The Butterfly Legacy
by Lynn M.
** This story is being posted simultaneously in the Nfic Thread. If you are of age and of a mind, I recommend that you read that version as it is the intended original. **
Author’s notes:
First and foremost, I’d like to give a great big Thank You to CC Aiken, who not only cheerlead-ed me through the long days of writing, even from the paradise of Disney World, but also helped me find my way out of several corners I’d managed to paint myself into. Without her, I might have tossed this all into the garbage at the eleventh hour when I was tearing my hair out!
Mostly, though, she passed along some sage advice from an old pro (not to imply that LabRat is old <g>) that gave me the courage to write this story the way I saw it. With her support, I found my backbone.
The standard disclaimer applies and appears at the end of the story, as do some additional author’s notes.
This story is set after Barbarians at the Planet but veers on a different course than the one taken in House of Luthor.
I plan to post this on an EOD schedule. Thanks for reading.
L.
~§~
Chapter 1
He flew low, through the thick band of towering cumulous clouds strung together like beads and hung across a cerulean sky. Icy mist pelted his face, stinging shards that caused no real pain but reminded him there was still some feeling left in his body. It would have been a simple matter to adjust his altitude a few thousand feet to avoid the clouds, yet he maintained his course. He didn’t want to see blue sky. Or sunshine.
Even though he had a destination, he didn’t fly at super-speed. The earthquake had occurred several hours earlier, his knowledge of it coming late. A few extra minutes wouldn’t make a difference by that point, and besides, he’d be there soon anyway. Metropolis to Colombia was only a jaunt half-way round the world, after all.
What a difference it made, to have something to actually run to when one needed to run away from something else, Clark noted as he swerved to avoid a United Airlines 747 banking left out of the clouds on its final approach into Miami.
In the month since the Daily Planet’s destruction, he’d come to look forward to calls for help. While he absolutely regretted any suffering, at least he’d felt useful. Now, if he could only find a way to forecast accidents and natural disasters, he’d wager that he’d have the perfect setup. Show up in time to avert disaster before anyone could be hurt, then move on to the next catastrophe.
Catastrophe. That pretty much spelled the current state of his life. No Planet. Friends scattered to the winds. No job or prospects.
No Lois.
Instantly his stomach wrenched, and he headed straight upwards, piercing the stratosphere in search of the space he needed to fend off the overwhelming claustrophobia. Whenever he thought about her and what was soon going to happen, he couldn’t breathe deeply enough, the feeling of suffocation inducing a near panic.
She was actually going to go through with it. In less than two months, Lois Lane would become Lois Luthor or Lois Lane-Luthor or Lois Luthor-Lane or whatever name she’d concocted. What she called herself was irrelevant. In the end, the only part that really mattered was the “Mrs.” that would soon precede all other names. Lois was getting married. And it sure as hell wasn’t to him.
In the weeks leading up to their heated argument during Perry’s retirement party, he’d tortured himself trying to find the way to make it all stop. There was something he should be able to say, some magic combination of words that would penetrate the steel armor of stubbornness Lois had donned. Some way he could avert the train wreck.
His first instinct had proven an abysmal disaster. He’d confessed his love, sitting on a park bench in the center of the bustling city. Told her in amazingly few words of the feelings that had stacked on top of themselves over the course of the past year. She’d handed them back with a polite thanks-but-no-thanks and an of-course-we’ll-always-be-friends. His sole consolation had been her lack of an enthusiastic yes when asked if she loved Luthor.
Next had been his efforts to discredit her fiancé. To make her see what kind of evil she’d be binding herself to if she didn’t wake up and face the truth. But without telling her how exactly he had come to know the depth of Luthor’s vileness, he had no real proof. Nothing concrete that a hardnosed reporter insistent on three irrefutable sources would accept. Every accusation he’d made she’d countered with a canned-by-Luthor excuse. She chose to remain blind, deliberately ignorant.
There had been some thought given to telling her who he was. In fact, he’d pulled that trump card out of its locked case and had been read to throw it on the table when she’d summoned Superman to her apartment. And then it had come. The coup de grace.
< If you had no powers, if you were just an ordinary man leading an ordinary life, I'd love you just the same…>
Her words were razors, severing the last threads of his hope to send him plunging into hell.
Lois loved the façade, the abilities and the cape. Even if she didn’t understand it herself, he had no more delusions to hide behind. Lois didn’t love him.
In the end, after he’d examined it ad nauseam, tore the beast apart trying to find the remaining inch he hadn’t covered, he’d finally seen clearly that there was simply nothing more he could do. To stop her from marrying Luthor. To get his old life back, her friendship better than the dissension crackling between them. To make Lois Lane love Clark Kent.
So denial had been evicted, a bitter gut-eating anger settling in for a long, extended stay. And the days became endless. The nights even longer. He had no purpose any more. He was a wanderer who’d stopped wandering but no longer had a reason to stay put.
With a harsh shake of his head, he tossed off the self-pity. He couldn’t afford such an indulgence, at least not at that moment. For a little while, anyway, he did have somewhere to go. Some fifty odd miles beneath him, the aftermath of an earthquake awaited.
He dove like a bullet toward the northwest coast of South America, pulling up just below the clouds to catch a magnificent view of the deep emerald jungles of Colombia where they ran right up to the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea. Even in his melancholic mood, he had to appreciate the raw beauty beneath him, two pristine jewels nestled together in vibrant contrast of earth and ocean.
Passing over the capital of Bogotá, which he’d visited during his traveling days, he headed southwest. News reports had placed the epicenter of the quake near the city of Popayán. In a country saddled with civil unrest, open guerilla warfare, and the proliferation of drug cartels, he was uncertain what he might find when he landed.
But Popayán proved well equipped to handle the surprisingly minimal damage it had sustained. Emergency teams controlled the scene at the northern most edge of town, where less than a dozen buildings had been affected. Speaking with several rescue workers and city officials, he learned that the quake’s epicenter was actually north and to the east, closer to the smaller village of Silvia.
After spending only an hour x-raying the few suspicious piles of debris and finding no trapped people, he lifted off the ground amidst cheers and shouted gracias, heading northward into the Andes in hopes that he wasn’t too late to do some good.
The small village of Silvia was in a more dire situation. Nearly a third of the town’s buildings tottered precariously on shaken foundations or lay in ruined heaps of stucco and adobe, and his initial scans sadly yielded real casualties. Ignoring the gaping stares of the villagers, he began to dig wherever a cry or a moan could be heard, and soon the crowds were digging alongside him.
Darkness descended too soon, making the rescue efforts even more difficult. But by morning, they’d searched the entire town for buried survivors, moving piles of shattered brick and splintered wood when necessary to extract both the living and the dead. The work was grim, and as dawn broke over the distant mountain peaks, Clark felt the bizarre mixture of satisfaction that he’d been able to help and despair that he hadn’t saved more.
With a heavy sigh, he determined he’d done all he could and made ready to leave. As the mayor of Silvia shook Clark’s hand appreciatively, a growing murmur spread through the crowd filling the town’s main square. The throng split, allowing a swayback horse to pass through. It’s rider, a boy looking to be no more than thirteen or so, nearly collapsed onto the street when he reached the center of the square. Both beast and youth foamed with exertion, and it took long minutes for the boy to gather enough strength to tell his story.
In a jumble of Spanish sprinkled with what Clark was later to learn was a hybrid of Guambiano and Paez dialects, the boy sputtered that his village, San Pablo, had been nearly decimated by the earthquake. Both the school and a newly built clinic lay in ruins as well as most of the homes. People were missing and many more injured.
The boy, whose name it seemed was André, had been sent to retrieve help, and he begged for anyone to return with him to his crippled village. But the weary inhabitants of Silvia had neither the strength nor the means to offer assistance. Located twenty treacherous miles down into the valley, San Pablo was simply too remote, and the villagers were already overburdened with their own losses.
When André collapsed in torrent of tears and failure, Clark approached him with an outstretched hand. Speaking in Spanish, he tried to explain that he could offer some help.
At first the boy stared blankly at Clark, mesmerized by the blue suit and billowing red cape. But when the meaning of Clark’s word’s reached his exhausted brain, André began to nod enthusiastically. Scrambling to his feet, he gestured at the road and made to remount his horse. Clark shook his head and pointed to the sky. In the end, it took quite a bit of assistance from the mayor to explain that it would be faster for the man in the cape to fly to San Pablo rather than making the three hour journey on horseback.
André balked at the prospect of flying anywhere with the gringo loco. Clark had to demonstrate several times that such a feat was even possible, and still the youth clung to his neck with an iron grip, keeping his eyes shut for the entirety of the flight down the mountain.
Almost as disconcerting as the premise of a man flying through the air was the reality that André would have to leave his horse behind to be fetched later. Clark was not about to fly with the horse, no matter how much the boy pleaded or lamented about his father’s imminent anger. Saving a village was one thing. Transporting livestock through the air was another.
San Pablo sat in a shallow valley no more than a quarter mile wide, on a narrow strip of cleared land surrounded by fingers of thick forests that rose up the hills on either side of it and ran right up to the edge of the village itself. The center of town consisted of a wide dirt road lined on each side with around a dozen adobe buildings. Five narrow tracks forked from the main street at various locations, and the villagers’ homes were sprinkled off them like leaves splayed from the crooked branches of a tree.
The entire scene reminded Clark of a movie set, white washed boxes topped with a variety of materials ranging from corrugated tin to red tiles to twisted bundles of dried grass and twigs. But this movie was clearly staged to be a tragedy, for the chaos that greeted him was a staggering jumble of noise and terror and destruction.
But the cacophony ceased as he touched down in what appeared to be the village’s main intersection. Every eye turned from the devastation to stare open-jawed at the flying man in blue spandex, carrying who looked suspiciously like André Martinez. Even without his super-hearing he could hear the whispers, the word Diablo hitting him particularly hard. Devil.
With his red cape and the way he’d been feeling of late, he could very well be from hell, so he took no offense at their obvious fascination and uncertainty. More accurately, he felt disbelief that in the very last decade of the twentieth century, in the age of computers and televisions and overly pervasive media that reached every corner of the globe, there were still places so remote that they’d never seen or heard of Superman.
When no one stepped forward to present themselves as the village’s mayor or leader, he wasted no time, turning to the rubble and beginning his search. As he scanned the first pile of destroyed adobe, he had to stifle a small smile. Behind him the very angry voice of a man berated the still bewildered André, wanting to know exactly what the boy had done with the family’s horse. Soon after father and son wandered off, the people behind him returned to the task of being stunned by the violence wreaked on their homes and businesses.
The routine he’d established in Silvia proved just as efficient in the smaller town. First he’d scan a pile of debris to determine if any survivors lay trapped within. Often he would extinguish a fire burning hotly out of control. If he spotted no movement nor heard any sounds of life, he’d quickly move on to the next pile.
Oddly, the entire process felt remotely like an assembly line. He’d been doing it for so long his body operated on automatic pilot, freeing his mind to wander the several thousand miles back to Metropolis.
What would he be doing, if he wasn’t there? Well, it depended on how far back he was willing to look. If he thought no further than a week or so ago, his answer would have been that he’d have been doing almost the same thing as he was doing in San Pablo. Removing rubble, in the metaphorical sense anyway. Picking up pieces of his destroyed life much as these people picked through the debris, looking for scraps and bits even remotely salvageable.
Less than a month ago, his life had been reduced to dust and splinters. When that bomb had destroyed the Planet, it had started a chain reaction, pushing over the blocks of his carefully constructed life as if they were no more than dominoes. He’d lost his dream job. He’d lost his work partner. He’d lost the woman that he loved. He’d lost everything.
But mostly, he’d lost himself. When Lois had rejected him only to declare her love for his alter ego, he’d lost any desire to be the man who’d even lived that life. Of the three men that Lois had held any feelings for, Clark Kent had ranked dead last. Last behind a murderous gangster. Last behind a two-dimensional cardboard cutout who could fly and bend steel with his bare hands.
No, much like these people, his entire life had been shaken out from under his feet in a matter of seconds. Except that the village of San Pablo could be rebuilt, the buildings reformed and the town made new again. The damage to his world was irreparable. Even if he could somehow manage to salvage some of it, he didn’t really think he wanted to live there anymore anyway. Not without Lois.
With nearly as much force as he employed in moving debris, he pushed thoughts of her from his mind. He knew the effort was futile. She’d show up there in a few minutes again anyway, no matter how hard he fought it. Even after her overt rejection and the finality of the choices she’d made, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Every day. Every minute. And it seemed that the more he tried not to, the more impossible he found it to stop.
Instead, he focused intently on the work, the feeling of heavy stone rough in his hands. He imagined the large chunks of adobe to be Lex Luthor’s head, feeling perverse pleasure when each crumbled into gray dust. The morning slipped into afternoon and neared evening before he slowed at all.
Clark stopped a moment, passing a hand across his forehead. He’d been removing rubble and extracting people for nearly two days. While it took a lot to deplete his resources, the constant emotional toil was starting to wear on him. He was getting tired. Of smashed adobe and blood and the keening wails of the victims.
“Here. Have a drink.”
He turned toward the voice, blinking against the shaft of sunlight lowering on the horizon, casting the stranger in silhouette. As his eyes adjusted, Clark saw a reedy man with deeply tanned skin and a thick, dark beard extending a battered tin canteen toward him.
“It’s been purified. Safe enough to drink,” the man said when Clark hesitated. Thrusting the canteen into Clark’s stunned hand, he repeated his command. “Drink.”
Clark shook his head. It wasn’t his fear of the water that caused his pause but rather shock at finding a man who spoke English without any trace of the thick Colombian accent he’d heard ever since arriving, when he’d heard English at all. When his own voice failed him, he took a long draught of water. Even lukewarm and tasting faintly of chlorine, the wetness was still refreshing. He tipped the canteen back for another swallow and felt his strength return.
“Name’s Jeff Phillips, with the PC,” the man answered before Clark could ask.
“PC. Peace Corps,” Clark translated after a moment of contemplation. The man must be American then. That would account for the lack of an accent despite the dark features that marked Mr. Phillips as a Colombian native. “I thought the government – “
“They did. Some of us didn’t listen,” Mr. Phillips offered with a wry smile, but he didn’t elaborate. “I’m guessing by that S on your chest that you might be Superman? I saw a picture of you in the Bogotá paper.”
Clark laughed. “That or the gringo loco. Nice to meet you Mr. Phillips.”
“Oh, it’s Jeff, please,” Jeff said, taking the hand Clark had extended and giving it a firm shake.
“You in charge here, Jeff?” Clark asked.
“I guess as much as anyone. I’m the teacher at the school. For some reason they seem to think that means I can do anything. Don’t know what gave them that idea,” he said with a deprecating chuckle.
Clark laughed along with the friendly man. “How many people live here?”
“Oh, there’s about five hundred that live in town. Another five hundred or so on the outlying farms,” Jeff guessed. “But San Pablo’s got the only school within walking distance. The clinic too. Serviced San Pablo, Peublito and Piendámo. Just finished about six months ago, and now it’s nothing but a spot on the road.”
Clark swung his gaze over the flattened town, taking in the partial walls and caved-in roofs, children playing in front of their former homes while parents stood helplessly staring at the wreckage. They’d had next to nothing, and now, they had nothing at all.
Jeff seemed to read his mind, giving voice to his thoughts. “These folks can’t seem to catch a break. They spend their morning picking coffee beans and their afternoons working their own farms just to scrape together enough to feed their families with maybe a little left over to sell at market. They don’t own much, and now what they do have is not a whole lot more than piles of dust.”
“Well, I’ve scanned each building,” Clark said, wanting to give this man some hope. “Good news is that everyone I found I was able to pull out. All of the fires are out, and what’s still standing seems fairly stable.”
“I don’t know how we would have managed without you,” Jeff said gratefully.
“You’ll have to give André the credit. He’s the one who convinced me to come down here.”
“Yeah, I don’t imagine you get this far off the beaten track.”
“Not usually,” Clark admitted with a grin. “And I’ll tell you, for about five minutes, when I thought I was going to have to carry André’s horse down into the valley, I kind of understood why.”
Jeff joined him in an appreciative laugh, and Clark felt a little bit better. He was tired, but he’d helped these people whom the world had pretty much forgotten.
“Oh, what is she doing now?” Jeff muttered, his frown directed at some activity happening behind Clark.
Clark twisted around, looking for the source of Jeff’s concern.
A small woman was climbing over a jumble of debris, picking up handfuls of adobe and tossing them aside. The two men hurried to assist her.
Clark couldn’t see her face, bent over as she was, but as they neared, he suspected that, like Jeff, she wasn’t Colombian. A long light-brown braid snaked down her back and the exposed skin of her arms was fair, Caucasian. A crimson scrap of cloth tied her braid and contrasted gaily with the piles of white-washed adobe and filmy gray dust, reminding Clark of a cardinal against the snowy fields of his parents’ farm.
“Gills, we went through this section already,” Jeff called out as he climbed the precarious mound. “There’s –”
She held up a hand, palm out, commanding silence. “I hear something.”
Clark immediately floated to the top of the pile and began to lift large chunks of wall from the pile, tossing them lightly to the side. He’d gone through this particular building earlier, and a cold dread swept through him at the thought that he might have left a victim buried within its destroyed innards. How could he have let himself be so distracted?
“No, stop!” the woman exclaimed. “You might crush it.”
Clark froze instantly at her warning.
But Jeff’s hands went to his hips, his patience clearly stretched. “It?”
“Yeah, it,” she said, gingerly removing individual pieces of adobe after testing the stability of the remaining pile beneath a prodding toe. “I heard a bark. Or more like a whine, really.”
Clark let out a heavy breath of relief at the same time Jeff released an exasperated sigh. “For heaven sake, Gillian. You had us thinking there was somebody trapped down there.”
She stood upright, brushing an errant wisp of honey-colored hair out of her eyes, and Clark was finally afforded a glimpse of her face, what little of it there was that wasn’t covered in dirt. His first thought was that she was far younger than he’d expected based on the authority in her voice. His second thought was that she had the grayest eyes he’d ever seen.
“Hey, just because it’s not a person doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve to be saved,” she accused before turning back to her rescue mission.
The two men watched her painstaking work for a long, stunned minute before joining her efforts. Clark focused and picked up the distinct yip of dog. Now able to pinpoint a more precise location, it took only a few minutes before a sizable hole had been made. The woman reached her arms in and extracted a very dusty, very wiggly dog.
“Hey, there,” she cooed as the squirming mass tried to lick her face. “You’re a little one.”
“Great. Now you’ve got another critter to look after,” Jeff muttered as climbed back down to the road.
“Jeff, your compassion is overwhelming,” she said pleasantly, satisfied with her rescue despite his cynicism. “I’m gonna call him Luke.”
Clark brushed the dirt from his hands and joined Jeff back on the firm ground. The woman apparently named Gillian made her way down more slowly, examining the yapping puppy for signs of injury.
Assured that Luke had suffered no harm throughout his ordeal, she turned her inspection to Clark. Her eyes widened perceptibly, as if she hadn’t noticed the man in the brilliant blue suit with the floor-length cape until that very moment. “Wow. Who are you?”
Jeff rolled his eyes. “Gillian, this is Superman.” Then more politely, he reversed the introduction. “Superman, this is Gillian Brooks.”
“So you must be the gringo loco who can fly,” she said. “I thought André had gotten hit on the head by some falling adobe.”
Ignoring her imprudence, Jeff turned to Clark to explain. “Gillian runs the clinic…well…runs what’s left of the clinic, anyway.”
“Nice to meet you, Ms. Brooks,” Clark said, but her attention had returned to the dog struggling in her arms. With an inward shrug, he turned back to Jeff, ready to go home. He needed a shower and a good night’s sleep, if that was even possible. “Is there anything else you need?”
“I think most of the heavy work is done. The rest is clean up and starting over. Don’t suppose you want to stick around for that?” Jeff asked with a hearty laugh.
“Let him go, Jeff. I’m sure he’s got a meaty steak, a hot shower and a nice comfy bed with his name written all over it.”
Clark blinked. Not so much at her rudeness but at the fact that he’d been thinking exactly that very thing. He felt his face heat, somewhat embarrassed for being caught in his own selfish musings.
“Gillian!” Jeff admonished, giving Clark an apologetic smile. “Don’t mind her. She’s had a rough couple of days.”
“Hey, I just lost an entire year’s worth of work, not to mention the fact that my bed is probably buried under ten feet of dust,” she said despondently.
At that moment, a stooped man wearing a torn blue poncho appeared behind Jeff and tugged on his shirt sleeve. Bending to hear the man’s softly uttered words, Jeff nodded several times and patted the man’s shoulder. Having reached an understanding, he turned back to Clark and Gillian.
“Superman, this is Roberto. His was the tienda...um...shop...at the far end of the village,” Jeff explained. “He needs some clean water for his wife. She was caught inside.”
Clark remembered both the store and the woman. She’d suffered a few cuts and bruises, mild wounds considering the severity of the earthquake. But their home and store had collapsed to the ground, now nothing more than white dust.
“Buonas díaz, señor. Siento su pérdida,” he said, offering the man his condolences for the loss of his store and home.
“You speak Spanish?” Gillian asked, not bothering to hide the surprise from her voice.
“Yeah, a little bit,” he offered, keeping his fluency to himself. “When you’re in my line of work, you sort of pick things up.”
Her light eyes narrowed, and he thought he caught a glimmer of respect flicker over them. He had no idea why, but her approval pleased him. Maybe because she seemed like a hard person to impress.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll give Roberto a hand.” Jeff smiled, his strong white teeth flashing against his dark beard. “Can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done, Superman. Gillian, stay out of trouble.”
And with that, he and Roberto walked down the road toward the school, leaving superhero, wiggling dog, and belligerent young woman staring at each other in awkward silence.
“Well, how about it?” Gillian suddenly blurted out.
“I’m sorry?” he asked, confused by her question.
“Are you going to stick around for the clean up?”
“Oh, uh...I don’t think...” he stammered, taken off guard. Jeff had joked about it, but this woman was serious. “I mean, I think I’ve done all I can here. Everyone’s safe and –”
She snorted. “We’ve got a clinic and a school that are just piles of dust. And about a hundred families without homes. Nobody’s safe yet.”
He glanced around at the darkening forest climbing up both sides of the narrow valley, now suddenly menacing. He hadn’t given much thought as to where these people would go once he’d pulled them out of their collapsed town. Guilt and something else pricked his conscience.
“I suppose I could...” he trailed off. What could he do? Stay and rebuild their town? The idea was laughable. His job was search and rescue, and he’d done that. Besides, he had a life of his own...
Gillian was waving at him dismissively. “Oh, no. It’s great and all, what you’ve done. I mean, it would have taken us weeks to move all of this rubble. Now we’re just looking at months...years...to put the place back together.”
She gave him a broad smile indicating that her suggestion had been meant only to tease. But the gray eyes held something that looked like disapproval. Or maybe he saw in them a challenge. Whatever it was, inwardly he squirmed, discomfited.
“Nice to meet you, flyboy. Thanks for helping with the dog and all,” she said before turning away, leaving him gaping after her.
Did she really expect him to stick around a small, remote village in the middle of the Colombian Andes? Didn’t she have any idea who he was? How many people out there needed him? That he had other places to go?
Clark watched her back as she headed up the pitted dirt road. The long rope of her braid swung back and forth like a pendulum, it’s red tie hypnotizing.
<Had a life.>
“I’m staying,” he called after her before his mind could register what he was saying. A streak of obstinate pride bubbled out of the dullness he’d felt for the last month and a half. He was tired of being a person without a purpose.
Gillian kept walking, but her pace seemed to slow a bit. A small boy ran from his place leaning against one of the few buildings that remained mostly standing to intercept her. She leaned down to say something, and Clark caught only the word agua before the boy nodded his dark head enthusiastically and scampered off. Water. Gillian moved back to the center of the road and increased her pace.
He wondered for a minute if she’d even heard him and was ready to repeat his declaration when she raised the hand that didn’t contain wiggling brown puppy and gestured forward, in the direction she was heading.
“Well, in that case, you’d better come with me.”
to be continued...
