Metropolis

She found him on a street corner, a pillar of desolated stillness in a river of pedestrians and traffic. The city had a current that parted around him and reformed on the other side, as if simultaneously indifferent and wary of his presence. The current inside of him was frozen. It belonged to a different time, before the river around him had worn away at the surrounding banks. He looked at the city and it looked back without recognition.

Gaia marveled at the way people walked right past him without even noticing the power inside. Would she have done the same, not knowing what she knew? Even knowing what he was and where she might find him, it would have been easy not to recognize him. The body at the power station had been diminished by long decades of confinement. The man standing before her was...beautiful. She had never seen anyone so perfect. And it was authentic perfection, not the surgical kind. He was a work of art. And he looked barely twenty, despite the centuries weighing on his broad shoulders.

"I thought I might find you here," she commented as she approached him. He did not respond, but stood as still as ever, his head tilted to look at something far above him. Gaia followed the line of his sight to the Daily Planet globe, spinning in neon splendor on top of the ancient skyscraper across the street. "It's the oldest building in Metropolis," she continued in the face of his silence. "Probably looks familiar, huh?"

As she watched him watching the globe, she realized that there was more pain than recognition in his features. The place must have changed too much to comfort him now. The echoes of the past embedded in its architecture only made the strangeness of it more cutting. Maybe it would have been better if they'd torn the thing down.

"I guess this place was special," Gaia ventured. "Isn't this where your reporter friends worked?"

She was getting used to his impenetrable silence and wasn't surprised when he failed to react to her voice. The nearly constant wind of Metropolis lashed his dark hair - much longer than in the pictures – across his face, but he ignored that too. She wondered what he was seeing that she could not.

"Come on," she said, grabbing one of his muscular arms and tugging gently. "Let me buy you a cup of coffee."

Gaia didn't see his head move. One instant his head was turned upward and in the next his pale green eyes were boring into hers, nearly stopping her heart with the force of their agony and expectation. The name came in a soft, breathy whisper. Gaia didn't recognize it; it wasn't in any of the files.

"Chloe…"

She hesitated, smoothing the stray blond strands the wind had sent whipping across her eyes with one hand. Her other was still wrapped around his unresisting wrist. She didn't know how to answer the longing in his eyes, and after a moment it flickered and died into emptiness. She turned away, unable to bear what she had seen inside of him.

"Come on," she repeated mechanically, and pulled him through the rushing tide of bodies to the coffee spot across from the Planet. It felt very strange, guiding this creature through the crowd like a child. She was extremely aware of the fact that she did so under his sufferance. He could have pulled free with frighteningly little effort. This perfectly human submission was somehow even scarier.

The Met Cup was, like every spot in the city, never truly slow, but the constant rush had eased enough to free a table or two. Gaia led the young man to an empty barstool and put in an order with the electronic waiter in the center of the tiny table. He succumbed to her guidance in a kind of indifferent daze. She sighed and studied him as he sat there looking vaguely around the room. Not quite what she had expected.

She'd spent years worming her way into the elite government organizations that controlled access to historical records that some believed existed only in rumor. She had exhausted every resource at her disposal to collect every piece of hard data relating to a man who had receded to the realm of legend. The stories people still told about him were impressive, but the truth was more impressive still.

The virus she designed to take out the power station was the culmination of all her efforts to revive that legend, to resurrect an immense power from the past. It had been more than a project for her; it had been a quest. She had chased a hero down the corridors of time in order to save a world she felt crumbling around her. The image she had constructed of him had guided her along the darkest paths she'd traveled to reach her goal.

And now the reality was clashing with that image.

He looked out of place, to say the least. The crowds passing on all sides displayed an impressive array of fashions and styles, some of them synthetic and some of them expensively organic. The rural denim trousers and simple, short-sleeved, white shirt he had somehow acquired did not fit any of them. And he wore the plain garb with such unhurried steadiness that he stood out in the din like a deep, still pool in the middle of a rapid.

His features were too smooth and youthful for the years they had seen. He was gorgeous and graceful, but he looked like a farm whelp. The man she had tracked down had been a leader. He had radiated confidence and courage. He'd been an inspiration to billions of people. When he talked, people listened. This...boy didn't talk. He only examined the world around him as if seeing it for the first time. He looked more like someone in need of protection than someone who could provide it.

Gaia's thoughtful silence turned sullen. She had reached the end of her road only to find the treasure she sought broken beyond repair.

A server dropped off their drinks. Gaia had ordered a pair of syncho lattes. "They're made with real milk," she informed her distant companion. "I thought they might remind you of home."

He picked up the cheap metal cup without wrapping it in an insulator and looked at it as if it were an object of great significance. The emptiness in his eyes filled once again with a sorrow too deep for words. "She used to say she had a five-latte minimum for each issue," he whispered suddenly. "She always sent me on coffee runs because I was faster than Pete. She thought it was because I didn't stop to talk to people but it was really because I ran instead of driving."

Gaia froze for a second with her cup halfway to her mouth before setting it back down, untasted. She watched him staring at the coffee and seeing a past that had not been in any of the files she'd uncovered. What part of his life had that come from? Those were not the words of the most powerful man on the planet. "Who-" she began, but his arresting green eyes settled on her again, burning the words from her tongue. She didn't know how to answer those eyes.

And just like that he was gone. A strong breeze swept her hair back from her face. The cup he had been examining wobbled in a short half-circle and clanked onto its side, dripping real milk and synthetic coffee onto the floor.