths and pondered the possibilities. His gaze shifted past Bruce, and he lost himself in thought for a while before a ghost of a smile began to form on his face. “If knowledge of every time travel movie ever made is an asset, then I have this one in the bag,” he said. “Though I’m almost jealous that Jon gets to be the one to experience it.”
---
Jonathan Kent hung up the phone and regarded his computer screen. His current assignment was proving to be rather frustrating, and not only for him. A series of robberies had occurred throughout Metropolis over the last couple days, and although plenty of high profile items had been stolen, neither he nor the police were any closer to figuring out who was behind them, and that was due in large part to the fact that the robbers seemed to simply disappear after pulling the job. One theory was that superpowered individuals were behind it, but Jon could say from firsthand experience that was not the case. In observing one of the robberies, it had seemed to him that there was some sort of hand-held device that the robbers activated, causing the air around to shimmer before they took a step forward and vanished. In the split second it took him to reach the site, they would simply vanish without a trace. There was also no pattern to the robberies, and trying to predict where they would hit next was proving to be difficult.
Jon had a leg up on other reporters covering the story, though, in that he had several connections within STAR Labs. Aside from Superman’s usual group of doctors and advisors, he had some old friends that worked there, that he often called when he needed information regarding the cutting edge of scientific research, and this seemed to fit the bill. In conversing with his friend, it was mentioned that other branches of STAR Labs has been attempting to develop personal teleportation devices, which, to put it in science factor terms, created little portals that would take a person from one place to another. It was fascinating research, but Jon’s friend was fairly certain that it hadn’t gotten beyond the conceptual phase.
Jon drummed his fingers on his desk, wondering how much of that information to put in the article. The robber’s method of disappearing was really just speculation at this point, and his editor was rather firm that speculation, rumor, and gossip had no place in the news. And anyway, he was on a deadline, which was only a few minutes away. With a sigh, Jon gave the article another once over, edited a few words and phrases to clean things up, and submitted it. The information from STAR Labs would just have to wait for another edition, when he was able to flesh it out a little better. In the meantime, he did have other sources he could probe for information. With a half smile, he picked up the phone again and dialed a familiar number.
His smile widened as his wife’s voice came through the receiver. “I see you’re calling from the Daily Planet - I suppose that means you’ll be asking me for a subscription,” she said coyly. It was a variation on a joke she used every time he called, but it never got old.
“I was just in need of information, so I thought I would call the smartest person I know,” he said. Phoning her during working hours was probably not strictly necessary, given the amount of time they spent together during the rest of the day, but there was an unwritten rule between them to leave work at work. And anyway, talking to her could only help improve his mindset on what had been an otherwise frustrating day.
“Ah, flattery,” she said, the good humor in her voice soothing to his soul. “I can’t possibly say no to you after that. What’s up?”
“Well, the most recent case of disappearing burglars happened in your precinct, and since I’m running into a brick wall in trying to figure it out…”
“Wait a second,” Diane said, interrupting him mid-babble. “You haven’t thought up an alliterative name for these guys yet?”
“The Daily Planet is above those kinds of tacky publicity stunts,” Jon replied with mock indignation. “And besides, we’re not the Hardy Boys.”
“Aren’t you the same paper that coined the name ‘Skyshot Sanchez’ for the Metro’s newest slugger?” Her voice was downright lyrical as she teased him.
“That was the sports section,” he answered. He waived his hand dismissively out of habit, even though he knew she couldn’t see it.
“And when historic Old Town went up in flames, didn’t you guys christen the perpetrator the Authentic Architectural Arsonist?”
Jon signed. She had a point, and he would be lying if the thought of some sort catchy nickname didn’t cross his mind. “I was leaning toward the Porthole Purloiners,” he said. “But is seemed like a stretch. Anyway, about the case?”
She laughed lightly, then cleared her throat. “Ah yes, the case. Tell you what, Kent. I will trade you information about this in exchange for a desk-side lunch. I’m positively starved, but I’m on duty here for another hour.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” he said, his cheeks hurting from trying to smother his grin. “I’ll be down there with sandwiches before you can say ‘pumpernickel.’”
A soft “p” sound had barely escaped her lips before Jon set the phone down, looked around, then, finding himself alone in his corner of the office, took off for his favorite lunch spot.
---
Jon took a bite out of his sandwich and raised his eyebrows as Diane pondered the information that he had given her.
“So STAR labs doesn’t have anything capable of doing what these guys can do?” she asked as she absently stabbed her fork into her salad. “They’re the most advanced research laboratory on the east coast. You would think if anyone could match the technology available to the random criminal element, it would be those guys.”
Jon bobbed his head and chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Well,” he said, “Just because they’ve been the most cutting-edge tech company in the past doesn’t mean they’re the most cutting-edge research company now. I can name off the top of my head another half dozen companies and a few universities between here and Gotham that have been involved in revolutionary technological breakthroughs in the last couple months. Then again, for all we know someone could’ve come up with the portal device in their garage.”
She snorted. “Yeah I can see that now. A couple scrubby guys hanging out in their garage tearing apart household appliances to construct a device that particle physicists have a hard time explaining. Somehow I think that’s not the answer, but….” She raised an eyebrow and took a bite, taking a moment to compose her thoughts. “If they were looking for someplace to disappear to where we would never think to look, some random garage in the suburbs would fit the bill pretty well,” Diane said.
“You know, it’s possible that they don’t disappear to a certain place, but to a certain time.” Jon leaned forward and lowered his voice. “My dad tells a story about a time when he had to deal with someone who used a sort of window to move through time periods and to even different dimensions.”
Diane blinked a few times. “Wow, really?”
He raised his eyebrows. “The technology came from the future, but the person using it didn’t come here to commit petty crimes. They were more…megalomaniacal than that. My dad can tell you the whole story, but…what’s going on here doesn’t have the feel of something big, so I doubt it’s related.”
“Still, it makes you think about the possibilities,” Diane said, then took another bite of her salad. They ate silently for a few moments, pondering, before Diane spoke again.
“There’s no pattern in their targets, right?” she said.
Jon sighed. “Not that I can find. Like I said, it’s frustrating.”
“And do you know what was stolen?”
“For the most part,” he said. “But it’s possible that we don’t know everything. Reporters usually only get told about the big ticket items.”
Diane’s eyes began to twinkle. “But I bet I could find out the whole list.” Putting her fork down, she began to type on her computer terminal, smiling as she found what she was looking for. Jon leaned over slightly and she tilted her monitor so he could see. “This is strictly off the record, of course.”
“Come on,” he said with a smirk.
She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, look who I’m talking to.” As they read over the list, they started to postulate on ways the items could be related, throwing out items that could be made from components or ways that the items could be reconstituted. Something was beginning to tickle the back of Jon’s mind, but before he was able to zero in on the thought, he caught the crackle of a police radio in the dispatch room.
“Jon?” Diane whispered, laying her hand on his arm and drawing his focus back to her. Years of marriage to him meant that she could read his cues, and although she had been speaking when he heard the radio, probably saying something profound, she didn’t seem upset. Excitement seemed to burn in her eyes as she awaited his response, and he had to smile as he briefly pondered how lucky they were to have each other. Trying to catch thieves, even ones that used novel model of transportation, could easily be very routine. But working with her, both in his guise as reporter and as a superhero, made it much more exciting, much more fresh. It always seemed like they accomplished more when they paired up than they did alone, and her presence certainly made the experience more enjoyable. The thrill of the hunt, the adrenaline rush that came with a successful outcome seemed to carry over once they got home at night, too, and he found himself suddenly just as excited as she was.
“They’re back,” he whispered back, standing abruptly. “The Diamond Exchange in the Hub Tower.” She stood, then gave him a small smile.
“See you there?” she said, and his smile widened.
“I look forward to it,” he replied, then leaned in to give her a quick kiss before jogging off to an empty hallway. Then, before anyone in the building could notice, he shifted into super speed and made his way toward the scene of the crime. Approaching the diamond exchange offices, he could see three men gathering things together, as if they had accomplished their mission, then suddenly one of the men took a step and seemed to disappear into a shimmering circle floating in the air.
It was true then, he thought, pouring on the speed. He had seen surveillance video that showed something similar, but video could be altered, and he had found himself skeptical that he was actually seeing what he thought he was. As he entered the building and zipped through the stairwells and hallways to the diamond exchange, he could see a second man step take a step and disappear. If he didn’t get there quickly, he might lose the best lead he had so far, and lose the suspects in the process. With one more burst of velocity, he reached the shimmering circle, which looked like nothing so much as a desert mirage, a distortion of air that could easily be dismissed as a hallucination. Time seemed to slow down as he reached it, and without a second thought, he entered it ahead of the third thief.
He wasn’t quite sure what he expected to experience as he entered the portal. Part of him thought that maybe he’d see important events from his life flash past him in a burst of colors, or see some lines of light pass by him as if he was moving at warp speed in a Star Wars movie. But what he found instead was an abrupt change of scenery. A moment earlier he had been inside an office building downtown, now as he stopped he found himself in a large, empty warehouse. The angle of the light streaming in through the windows made him believe that it was still around the same time of day, but the thick layer of dust covering everything, and the general state of repair of the place seemed to indicate that the building had been abandoned for some time. He also didn’t see any crooks, or any signs of life at all, outside of the rats and cockroaches scurrying around the base of the walls. He activated his x-ray vision and checked out the world outside the warehouse, and found that he was in a neighborhood near the docks, one that seemed familiar yet different from the warehouse district that he knew. The entire neighborhood seemed abandoned, overgrown, and forgotten.
With a frustrated grunt, he dropped to the ground and made his way to the nearest door. A padlock locked the door from the outside, though a small push was all he needed to make the lock succumb. Once outside, he took another thorough look around, then sighed and took off into the air, hoping to orient himself then return to his wife and his lunch. Clearing the top of the warehouse, he turned toward downtown, then stopped cold. Something was wrong with the skyline – buildings seemed to be missing, and others were there that shouldn’t be. He’d spent enough time staring at that skyline, populating the tops of the buildings there, that he should know what it looked like. His brow furrowed, and he started to question his memory, but it was at that moment that he became aware of sirens, a whole lot of them, and a police dispatch indicating a fire in a hotel not too far from where he was. Without another thought he took off to help.
The fire was in the middle floors of a 30 story hotel, and people could be seen in the widows on the upper floors, signaling for assistance. Jon quickly got to work rescuing people, though he noticed a certain reaction to his presence, almost as if people were surprised to see him. He didn’t let the reaction slow him down, though, and soon enough he was satisfied that the upper floors were vacated. Landing atop the building across from the hotel, he pondered the firefighters approach to the blaze and how best to help them, when his father landed next to him. Jon glanced toward him, but had to do a double take at what he saw.
“Get a new suit?” he asked with a half smile, noting that the fabric and stitching all seemed very different than the last time he saw him. The color was a slight shade different, too, and the size of the S shield somewhat larger. Even aside from the suit, though, the way he styled his hair seemed different. Their costumes and overall look were not exactly static, despite what the public thought. From time to time Jon or Clark would experiment with different materials or make slight tweaks to the costume to simplify its construction of take advantage of some new technique or technology. The changes tended to be minor, though, and they would rarely make more than one small tweak at a time. This was the most radical change that Jon had seen in Superman’s appearance, and it was a little jarring. And the expression on his face – was he confused? alarmed? – didn’t help. Jon felt his smile starting to fade as his dad opened and closed his mouth a couple times, acting like he wanted to say something, but ultimately not saying anything. Jon shook his head and reminded himself that this was his father, after all, and the two of them didn’t have any reason to feel uncomfortable around each other, even if the air between them seemed very stuffy at the moment. He was probably just concerned about the fire. “I, uh, was going to work on putting out the fire around the building core, if you wanted to work from the outside,” Jon said, and his father nodded dumbly.
After a moment of hesitation, Jon took off again and went about his work. Working as a team with his dad, it didn’t take long to finish. Once all the hot spots were taken care of, Jon flew out of the building and hovered in the air for a moment, noting with some puzzlement that there seemed to be an awful lot of media members on the street for a simple fire, even if it was a rather visible one. And they all seemed to go crazy once they caught sight of him, which hadn’t really happened much since his first year on the job. He was going to ask his dad about it, but noticed that Superman had apparently disappeared. No doubt to go write up the story, Jon thought with a grateful smile. Giving the crowd a salute, he took off for the police precinct and the rest of his sandwich.
He found his velocity slowing as he went along, his attention diverted by a thousand little things that just seemed wrong. The vehicles on the road – all seemed to be from sort of period movie, where old cars looked new, older cars were way more common that he could ever remember, and any car manufactured since the turn of the millennium was completely absent. The clothing and hair styles of the people on the streets also seemed odd – too pastel, with too much hair spray. Nobody walked around distracted by small screens in front of their faces, though a minority of people still seemed to be conversing on odd cell phones. Even the sounds in the air were different – the radio spectrum seemed much less crowded, with some digital bands entirely missing. There was a pervasive high-pitched whine in the air characteristic of tube-type televisions, a sound that was usually quite rare, but now seemed to be everywhere. In all, it made an odd picture, but he didn’t begin to get worried until he reached the police precinct where he had been conversing with his wife less than an hour earlier. Watching from the air, he could find no sign of Diane, and her desk seemed to be occupied by someone else. The furniture in the building looked old and beat up, the carpet different, the computers on the desks gigantic.
Gaining altitude, Jon looked toward his apartment, and blanched when he saw that it was completely missing. In place of his building stood an abandoned warehouse, not too different from the one he found himself in after entering the porthole. Panic began to seep into his consciousness as he drifted toward the Daily Planet. Looking inside, he saw a newsroom that looked nothing like the one he knew, and his desk was gone…a closet occupied the floor space where it should be. And there, in the middle of it all, he could see his parents, only…. Only they were young, very young, his mother’s hair devoid of grays, her face smooth and vibrant. His dad didn’t look terribly different, though his wardrobe did. At the sound of Jon’s gasp, he saw his father look toward him, directly at him, his eyes widening.
“Where…when am I?” Jon whispered, though he had a terrible feeling that he already knew the answer. His father’s eyes diverted to a wall on the far side of the newsroom, and Jon’s gaze followed, noting the Daily Planet’s masthead splashed above a series of clocks and, finally, a calendar. The year at the top of the calendar stated that he was, in fact, in the year 1997… 28 years earlier than when he had awoken that morning.
“No. No no no,” Jon said, the panic building inside of him. How could he be in 1997? What had happened when he went through that porthole? With the exception of his parents, everyone he knew, everyone he could confide in or try to work out the answers to his questions was gone, or technically had yet to be. CJ, Laura, Jenny…Diane. He had seen enough science fiction to know that he couldn’t talk to his parents, that he should just get as far from them as he could, for the sake of his own future. But where could he go? Who could he talk to?
In an instant the answer came. There were two people he could seek out, people who weren’t a part of the world he left, people who had always known the right words to say and the right advice to give. Without a second thought he left, bound for Kansas.
