Disclaimer: As usual, everything you recognise from the various relevant properties isn't mine, and this fic is part of a wider series as created by Michael Weyer and is written with his permission.

Feedback: Always appreciated.

AN: As previously stated, this fic is part of Michael Weyer's Infinity Crisis series, and involves plot elements introduced in the spin-offs 'Counterpart Chronicles' and 'Salvation Run' in particular; hope you like the result. This starts off during the events of the 2019 horror film Brightburn shortly after Tori Bryer learned of her husband Kyle's death at the hands/eyes of her son Brandon, followed by his initial 'attack' on their farmhouse, but from there… well, things get a bit less one-sided for Brandon.

A Darker Shade of Red

Earth-8391

Even after the thing that had to be Brandon literally crashed through her house, the worst part for Tori was that she couldn't work out how she should be feeling about the current situation.

It wasn't as though she was ignoring the fact that her son had killed her husband, and she was 'satisfied' that he had been responsible for Noah's death as well, but in the end, he was still her son…

She'd raised him, she'd nurtured him, she'd tried to assure him that she still loved him… was he really going to do-

No.

She couldn't consider that; there was still time to stop this… he was just lashing out, he hadn't tried to actually hurt her yet… if they could get more people in, they could talk him down… Brandon was her son…

She could just about see him hovering up in the sky above the fields if she looked out, but if he hadn't actually attacked her yet… maybe it was still possible to calm him down…

When she heard police sirens outside the house, after confirming that Brandon wasn't above the fields any more, she gathered her nerve and ran for the kitchen door, keeping her back pressed against the wall as she carefully made her way to the main door.

"Tori!" she heard the usually reassuring sound of Sheriff Deever's voice calling out to her. "You got the sheriffs here! Where are you? Come to the sound of my voice, Tori!"

"I… I'm here!" Tori called out, moving away from the wall as she began to run to the door. "I'm here-!"

She screamed as something- she couldn't think of it as Brandon- crashed through the wall in front of her, missing her by what felt like a hair's breadth. For a moment she could only sob in terror, but then the sound of voices at the door reminded her of what was at stake and she hurried towards the front of the house, desperately calling out a warning.

"You're safe now," Sheriff Deever began when she came into view.

"No, no…" Tori tried to protest desperately. "You need to get-!"

Even when she looked back on that night later, Tori was never sure how to explain it. One moment she had been running towards Sheriff Deever and Deputy Aryes on the porch, and then all three of them were standing in her front garden, Brandon was lying on the ground in that red hood-thing she'd seen in his sketches, and there was a man standing between her son and the other three adults. The new arrival was a tall man with dark hair and a handsome face, wearing a tight blue bodysuit with a long red cape that reached down to just below his knees. There was a strange diamond-like symbol on his chest with an elaborate S on it, and a red belt-like design with a yellow diamond-shaped buckle at his waist, and he wore red boots that came up to just below his knees, although his hands were bare.

"I wouldn't do that," the new arrival said, his gaze fixed on Brandon as the boy got to his feet even as he stood in a manner that was clearly intended to put himself between Brandon and the other three adults if it was necessary. Even with the hood covering his face, Brandon practically radiated a sense of rage as he glared at this man, demonstrating a hostility that Tori hadn't seen the boy demonstrate before.

He'd been shocked and confused when he'd first been shown the ship and told about his heritage, but this…

"You hit me," Brandon said, a level of cold contempt she hadn't expected to see from her son. Even in her worst fears since Kyle began to suspect what Brandon was capable of now, Tori had always seen Brandon as calm and in control, to the point that she feared he didn't actually care enough about anything to hate them, but the idea that he was genuinely angry now…

"I did," the man in blue nodded as he kept his gaze fixed on Tori's son. "I didn't like it, but-"

Brandon let out a roar of rage, and suddenly both he and the new arrival had vanished, accompanied by a burst of wind that sent Tori, Deever and Ayers off their feet. Tori bit back a scream as she hit the wall of her house, but as she got to her feet a quick glance was enough to confirm that the officers were still awake themselves, albeit holding an arm each in a manner that suggested the limbs had taken the brunt of the recent impact.

Looking up into the darkening night sky, Tori could just glimpse two figures flying through the air as they lashed out at each other, reaffirming her sense of helplessness.

Whoever the new arrival was, he was clearly here for Brandon, but that left the question of what he'd do to everyone else afterwards…

"HOW!" the boy roared, once again trying and failing to charge at Clark before the Kryptonian flew out of the way. "HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS?"

"Practice," Clark replied, even as he tried to hide how unnerving it was to be in this exact situation. Facing flying opponents was something he'd had to deal with even before he'd mastered the ability himself, but the idea that he was facing a boy who wasn't even in his teens yet who was capable of what he'd seen so far…

It wasn't that he didn't recognise that Brandon was a serious threat to this Earth, but after facing the likes of Davis's super-powered alter ego, the Darkseid-possessed Lionel Luthor, and two different versions of Zod, this boy was more potentially dangerous than a serious threat. Even if he was considerably stronger than Clark remembered being at that age, Brandon was still a child, lashing out and impulsively trying to make the world the way he wanted it to be without truly thinking things through.

"I- how can- you can't do this to me!" Brandon yelled, charging up to Clark and delivering a series of quick punches to his chest. On anyone else, Clarke knew that the first blow would have at least broken a few ribs if not outright killed the subject, but on him Brandon might as well have been patting at his chest. "I'm special-!"

"You're no more special than I am, Brandon," Clark replied, grabbing the boy's wrists as he stared at the boy. "We have abilities, but does that make us better than anyone else?"

"Yes it does!" Brandon yelled as he strained against Clark's grip. "I'm more powerful than anyone-!"

"Our current situation would seem to disprove that," Clark countered, raising a finger to gesture between himself and Brandon.

"I- this- you're nothing!" Brandon yelled, firing a quick burst of heat-vision that Clark easily evaded with a brief flight to his left, even if he was forced to release his grip on the boy's wrists.

"I'm certainly nothing you've encountered before," the Kryptonian responded as Brandon flew out of reach. Clark didn't want to fight a child, but he couldn't ignore the fact that this boy had already killed his uncle and his father, and had been fully prepared to kill the sheriff before he stepped in. "You have to realise that you don't have the right-"

"I have every right!" Brandon yelled, launching a desperate punch that Clark was sure he could have evaded even if his opponent had been an adult; even before he got some training himself, Clark was sure he'd never been this sloppy. As Brandon launched the latest punch, Clark grabbed the boy's arm and hurled him away, following the attack up by flying behind him and grabbing his smaller opponent around the waist to keep his arms trapped.

"Now," Clark asked with a smile, "is there any chance we could talk about this?"

"NO!" Brandon countered, straining against his current captivity. "How can you- you dare to fight me like this?"

"You were going to hurt innocent people-"

"Who were trying to stop me!" Brandon yelled, ineffectually slamming his head against Clark's chest. "They're so… how dare they try to stop me!"

"Because they're 'inferior' to you, right?"

"Exactly!" the boy seemed to brighten as he stopped his poor attempts to attack Clark and tried to turn around to look at him. "You understand; why should I care what they think of me?"

"Because if nothing else, you do have to live in this world?" Clark countered with a teasing grin.

"I can make this world what I want-!"

"And then you'll have nothing but power," Clark countered, shaking his head as he looked sadly at the boy. In a dark way, listening to the boy's rants about his own superiority, Clark was reminded of his own attitude back when he'd first been under the influence of red kryptonite, dismissing every moral lesson he'd received from his parents in favour of just doing whatever he wanted to do no matter how it put at risk. That said, even when he'd actually wanted to use the red to escape his guilt after his mother's miscarriage, Clark knew that he'd never have even considered crossing the lines Brandon had crossed so far, but the fundamental idea that his powers gave him the right to take what he wanted without concern for others…

"I've been there, you know," he said at last, once he was satisfied that Brandon wasn't going to just keep trying to hit him.

"…You have?" Brandon replied, his tone cautious but curious.

"I spent years thinking that I was sent here to conquer the world," Clark continued, looking solemnly at the boy. "The last relics of my home culture told me that I was here to 'rule them with strength', and my father died before I could properly talk with him about the fact that he spent over a decade hiding my origin from me… but even when I was angry about the secret, I never doubted that he loved me-"

"My dad tried to kill me because I wasn't like him-!"

"He tried to do that because you killed people," Clark corrected the boy. "Killing is easy, but that's the very reason we can't solve things that way; there are rules we all have to live by-"

Brandon let out a roar of outrage and suddenly forced Clark's arms upwards while he flew down and out of his opponent's grasp. Clark was just able to reposition himself when he took a lucky uppercut to the jaw, followed by another series of outraged punches from his foe.

"THEY LIED TO ME!" he heard Brandon yell as he kept hitting Clark. "THEY HELD ME BACK! I HAVE ALL THIS POWER AND THEY WANTED ME-!"

"To live a normal life," Clark cut Brandon off as he grabbed the boy's fists. "Just like mine did."

"Maybe you wanted to accept that; I'm here to take the world-!"

"And then what?"

"…what?"

"What would you do with the world once you'd taken it?" Clark continued, grateful that Brandon had even stopped kicking him after that last comment. "You can't just lash out like this whenever you lose your temper; from what I've heard, your parents only lied because they wanted to wait until you could understand why they hadn't told you the truth earlier-"

Brandon just roared in rage as he yanked his fists out of Clark's hands and tried for another punch, leaving Clark mere milliseconds to grab the boy's arms and send him flying off to the side once again.

"Maybe we're physically superior," he continued, hoping against hope that he could still make his point to Brandon the old-fashioned way, "but there's something in humanity itself that goes beyond the idea that we can just beat up anyone we feel like; if we-"

"I DON'T CARE-!" Brandon began, before he suddenly reeled back and clutched at his head with an agonised scream-

"Got it!" a new voice suddenly yelled.

"What the-?" Sheriff Deever voiced Tori's confusion before she could say it herself. As the three of them turned away from their silent attempt to watch the battle being waged above them, Tori took in the sight of an unfamiliar blonde woman walking out of the barn as though she had been a known guest. The blonde was wearing a long lilac-coloured coat over a blue shirt with rainbow stripes and blue Capri trousers, and was holding a strange silver tube in her right hand and had a casual smile on her face.

"Wh… who are you?" Tori asked, trembling as she looked at this latest stranger in her life, trying not to consider the implications of the woman coming out of the barn…

"Oh, I'm the Doctor," the woman smiled at her. "I take it you're the owner of this barn?"

"…Yes?"

"Which I assume means you're aware of the spaceship underneath it?"

"The what?" Deever looked at her incredulously, Tori only able to stare in shock at the way this woman was so casually revealing all her deepest secrets.

"I'm doing you the credit of assuming that you're not responsible for the body opposite it, for the record," the self-proclaimed Doctor said, looking at Tori with a focused stare before she indicated upwards with a smile. "But on the upside, I see that you've already met my friend?"

"Your fr… the big guy in blue?" Deputy Aryes asked uncertainly, looking uncertainly at the sky above them, Brandon and the flying man just visible as they continued to hover in mid-air.

"Not a regular associate of mine, but I like his style and he gets the job done," the Doctor explained before she turned back to Tori. "Anyway, you'll be glad to know that I've managed to take care of the signals that thing was sending to your son-"

"Signals?" Deever cut the Doctor off, looking between the Doctor and Tori incredulously. "What the Hell are you talking about? What was- you're seriously saying that's Brandon Bryer up there?"

"Yes," the Doctor said, before she looked back at Tori. "I'd like to stress that it's not your fault, but that ship's the main reason everything fell apart this quickly in the first place; the signals coming from that thing couldn't have been good for his mental state-"

"Signals?" Tori yelled, trying desperately to wrap her own mind around everything this strange woman was telling her. "You- that ship was… was it controlling my son?"

"Ah… control would be a strong word, I'm sorry to say," the Doctor said, looking at Tori regretfully. "The ship was certainly pushing him further than he would have gone on his own, but you have to understand that the people who sent him to your world… they would have made sure that Brandon reacted to everything the way they wanted him to."

"What the hell are you talking about here, lady?" Deever looked desperately between Tori and the Doctor, clearly tired of being ignored like this. "What's all this about a ship? Someone sent Brandon to our world? What are you keeping in there-?"

Tori was saved from having to find answers for those questions when something blue and red seemed to zip through the air in front of her, accompanied by a bright flash in Deever and Ayres' faces that sent them both falling to the ground, only to be caught by that same blue figure before they hit the ground. Taking in the blue-clad figure she'd only briefly witnessed attacking her son earlier, Tori was saved from asking what had happened to Brandon when she saw the boy in question on the grass a few feet away. His eyes were closed as he lay on his back in his striped shirt and jeans, that disturbing red hood and cape he'd been wearing earlier burning alongside his fallen body, but a quick glance was enough to confirm that he was still breathing.

"They're safe," the man in blue said as he lay the two police officers down on the porch. "I just rendered them unconscious when I wiped their memories."

"You… wiped their memories?" Tori repeated uncertainly. "Of… of what?"

"Basically anything relating to what your son's been doing the last couple of days," the man in blue explained.

"It's a more complicated wipe than these things usually perform- most of the time they just blank out a set time period to cover up knowledge that shouldn't go public- but we had time to prepare a cover story before we came here and upload it accordingly," the Doctor explained. "As far as anyone else will know, your son's victims will just be the victim of… extremely unfortunate accidents; we'll sort out the fine details once we leave-"

"Leave?" Tori repeated incredulously. "But… but Brandon… he just tried to-!"

"M… Mom?"

"Brandon?" Tori looked down in shock as her son sat up, looking lost and afraid in a manner that she hadn't seen from him in…

Actually, now that she thought about it, it was like Kyle's comment about how Brandon had never been cut; she'd never thought about the fact that he never gave this kind of impression to other people until she had to think about it…

"Clark…" Brandon said, looking past her to look at the man in the red cape now standing beside the Doctor. "You… you're Clark Kent… your father always took you fishing… your mother comforted you after you first used your speed… you stopped Jeremy Creek attacking the dance… you tried to help Earl Jenkins find out what had happened to him…"

"I did," Clark said, walking over to crouch down beside Brandon. "And I did so many more great things because of the human kindness taught to me by my parents…"

"And that's the most important thing humanity can teach us, Brandon Bryer," the Doctor said as she joined Clark in crouching beside Brandon. "There's no strength in just hitting everyone who's against you in some way… but there's a lot to be said in having the courage and compassion necessary to choose not to kill, even when it would be easy to do so."

"But… I'm special…" Brandon whispered. "I can… take the world…"

"And that would accomplish nothing more than causing more death and pain," Clark gave the boy a cautious smile. "Even if it feels like killing brings more immediate satisfaction… in the end you're just left feeling empty and bitter about what you did."

"And that's just when it's a stranger," the Doctor added. "When it's a family member…"

It might sound dark, but when Tori saw tears gleaming in Brandon's eyes as he listened to the Doctor and Clark's words, she suddenly had hope that this didn't have to end with her son's death.

"M… Mom…?" Brandon suddenly whispered, his head turning towards her as he held out a hand.

"I'm here, baby," Tori whispered, putting her misgivings aside as she moved to take his hand. "I'm here…"

"You… you love me…?"

"I will always love you," she said, knowing that it was true even as she said it; regardless of what Brandon might have done to Erica or Kyle, she couldn't just stop herself loving the boy she'd raised for the last eleven years, even with all this to take into account.

"I'm… I'm sorry…" Brandon whispered before he laid back down and closed his eyes, soon falling into the familiar sprawled-out form that he always assumed when he was asleep (Tori had speculated that he just let himself 'relax' like that after being stuck in the confined ship for however long he'd been trapped there).

"Wh… what was that?" Tori asked once she was sure Brandon was asleep, looking tentatively at the two men. "What he said about that… Jeremy Creek and Earl Jenkins; I've never even heard those names…?"

"I gave your son a few memories from my friend here," the Doctor explained, patting the other man's shoulder. "Clark… well, his life follows a similar path to Brandon's, but obviously he never had as many issues as your son's had; I thought it would do the kid here some good to see what he could do for other people if he wasn't on such a- if I may be blunt- rampaging ego trip about his powers."

Tori stared at Brandon in silence for a moment, torn between her motherly desire to protect her son and the knowledge that the other woman had a good point, before she looked at the man in blue who was apparently Clark.

"You… you lived a life like Brandon's?"

"Basically, yeah."

"In… what way?"

"I was an alien who came to Earth as a child and was raised by human parents," Clark explained. "My ship contained a program that apparently ordered me to conquer Earth, but I resisted it until my parents and I were able to… shut that down."

"So… you stopped it?" Tori asked. "You resisted the ship?"

"And he became the greatest hero of his world," the Doctor grinned, before she looked more solemnly at Tori. "But don't feel that you need to make Brandon follow that example. We just came here to make sure your son wasn't a danger to your world; the ship's influence has been taken off the board, and from here on, what Brandon does with his powers is entirely up to Brandon."

Looking back at her son, Tori found herself wondering if she could actually bring herself to do this. As much as she loved her son, she knew for a fact that he had killed at least three people, including his own father, displaying powers that nobody on Earth could hope to match apart from whoever Clark was, and she had a feeling he wasn't going to be available all the time…

But no matter what reasons she could come up with for rejecting him, when she looked at Brandon, she could still see that tiny, fragile baby boy who had needed her protection just as she had been so desperate for a son.

When she became a mother, she had promised that she'd do everything in her power to protect her little boy… did that change just because she now knew that one of the things she had to protect him from was himself?

As she crouched down to take hold of Brandon's hand, giving it a cautious squeeze of comfort, she was only partly aware of a strange wheezing, groaning sound coming from off in the distance, and was only slightly surprised to look up a few moments later and find that the Doctor and Clark had left.

She would be grateful to them for their help, but for the moment, her priority would have to be working out how she and Brandon would cope with the memory of everything he'd done and his (hopefully) new perspective on it…

Time Vortex

"So," Clark folded his arms as he looked pointedly at the Doctor, the two standing solemnly in the TARDIS after the ship had been set into flight, "how did Brandon get my memories?"

"Oh, I took a scan of your mind when you entered the ship and uploaded it to the screwdriver."

"You… took a scan of my mind?"

"Just the general highlights; he won't get any personal moments or in-depth secrets beyond your name and a few key faces, but we needed to give him the right kick to realise that his existing attitude wouldn't help him in the long run," the Doctor clarified with a nonchalant shrug. "That's why I chose you for this in particular, actually; you've had similar bad experiences with alien technology trying to tell you what to do with your life, but you were still able to make the right choice in the end."

"Whereas Brandon was just letting the ship tell him what to do with himself and how he should relate to the people around him…" Clark finished, looking contemplative back at the door of the Doctor's remarkable ship.

"That's the advantage of the Skrulls' experience with this kind of operation," the Doctor observed. "They know how to be subtle even on a personal level."

"That's what I don't understand about this, actually."

"What?"

"I can understand what you've told me about the Skrulls wanting to infiltrate parallel worlds, but why would they do something this elaborate in some completely new alternate universe?" Clark asked. "I mean, I can get the advantage of trying to take over a planet that doesn't have any kind of defenders like… well, us… but when they've willingly targeted other heroes' worlds before now, why would they go that far in the first place?"

"It's…" the Doctor began before she sighed. "Well, I'd like to say that it's because they're shapeshifters who are excessively focused on making their plans overly complicated, but there's a deeper reason behind it all."

"Which is?"

"You may have noticed that there are certain alternate universes out there that are more commonly variations on existing worlds?" the Time Lord explained. "I mean, there are a few worlds out there where Earth's defenders are the Power Rangers, there's at least a dozen major worlds protected by some variation of your team or the Avengers, but I'm fairly sure there aren't that many realities out there with variations of me in existence, and there's only one world out there where the primary defenders are… a giant lizard and a giant ape, just as an example."

"Really?"

"Really; couple of worlds where one or the other of those guys exist, but only one where they live on the same Earth," the Doctor grinned before she waved a hand with a shrug. "Anyway, this particular universe is close enough to your reality that they could at least potentially operate on a similar rule of… let's call it 'narrative causality' to keep it simple, so things that happen in your world are more likely to happen in this one, such as alien artefacts giving humans power-"

"Or an alien coming to Earth and being adopted by a family of farmers to grow up to become the most powerful man on the planet."

"Exactly," the Doctor nodded. "Anyway, the best I can speculate is that the Skrulls were intending to use this world's closeness to your own to basically 'trick' this reality into thinking that Brandon was just another version of you."

"…They wanted to 'trick' reality," Clark repeated.

"It's actually not a bad plan; since I started tracking these Skrulls, I've found one world where we have superhumans walking around in the seventeenth century because a prominent figure from the twentieth was sent back in time by around four centuries," the Doctor explained. "Certain parties have speculated that all happened because the universe basically… created its own defenders to help stop the consequences of his presence."

"I… see."

"Good, because it's a crazy concept to me but it's the best thing I can think of to justify that mess," the Doctor shrugged. "Anyway, like I said, setting up Brandon's life as a dark copy of yours would let them avoid any of those issues by essentially tricking the universe into thinking he's just the latest iteration of you. By the time Brandon's presence became big enough that it would be obvious to whatever influences these universes that he wasn't you, he would also be too big and powerful for anything in this world to stop him."

"Right…" Clark nodded in grim understanding. "And they were able to… create Brandon from a sample of my blood?"

"A sample of blood from Clark Kent; I can't say for sure if they meant yours or one of your alternates," the Doctor corrected before she gave him an encouraging smile. "On the bright side, if they could use that sample to augment just any old Skrull agent, we'd have had far more on our plate than just that."

"Tricky experiment, I take it?"

"There's a reason that cloning program you told me about only produced one viable hybrid; Kryptonian DNA is notoriously complex. The Skrulls are smart, but there's a reason they never managed to give anyone else Carol Danvers' abilities even after 'Vers' was working with them for most of a decade; they're not as smart as they think they are."

"I know a few people like that," Clark smiled at the memory of some of his lesser foes before he looked more seriously at the Doctor. "Will Brandon be… all right?"

"He has a chance and I've left a warning system or two in place if he doesn't take it."

"You left a warning system?"

"Trust but verify," the Doctor observed. "Considering what Brandon did to his own father before we got there, would you want to leave him completely to his own devices?"

"…Good point," Clark said, looking at the central column for a moment before he looked back at the Doctor. "Did we make a difference?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, if we're in a multiverse of parallel timelines and all that… does it matter if we stopped Brandon? Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that we helped out, but if we stopped him here, doesn't that mean there's another world out there-?"

"Where you killed your wife?"

"What?"

"Just a dramatic statement to make a point," the Doctor held up her hands as Clark looked at her in shock. "There is no reality where you, as you are, has killed Lois Lane, but according to the multiverse theory you're thinking of there should be such a world… which means?"

"That… what we do does matter?" Clark asked hopefully.

"Bingo," the Doctor grinned. "Choices make new laws for the multiverse; the possibilities are infinite, but we can't discount the individual impact on events as well."

"Like that time I visited that parallel universe where I was raised by Lionel Luthor?"

"The one where you and your associates ended up talking your counterpart into changing his ways?" the Doctor pointed out. "Even the worst version of yourself that you could imagine still had the potential to be a hero and just needed the right kick to get to that point."

"What are you saying? That I'm just… meant to be Superman?"

"I'm saying that, in any reality where Kal-El of Krypton comes to Earth, he will become some form of Superman even in a culture that doesn't have the concept of a superhero yet; one version of you arrived in the Middle Ages and ended up forging that world's Excalibur."

"Really?" Clark grinned at the idea. "That's… kind of cool."

"That you didn't live long enough to do much more, unfortunately, but the point is that he made an impact," the Doctor affirmed. "Even the Clarks that become Superman are all different; I've seen a world where you mostly deal with criminal masterminds, a world or two where you became the ruler of Russia during the Cold War, and there are one or two where you're that bit more willing to kill even if you only do it if you're sure there isn't another way…"

"Oh," Clark said, suddenly recalling those early moments of his life back in Smallville where some foes had ended up dying for some reason or other- Tina running into that wooden spike, Lana overloading 'Bizarro' with blue kryptonite, Brendan being turned to wax by his own power- before he shook those thoughts aside. "I've… never wanted to kill myself…"

"But can you accept that these other yous don't do it easily?" the Doctor asked. "Can you accept that any version of you that does kill only does it because he's sure he doesn't have another way to stop a particularly powerful opponent, whether because he doesn't have the resources to contain it or the ability to send him elsewhere?"

Clark stood in silent thought for a moment before he nodded.

"I… can see how that might happen," he said at last. "I just… I'd do everything I could to find another way first…"

"And that's why I chose you over them for this particular trip; your faith that you can find another way," the Doctor grinned encouragingly at Clark, before she waved a hand as though dismissing the matter of those other worlds as she looked at him more seriously. "Anyway, my point is that, no matter what your cultural background, it takes something pretty significant to stop Kal-El of Krypton from becoming Clark Kent of Earth and going on to become the kind of Man of Steel I see before me; the exact details of your past and the methods you use 'in the field' might change from world to world, but so long as the right opportunities are presented, things can still work out."

"And you think Brandon has a chance to work it out the right way now?"

"I was once told by the personification of Death herself that I could have been the villain of my home universe if certain other parties hadn't stepped in," the Doctor observed. "If all it could have taken to turn me into the villain is one bad memory, why shouldn't your good ones be able to help Brandon become a better man?"

Looking at the encouraging smile on the Doctor's face, Clark decided to take the expressed sentiment in the manner that it had clearly been intended, and simply nodded in agreement as the Time Lord set the TARDIS back towards Clark's own universe.

Brandon's ship would be disposed of and Brandon himself had been given a better example to follow than what he'd had before; if Clark had been willing to give Major Zod a chance to be better than his predecessor on less, what he and the Doctor had done for Brandon had to be enough to set him on a better path…

Always assuming the Skrulls can't try something else once they realise this didn't work…