The House of the Earth Part 3 (3/8): Scarecrow
Title: Chapter Three: Scarecrow
Pairing/Characters: Kal/Bruce, Scarecrow
Notes: " The House of the Earth" is an AU in which a few thousand Kryptonians escaped the destruction of Krypton to flee to Earth and conquer its people.
Rating: G
Word Count: 2900
Summary: Kal and Bruce encounter the overseer who calls himself Scarecrow.
At previous plantations, people had spilled from the houses along the row of shacks as the truck pulled up; the arrival of the supply truck was a rare point of interest in an otherwise grinding day. But today the dusty, rutted road remained empty and silent.
Bruce pulled the truck to a stop and got out. "Supplies?" he called. After a moment, a door swung open and a woman peeked out, glancing in all directions. Then she beckoned them in, her eyes fixed fearfully on the main house far down the road, as if it were watching her.
"Do you need anything, sister?" Kal asked politely as they entered the shack. It was mostly bare, tidy, one corner screened off by a curtain.
"I'm Nicole," she said. "Do you have any..." She bit her lip. "...any morphine? Or any other...?"
"I'm sorry, we don't," said Bruce, and started to add more--but was cut off by a hoarse, agonized scream from behind the curtain, a scream that started low and rose to agonized levels.
Nicole rushed to the curtain and threw it open to reveal a woman on a cot, her back arched in convulsions, bloody foam flecking her lips. "Frida, dear," said the other woman, throwing her arms around her, "It's a nightmare! It's gone! There's nothing here!" But Frida seemed unable to hear her, and her screams went on and on until Bruce pulled the sobbing woman away from her side. He knelt down and touched her forehead, captured one of her flailing hands to take her pulse. In the middle of his check she went limp with such suddenness that Nicole gasped--at first Kal thought with terror, but then he realized it was with relief and a sort of hope. When Frida took a long, ragged breath she sobbed and turned away.
"She's dying," she said. "She's been dying for days. Her brother left. He couldn't--I can't do anything for her. I just wanted--" She broke off and sobbed again, once, "--I just wanted to make it a little easier for her."
Frida's eyes stared through Bruce unseeing, her mouth twitching in horror at something only she could see.
"What happened?" Kal said as Bruce lifted her eyelids and laid a hand on her flushed cheek.
"Scarecrow," Nicole said, and her eyes darted to the door as though she expected something unspeakably horrible to come through at the word. "He took her a week ago. Three days ago she was dumped on his doorstep like this. He was done with her." She bowed her head, rocking in on her grief. "She's dying, and I can't even give her a moment's peace."
"What did he do to her?"
Nicole stared at him hopelessly, her eyes bloodshot from weeping but dry. "He tests his drugs on the slaves. They give visions. Horrible nightmares of whatever you fear most. All of the people he takes die. The lucky ones die quickly."
"He's got to have some kind of antidote," Bruce said, rising from Frida's side.
"Why?" Nicole said, her voice flat and dull.
"People like this always want to know how to reverse what they're doing. They just don't care to do it," Bruce said. He looked over at Kal, then reached out and lightly tapped one of his hands. They were clenched into fists and Kal hadn't noticed. "So, Clark," said Bruce, "Are you up for some breaking and entering?"
The smile that met Kal's was fierce and angry and beautiful.
: : :
Nicole begged them not to go, but Bruce just laughed. "Don't worry about us," he said.
She wrung her hands. "You don't understand, Scarecrow is dangerous. May the Bat eat his soul!"
Kal looked up from where he was putting a damp cloth on Frida's forehead. "The Bat?"
"Oh," Nicole looked embarrassed. "It's not like I actually believe in it. They're just stories."
"What stories?"
Nicole shot a quizzical look at Bruce, who smiled and said, "He's been fairly isolated the last few years."
Nicole blushed and dropped her eyes at the implication that Clark had been a pleasure companion and thus cut off from human society. "Oh, the Bat is Robin Hood, King Arthur, Zorro--all rolled into one. An avenging spirit. Justice for those who suffer."
Bruce shook his head. "You know the kinds of stories. Everytime a machine breaks down, every time an overseer falls ill or a slave runs away--it was the Bat."
"I suppose it makes us feel better." Nicole looked down at Frida's contorted face. "He's not real."
"He'd be quite a brave man if he were," Kal said, looking at Bruce.
"But he's not," Bruce said, with a small smile. Kal might have said more, but Frida had another spasm of screaming at that point and all of them were too busy trying to keep her from injuring herself to continue the conversation.
"She won't make it to another sunrise," Bruce said softly when she went limp again. "We may already be too late."
Nicole's eyes were devoid of hope, dull pebbles in a face beyond suffering. "Don't go," she whispered again.
Kal and Bruce just shook their heads. Simultaneously.
: : :
The moon was the tiniest sliver of silver in the sky that night, leaving most of the world plunged into darkness. Kal followed behind Bruce as they slipped up toward the main house. Silently, carefully, Bruce opened a window and they moved inside.
The house was quiet, but Kal could hear rustling noises below them, sounds that broke into moans now and then. Chills chased along his spine as they moved deeper into the house. Everything was cobwebbed and disused, covered with dust.
Bruce met his eyes, a mere glint in the darkness, and slowly opened a heavy oak door--to stop in surprise. The room beyond was clean and sterile, filled with neatly arranged beakers and burners, gleaming countertops and sophisticated computers. Bruce moved soundlessly into the room and began to rummage through the neat piles of notes; Kal did the same. After a moment, Bruce hissed triumphantly. "It's a red powder," he whispered.
As if his voice had triggered it, a steel shutter clanged down over the rough-hewn wooden door and a monitor flickered to life. "Now, now," said a skinny older man from the screen. "Is someone being naughty down there? I'll be right down to deal with you."
The screen went dead and Kal could hear a hissing sound coming from somewhere, as if gas were being vented into the room.
"Help me look," said Bruce, pawing through the vials and flasks with increasing urgency. "Hurry." Kal was tempted to rip the shutter off the door, but that would surely reveal him as a Kryptonian and put them--and the rebellion--in deadly danger. So he kept looking for a red powder, rummaging through drawers and cabinets.
"Do you think--" he started to say, but turning to look at Bruce the rest of the sentence died in his throat.
Bruce was cowering on the floor, crouching with his hands over his eyes, shaking so violently that it seemed possible he might injure himself. Kal jumped forward to touch him, but Bruce didn't acknowledge the touch, not even to throw it off. He merely made a high, horrible keening sound between his teeth that ripped Kal's heart to shreds. "Bruce! It's not real, whatever it is!" He put his arms around Bruce's unresisting body. "You can fight it! You won't let it happen. Do you hear me, Bruce? Whatever it is, however bad it is, you won't let it happen!" Bruce's keen turned into something like a groan, choking and lost, but he didn't take his hands from his eyes.
He heard a click and looked up to see a man standing in front of the re-sealed door. He was wearing some kind of mask, ragged burlap covering his features. He looked at Bruce and Kal as if at two interesting specimens. Kal went to his knees next to Bruce, turning his eyes down, feigning the terror that was gripping Bruce. He couldn't let the man know he was an alien and unaffected...
Footsteps on the floor as the man approached; Bruce shuddered and muttered meaningless syllables in Kal's arms, a croon of horror that seemed to twine around Kal's spine, sending sympathetic tremors along his limbs. "Bruce, please," Kal whispered. "Come back. I need you."
Bruce shivered all over. "Kal?" he whispered, as if to himself, almost too low to hear.
"What have we here?" said the Scarecrow. "I don't know you two." His voice was like fingernails on slate and Kal wanted to clamp his hands over his ears to make it stop, he couldn't seem to draw breath. "Look at me," he commanded.
Bruce ignored him, lost in nightmares, but Kal looked up to meet the man's blank, burlap-filled sockets. Scarecrow chuckled. "You're a strong one. Good."
He kept speaking, but Kal's eyes were drawn to the wall behind him. It was shifting, writhing with black-violet energy--it was a wormhole of the kind the Kryptonians had created when they came to Earth. Opening up right here. How could Scarecrow not see it, how could he keep talking like that?
Out of the gate, arm in arm, came Jor-El and Lara.
They were dressed exactly as they were in the portrait-- the portrait that had looked down at him every meal of his childhood. Their eyes were filled with sorrow. Sorrow and--he realized with a jolt of horror--anger and shame. "Kal-El," said his father, his voice mournful, "How could you?"
They walked over to him, their feet on the floor, on the earth. Lara shook her head, gazing at him with tears in her eyes. "We've been trapped in this portal for years, unable to do anything but watch you."
"Watch you as you betrayed all we stood for!" his father burst out in fury. "We fought, we struggled against this hideous reign, and you--you just accepted it, like it was your rightful due."
Kal staggered to his feet, ignoring the bewildered Scarecrow. "Father--Mother--"
"Don't call us that!" snapped Jor-El. "You have no right!"
"I didn't know!" Kal cried. "I didn't know that you--"
Jor-El's mouth twisted in a snarl. "You didn't know that slavery was wrong? You honestly thought we'd ever be part of something like this? I'm ashamed you bear my name."
The tears in Lara's eyes brimmed over. "Selfish, cruel, monstrous child! I--I wish you had never been born!" She buried her head on her husband's shoulder, her furious weeping tearing at Kal's heart.
Kal wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. They were right. He bowed his head, remorse and guilt a torrent underneath which he was lost, an infinity of shame. Lost.
Somewhere in the anguish that tore him like knives, a voice was crying. "Clark! Clark! Damn it, snap out of it!" The voice was familiar, but Kal had no idea who Clark was. "Help me! Please!" There was a crashing noise nearby.
Bruce's voice. Bruce needed help. Kal raised his eyes to his parents; they swam before him, prismed by tears, witness to his shame. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I have to help Bruce."
Fury flickered on their features, distorting them. "Don't you dare," snarled Jor-El. "Don't you dare turn your back on us, you ungrateful child." Lara merely wept, the disappointment in her eyes more painful than the rage in his father's. But he shook his head.
"I can't abandon him. He needs help, can't you hear him? Even from someone like me--" He broke off and turned away from his parents. "I'm sorry," he said, grief wringing his heart.
Bruce was dodging a vicious scythe being swung with surprising strength by the Scarecrow, his movements hampered by the vial clenched tightly in his hand. A beaker had overturned onto a burner, and flames were licking around a table, moving up the wall, greedy. Smoke was filling the room. "Catch!" Bruce yelled when he saw Kal looking at him. The vial arced in the air between them; Kal caught it out of the air. Unrestrained now, Bruce moved forward with lithe grace, slipping past the Scarecrow's guard to lay him out with a precise jab to the jaw.
He caught the man on the way down. "We have to get out!" he choked past the acrid smoke. Kal ripped the metal shutter off the door and the flames leapt higher at the influx of fresh air.
They staggered out into the night air, coughing, Kal's vision still smeared by tears. Bruce dropped the limp Scarecrow on the ground a safe distance from the house.
As one, they wheeled to run back into the flames, to get into the basement and release his other victims.
Back and forth in the night they went until all the humans in the building were out. The house was close to collapse now, a blaze against the night. Kal turned to go back, and Bruce caught his sleeve. "Where are you going?"
"My parents--they're still in there. I have to get them out!"
Bruce's eyes were wide; reflected flames danced in them. "Kal. They weren't real. They were a hallucination."
Kal stared at him for a long moment, taking deep breaths of cool, untainted air, his head clearing. Then he staggered over to a grassy spot and sat down hard, rocking back and forth, body clenched against tears. "They said that--that they saw it all. My whole life. I've failed them utterly."
There was a long pause. Then Bruce's hand rumpled his hair, almost roughly. "Bullshit," Bruce said hoarsely. "Don't say that again," he said as Kal started to speak. "I don't want to hear it."
"But you must have seen them." They had been so real...
"No. I saw something else, something--" Bruce broke off. "It doesn't matter, it wasn't real, it was a drug. Whatever you saw, whatever we saw, it was caused by a chemical. It wasn't real." He turned away and went to check on the coughing, sobbing victims. Firelight glinted in his hair like scraps of sunlight.
Kal realized there was something in his hand. He uncurled his fingers to find the vial of the antidote. He wanted to lay down on the grass and close his eyes and weep, weep until he washed the toxin out of his body and his mind. But instead he stood up. There were people who needed the antidote.
There would be time to weep later.
: : :
The dawn was turning the skies rose as Nicole pressed a small bundle into Kal's hands. "Bread. I bake a pretty good loaf, if I do say so myself." When Kal tried to give it back, she just shook her head. "You gave me my Frida back. I owe you more than my life. At least take my bread."
Kal took her bread.
Bruce started the engine and the small village fell away from them. Better to leave before the Kryptonians came to investigate Scarecrow's abuses of Kryptonian property--both the stolen scientific equipment and the lost slave labor. With any luck the next overseer would be less brutal.
They drove in silence down the long road leading back to the main highway. Bruce had said little since their escape, throwing himself into distributing the antidote, not meeting Kal's eyes. Kal struggled for something to say, unwilling to push at the pain he saw in Bruce's eyes. "They must have twisted him," he said. "The Kryptonians. To make him see humans as plaything and subjects like that."
Bruce's laugh was dry. "Don't romanticise humans. We did things like that to each other long before you got here. And most of us just let it happen, didn't fight it. We are...capable of great cruelty and vast apathy. We just don't have as much power right now."
They reached the main road, a long ribbon winding from the east to the west. Bruce drew the truck to a stop, but then didn't pull onto the main road. He just sat there for a moment. "The toxin," he said, then stopped.
Kal said nothing. Waiting. Unsure he wanted Bruce to continue at all.
"I saw," Bruce paused. "We fought the Scarecrow and won, but I was hurt. Nothing too serious. But we decided...decided to turn back. To go home. Home," he repeated, his tone torn between softness and venom. "We went back. Time passed. I healed. I missed some meetings of the underground. It didn't seem that important. I became content with my life. With our life together. Years passed. I stopped worrying about the struggle. I was happy." His voice was wondering and pained. "I was happy."
Kal couldn't look at him. "You'd never let that happen. Never."
Bruce's hands clenched on the steering wheel. "It's...not inconceivable."
"No." Kal wanted to touch those hands, knotted around pain and determination. He didn't. "You'd never let that happen."
"You said that, back...there. I heard you say that." Tendons flexed, eased a little. "You wouldn't, either."
"I wouldn't," Kal agreed.
"Well," Bruce said. He nodded slightly. "Good."
Kal gestured toward the road, the rising sun spilling out across it. "Shall we continue?"
Still staring ahead, Bruce reached out and very briefly clasped Kal's shoulder. "Yes," he said. "Let's."
They pulled out onto the road, heading west, the morning sun bright behind them.
Pairing/Characters: Kal/Bruce, Scarecrow
Notes: " The House of the Earth" is an AU in which a few thousand Kryptonians escaped the destruction of Krypton to flee to Earth and conquer its people.
Rating: G
Word Count: 2900
Summary: Kal and Bruce encounter the overseer who calls himself Scarecrow.
At previous plantations, people had spilled from the houses along the row of shacks as the truck pulled up; the arrival of the supply truck was a rare point of interest in an otherwise grinding day. But today the dusty, rutted road remained empty and silent.
Bruce pulled the truck to a stop and got out. "Supplies?" he called. After a moment, a door swung open and a woman peeked out, glancing in all directions. Then she beckoned them in, her eyes fixed fearfully on the main house far down the road, as if it were watching her.
"Do you need anything, sister?" Kal asked politely as they entered the shack. It was mostly bare, tidy, one corner screened off by a curtain.
"I'm Nicole," she said. "Do you have any..." She bit her lip. "...any morphine? Or any other...?"
"I'm sorry, we don't," said Bruce, and started to add more--but was cut off by a hoarse, agonized scream from behind the curtain, a scream that started low and rose to agonized levels.
Nicole rushed to the curtain and threw it open to reveal a woman on a cot, her back arched in convulsions, bloody foam flecking her lips. "Frida, dear," said the other woman, throwing her arms around her, "It's a nightmare! It's gone! There's nothing here!" But Frida seemed unable to hear her, and her screams went on and on until Bruce pulled the sobbing woman away from her side. He knelt down and touched her forehead, captured one of her flailing hands to take her pulse. In the middle of his check she went limp with such suddenness that Nicole gasped--at first Kal thought with terror, but then he realized it was with relief and a sort of hope. When Frida took a long, ragged breath she sobbed and turned away.
"She's dying," she said. "She's been dying for days. Her brother left. He couldn't--I can't do anything for her. I just wanted--" She broke off and sobbed again, once, "--I just wanted to make it a little easier for her."
Frida's eyes stared through Bruce unseeing, her mouth twitching in horror at something only she could see.
"What happened?" Kal said as Bruce lifted her eyelids and laid a hand on her flushed cheek.
"Scarecrow," Nicole said, and her eyes darted to the door as though she expected something unspeakably horrible to come through at the word. "He took her a week ago. Three days ago she was dumped on his doorstep like this. He was done with her." She bowed her head, rocking in on her grief. "She's dying, and I can't even give her a moment's peace."
"What did he do to her?"
Nicole stared at him hopelessly, her eyes bloodshot from weeping but dry. "He tests his drugs on the slaves. They give visions. Horrible nightmares of whatever you fear most. All of the people he takes die. The lucky ones die quickly."
"He's got to have some kind of antidote," Bruce said, rising from Frida's side.
"Why?" Nicole said, her voice flat and dull.
"People like this always want to know how to reverse what they're doing. They just don't care to do it," Bruce said. He looked over at Kal, then reached out and lightly tapped one of his hands. They were clenched into fists and Kal hadn't noticed. "So, Clark," said Bruce, "Are you up for some breaking and entering?"
The smile that met Kal's was fierce and angry and beautiful.
: : :
Nicole begged them not to go, but Bruce just laughed. "Don't worry about us," he said.
She wrung her hands. "You don't understand, Scarecrow is dangerous. May the Bat eat his soul!"
Kal looked up from where he was putting a damp cloth on Frida's forehead. "The Bat?"
"Oh," Nicole looked embarrassed. "It's not like I actually believe in it. They're just stories."
"What stories?"
Nicole shot a quizzical look at Bruce, who smiled and said, "He's been fairly isolated the last few years."
Nicole blushed and dropped her eyes at the implication that Clark had been a pleasure companion and thus cut off from human society. "Oh, the Bat is Robin Hood, King Arthur, Zorro--all rolled into one. An avenging spirit. Justice for those who suffer."
Bruce shook his head. "You know the kinds of stories. Everytime a machine breaks down, every time an overseer falls ill or a slave runs away--it was the Bat."
"I suppose it makes us feel better." Nicole looked down at Frida's contorted face. "He's not real."
"He'd be quite a brave man if he were," Kal said, looking at Bruce.
"But he's not," Bruce said, with a small smile. Kal might have said more, but Frida had another spasm of screaming at that point and all of them were too busy trying to keep her from injuring herself to continue the conversation.
"She won't make it to another sunrise," Bruce said softly when she went limp again. "We may already be too late."
Nicole's eyes were devoid of hope, dull pebbles in a face beyond suffering. "Don't go," she whispered again.
Kal and Bruce just shook their heads. Simultaneously.
: : :
The moon was the tiniest sliver of silver in the sky that night, leaving most of the world plunged into darkness. Kal followed behind Bruce as they slipped up toward the main house. Silently, carefully, Bruce opened a window and they moved inside.
The house was quiet, but Kal could hear rustling noises below them, sounds that broke into moans now and then. Chills chased along his spine as they moved deeper into the house. Everything was cobwebbed and disused, covered with dust.
Bruce met his eyes, a mere glint in the darkness, and slowly opened a heavy oak door--to stop in surprise. The room beyond was clean and sterile, filled with neatly arranged beakers and burners, gleaming countertops and sophisticated computers. Bruce moved soundlessly into the room and began to rummage through the neat piles of notes; Kal did the same. After a moment, Bruce hissed triumphantly. "It's a red powder," he whispered.
As if his voice had triggered it, a steel shutter clanged down over the rough-hewn wooden door and a monitor flickered to life. "Now, now," said a skinny older man from the screen. "Is someone being naughty down there? I'll be right down to deal with you."
The screen went dead and Kal could hear a hissing sound coming from somewhere, as if gas were being vented into the room.
"Help me look," said Bruce, pawing through the vials and flasks with increasing urgency. "Hurry." Kal was tempted to rip the shutter off the door, but that would surely reveal him as a Kryptonian and put them--and the rebellion--in deadly danger. So he kept looking for a red powder, rummaging through drawers and cabinets.
"Do you think--" he started to say, but turning to look at Bruce the rest of the sentence died in his throat.
Bruce was cowering on the floor, crouching with his hands over his eyes, shaking so violently that it seemed possible he might injure himself. Kal jumped forward to touch him, but Bruce didn't acknowledge the touch, not even to throw it off. He merely made a high, horrible keening sound between his teeth that ripped Kal's heart to shreds. "Bruce! It's not real, whatever it is!" He put his arms around Bruce's unresisting body. "You can fight it! You won't let it happen. Do you hear me, Bruce? Whatever it is, however bad it is, you won't let it happen!" Bruce's keen turned into something like a groan, choking and lost, but he didn't take his hands from his eyes.
He heard a click and looked up to see a man standing in front of the re-sealed door. He was wearing some kind of mask, ragged burlap covering his features. He looked at Bruce and Kal as if at two interesting specimens. Kal went to his knees next to Bruce, turning his eyes down, feigning the terror that was gripping Bruce. He couldn't let the man know he was an alien and unaffected...
Footsteps on the floor as the man approached; Bruce shuddered and muttered meaningless syllables in Kal's arms, a croon of horror that seemed to twine around Kal's spine, sending sympathetic tremors along his limbs. "Bruce, please," Kal whispered. "Come back. I need you."
Bruce shivered all over. "Kal?" he whispered, as if to himself, almost too low to hear.
"What have we here?" said the Scarecrow. "I don't know you two." His voice was like fingernails on slate and Kal wanted to clamp his hands over his ears to make it stop, he couldn't seem to draw breath. "Look at me," he commanded.
Bruce ignored him, lost in nightmares, but Kal looked up to meet the man's blank, burlap-filled sockets. Scarecrow chuckled. "You're a strong one. Good."
He kept speaking, but Kal's eyes were drawn to the wall behind him. It was shifting, writhing with black-violet energy--it was a wormhole of the kind the Kryptonians had created when they came to Earth. Opening up right here. How could Scarecrow not see it, how could he keep talking like that?
Out of the gate, arm in arm, came Jor-El and Lara.
They were dressed exactly as they were in the portrait-- the portrait that had looked down at him every meal of his childhood. Their eyes were filled with sorrow. Sorrow and--he realized with a jolt of horror--anger and shame. "Kal-El," said his father, his voice mournful, "How could you?"
They walked over to him, their feet on the floor, on the earth. Lara shook her head, gazing at him with tears in her eyes. "We've been trapped in this portal for years, unable to do anything but watch you."
"Watch you as you betrayed all we stood for!" his father burst out in fury. "We fought, we struggled against this hideous reign, and you--you just accepted it, like it was your rightful due."
Kal staggered to his feet, ignoring the bewildered Scarecrow. "Father--Mother--"
"Don't call us that!" snapped Jor-El. "You have no right!"
"I didn't know!" Kal cried. "I didn't know that you--"
Jor-El's mouth twisted in a snarl. "You didn't know that slavery was wrong? You honestly thought we'd ever be part of something like this? I'm ashamed you bear my name."
The tears in Lara's eyes brimmed over. "Selfish, cruel, monstrous child! I--I wish you had never been born!" She buried her head on her husband's shoulder, her furious weeping tearing at Kal's heart.
Kal wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. They were right. He bowed his head, remorse and guilt a torrent underneath which he was lost, an infinity of shame. Lost.
Somewhere in the anguish that tore him like knives, a voice was crying. "Clark! Clark! Damn it, snap out of it!" The voice was familiar, but Kal had no idea who Clark was. "Help me! Please!" There was a crashing noise nearby.
Bruce's voice. Bruce needed help. Kal raised his eyes to his parents; they swam before him, prismed by tears, witness to his shame. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I have to help Bruce."
Fury flickered on their features, distorting them. "Don't you dare," snarled Jor-El. "Don't you dare turn your back on us, you ungrateful child." Lara merely wept, the disappointment in her eyes more painful than the rage in his father's. But he shook his head.
"I can't abandon him. He needs help, can't you hear him? Even from someone like me--" He broke off and turned away from his parents. "I'm sorry," he said, grief wringing his heart.
Bruce was dodging a vicious scythe being swung with surprising strength by the Scarecrow, his movements hampered by the vial clenched tightly in his hand. A beaker had overturned onto a burner, and flames were licking around a table, moving up the wall, greedy. Smoke was filling the room. "Catch!" Bruce yelled when he saw Kal looking at him. The vial arced in the air between them; Kal caught it out of the air. Unrestrained now, Bruce moved forward with lithe grace, slipping past the Scarecrow's guard to lay him out with a precise jab to the jaw.
He caught the man on the way down. "We have to get out!" he choked past the acrid smoke. Kal ripped the metal shutter off the door and the flames leapt higher at the influx of fresh air.
They staggered out into the night air, coughing, Kal's vision still smeared by tears. Bruce dropped the limp Scarecrow on the ground a safe distance from the house.
As one, they wheeled to run back into the flames, to get into the basement and release his other victims.
Back and forth in the night they went until all the humans in the building were out. The house was close to collapse now, a blaze against the night. Kal turned to go back, and Bruce caught his sleeve. "Where are you going?"
"My parents--they're still in there. I have to get them out!"
Bruce's eyes were wide; reflected flames danced in them. "Kal. They weren't real. They were a hallucination."
Kal stared at him for a long moment, taking deep breaths of cool, untainted air, his head clearing. Then he staggered over to a grassy spot and sat down hard, rocking back and forth, body clenched against tears. "They said that--that they saw it all. My whole life. I've failed them utterly."
There was a long pause. Then Bruce's hand rumpled his hair, almost roughly. "Bullshit," Bruce said hoarsely. "Don't say that again," he said as Kal started to speak. "I don't want to hear it."
"But you must have seen them." They had been so real...
"No. I saw something else, something--" Bruce broke off. "It doesn't matter, it wasn't real, it was a drug. Whatever you saw, whatever we saw, it was caused by a chemical. It wasn't real." He turned away and went to check on the coughing, sobbing victims. Firelight glinted in his hair like scraps of sunlight.
Kal realized there was something in his hand. He uncurled his fingers to find the vial of the antidote. He wanted to lay down on the grass and close his eyes and weep, weep until he washed the toxin out of his body and his mind. But instead he stood up. There were people who needed the antidote.
There would be time to weep later.
: : :
The dawn was turning the skies rose as Nicole pressed a small bundle into Kal's hands. "Bread. I bake a pretty good loaf, if I do say so myself." When Kal tried to give it back, she just shook her head. "You gave me my Frida back. I owe you more than my life. At least take my bread."
Kal took her bread.
Bruce started the engine and the small village fell away from them. Better to leave before the Kryptonians came to investigate Scarecrow's abuses of Kryptonian property--both the stolen scientific equipment and the lost slave labor. With any luck the next overseer would be less brutal.
They drove in silence down the long road leading back to the main highway. Bruce had said little since their escape, throwing himself into distributing the antidote, not meeting Kal's eyes. Kal struggled for something to say, unwilling to push at the pain he saw in Bruce's eyes. "They must have twisted him," he said. "The Kryptonians. To make him see humans as plaything and subjects like that."
Bruce's laugh was dry. "Don't romanticise humans. We did things like that to each other long before you got here. And most of us just let it happen, didn't fight it. We are...capable of great cruelty and vast apathy. We just don't have as much power right now."
They reached the main road, a long ribbon winding from the east to the west. Bruce drew the truck to a stop, but then didn't pull onto the main road. He just sat there for a moment. "The toxin," he said, then stopped.
Kal said nothing. Waiting. Unsure he wanted Bruce to continue at all.
"I saw," Bruce paused. "We fought the Scarecrow and won, but I was hurt. Nothing too serious. But we decided...decided to turn back. To go home. Home," he repeated, his tone torn between softness and venom. "We went back. Time passed. I healed. I missed some meetings of the underground. It didn't seem that important. I became content with my life. With our life together. Years passed. I stopped worrying about the struggle. I was happy." His voice was wondering and pained. "I was happy."
Kal couldn't look at him. "You'd never let that happen. Never."
Bruce's hands clenched on the steering wheel. "It's...not inconceivable."
"No." Kal wanted to touch those hands, knotted around pain and determination. He didn't. "You'd never let that happen."
"You said that, back...there. I heard you say that." Tendons flexed, eased a little. "You wouldn't, either."
"I wouldn't," Kal agreed.
"Well," Bruce said. He nodded slightly. "Good."
Kal gestured toward the road, the rising sun spilling out across it. "Shall we continue?"
Still staring ahead, Bruce reached out and very briefly clasped Kal's shoulder. "Yes," he said. "Let's."
They pulled out onto the road, heading west, the morning sun bright behind them.