It's STILL all Becs' fault, and yes, I'm ashamed of myself for having such fun with it.
* * * * *
Wally wasn't sure what he expected of a place that called itself Special Operations and was too top secret for James Bond to know about, but the most boring industrial expanse of ugly concrete he'd ever imagined wasn't it. No wonder nobody ever looked for them, or even at them. It induced terminal snooze just to walk across the parking lot.
The secretaries in the front office gave a new meaning to the word bland. It was only the fact that all three of them pronounced "Kal-El" with that weird accent that gave him a hint that they might be a little more than your average desk-driver.
Well, that and the fact that they all greeted him by name too, and offered sympathies on losing Barry. Okay, now he believed that he was among top-level spies. He hadn't thought that more than a handful of other people knew the story of Barry's sacrifice.
He had told himself that he was going to quit being shocked about four hours ago, and that was a whole bunch of time at his speed, but every step into Special Operations was pretty much another problem in keeping his feet moving and not stopping to gawk. There were the elevators that went down eight levels instead of up two, and that you had to have your ID coded into in order to activate. There were the walls that answered, when Wynter gave his rapid-fire report (waving his arms and making hand gestures for emphasis) to thin air, with what Wally would swear was a tone of amusement. But he got yet another jolt to the nerves once they went into the main computer room, and the tired-looking and disheveled man looked up from his console and broke into a smile that made him look ten years younger.
"Wynter! So you made it without Clark turning the plane over." (Clark huffed indignantly.) "Hello, Walter. I'm Bruce. Banner. I don't know if Barry ever mentioned me. We -- talked, some, after the accident. The, uh, accidents. We sort of fell out of touch after that. I'm really sorry about ... that I wasn't ... that I didn't...." Bruce looked away, wondering regretfully if he, if as the Hulk, could have done anything to intervene in the disaster that had killed Barry. Wishing he would have at least tried. Hulk would have tried, he hoped. But he didn't know.
It was Clark who stepped forward and put a hand firmly on Bruce's shoulder, wincing only slightly at the residual gamma radiation shock. "Don't they force feed you enough of the 'it's not your fault' line here? The 'you can't do everything'? They do to me. And I could have done more than you could."
Wally frowned at him. He and Clark were still kids. They both still had curfews, for pity's sake. What could they have done?
"And does it work?" Bruce shot back.
Wynter controlled the impulse to throw things at both of them to break up the pity party. He had a great deal invested in having Bruce around, and not just because Bruce was a good intermediary for the only person on the planet potentially in Kal-El's strength class. Plus, he was quick on the uptake, even by Wynter's standards. But if there was anything he'd learned from the Baron, it was that guilt complexes just screwed up intended results.
"Well. Sometimes. I'm ... trying." Clark all but toed the ground. "I'm here, aren't I? Instead of...."
"That's enough," Wynter said, far too firmly for the smallest person in the room. "We have a real problem to work here, and the moping is wasting time and energy. Bruce, the kicker is that someone knows about both our testing range and Clark's meteorites. I know you're not a regular here, but could you help us out some?"
Bruce stood. "There is absolutely nothing you could ask that I wouldn't do. In this form, or in Hulk's. I owe you," he nodded in Clark's direction, "and the superboy there, more than I can ever repay. Give me a starting point and I'm on it."
"I have all the details I could put into the recordings loaded already. McCallan and Noah are headed there now to see what they can sniff up, and they're both on transmitter, so we'll have some more details soon. Right now somebody needs to give Wally here the indoctrination tour before Clark tries to do it himself."
Wynter ran a hand through his, well, what passed for hair. "I'll be in the com room. John is going to skewer me for being gone so long as it is. Miriam's on call if you need anything. Thanks, Bruce. I have a bad feeling about this. We probably won't need you -- Lake and Nicole are due back from Taiwan Friday, if nothing else goes ballistic -- but it's good to have you here, just in case."
Clark was still pouting about the "tries to do it" remark, though being called "superboy" made him want to go hide in a closet somewhere. Wally's open staring between the three of them wasn't helping.
"You're the Hulk," Wally said finally, somewhere between shock and accusation.
"I did say that," Bruce said mildly.
"And you people just let him run around loose here?" Wally rounded on Wynter furiously. "Don't you have any idea how dangerous -- "
"More dangerous than me?" Clark cut him off, deceptively calm.
"He's the HULK," Wally repeated, a snarled yell. "He could -- "
"I can put him down with one hand." Clark about-faced to stand beside, and side with, Bruce. "Well, it feels like what I imagine arthritis would to you, to touch him, but Doctor Banner is no more threat to you, even as Hulk, than I am," and his eyes shifted red inadvertently, "every second of the day."
"You," Wally pronounced, "Have officially lost your mind. You're not just some mindless monster who -- "
"Steals and hurts people and destroys buildings and uses women like tissue paper?" Clark cut him off. "Oh, no. I don't have Hulk's excuse. I wasn't mindless when I did those things. I knew exactly what I was doing, and enjoyed every minute of it. And Bruce never almost killed his own father."
Wally went pale. "You're not -- you didn't -- "
"It's all in the files." Clark moved away from all of them, averting his face. "Assuming Wynter and John ever clear you to read anything beyond your own name."
Wally's indignation at that overrode his common sense. "And you have such a high security clearance because of all those things you did? Gee, what a wonderful recommendation."
Wynter glanced at Bruce, eyebrows raised. Neither of them were much worried about Clark killing Wally on the spot for that remark, because Clark had a permanent guilt complex over his months of being drugged nearly schizophrenic on red kryptonite, but intervention was probably a good idea right now.
"Kal." Bruce touched his shoulder lightly, just for a split second. Whether Clark's flinch was at the gamma ray pain, or the idea of being touched in his mood, he would never tell anyone. "That's OVER with. For both of us. Wally's only known you for a little while, he doesn't know what you've been through. For that matter, you don't know what he's been through. You two might work on talking instead of just running races."
"You wouldn't even blink if someone like, oh, say, Chloe said that," Wynter added craftily. "And you never even bothered to tell her why you were so whacked out in Metropolis. She had to figure it out herself. Wally barely knows where you grew up."
Clark spun on him, shocked. "Chloe knows?"
Wynter threw his hands in the air. "What, you left Wally and Chloe alone? And NEITHER of them told you what they talked about? All the names of all the stars, Kal, you'll graduate to Special Operations agent about the time the sun burns out. Chloe was the one who figured out that there was a red version of the meteorites in the first place, remember? Maybe that stuff really does screw up your memory."
"Eh." Wally looked a little red himself. "No, we didn't tell Clark what we -- mostly talked about. Clark only came up -- a few times."
Wynter was turning several shades of purple with the effort not to laugh. "What do you think, Bruce? Should we put Wally through basic training?"
Banner shook his head. "I think the kid is hopeless. Clark at least finishes his assignments. According to Barry, Walter had to repeat Algebra. He couldn't begin to run the equations to understand what Clark can do."
"You could change, and we could give him a demonstration of arm-wrestling," Clark offered.
"I take back what I said about you having half a brain. Go do your history homework. Lake and Nicole are likely to quiz you when they get back."
Bruce was grateful to, and solicitous of, the super-brained boy and super-strong boy and the ancient Baron who had taken him in and given him so much acceptance as well as assistance, but Lake and Nicole scared him out of his shorts. He would just as soon be in a different country if the insane barely-controlled psycho-telekinetic and invulnerable laboratory creation came back from any assignment in which anything at all had gone wrong.
And Clark could throw Hulk through a wall, despite the gamma-ray pain it caused Clark to touch him (the radiation that activated and powered the Hulk form was similar to, though fortunately not exactly the same as, the meteorites' high frequencies), and even Clark was terrified deep down of the small pale woman and innocuous-looking woman-thing who wore that ridiculously red lead-shielded (to protect other people from her nuclear furnace's residual radiation) bodysuit.
Wally may have had it easier with his older mentor to teach him how to handle his differences, but he was about to learn new depths to the meaning of the word "different." Baron John's stable consisted of more than just headcases like Wynter.
"Kal-El, I don't think you could beat Hulk with just ONE hand," Wynter opined, eyes distracted in the way that meant he was running serious data through his head. "Though we could rig some comparative equipment in Nicole's workout room. She's been aiming for half a million kilograms for a year or so, you probably couldn't break anything rated for that. Too badly, anyway. Tomorrow, okay? I need to look into some stuff. Can you find the food stores on your own? Of course you can. Kal, don't bend the hinges again! The tofu grew a science project last time when you didn't seal it properly." Wynter shook his head and waved abstractedly to them in leaving, muttering to himself.
Bruce snickered. Clark raised his eyebrows at him in understanding sympathy. You just had to take Wynter as he was, because even the Baron had admitted that there was no changing him.
Wally glared at them. "You're -- I -- what did -- and he -- half a million -- ?"
"The trick at that kind of weight is how to grab it," Bruce offered kindly. "Pounds per square inch deformation. Things tend to shred under your fingertips."
"No duh," Clark muttered. "Metallurgy class wasn't so bad, but John flunked me on three physical checkouts in a row and made me go back and heat-ray everything I'd ever lifted or caught at speed to get rid of the prints. Lex still has that damn car, though. Okay, so it was dumb to brace my hand on it when I ripped the top off. So I wasn't thinking straight. I'd never been hit by a Porsche before, you know?"
Bruce chuckled. "Actually, I don't think I've ever been hit by a Porsche either. Plenty of Fords and Chevys, I'm sure, but you out-class me in the being-hit-by-expensive-cars category too. Did Lex ever hit you with one of his Ferraris?"
Clark snorted. "No, but I've ridden with him in one a few times. The way Lex drives, being invulnerable is really comforting. Thank all the stars that John won't let Lake have a sports car; Nicole is the only one who'll ride with her as it is. No physically normal human should ever even be allowed behind the wheel of a 512. If Lex could have seen Wally or me, he'd be trying to race us. If he ever saw Lake drive, it would take the NTSB's plane crash team to find all the pieces. I'd rather be hit by a truck than ride with either of them any day."
"You two are weird," Wally opined at that comment.
"I'm from another planet, and Bruce is the Hulk. Your point is?"
* * * * *
* * * * *
Wally wasn't sure what he expected of a place that called itself Special Operations and was too top secret for James Bond to know about, but the most boring industrial expanse of ugly concrete he'd ever imagined wasn't it. No wonder nobody ever looked for them, or even at them. It induced terminal snooze just to walk across the parking lot.
The secretaries in the front office gave a new meaning to the word bland. It was only the fact that all three of them pronounced "Kal-El" with that weird accent that gave him a hint that they might be a little more than your average desk-driver.
Well, that and the fact that they all greeted him by name too, and offered sympathies on losing Barry. Okay, now he believed that he was among top-level spies. He hadn't thought that more than a handful of other people knew the story of Barry's sacrifice.
He had told himself that he was going to quit being shocked about four hours ago, and that was a whole bunch of time at his speed, but every step into Special Operations was pretty much another problem in keeping his feet moving and not stopping to gawk. There were the elevators that went down eight levels instead of up two, and that you had to have your ID coded into in order to activate. There were the walls that answered, when Wynter gave his rapid-fire report (waving his arms and making hand gestures for emphasis) to thin air, with what Wally would swear was a tone of amusement. But he got yet another jolt to the nerves once they went into the main computer room, and the tired-looking and disheveled man looked up from his console and broke into a smile that made him look ten years younger.
"Wynter! So you made it without Clark turning the plane over." (Clark huffed indignantly.) "Hello, Walter. I'm Bruce. Banner. I don't know if Barry ever mentioned me. We -- talked, some, after the accident. The, uh, accidents. We sort of fell out of touch after that. I'm really sorry about ... that I wasn't ... that I didn't...." Bruce looked away, wondering regretfully if he, if as the Hulk, could have done anything to intervene in the disaster that had killed Barry. Wishing he would have at least tried. Hulk would have tried, he hoped. But he didn't know.
It was Clark who stepped forward and put a hand firmly on Bruce's shoulder, wincing only slightly at the residual gamma radiation shock. "Don't they force feed you enough of the 'it's not your fault' line here? The 'you can't do everything'? They do to me. And I could have done more than you could."
Wally frowned at him. He and Clark were still kids. They both still had curfews, for pity's sake. What could they have done?
"And does it work?" Bruce shot back.
Wynter controlled the impulse to throw things at both of them to break up the pity party. He had a great deal invested in having Bruce around, and not just because Bruce was a good intermediary for the only person on the planet potentially in Kal-El's strength class. Plus, he was quick on the uptake, even by Wynter's standards. But if there was anything he'd learned from the Baron, it was that guilt complexes just screwed up intended results.
"Well. Sometimes. I'm ... trying." Clark all but toed the ground. "I'm here, aren't I? Instead of...."
"That's enough," Wynter said, far too firmly for the smallest person in the room. "We have a real problem to work here, and the moping is wasting time and energy. Bruce, the kicker is that someone knows about both our testing range and Clark's meteorites. I know you're not a regular here, but could you help us out some?"
Bruce stood. "There is absolutely nothing you could ask that I wouldn't do. In this form, or in Hulk's. I owe you," he nodded in Clark's direction, "and the superboy there, more than I can ever repay. Give me a starting point and I'm on it."
"I have all the details I could put into the recordings loaded already. McCallan and Noah are headed there now to see what they can sniff up, and they're both on transmitter, so we'll have some more details soon. Right now somebody needs to give Wally here the indoctrination tour before Clark tries to do it himself."
Wynter ran a hand through his, well, what passed for hair. "I'll be in the com room. John is going to skewer me for being gone so long as it is. Miriam's on call if you need anything. Thanks, Bruce. I have a bad feeling about this. We probably won't need you -- Lake and Nicole are due back from Taiwan Friday, if nothing else goes ballistic -- but it's good to have you here, just in case."
Clark was still pouting about the "tries to do it" remark, though being called "superboy" made him want to go hide in a closet somewhere. Wally's open staring between the three of them wasn't helping.
"You're the Hulk," Wally said finally, somewhere between shock and accusation.
"I did say that," Bruce said mildly.
"And you people just let him run around loose here?" Wally rounded on Wynter furiously. "Don't you have any idea how dangerous -- "
"More dangerous than me?" Clark cut him off, deceptively calm.
"He's the HULK," Wally repeated, a snarled yell. "He could -- "
"I can put him down with one hand." Clark about-faced to stand beside, and side with, Bruce. "Well, it feels like what I imagine arthritis would to you, to touch him, but Doctor Banner is no more threat to you, even as Hulk, than I am," and his eyes shifted red inadvertently, "every second of the day."
"You," Wally pronounced, "Have officially lost your mind. You're not just some mindless monster who -- "
"Steals and hurts people and destroys buildings and uses women like tissue paper?" Clark cut him off. "Oh, no. I don't have Hulk's excuse. I wasn't mindless when I did those things. I knew exactly what I was doing, and enjoyed every minute of it. And Bruce never almost killed his own father."
Wally went pale. "You're not -- you didn't -- "
"It's all in the files." Clark moved away from all of them, averting his face. "Assuming Wynter and John ever clear you to read anything beyond your own name."
Wally's indignation at that overrode his common sense. "And you have such a high security clearance because of all those things you did? Gee, what a wonderful recommendation."
Wynter glanced at Bruce, eyebrows raised. Neither of them were much worried about Clark killing Wally on the spot for that remark, because Clark had a permanent guilt complex over his months of being drugged nearly schizophrenic on red kryptonite, but intervention was probably a good idea right now.
"Kal." Bruce touched his shoulder lightly, just for a split second. Whether Clark's flinch was at the gamma ray pain, or the idea of being touched in his mood, he would never tell anyone. "That's OVER with. For both of us. Wally's only known you for a little while, he doesn't know what you've been through. For that matter, you don't know what he's been through. You two might work on talking instead of just running races."
"You wouldn't even blink if someone like, oh, say, Chloe said that," Wynter added craftily. "And you never even bothered to tell her why you were so whacked out in Metropolis. She had to figure it out herself. Wally barely knows where you grew up."
Clark spun on him, shocked. "Chloe knows?"
Wynter threw his hands in the air. "What, you left Wally and Chloe alone? And NEITHER of them told you what they talked about? All the names of all the stars, Kal, you'll graduate to Special Operations agent about the time the sun burns out. Chloe was the one who figured out that there was a red version of the meteorites in the first place, remember? Maybe that stuff really does screw up your memory."
"Eh." Wally looked a little red himself. "No, we didn't tell Clark what we -- mostly talked about. Clark only came up -- a few times."
Wynter was turning several shades of purple with the effort not to laugh. "What do you think, Bruce? Should we put Wally through basic training?"
Banner shook his head. "I think the kid is hopeless. Clark at least finishes his assignments. According to Barry, Walter had to repeat Algebra. He couldn't begin to run the equations to understand what Clark can do."
"You could change, and we could give him a demonstration of arm-wrestling," Clark offered.
"I take back what I said about you having half a brain. Go do your history homework. Lake and Nicole are likely to quiz you when they get back."
Bruce was grateful to, and solicitous of, the super-brained boy and super-strong boy and the ancient Baron who had taken him in and given him so much acceptance as well as assistance, but Lake and Nicole scared him out of his shorts. He would just as soon be in a different country if the insane barely-controlled psycho-telekinetic and invulnerable laboratory creation came back from any assignment in which anything at all had gone wrong.
And Clark could throw Hulk through a wall, despite the gamma-ray pain it caused Clark to touch him (the radiation that activated and powered the Hulk form was similar to, though fortunately not exactly the same as, the meteorites' high frequencies), and even Clark was terrified deep down of the small pale woman and innocuous-looking woman-thing who wore that ridiculously red lead-shielded (to protect other people from her nuclear furnace's residual radiation) bodysuit.
Wally may have had it easier with his older mentor to teach him how to handle his differences, but he was about to learn new depths to the meaning of the word "different." Baron John's stable consisted of more than just headcases like Wynter.
"Kal-El, I don't think you could beat Hulk with just ONE hand," Wynter opined, eyes distracted in the way that meant he was running serious data through his head. "Though we could rig some comparative equipment in Nicole's workout room. She's been aiming for half a million kilograms for a year or so, you probably couldn't break anything rated for that. Too badly, anyway. Tomorrow, okay? I need to look into some stuff. Can you find the food stores on your own? Of course you can. Kal, don't bend the hinges again! The tofu grew a science project last time when you didn't seal it properly." Wynter shook his head and waved abstractedly to them in leaving, muttering to himself.
Bruce snickered. Clark raised his eyebrows at him in understanding sympathy. You just had to take Wynter as he was, because even the Baron had admitted that there was no changing him.
Wally glared at them. "You're -- I -- what did -- and he -- half a million -- ?"
"The trick at that kind of weight is how to grab it," Bruce offered kindly. "Pounds per square inch deformation. Things tend to shred under your fingertips."
"No duh," Clark muttered. "Metallurgy class wasn't so bad, but John flunked me on three physical checkouts in a row and made me go back and heat-ray everything I'd ever lifted or caught at speed to get rid of the prints. Lex still has that damn car, though. Okay, so it was dumb to brace my hand on it when I ripped the top off. So I wasn't thinking straight. I'd never been hit by a Porsche before, you know?"
Bruce chuckled. "Actually, I don't think I've ever been hit by a Porsche either. Plenty of Fords and Chevys, I'm sure, but you out-class me in the being-hit-by-expensive-cars category too. Did Lex ever hit you with one of his Ferraris?"
Clark snorted. "No, but I've ridden with him in one a few times. The way Lex drives, being invulnerable is really comforting. Thank all the stars that John won't let Lake have a sports car; Nicole is the only one who'll ride with her as it is. No physically normal human should ever even be allowed behind the wheel of a 512. If Lex could have seen Wally or me, he'd be trying to race us. If he ever saw Lake drive, it would take the NTSB's plane crash team to find all the pieces. I'd rather be hit by a truck than ride with either of them any day."
"You two are weird," Wally opined at that comment.
"I'm from another planet, and Bruce is the Hulk. Your point is?"
* * * * *