The Wonder That's Keeping the Stars Apart (2/7)

[mithen]

Title:  The Wonder That's Keeping the Stars Apart, Chapter Two
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce, Alfred Pennyworth, Jim Gordon
Notes: "Music of the Spheres" is a series set in the combined universes of "Batman Begins" and "Superman Returns." Other stories and notes on the series here.
Rating: PG
Summary: Clark tries to search for Bruce while taking on duties as both Superman and Batman.
Word Count: 1700

i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

Alfred's voice crackled over the communicator, filled with disbelief.  "Ra's al Ghul?  But he's--"

"I know," Clark said.  He was flying in an ever-widening spiral from the point he had last heard from Bruce, staring down at Gotham.  "Bruce started to say the same thing.  But he knew his attacker immediately.  And his attacker knew him.  He said he'd gotten better.  No one would say that to Bruce Wayne unless they knew." 

"And no one knows that but Ra's."  Clark could hear him pacing, his footsteps on the walnut floor of the Manor library.  "Can't you hear him?  His heartbeat?"

There was so much lead in the earth here, lead pipes like a maze underneath the ground, a haze of gaps in his vision.  "Super-hearing is no good at picking out individual sounds.  Sudden, unusual noises--screams, explosions--but a heartbeat, one heartbeat in billions..."  Even the dearest...  "No.  I can't hear him."

I can't hear him!

A loud thump startled Clark until he realized it must be Alfred slamming his fist into a wall.  "How did the bastard come back?  He was dead!"

"Bruce didn't see him die, maybe he...I don't know.  I doesn't matter."  He was outside Gotham now.  The sea stretched out to the east, endless.  The continent to the west.  Spirals.  The world spun beneath him.  Nothing.  "I'll find him."

"You can't search every acre of the world!"

Clark laughed, hearing a thread of hysteria deep under it, like a flaw deep within a crystal.  "Watch me."

He searched, the silence in his ears buzzing.  He searched, but then he heard the cries of people trapped by an earthquake, a Greyhound bus teetering on a precipice...he couldn't ignore them, Bruce would never forgive him.  Bruce would never want that...  the people were saved, the search pattern returned to.  More searching, more interruptions. 

The Earth was so large, could hide so much.  It sent landslides and tsunamis to interrupt him.  Searching.  Silence.

Alfred's voice.  "Mister Kent.  You need to rest.  It's been almost twenty hours.  Come home."

I'm looking for home, he wanted to say, but instead he went back to the silent Manor.  He ate what Alfred put in front of him, then stood to go again.

"Wait," said Alfred.  "We have to deal with Gotham, sir."

"Deal with Gotham?"  Clark ached to be in the air again, to be moving, active.  Alfred put a hand on his arm as if he could tell Superman was tempted to ignore him and leave.

"Bruce Wayne has gone missing, sir.  That means Batman has, too.  We have to initiate one of his plans for this contingency."

Clark stared at him.  "You want me to pretend to be Batman?"

"It's necessary he not disappear."

Clark blinked.  The plan had always included him impersonating Batman.  Why had they never discussed the fact that this brilliant plan meant he would lose time he could be searching for Bruce?  "I'll give it another twenty-four hours.  I'll find him by then."

"Sir...we have to provide cover for Bruce as well."

"Another twenty-four hours," Clark said.  "He'll be back."

"What about work?"

"I am working."

"I mean..."  Alfred frowned.  "What about the Daily Planet?  You missed work today.  You'll need to go in tomorrow."

"I'll think of something."  He was already out the door and in the sky again.  "There's a shipwreck in the Atlantic I need to deal with, then I promise I'll get back to the search."

"Sir."  Alfred's voice was small in his ear, hardly loud enough to cut through the silence and the rush of wind.  "You need to rest, not just eat."

Beneath him a storm cloud gathered like a fist.  He could hear the SOS signal.  "I'll rest soon."

"Sir--"

Clark turned off the receiver and dove into the storm.

: : :

He saw it on a television screen while stopping a robbery in Metropolis, as he turned to get back to searching.  "Playboy Billionaire ditches Gotham," read the news crawl.  "Bruce Wayne has left Gotham for a world cruise on his yacht," said the perky announcer,  "No word on if he'll be back soon--or if he's taken any ballerinas with him this time." 

Clark tapped his communicator, opening a line to the Manor. "Alfred.  Why have you moved ahead on Bruce's cover?"  The Pacific Ocean spun beneath him, infinite and blue as the sky.  Empty.

"You said twenty-four hours, sir.  It's been thirty-six."

"It has?"  Clark rubbed his eyes. 

"Sir, you promised you'd come back and appear as Batman tonight.  Gotham needs to know he's around.  Just take a moment, stop a couple of crimes, and then--"

"--Then I'll get back to searching."

"No, sir, then you will get some rest."  Alfred's voice was sharp.  "You've been searching for almost sixty hours straight."

"I haven't spent it all searching.  I've had to keep stopping."

"Sixty hours, sir."

"I'm not human, I don't need much rest."

"But you do need some."

Clark shrugged as he dropped toward Gotham, then realized Alfred couldn't see him.  "I'll get some."  He was in the cave now, pulling on the armor.  Alfred handed him some food and he ate it between buckles. 

"The signal is on, sir," said Alfred.  Clark nodded.  Then he got on the bike--the machine was slow, so slow, but he couldn't fly in this costume--and headed in to Gotham.

: : :

Jim Gordon knew something was amiss the moment Batman landed on the roof.  There was something subtly wrong about his stance.  He landed too lightly.  His head was cocked at the wrong angle.

"What is it?"  Batman's growl, low and guttural.  And yet.

Nobody else would have ever noticed, but Gordon knew the man in front of him was not the man he'd been working with for over two years.

"Are you all right, Batman?"

The armored figure merely looked at him, still as stone.  There was a long silence in which a wind moved through Batman's cape.  Sirens howled in the distance.

"I said--"

"--Any leads on the Zsasz case?"

Gordon narrowed his eyes.  Very few people outside the department knew they were closing in on Zsasz.  "Another killing in his style.  A jogger.  Her throat cut, body arranged on a park bench to look like she was taking a nap."

The man in black seemed to wince.  "I wasn't there," he said.  His voice was all gravel, so close to perfect.

"You can't be everywhere at once," said Gordon. 

The man shook his head once, sharply, as if disagreeing, but said nothing.

Gordon held out a piece of paper.  "Here's the victim's name and information."  As the man took it, Gordon added, "And a word to the wise:  he stands a little more forward on his toes than you are.  You're almost perfect, though."

The man stared at him for a moment, then chuckled shortly.  "Thank you," he said, and leapt off the roof, the twang of his decel line following after.

: : :

Clark stood in the woman's apartment:  spare, clean, empty.  A Hello Kitty bobblehead sat on the windowsill, goggling at him.

There would be no information here, Clark knew that.  Zsasz chose his victims at random, crimes of opportunity.  Bruce's files on him contained all his psychological information, as well as the photos:  a man with a strange sharp focus to his eyes and a torso covered with tiny scars.  One for each victim.

Somewhere in this city, Victor Zsasz was carving himself a new scar tonight.  Clark could feel his smug pleasure in the air, taunting him.

"I'm sorry, Debbie," he said to the waiting apartment.  "I'll catch him."

But patrol in Gotham was always more difficult than anywhere in the world.  The city...eluded him, like smoke and fog.  Things went wrong.  Gusts of wind knocked over trash cans and alerted drug dealers to Batman's presence, lights flickered off and panicked mob bosses before Batman could break in on them.  At a standoff in a convenience store, the robber shoved the hostage away in a panic.  As Clark jumped forward to disarm him, the former hostage staggered into a display and it came crashing down on top of her.  Clark restrained the thug and knelt by the sobbing woman, her ulna broken, jagged edges of bone emerging from the skin.  He lifted her gently and carried her to the hospital, not caring that no mortal man could carry a woman that far, her choked gasps of pain tearing at him.

This would never have happened to Bruce, he thought.  A crazy thought, irrational, but he had been patrolling Gotham for six hours and he was exhausted, a bone-deep weariness as if he had been battling a strong headwind the whole time.  He shouldn't be so exhausted.

As he handed the woman to an astonished nurse, he heard sirens.  Not nearby.  Metropolis.  With a sense of absurd relief, he stopped in the cave just long enough to change to the spandex and was gone again. 

An hour later he was in his apartment in Metropolis, standing in the kitchen in his costume, staring almost dumbly at a teakettle on the stove.  He wanted a cup of tea before he laid down for a couple of hours, but the water seemed to be taking forever to heat.  He could just make it hot with heat vision, he knew.  He didn't like to do that at home.  But the time he was standing here waiting for the water to heat was wasting time he could be sleeping, or searching for Bruce.  He was so tired, and he just wanted a sip of hot tea before he caught some sleep, was that asking so much?

He was too busy to waste time with this.

Thirty seconds later he had his tea and was sitting down on the couch to enjoy it, but he fell asleep before he took two sips.