Trinity: Remixed
- Superman -
Kal El soared through Gotham's cloudy skies, high above the seamy streets of the grubby city.
He was in trouble, and he knew it. His presence here was adding insult to injury, salt in the wound.
However, he felt he owed Crusader an explanation - however unlikely it was that the man would take it.
The wind caressed his face, throat and hands as he flew past the mix of old-time Gothic architecture from which the city had taken its name, and the shiny blue-silver surfaces of the modern skyscrapers that made up the skyline of every American city.
And there, on the Civic Centre, was the cape-clad figure he was expecting to see, standing at the edge of the skyscraper, heedless of the fall below.
The figure was small, but growing rapidly larger as Kal approached. To most eyes, he would have been hardly visible, the dark blues of cape and costume blending well into the shadows of the city. Kal's sharp eyes could pick out the line of head and shoulders, the familiar stance, and the watchful awareness that had seen Kal's coming probably before Kal had seen Crusader.
Kal touched down on the ledge beside his team-mate.
"I thought I asked you to stay out of my city." Not pleasantries, no niceties, Crusader went straight to the heart of the matter like a surgeon making an incision for an operation.
Kal regarded the city, laid out below them, not looking at his blunt-spoken team-mate. He had learned not to mind Crusader's curt speech. It was a refreshing change from the polite words too often used by people in the Outside World to conceal other motives. He'd learned to be wary of smooth politeness.
"I was invited to the charity ball, Crusader," he said. "I was there as a legitimate guest when the men interrupted the night."
His ire rose, not at Crusader, but at the memory of the guns pointed at Ms. Lane and Ms. Prinze's head. He'd been unwilling to take the risk that he could disable them all before one of them got off a shot.
On the other hand, Lady Night had not seemed to give much thought to the safety of the bystanders. Her appearance out of the shadows had been as much surprise to Kal as it had been to the bandits. However, once they opened fire on her, Kal had taken the opportunity offered by her presence and the chaos it engendered.
"And the Lady?" Crusader inquired acidly. "Was she also a guest at the ball?"
"I was...in the area," said a new voice, rising from the empty air before the two men. She was borne on the back of winds unseen, the ebony of her outfit clinging to every curve of her slender figure. The darkness of her form sucked at the ambient light around her, to their eyes, she was a negative image against the background of the building across the street. Masked and costumed from throat to toe in black, with a sparkle of stars running from just over her heart to her right shoulder.
"You were nowhere in sight," continued the Lady, "and Superman was held from action due to his...affections for one of the ladies in question."
Kal felt his cheeks colour. He had not thought anyone noticed his appreciation of Ms. Lane, although given who his team-mates were; he supposed he should have known better.
"You have no shame, Lady," he chided, but with a smile on his face. Where Crusader was blunt and not given to many words, the Lady displayed a darkling sense of humour that manifested itself most plainly in her retorts and teasing of her team-mates.
"Indeed," Crusader said. His flat, hard tones were sufficient to deter most of their team-mates when they pressed too hard about the matters he wished to keep his own. "This is my city. I'll thank you to stay out of it."
"And if I'd stayed out of it tonight, more of your citizens would lie in the morgue, cold rotting flesh for wormfood." There was a clear challenge in her voice, but Crusader was untouched by it.
"I'm very much aware of that," he continued, his cloak flapping about him in the endless wind that whistled through the streets of Gotham. "However, the sentiment remains," he turned to look at Kal, "for both of you. Tonight was an aberration - don't intrude on what is mine."
And with that, he leaped from the roof, casting out a line before him to swing through the air. In less than a minute, he was the merest speck along the line of Gotham skyscrapers. Conversation ended. As far as Crusader was concerned, Gotham was his city; he expected others to stay out of it, and there was nothing more to be said on the matter.
The Lady laughed, a rich, dark amusement that flowed from her like a river. Whoever she was, she was exquisite, all sleek moves and coiled dark hair, and a deadly sense of humour. "Do we follow him?"
"He would not thank us for it."
"Is there anything for which he does thank us?" She inquired, and the warm accents of her voice slid warmly down his spine.
Kal grinned, "I cannot think of it."
"Then it makes little differ whether or not he thanks us," the Lady dismissed.
In all this time, her feet had not touched solid ground; she was as at home in the air as she was on the ground, and Kal could not help but wonder who this woman was that she had such power and grace.
His own skills he knew well; his people had lived in silence and shadow from the World Outside for over two thousand years - a race of legend and myth, even in the time of the Greek Empire. Before that, they had been through the world but a little, and their presence, their magic; their powers lived on in the legends of the city of Atlantis.
Forewarned of its destruction, a small group of their race had fled to another land, no more than a hundred men, women, and children to keep alive the legends of the Kryptonian race.
But no Kryptonian had left their island for over five hundred years, not until Kal El, son of Jor El, felt something drawing him to the World Outside as the Imperiex attacked from space. He had left the island against his father's wishes, had come to fight against the invaders who threatened the world that was his own, had taken on the responsibility of the World Outside with his actions, according to the law of the Kryptonians.
Kal had fallen in with men and women whose physical strengths were inferior to his, but whose spirit and passion he would never dare underestimate. Of all his fellows, Lady Night was the only one with comparable strength or speed to Kal's own, the only one who challenged him in body, but the others each had their strengths and skills, specific to the need as it arose.
Even now, she hovered in the air, her head tilted off in the direction where Crusader had vanished. "Do you hear gunfire, or is that only my imagination?"
It wasn't her imagination. Kal could hear the chatter of bullets as well.
She was off down the street in a moment, leaving only the fading trail of her voice. "Last one there has to apologise to him!"
Kal flew after her, arrowing through the air with a faint smile on his face. Fast as he was, she would reach the fray before him, simply because he was not minded to fly at a speed that would leave the city behind him in disarray.
A single glance at the fight told Kal all he needed to know.
The clothing was the same, even down to the balaclavas and the weapons. These men had robbed the charity earlier tonight. They had threatened two helpless women rather than face him, using the innocent to further their base ends. They were criminals to be stopped.
All this rushed through his mind, faster than the speed of light, and then he was in there, laying about him without mercy.
Crusader was in the thick of the fight, of course. Fists, feet, and the weapons he wielded - tiny throwing crosses that bit deeply into flesh, sharp-ended bolas that spun from agile fingers and pricked human flesh, and the cables and grapples that formed Crusader's ability to 'fly'.
For a 'mere human', Crusader was far less human than even some 'non-humans' Kal had known. Everything was a weapon in the eyes of his team-mate, and every motion had a reason and a purpose, there was no energy wasted in anything he did.
Beside such choreographed elegance, there were moments where Superman felt distinctly crude. His strengths were fists and force - along with a certain immunity to bullets. Still, fists and force had their purposes - as more than a few of the men felt.
He was dispatching a fifth man, when it occurred to him that he'd as yet seen no sign of the Lady.
A moment later, as if his thoughts had summoned her, a man behind Kal's opponent was jerked off his feet into the air, clawing at the silvery loop that appeared around his neck and hauled him into the air. The end of the lariat rested firmly in the black-gloved hand of the woman who stood on nothing at all.
"No killing!" The command rang out from Crusader, and even as Kal tossed his opponent into the next, he heard the Lady sigh.
"As you wish, highness." Her mockery bit as sharply as the lash of her lasso, and the strangled man dropped a full eight feet to the ground. Injurious, but not fatal. A moment later, he curled up in agony as the Lady landed directly on his groin. Dark heels ground inelegantly into his crotch, eliciting a scream of pain, before she launched back into the air, and lashed out with the silver lasso again.
In the might, distant sirens wailed. "Did you have any particular plan for this engagement, Crusader?" The Lady inquired as her boot swung at another man with an accuracy that ached in even Kal's jaw. "Or were we simply going to beat them to a pulp?"
"Did you hear the part about 'no killing', Lady?"
Another man was poleaxed with a roundhouse fist to the jaw. "I have yet killed none. Superman?"
"None." It was not his mission to destroy or kill, although he would do both if he perceived the need for it.
His team-mate, however, preferred to disable his enemies rather than kill them. The ethics were both admirable and deplorable in Superman's eyes: some evils should not be permitted to live on. And yet this was not his city and so he played by Crusader's rules. Mostly.
Crusader was facing the last two men as the Lady dropped to the ground beside Kal. A small four-pointed cross spun through the air, shooting out weighted lines that curved around the first man's waist and swung in on him, tangling him up in the strong wire, pinning his arms to his side. The second had his feet neatly swept out from under him, and he was flat on his back with one booted toe at his throat before he could do more than gurgle.
Kal waited to see what the other man would do with these. The police were not far away, but it seemed that Crusader had more specific questions than those of robbery and theft.
"Who hired you?" The deep, gravelly voice demanded, lethally soft in the night.
At first, the man was reluctant to answer. He changed his tone with a desperate gurgle as Crusader gently dug his toe into the throat, and repeated his question. "Who hired you?"
"And he wanted me to go easy on the goods," murmured the Lady ironically, still watching from the air.
The man gasped something, a string of syllables that had little meaning for Superman, but which evidently meant something decipherable to Crusader, for he nodded. "You were provided with all the equipment?" An assent met that question. "And what did he get out of it?"
Movement at the corner of Kal's eye distracted him from the interrogation; although he could hear the answers quite clearly, he was no longer listening. The Lady had turned away, uninterested in the interrogation process. In the meantime, she'd begun hauling up the bodies and laying them out in neat rows with a methodical calm that was frightening in its inhumanity.
Little was known about the Lady, other than that she had begun appearing in the news nearly five years ago, a night-time vigilante who kept to the shadows, walked her own way, and intervened when and where she felt like it. She'd laid a claim to Metropolis, north of Gotham, and policed the city she thought of as 'hers' as much as Crusader thought of this city as 'his'.
She was, however, considerably less territorial about it. Kal had flown in her city before and she had welcomed his help. Perhaps a subtle difference between male and female ego?
There were moments when her actions had stunned her team-mates, so coldly rational as they were. This was one of them. In such a manner had Kal seen the dead laid out after battle. Yet these men were not dead - some stirred briefly, only to fall back into the safer somnolence of unconsciousness.
One man stirred more definitely, and without a word, she strode into the darkness, her figure almost vanishing even to Kal's sharp gaze. There was a groan, swiftly interrupted with a sigh and the thump of his head falling back to the pavement.
Kal winced.
"Lady-" Crusader's voice cut through the sound of the sirens growing louder.
"I knocked him out again," her rich, resonant voice spoke from the shadows. "A mere tap behind the ear. He will awaken sore, but none the worse for his experience. You should learn trust."
It seemed the other man had finished with the interrogation, for the informer was now bound and still, too terrified of the woman who stalked out of the darkness, her tall lean form lacking only a set of huge batlike wings to complete her menace.
Crusader was unthreatened by her ferocity, for all that she stood of a height with him and far stronger than he. "You should learn boundaries."
"Do you wish us gone before the police department arrives?" Kal inquired, interrupting them before trouble could truly brew. He felt no desire to leave the scene - in truth, he felt he should see this out. However, his respect for Crusader extended to the man's sensibilities. And it would reinforce Crusader's standing among Gotham's Police Department to be the only one seen with the fallen thugs, even if it was subconsciously known that his team-mates had assisted him in this matter.
Crusader regarded him, the cynicism plain, for all that there was no way to see the man's eyes through the lenses of his cowl. "What do you think?"
The Lady's laugh rippled out through the night, audible beneath the piercing wail of the police sirens, now at the end of the street in question. "Fight well, then, Crusader. And good night to you."
With one swift, vertical leap, she vanished into the sky, the silvery coil of her lariat nothing more than a flash in the darkness.
Kal regarded Crusader for one more moment, meeting the opaquely dark gaze. Then with no effort at all, he lifted from the ground, following the Lady into the air. Several hundred yards up, he found her sitting astride a gargoyle leaning her cheek along the carved creature's head between the ear and a row of spines on its skull and smiling to herself.
"He didn't thank us."
Her mouth curved deeper. "You said he would not." One leg swung over the edge of the gargoyle and she perched on the gargoyle's back, at home so far above the solidity of the ground. At her hip, her lasso gleamed in the reflected light over Gotham city, briefly drawing his eye to her leg, before he looked beyond to the street below.
"So I did." Kal regarded the goings-on, far beneath them. "Did he get the answers he was seeking from those men?"
"You were standing closer," she chided, "and your hearing is better than mine. You should know."
"I could not distinguish most what the man was saying," Kal admitted, unabashed by her reproof. "It made no sense to me. Doubtless it made sense to him."
"Doubtless."
He regarded her as she glanced down at the tableau below, the caped-and-costumed figure distinct amidst the blue uniforms of the GCPD as they collected the remainder of the men from this evening. "You never did say what you were doing in Gotham in the first place."
She smiled, "And you never did ask."
Not that she would tell him if he asked. Crusader kept his secrets close, but sometimes Kal suspected the Lady kept hers closer. If Crusader had ever determined her origins, he had never revealed them to anyone else. And for all that Kal could look and see the face behind the mask, he respected her privacy and her choice. If she chose to speak of her true self, then she would tell him. He could be patient and wait.
"I am minded to stay and wait for his haranguing," she said at last. A sly smile hovered on her lips. "But my own city calls me and I cannot abandon her longer." She smiled. "Will you remain to be told off for poaching on his territory like a possessive tom on his home ground?"
When she put it like that, "No."
Her laughter rippled around him, powerfully attractive. For all that Lois Lane was a beautiful, challenging woman, Kal could not deny that something in him was drawn to his team-mate - to the shadows of her mind and her soul, and the secrets of her life.
However, she neither invited him in word, nor encouraged him in look or deed. Her interactions with him and the rest of the League were purely functional, absently affectionate in the way of comrades of war, but without the personal edge that Kal had seen in the others of human background.
He put his thoughts aside as she spoke again, pushing herself off the gargoyle and floating away through the empty air. "I'll see you at the next League gathering, Kal."
"Indeed, Lady."
And in a moment, the space she had inhabited was nothing more than a vacuum into which the air flowed, and she was nothing but a fast-diminishing speck on the Gotham skyline.
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