A broad shoulder man, approximately six-foot four, stood in front of a small silver cylinder craft, and smirked. On the other side of him was a woman somewhere in her late twenties, pregnant, and wearing a light, see-through gown. His garb flowed right above his ankles, and he wore golden bracelets on both wrists. "If not for the shield, my father would have put me in this thing."

"It's magnificent." She raked her fingers across the smooth surface of the vessel. "Kryptonian technology is so advanced, even from forty-years ago."

"La El," he whispered as he put his large hands on her face. He towered above her like a giant, and she was only a little over five-foot four. "The shield's days are numbered."

"You can't give up hope," she snapped. She placed her hands on her bulging belly. "You're your father's son, Kal-El."

He smiled gently. "Did the baby kick?"

"Yeah. He's strong, this one." La El walked over to the window in her bay looked at the large generators that powered the shield, and said, "How long do we have?"

"Six months, a year, maybe two." He wrapped his arms around his wife's tiny frame. "The vessel still works."

"But we're Kryptonians. If it's our time, then it's our time."

"You sound like the Elders," he said with a grimace. "The Elders listened to the Guardians, and now we're a doomed race. We could have…"

"You know what happens when we leave the confines of our solar system," she said, "Our powers grow. We become godlike and petty."

"Is that a crime?" He asked in haste.

"Yes. It's a crime against everything we stand for as a people," she said as she sat on her wide bed that covered half her bay. "The legend states: we live under a red sun. We die under a red sun."

Meanwhile:

Jimmy sat next to the pond on the old Wayne property looking over the soft water, eating a sandwich, and listening to the crickets. The fish bobbed in and out of the water majestically, and he looked on with amazement. A black dragonfly buzzed near his head for a few seconds, and then it fell to the ground and died. It was a common occurrence that happened with mosquitoes and flies, but it was the first for a dragonfly. A light fishy smell emanated from the water, but it didn't bother the young clone too much, because he enjoyed the sounds of nature. He took off his shoes and socks, and then stuck his feet into the water until all the fish floated to the top like those red and white fish bobbers. They floated lifelessly on top of the pond, and all he could say was, "Oops!"

He couldn't believe what he had done, because he knew his energy flowed through water like electricity, and now hundreds of fish lay dead in the quiet pond. If he wanted the Batman to like him, he knew that he needed to do a better job at not killing the wildlife. All he wanted to do was to enjoy the cool water between his toes, and now he caused an ecological disaster—something his Momma warned him about plenty of times when he acted recklessly. It wouldn't take long before the fish stunk up the place. His mother would have warned him about taking off his shoes in public, if not for her death at the hands of three jokers, because everything living he touched died, including the grass beneath his feet. She always made sure he stuck to the rules, so he didn't accidentally kill somebody.

He flew over the mansion and next to his little tent that the Batman setup in the middle of the field, and wondered if his Momma was in Heaven. He had heard one of the kids talking about God while she read the Bible in his last school, but he never believed in the one true God, or even many gods. What was the probability that some guy somewhere worried about one insignificant person? And when it came to creation, he knew his Momma helped grow him in a lab with the essences of Superman; and somewhere in the scheme of things, she made a mistake. Maybe God was man's creation that forced the masses to obey man's laws. The probability of some all-knowing being that punished the wrongdoers wasn't reality, because evil flowed through Metro City like water through the Mississippi River.

The smell of cologne struck Jimmy's nose, when the Batman appeared in front of him holding a silver cylinder. He looked thin in his suit, almost too thin. He might have weighed around one hundred and sixty-two pounds at the most, and he was approximately six-foot two to six-foot three feet tall.

"What is this?" He asked as he looked at the silver cylinder.

"Your mother's ashes."

The Batman pulled off his dark mask with the long pointy ears, and he was an older white man with a scar over his left eye. It was a horrid scar, the kind of scar that looked like a knife slice across his face. It was ugly.

"What happen?"

He placed his hand over his wounded eye, and said with a serious look on his face, "Life happened." He laughed a little, and then he had a look of anger on his face. "A few years back, I was on patrol in Gotham City when an explosion happened." He looked off into space for a moment, and said, "It was a nuclear explosion that killed thousands." Grabbing a brown folder he had stuffed in his costume, he threw it on the ground. "The explosion was you."

"Yeah. I remember," he said as he grabbed the folder off the ground. "They tried …"

"To kill you. I know," he said, "Nobody else can know." He pulled out a lighter, grabbed the folder, and then lit the secret on fire. "This way nobody can ever know who you are."

It didn't take much fire to burn the folder and all its contents, but he still didn't feel his secret was safe. Terry threw the burning material onto the ground, stood over it, and watched it burn.

"So many men paid a price for you," he said as the glare from the burning folder bounced off his eyes. "I'll give you a home, and raise you right."

Jimmy awoke to the sound of machines working on the Wayne mansion, for a special room where he could sleep without killing Terry with his energy field. The grass around the tent was completely brown, because his energy field killed it. He hated sleeping in his mask, so he pulled it off in the middle of the night, which caused the grass around his tent to die. The smell of the dead fish stuck to everything on the Wayne property; it was thick in the air.

Swarms of birds swooped down to grab the dead water life, but they never resurfaced, because Jimmy's energy lingered in the pond. Later in the evening, he flew over to the pond to see hundreds of birds lying dead beside the pond. With the sun's rays slowly cooking the dead, he decided to use his heat vision to burn the birds. When he shot the red energy from his eyes, he turned every dead animal in the pond into dust, and the water in the tarn completely dried.

Weeks went by fast and furious, and Terry patrolled every night without question. He didn't talk much. He sat on the couch with a picture of a young, teenage boy, a bottle of rum, and cried. It was a nightly ritual that bothered Jimmy, because Terry kept everything about his life hidden. His black hair had a few gray streaks on top, but it didn't seem to bother him.

"Who's that in the picture?"

He paused for minute. Jimmy could tell he tried to curve his frown into a smile, but he couldn't do it. "My brother." His voice crackled.

"Did he die or something?"

He looked up at Jimmy with a serious face, and said, "Or something. Not everybody could be saved."

"From what?"

"Themselves!" He snapped. The picture fell to the ground, and the glass shattered near Terry's feet. "Sorry about that."

"It's okay," Jimmy said. He pointed to the broken glass with his right index finger, and it became a solid piece.

"Your powers are growing," he whispered. "Use them wisely."

"Tell me about Matthew."

He laughed a little, after he set the picture on the coffee table. "Ever heard of Smear?"

"Smear? Uh, no."

"It was my first year of law school," he said as he gazed at the ground. "Several teenagers on a field trip to Gotham's Nuclear Power Plant were involved in a major accident."

"What happened?" Jimmy asked wide-eyed and curious.

"Fate, life, a change that destroyed my brother," he said with a grimace. "All the kids gained powers on some level, but Matthew..."

"Was he as powerful as Superman?" He asked.

Laughing. "Not that powerful, but pretty powerful nonetheless." He wiped the smile off his face as easy as it came. "He killed my fiance stealing money from Gotham Bank." He clasped his hands, and then tears rolled down his slender face. "Didn't know the killer was him until one of my bombs blew off his mask, killing him instantly."

"Oh my goodness," he said, "What did you do?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all," he said, "But it killed my poor mother when she found out her youngest was dead. Her heart gave out."