It was while wandering through the nightlife of a city rather than flying over it, interacting with it rather than staying apart from it, that Superman felt all of his years press down on him the most. Part of the reason for this was that he had perfect recall. Though he could file things away in his memory and not think about them for years or even decades, he never really forgot them. That perfect recall was currently overlaying an image of the street he was walking down from the 1940s onto what he was seeing of the street in the here and now and drawing comparisons. Being a part of the city that usually didn't pack it in until around midnight even then, the street was just as active in his memory as it was tonight. Every once in a while, he found himself spotting an individual walking into one of the establishments that ran along this street which had long been a part of the entertainment district who could be the grandchild or the great-grand child of someone who had been wandering about on the street that night in 1946. Someone whose ghostly image walked through a person or object that wasn't there back then as the memory overlay continued.
One major difference between now and then was the complete lack of unaccompanied children. There were no children running loose in the street playing, begging, selling things, or stealing anything and everything they could get their little hands on. There were no homeless ragamuffins under the age of sixteen or so sleeping in doorways or wandering about tonight. Or, if there were, they were keeping well away from here. The few children he had spotted walking along this evening were accompanied by an adult; and, if he did happen to find any unaccompanied children at this hour, he would be duty bound to turn them over to Social Services rather than employ them as informants and let them run loose on the street since children were no-longer allowed to be running loose after dark. Or in the daytime either for that matter.
People cared more these days, and they were more fearful and more interfering by far when it came to the lives of their children and those of others. As a result of the more caring nature of man, or at least the cultural shift in attitudes towards what constituted appropriate childcare, there were now better options in regards to places to send homeless and/or abused and/or neglected kids to in Gotham. It was no-longer a choice between relatives who made the street seem a safer option, a ratty hellhole of a deathtrap orphanage run by the dregs of society who were looking to make a profit on the plight of the kiddies in their care, or a poor but nice orphanage that was liable to be burned down by the latest maniac looking to make a reputation for themselves on what was practically a weekly basis. Much of this was thanks to tighter Child Welfare laws made on a national level, and increased government inspections of any facility that takes on the responsibility of caring for children regardless of whoever they had previously belonged to. Bruce and his family had also contributed heavily to this, through both their donations, and their efforts to weed out corrupt officials who might be open to being bribed to look the other way by the childcare facilities they were supposed to be inspecting.
On this night, people with children accompanying them clutched their children close to them as if they were afraid they might lose them, or that someone in the evening crowd might snatch them. People without children with them were far less watchful than the parents, and the people who had wandered through that night in 1946. Women didn't guard their purses as closely as they did back then. Men's eyes didn't watch every dark nook and cranny as if they expected an attacker to suddenly emerge and ruin their evening. Strangely, despite being less watchful and on guard, people didn't linger on the street. They didn't stop and chat, but instead, they hurried to wherever it was they were going without a word to any of the people surrounding them unless said people were accompanying them or unless one of the people accidentally ran into someone else.
Not really seeing anyone who was liable to stop long enough for him to converse with, and wanting to find a place where he was less likely to find himself flashing back to a previous age, he turned down a side street where a part of historical Gotham had been preserved in the form of a small neighborhood of hundred and forty year-old Brownstone houses. As he did so, he found himself blinking in startled surprise as a much older image flashed across his memory for a second. A nighttime image of a brick-cobbled road, houses that loomed impossibly high in a gloomy gaslit darkness, and an impossibly sized horse-drawn cab rolling away.
Funny. He hadn't thought about the time he and his mother had gone to visit her sick and dying cousin in over a century. Despite the fact that he never consciously thought about it, and didn't pull up memories of staying indoors while rain streamed down the windows and his mother's cousin's breaths grew steadily more labored with each passing hour, the utterly gloomy fortnight he'd spent in Gotham tending to Agnes Clark and eventually attending her funeral had left such a negative impression on him that he'd never thought twice about going to Metropolis U despite the fact that UNJ Gotham, which he'd also been accepted at, was at the time the more prestigious of the two by far. Even now, as he walked down this street, past brownstones whose facades hadn't changed all that much in the century since his mother's elderly cousin's funeral, he could smell the reek of medicines that the FDA would've had conniptions over in this day and age.
Looking up at the house that had once belonged to Agnes Clark, he remembered how her passing at the ripe old age of 87 had been almost immediately overshadowed by the news of an even greater tragedy. There were very few left in the world who could say that they remembered what they were doing when they got word that the Titanic sank. With all of the funerals and memorials for those whose bodies that would remain unrecovered going on that week, poor old Agnes had gotten lost in the shuffle as the rest of the family had been off attending the funeral of his mother's nephew's son who had been returning from a business trip to England. His mother had been torn between wanting to attend the funeral of the grandson of her sister who had remained in her native Metropolis, and seeing to it that at least someone in the family was there when poor old Agnes had been laid to rest. In the end, what she saw as duty to Agnes won out, and he and his mother were amongst the tiny handful of mourners present at Agnes' funeral.
Usually, when he remembered 1912, he tended to focus on the Summer when his father had decided he was old enough to do little things around the farm like feed the chickens and collect their eggs. That was the Summer that his father had shown him how to fix a plow. The Summer when Ben Hubbard's new tractor had been the talk of the county...
The sound of a cape flapping in the breeze and the thud of a pair of booted feet landing on nearby pavement pulled him out of memories he hadn't examined in a good long time.
"Is there something about that house I should know about?" the Bat brat asked from behind him.
"No," he replied. Deciding not to give the much younger man more information than he felt was necessary. Besides, knowing Bruce, there was likely a fully detailed file on him that the man's great-grandson could read if he wanted to know about how he and the house were connected.
Turning and leaving before the Bat brat could pull his vanishing act less skillfully than Bruce who'd had it down to an art form, he started walking towards where there was more people. He wouldn't be able to "connect" with the city if he didn't interact with any of the inhabitants after-all. Since this area was bringing up so many memories, he decided that he would try and find a newer part of the city where old memories and ghosts of the past wouldn't overshadow the present.
Easier said than done in a city that is over two-hundred years old with a street layout that hasn't changed all that much in well over a century. Many of the buildings may be new, but those were the same old streets running in the same directions they had run when they had been laid out in whichever phase of Gotham's expansion they'd been planned during. Step down one road, and you'd find yourself in what had been suburbs sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred years before, but was now city proper. Even the frequently rearranged parks that dotted the city were old by even his standards.
After about an hour's walking, he finally found an area he'd never actually set foot in and therefore didn't have any ground-level memories of. It wasn't a particularly nice area. But, from this perspective, it was new to him.
"Are you lost?" someone asked, pulling him out of his musings as he passed a park that he vaguely recognized as having flown over several times on his way to visit Bruce. The neighborhood surrounding the park had gone sharply downhill in the decades since he'd last flown over it, though the ethnic mix strangely hadn't changed all that much. In this case, it seemed to be more a case of "Money flight" rather than "White flight" after the neighborhood had lost its "Trendy High Class" status the minute some common greengrocer with a little more money than usual managed to purchase a house here. There were still signs of the period when the neighborhood was blue collar before it had transitioned to no-collar layered over the skeletal traces of the time when this neighborhood had been home to the upper-upper-upper Middle-Class furs and pearls set.
"No," he replied to the person who didn't sound to have asked that question out of concern for what may have looked like an out of place tourist. "I'm just going for a walk."
"Well," said the person of near-indeterminate gender with long dyed hair who was wearing jeans and a t-shirt from some band that had last toured back before they were born, sounding a mix between threatening and suspicious. "I suggest you walk elsewhere".
Ah yes, that old Gothamite suspicion that had been lacking elsewhere and he'd thought might actually have been gone for good rears its head once more. While an excellent survival trait in Gotham, one could use it to spot a Gothamite anywhere else. The people in Metropolis had always been a good deal more open than your average Gothamite. At least they used to be. To be honest, he hadn't spent all that much time in Metropolis in the last four decades, so he didn't really know how everything stood now. For all he knew, they could've become just as closed off and suspicious as their neighboring Gothamites.
"Why should I?" he asked the individual, finding himself not wanting to be chased off of his chosen course by a bunch of suspicious locals on his first stroll in ages. "It's a free country, and I'm not hurting anything."
Clark would've apologized and left after a bit of passive-aggressive retaliation courtesy of a bout of "clumsiness" that left the other individual far more humiliated than he at this point, rather than invited open conflict as he had. He wasn't feeling the least bit "Clarkish" at this moment. Truth be told, the fact that he was feeling anything at this moment had surprised him. But, by all metrics, today hadn't been all that good of a day. He'd been pushed outside of his comfort zone by unwanted reunions, unwanted contact by individuals who normally knew well enough to leave him alone, and by his own memory. This minor annoyance that would normally be nothing was fast becoming a last straw for no reason he could discern.
"This is my neighborhood, and you don't belong" the person replied, moving to a more aggressive stance.
"Who are you to decide where I do or don't belong?" he asked, bristling slightly as he fought back certain instincts that were triggered by the aggressive stance that the individual had taken. It had been decades since someone who wasn't a villain or a wannabe villain had moved in an aggressive manner around him. He had to keep reminding himself that he was dressed like Clark and that this person who had no clue who he really was was just some idiot who was trying to pick a fight, not someone who was trying their hand at mass murder or world domination.
"Neighborhood watch." the person practically growled.
"You don't look like neighborhood watch." he replied, looking the person up and down in what he full well knew was a condescending manner, making sure that his eyes were seen to linger on that long mess of acid-green hair, which was a very poor color choice for Gotham, and the holes in the knees of the individual's ripped jeans.
"This person bothering you Alex?" a rather large man who looked to be related to the person asked, cutting off whatever idiotic response "Alex" had been about to make to his comment.
"No," he replied before "Alex" could say anything. "Alex was just bothering me."
"And," the hulking stranger said, "What were you doing when Alex started bothering you?"
"I was taking a walk." he replied, half tempted to push past these two individuals, leave this behind, and then leave this whole charade behind, his dead fathers' wishes be damned.
"Nobody takes walks around here." the man said disbelievingly, making an expressive gesture that took in the generally poor condition of the neighborhood and the run-down buildings they were surrounded by.
"Up until about a minute ago, I was." he responded, irritated at this latest annoyance to come along and wondering how meeting people on a walk he'd taken for the sole purpose of meeting people could've gone so wrong.
"Well, I suggest you walk elsewhere." Alex's relative replied, trying to look menacing. Had he been anybody else, the man would've succeeded. As it was, he was stuck fighting down instincts that were telling him to take this guy down and fast.
"I'd leave that one alone if I were you." an elderly voice cut through the situation.
"Go back inside grandma!" the man who had tried to look menacing yelled.
"Don't think you're too big for me to take a switch to you boy!" the old woman said. "I said leave that one alone!"
"Why should I?! We don't need strangers wandering our neighborhood, especially not when..." the woman's grandson replied.
"I ain't going to be attending your funeral boy! I ain't going to be burying another one of you, not at my age! I said leave that one alone!" the old woman said, coming closer and raising the standing cane she'd been using to support herself.
"And you!" the woman said threateningly, causing him to take an involuntary step backwards, as angry old ladies invariably brought up images of his mother "You run along and leave mine alone before I call Father Jones! Don't think I don't know what you are! I seen you survive things you'd need a deal with Down Below to survive damn near eighty years ago!"
It would seem that the one major flaw in the Bat brat's plan, the fact that there are people who had previously encountered and still remember Clark Kent still living, would be randomly rearing its head on a possibly semi-regular basis. If tonight was any indication, he wouldn't even be able to go for a walk without being assaulted by his past. Quite possibly literally.
"You heard me!" the old woman yelled, doing her level best to keep the tremor of fear that underlied the stern anger out of her voice. "Go on! Get!"
Honestly, he should've figured something like this might happen someday if he kept being Clark, or at least playing him until he became him again. He had done his level best to keep Clark separate from Superman, and not everyone was Officer Simmons. Even back in the Sixties, there had been people that had crossed themselves as he passed. He'd thought it an exaggerated joke, but considering how many of Clark Kent's "Near death experiences" would have been unsurvivable by anyone else...
Edited 9-4-15.