All reviews are amazing! Superman's suit design was inspired by a piece of art by Harseik on deviantart. I liked the aesthetics of the Man of Steel suit and I wanted to keep the red, but not the panties. Little history fact: Supes's original design from the 30s was based off of wrestlers who wore super-sheer tights that had a habit of splitting along the seams when they flexed too hard, so the hot-pants were added to preserve modesty. The red panties are a classic, but for a modern setting, they're kind of outdated.
Also, I'm about 2/3rds of the way through Story 3. I'm estimating a rough sum of 15 more chapters before it's completed.
Updating a week early because I have a boss battle to write and fight scenes are the devil. Weekly updates begin Sept. 2nd!
(quick question. I'm considering creating a deviantart page just for dumping headcanons/background information on the 'verse. Anyone interested in that?)
Chapter Twenty-Three: A Service to the People
The first instant when Dr. Essex let go of her hand was surreal, like a dream that she was going to wake up from before she hit the ground. It didn't feel so much like falling as it felt like sinking. It was just happening at a faster rate.
It took a second for Lois to recall that this was no dream -- that good old fashioned denial quick to work. But then it hit her, hard and fast like a brick. She was falling from two miles up and there was nothing between her and the ground but a very, very long drop.
Lois had never appreciated just how very solid the ground had looked until now. A distinct, feral sort of panic gripped her; the kind that made you want to empty your bowels and scream hysterically because it was all you could do. Her hands flailed uselessly for something to hang on to, but there was nothing. Nothing to grab on to and she didn't even scream.
The only plus side was that she might not be conscious when she finally hit the ground. Perhaps her blood pressure would bottom out and every last drop would rush out of her brain, leaving her as limp and unresponsive as a rag doll. Maybe she would be dead to the world before she was actually dead.
Not much of a plus, admittedly, but as long as she didn't have to feel it.
"Hang on! I've got you! Don't worry!"
Kal-El had swooped in, practically on top of her by the time she actually looked. So close she could touch his face and see if his cheekbones were really as sculpted as they looked.
Hello tall, dark, and handsome, what cloud in heaven did you fall off of? Lois found herself wondering.
Then his arms were around her, strong and firm, holding her close to an incredibly muscular body and with her every nerve alive from adrenaline, her fingers could trace the muscle fibers clenching under her hands. There was a sudden sense of gravity, but in the reassuring sense that kept both your feet on the ground. She was no longer falling. Kal-El had her and they were flying now.
And that hit her like another brick.
They were flying.
Lois screamed.
"Me?! You've got me?! Who's got you?! Who are you?!" she shrieked, reflexively trying to push away from him.
Then she looked down. Down at Metropolis still sprawled out below them. They all but hung suspended above it. Lois's next scream was one of surprise and she seized Kal-El a little tighter.
"Oh my god, you are flying! You're actually flying! Like actually flying!" she gibbered, practically trying to crawl onto his shoulders, as far away from the ground as she could get. Her hands fisted into his cape and she stared down his back at the city streets that were just way too far down there.
"Yes, I'm actually flying." Kal-El assured her, sounding amused. He had a velvety voice and it rumbled nicely all the way up her ribcage. "Just hang on, okay? It'll be easier to set you down if you're not wiggling."
They were shedding altitude now. Lois's ears popped and her wrist throbbed even more, but it was comforting to see the topmost spires of the city growing larger and knowing that she wasn't going to leave a bloody smear on one of them on her way down.
Flight.
"Oh my god..." Lois squeaked, a little too close to a whimper for her liking. She was over a thousand feet up and she had almost plunged to her death, but now she was in the arms of a man who could fly.
Kal-El looked down at her with a concerned expression. "Are you all right... It's Lois Lane, isn't it?" he asked.
"You know my name." Lois stated.
"Yes, I do." Kal-El said, flashing a twinkling smile. Lois felt her knees go mushy. That smile should have been on a toothpaste ad. He could make good money doing toothpaste ads. "Are you all right, Ms. Lane?"
Lois opened her mouth to reply when déjà vu washed over her and a prickle of familiarity followed. She peered a little harder at Kal-El, wondering if she really had seen him before, since Dr. Essex seemed to think they were previously acquainted. She definitely would have remembered those eyes; the bright blue of a cloudless summer sky. His voice sounded like generic Midwest, but that "Ms. Lane" had sounded a bit familiar. The way it had dipped and twanged, curling around the syllables with all the laziness of a creeping vine.
"Miss Lane?" Kal-El asked again, his brow drawing down to the bridge of his nose.
"O-Oh! I'm fine..." Lois squeaked, shaking away the sense of recognition. She had never seen him before, right? No, she hadn't. Not quite like this, at least. "Th-Thank you?"
"You're welcome." Kal-El nodded and there was that toothpaste ad smile again. "I hope this won't put you off flying. Statistically speaking, it's still the safest way to travel."
There was just no responding to that. Not while there was a gigantic whirling portal opening above them. Not after he had just plucked her away from death. This was not a situation where he got to make funny jokes.
"Don't talk. Just don't talk." Lois told him. "It's cold up here and I'd like for you to put me down on something solid. With a staircase. Please." she added, just so she didn't sound totally ungrateful for being saved.
"Not a problem, Miss Lane." Kal-El said.
Then he angled their descent towards the helicopter pad on the roof of the LexCorp building. Lois tried to put some dignity in her clinging -- there was little doubt Lex Luthor himself was plastered to one of his windows even this early in the morning, watching the spectacle.
She wondered what the business mogul would think of it.
No, forget Luthor. What about the nation? What was the rest of the nation going to think?
*BRRRNNNNN!*
The sound was foghorn-like in its intensity, but something Lois felt more rattling in her bones and humming in her teeth, and accompanied by a visible pulse of energy that originated from the very center of the portal.
A visible, tangible pulse of energy. Lois's teeth hadn't stopped humming before Kal-El suddenly dragged her off his shoulders and against his chest when that pulse slammed into them, like swatting a fly out of midair.
And suddenly their flight turned into a plummet.
That sense of gravity -- that there was something to push off of was gone. Tucked securely though she was against the flying man's chest, underneath his incredibly strong arms, Lois felt cold fear washing through her veins.
"Fly! Fly! Fly goddammit!" she shrieked, which were a series of words she hadn't imagined herself screaming outside of a fuselage.
Kal-El grunted, his face strained like he was trying to pass a kidney stone and there was a sudden pull of gravity but it only came out as a split-second burst that turned their fall into a tailspin. The world spun wildly in response, earth and sky and portal and Metropolis blurring into nearly indistinguishable smears. They were still angled towards the LexCorp building and when Lois happened to catch glimpses of it, the helicopter pad was beginning to look very solid.
One of them wasn't going to get out of this alive.
My near-death experiences aren't supposed to happen on Tuesdays... Lois thought vaguely, squeezing her eyes shut so she didn't have to see the final collision.
Gravity pulled on her again and the tailspin stopped as abruptly as it had begun, leaving Lois gasping and nauseous in the pit of her stomach but she had no time to recover. Kal-El's cape swept up over her and his legs doubled up to his chest. Or rather, around her since she was already in the way. And then he flipped over so his back to Metropolis.
"Keep your head down!" he ordered. His grip changed, hands moving to her shoulders and her hips rather than directly around her chest, and his shoulders hunched protectively.
Lois was about to ask why--
Concrete rebar and steel crunched and crumbled, and the reporter felt the impact like she was standing on the other side of a brick wall. It still jarred her from head to toe and set her wrist throbbing, but it wasn't any worse than that. There was nothing to see with the cape covering her, but Lois had the funny feeling they had just had gone through part of the LexCorp tower.
Only part, because they were still falling.
Eat a dick, Luthor. Lois thought, grinning at the thought of a giant hole in the monument to the businessman's ego.
Hole in Luthor's ego or not, they were still falling.
The portal went *BRRRNNNNN!* again, the pulse of energy shattering the glass windows of the top few floors of the nearby skyscrapers. Lois still felt the rattle in her bones through the cape and limbs bundled around her, but they were outside the zone of immediate effect. The shockwave didn't swat them down.
All the same, they were still falling.
"Get a hold of yourself and fly!" she shrieked at Kal-El, where she could see his face.
"I'm working on it!" he half-shouted back, his face still strained, his voice still something of a grunt.
"Work harder!"
Surely flying couldn't be that hard. It wasn't like he had wings or other required appendages. From her perspective, it felt like he generated his own gravitational field.
(Honestly though, it was harder than Lois imagined. Clark hadn't always been able to fly; it had taken time to develop. The potential had always been there, but it hadn't until this past year that Clark had been able to put himself in the air and keep himself there without thinking too hard about it. People just didn't step into the air and fly with a thought. He might have had some kind of organic gravimetric generator as part of his spine, but that didn't necessarily mean he fully understood how it worked. He was a bipedal creature who had no business leaving the ground.)
"Brace yourself." was all Kal-El said in return, looking a little grave.
Lois ducked her head down.
Glass shattered and people screamed and they hit something that could have been a floor but it cracked and cracked and broke and then they fell straight down rather than sideways. There was a yank-pull of gravity and then Kal-El smacked shoulders-first into something that didn't break under him and bounced a few more times before actually sliding to a halt on his side. Lois's teeth clacked together each time, her head rattling, but otherwise safe and unharmed (except for her wrist, that was throbbing like a broken little bitch).
"Ow..." Kal-El grunted.
Lois's ears rung without the wind whistling in them, but it had been replaced by the worried noises of people. They had landed in an office building, no doubt. Over the Central Business District, there was nothing but office buildings around.
The reporter uncurled from Kal-El's chest and he loosened his grip the second he felt her trying to fight her way clear of the cape. Lois all but tumbled out onto the carpet, noting just the hole in the ceiling and the floor which now featured the dents where Kal-El had bounced.
How durable do you have to be to leave dents? She wondered, feeling vaguely like her head was about to slide off her shoulders.
Then she stood up and actually looked around for real. It was an office building but at seven-thirty-ish in the morning, just a sparsely populated one. It was the early bird employees peering cautiously over their desks with wide frightened eyes.
"It's okay, people. Just a little-- disaster..." Lois said, but the reassurance fell rather flat. It was starting to look a bit like the end of the world out there and they probably didn't have a very good view of what was going on.
"Look, I don't actually know what's going on up there, but it looks bad so you might want to head for the ground floor. Practice your fire escape routine." the reporter suggested, making shooing motions with her good hand.
No one moved. They weren't staring at her, but their eyes were riveted on the man getting to his feet behind her. Kal-El rose up like a feather in an updraft more than actually used his limbs. It was a graceful, almost dancer-like movement that reminded Lois that this man might not have been a man at all.
"You talk like you're not human." Lois had said to Dr. Essex and he had replied: "As if I would ever consider myself a member of your appalling excuse for intelligent civilization."
He had practically said it right there, hadn't he.
Dr. Essex was not a human being.
And if Kal-El really ran in the same circles, then he wasn't human either.
"You heard her." Kal-El said, coming up to stand right behind Lois, so close she could feel the heat radiating off his chest and that made her intensely aware of just how
close he actually was. "Get to safety."
The businessmen and women stared expectantly as if they were still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then someone clapped their hands loudly and everyone flinched.
"Okay people, you heard them!" shouted one of the men, his little brass name-plate suggesting a management position. "We need to get out of here right now! Let's go, let's go! Treat this like a fire drill! We're going down the stairs! C'mon, let's hustle hustle hustle!"
With his encouragement, the employees started abandoning their desks and making for the elevator lobby, some of them still glancing over their shoulders fearfully.
"Miss Lane, go with them." Kal-El said.
"What?" Lois whirled around to face him. "Do you even know what my job is? You're not leaving without me!"
"Yes I am. Your job is not an excuse to go walking into danger zones and I'm not voluntarily taking you in there." Kal-El said, looking disappointed, like he had expected better of her. "That portal could tear the city apart if it gets any bigger."
"Where does it lead?" Lois asked, unable to stop her curiosity.
"To a prison dimension. Dr. Essex is trying to free his commanding officer and if I don't stop him now, the Earth will be in great danger." Kal-El said. His voice and his expression were both solemn. Brought up to date on what General Zod had tried to do to Krypton, he knew what was at stake.
"You have to stop him?" Lois repeated incredulously, even though she understood what he was saying. The army would take too long to mobilize. Too long to confirm the intensity of the threat level. Too long to secure permission. Too long to scramble the Warthogs. Too long to get the choppers in the air.
God only knew what was going to come out of that portal when it opened to its full dilation, but she had no doubt that anything coming out of a prison dimension wasn't going to be friendly.
But nonetheless...
"Are you sure that's something you can fight?" Lois asked, pointing up towards the sky. She looked him up and down. "Do you even know how to fight that?"
Kal-El smiled that twinkling smile again. "I'll improvise."
"Improvise?!" the reporter repeated. Oh, that did not sound reassuring. "What are you trying to be, crazy?! You can't go in there with a quarter-assed plan and expect to win! That's what gets wanna-be heroes like you killed! You're the man who just saved my life so I'm feeling a little fond of you at the moment and I do not want to see you get killed!"
"I don't have a choice. I'm the only one who can do it." Kal-El said. He held eye contact for the most part, but still shot a nervous look towards the windows. Maybe waiting for the sky to darken to apocalyptic levels.
"That's what idiot heroes say! You're not a hero! You're just a flying idiot in a cape!" Lois snapped. She wasn't sure why she wanted to be so angry with him. Maybe she did know him after all and it just hadn't clicked yet and even when she didn't recognize him, she still didn't want him risking his life.
The twinkling smile came back and Lois's knees did that mushy thing again and there was a flush of warmth across her chest. Oh, that smile was just not fair if it could do that to her every time.
"There are no heroes left in the world, Miss Lane." Kal-El pointed out, his tone firm but his voice gentle. "If I'm not the one to do this, then who else is there?"
Lois had no reply to that, because it was damingly true.
"I'm not trying to be a hero, Miss Lane. I'm just trying to save the planet." he said.
Then he stepped back and kicked off the floor until he was in the air. The air around him appeared to bend and then it snapped forward like a rubber band. He darted up through the hole in the ceiling and out through the broken windows on the other side.
Lois stared in the direction of his departure for a moment and then shook her head.
"Isn't that the same thing?"
She patted down her coat for her phone. She had lost her bag when Sofia had shuffled them off to the Slam and she did half hope it could be recovered, but she'd stuck her phone to an inside pocket.
Her phone was still where she'd left it, a little damp, but this was an indestructible WayneTech phone. It had already withstood two dunkings in a great lake and it still turned on without any damage whatsoever.
Once it was safely in hand, she rushed for the stairs, but took them up towards the roof instead of down. There was a dimensional portal open above the city and there was about to be a clash of titans.
Lois Lane wasn't going to let this one slip by her. The story of the century if she had ever seen it.
The portal was well over two hundred feet across by the time Clark laid eyes on it again and it was still getting larger. The lightning storm had only gotten even wider and more vicious, the strikes lashing out five times a second.
How much worse is this going to get? He wondered.
But there was just no time to ponder about it. He had to deal with it before it got worse. Nam-Ek was still in front of the portal to the Phantom Zone, shouting passionately into the void.
"Dalgemey Dru-Zod! Nih pagetve hva akaen! Nih jkev hva spasklor! Avezo daun vakas rupsh atso saldunllik!"
"I don't think so!" Clark shouted, tackling the other Kryptonian bodily.
Nam-Ek instantly elbowed him the jaw and then the chest in quick succession before Clark could get a firm grip on him and shove him away from the mouth of the portal. The much larger Kryptonian turned the tables even more in his favor and seized Clark in a choke-hold. The feeling of getting choked was just the same as last time; the pressure around his neck, the restricting sensation, unable to draw in a full breath, the knowledge that Nam-Ek could probably kill him. It was just as frightening as the first time.
"Know your place, you diseased abomination!" Nam-Ek hissed, disgusted. "If your father had had any sense, he would have never gone through with such a dangerous experiment!"
"My parents were good people." Clark growled back. Three hours of talking to their A.I. facsimiles had shown him that much.
"Good people? Hah! The lies your grandfather has already told you!" Nam-Ek spat. "Good people don't risk an epidemic for their own selfish ends! Believe whatever you want, but know that the truth is that your sainted parents were never good people!"
With that, he threw Clark.
It wasn't just any piddly little throw, no, Nam-Ek spun sharply to build up momentum and heaved Clark like a shot-put just as the portal went *BRRRNNNNN!* a third time. The younger Kryptonian was caught in the energy pulse and it smacked him straight towards the nearest building.
The spinal helix struggled to exert enough counter-force to lift him into the air, but Clark couldn't even concentrate on gaining any control over his direction of travel. He crashed through the building's side amid a shower of glass and steel and concrete and then through the floor to the next level down. Electrical wires and load-bearing struts sparked and popped and screamed in distress. The floor below barely absorbed enough of his momentum to stop him. But he did stop, his body smashing a crater into the carpeted concrete.
"Ow..." he whispered dizzily, his body throbbing from the blows.
Mostly invincible, yes. Not a scratch marred his skin.
Immune to pain and blunt impact, not so much, it seemed.
He blinked up at the broken ceiling above and briskly shook his head, trying to clear the haze from it. Before he could really get his head back on straight, concrete dust rained down on him. Nam-Ek's hands were suddenly around his throat again and driving him down through the next floor and the next and the next, smashing him off every single strut and beam that was even remotely in the way. Nam-Ek's face was an even thicker mask of anger, as though Clark's assertion that his parents were stand-up people had angered him to the very core.
The trip down to the bottom floor seemed to take forever but in reality, probably only a few seconds had passed by the time Clark hit the second floor and was bulldozed right through it into the building's lobby.
Just as people were filing in for work.
They screamed and ran and threw their briefcases as Clark hit the floor with Nam-Ek on top of him, shaking the ground in every direction. The older Kryptonian closed his hands tightly over Clark's throat, squeezing until he wheezed.
"What do you know about the Contact Plague?" Nam-Ek demanded. "Primis Interpretaris! It was a swampy pit of a planet with a fascinating ecological system, but no colonial value. That's where our explorers contracted it and then they brought it home!"
He reared up, dragging Clark with him, and threw him again. This time, like a baseball, sending him across the lobby and through the glass-paned doors. People coming in dove out of the way or fell flat to the ground. Clark bounced off the pavement twice, cratering the ground, and then smashed into a parked car on the other side of the street. Before he could get up, Nam-Ek appeared and grabbed him around the neck again.
"We didn't find out for months that it was carried by parasites in the water." he went on. "Our explorers were infected by the time they left. Hyper-sleep slowed the advance of the pox and they remained asymptomatic for the first two weeks. But they were contagious the whole time!"
He slammed Clark into the pavement so hard that the reporter's head rung from the blow.
"The plague cut us down hundreds at a time! We did everything we could to stop its spread, but it was highly contagious through touch alone! It took us three years to manufacture a vaccine that plague couldn't develop an immunity to!"
"What does that have to do with my parents?" Clark asked gravelly, through his compressed vocal cords.
"I'm getting there." Nam-Ek growled. "One year from the issue of the vaccine, we thought we had beaten it. Two years out and that's when it happened."
He lifted Clark up and threw him back into the pavement, like the physical blow would drive the point home in a more visceral manner.
"Children were being born already infected! The pox had mutated to become part of our genetic structure!"
Nam-Ek released Clark's throat, but stomped his foot down into the center of his chest, driving him deeper into the cracked street. All around him, Clark heard the onlookers cry out in what sounded like sympathy.
"Some of them were lucky! Infected, but asymptomatic! The others weren't! Thousands of babies died before their third birthdays! We were passing the plague on from parent to child at conception!" Nam-Ek roared, his face coloring dark with a surge of blood. "So we perfected artificial insemination, prioritized genetic research, and created our genesis chambers. In five years, we were able to isolate the infectious gene and deactivate it within the fetus, but we couldn't destroy it from the gene pool. We were all infected! We could only pray that the virus didn't mutate again!
"We never experienced another outbreak thanks to two thousand years of genetic manipulation, but we were infected right up to the day that Krypton destroyed itself. That plague sits in my genetic coding just as it does yours."
Nam-Ek leaned over, sneering at Clark with graying teeth.
"And your parents. Your foolish stupid parents risked re-activating that dormant gene by conceiving you without using the Loom-Nak procedure." he growled. "You, Kal-El of Krypton, could have destroyed your own people in the blink of an eye.
"What do you have to say for yourself?"
Clark gritted his teeth and doubted there was anything he could say that would come close to placating Nam-Ek's anger. The man seemed to have taken the whole thing very personally even in spite of the two millennia gap that separated Then from Now.
His parents had been scientists and if he knew anything about scientists, it was that they were careful and followed the safety procedures before going ahead with anything dangerous. He had been conceived in a genesis chamber just the same as any other Kryptonian child, but carried in his mother's womb rather than an artificial one. Certainly Jor-El had insured that his second child would be born healthy and asymptomatic and not contagious.
But Clark highly doubted that Nam-Ek wanted to hear anything of the sort. He just wanted someone to blame.
Clark goddammit, use your heat vision.
The thought practically came out of nowhere, but it reminded him that he had that sort of thing at his disposal. The skin of his eyes heated up and the blue-white gathered in his irises and he glared at Nam-Ek's forehead. Lines of visible white heat bristled up, hitting the older Kryptonian right in the middle of the forehead.
"Aagh!" Nam-Ek reeled back, clapping a hand over his head in shock and pain.
Two miles above the city, the portal released another energy pulse and that bone-shaking subsonic noise. The people of Metropolis ducked and covered their ears, crying out and the sound of their fear hit Clark in the chest.
Whether these people knew it or not, their lives were in Clark's hands.
He could not let them die.
He could not fail them.
Clark grabbed Nam-Ek by the back of his shirt and burst into the air, heading back to the portal. It was more than three hundred feet across by this point, looking like it could swallow Metropolis-- or at least New Troy -- whole. The lightning storm had become a vicious, ferocious thing that snapped and bit, throwing so much electricity into the air there just appeared to be one giant near constant strobe.
This had to end.
He produced the prisoner tag, ready to hook it the back of Nam-Ek's shirt, but the elder saw it and twisted around in Clark's grip, lunging for the thin strip of metal with a crazed grin.
"I don't know where you got that, but thank you for bringing it!" he laughed, clawing at the younger man's arm in an effort to reach it. "My lord Zod will have the pleasure of pushing you into the Zone himself! Once he's done ripping you apart!"
"It's meant for you!" Clark snapped back, releasing Nam-Ek so he could pass the tag into his other hand. He kicked Nam-Ek in the chest to give himself some breathing room to fly backwards. "I don't want to kill you!"
"Did anyone tell you that you might have to?" Nam-Ek taunted, lunging at him so ferociously that Clark nearly lost his grip on the tag. "I will see to it that this planet is ravaged! Cured of the human blight! It won't be long now!"
Nam-Ek's weight and strength were both greater and he was definitely more adept at using both to win the fight for him. He resorted to using his fists to make Clark let go, employing a speed that might have shattered Clark's bones if he had allowed the blows to connect. He pushed the tag down into his fist and kept dodging. It was all he could do to keep the other Kryptonian's hands off it.
"So pathetic! You couldn't hope to beat me! Not that you ever had the training!" the geneticist taunted. "The last son of the House of El! You will kneel before Zod!"
"I don't need to overpower you! I just need to outlast you!" Clark shouted, moving out of the way another roundhouse punch -- they seemed to be the favored form of attack. "I was raised human, Nam-Ek! I have all the stubbornness they're known for!"
"That sentimentality was the death of your parents and it'll be the death of you!" Nam-Ek snarled. He coiled up for another attack, but from the entrance of the portal, someone shouted.
Just like that, he lost interest in the fight, in what he was trying to do. His expression became something like rapture and he whipped around to see what was going on. Emerging slowly from the darkness was a profile that Clark had made himself memorize. The Roman-esque features, the aquiline nose, the short dark hair, and the scar running down past the left eye.
General Dru-Zod, the man who might have destroyed Krypton before it had destroyed itself.
But he hadn't crossed the threshold yet. He hadn't emerged into this world. But he was framed from behind by too many dark shapes to count. His army, following in his footsteps as they always would.
And Nam-Ek was utterly distracted, his arms raised in both supplication and greeting, his expression one of rapture.
There was no time like now.
Clark acted, hooking the tag onto the back of Nam-Ek's shirt, right between the shoulder blades where it was harder to reach. The older Kryptonian made a slightly surprised noise, but that was all he was able to do before Clark spun on the spot to build up momentum and kicked him hard in the back, sending him towards the portal. The blowing wind reversed, sucking straight towards the Phantom Zone and beyond its dark threshold.
And that was when Nam-Ek realized what was going on.
"NOOOO!" he screamed in defiance, but it was too late. The portal recognized the tag and recognized him as a prisoner and the suction jerked him over the boundary of the rings before he could so much as turn around.
"It's better than killing you." Clark commented, however watching with no small amount of satisfaction when the geneticist tumbled right into Zod, throwing them both back into the darkness.
Dodging the lightning, he flew up to the bottom of the rings were they joined and touched the rune to deactivate the projector.
Instantly, the lightning strikes became less violent and the fierce winds started to die. The portal released another pulse of energy, but instead of jumping outwards, it contracted tightly and began shrinking at a fantastic rate. The blinding blue light dimmed and the dark circle faded. The doorway collapsed in on itself, the cloud cover turned to vapor and dissipated, and within a minute, the metal bands snapped back around the seven-inch sphere, dropping into Clark's outstretched hands. It vibrated for a second, and then the light inside resumed its previous waxing/waning business, continuing to search for the right frequency.
Clark breathed a long sigh of relief. He had done it. He had put Nam-Ek in the Phantom Zone and he was mostly sure that nobody was actually dead. Earth was safe from any disasters General Zod could wrought upon it. Humanity was safe.
It was over before it had ever begun.
And the sun started to rise in earnest.
Bundling the projector under his arm, Clark started to descend, but a lone figure standing on the helicopter pad of the building where he had left Lois caught his eye and he laughed. Of course it was Lois, what had he been thinking? Of course she wouldn't go anywhere; there was a story to be had. He changed his course to join her.
Lois was holding her bruised and fractured wrist to her chest and her phone in the other hand, its record light flashing. Her eyes grew wider and wider as he approached. There was no flash of recognition anywhere in her eyes - she didn't recognize him - but there was relief and a sense of open-mouthed awe as she watched him touch down on the roof in front of her.
Lois took her eyes off the phone's screen to look at the man in front of her, not sure if the emotion she was feeling was fright, awe, or... perhaps arousal? Once the adrenaline got going, they all seemed to feel the same to her. He was majestic to look at, truly. That square jaw, those bright inhumanly blue eyes, goodness gracious those muscles were going to lurk around the edges of her dreams for a while. His mere presence was oddly reassuring, comforting. 'Everything's okay', his smile alone seemed to say.
But even with the rising sun at his back, she knew he wasn't entirely human, or if there was any human in him at all.
"Who are you?" Lois asked. "Really, who are you?"
Kal-El just smiled gently, reassuringly. He only said:
"Take my hand."
-0-
if you're binge-reading, this is a good place to stop.