Earth 50 Justice Lord

"I did love being a hero… but if this is where it leads, I'm done with it."

"Kal.. Do you have a moment?"

@lord-of-gotham

The war room had gone almost silent around him, save for the low mechanical hum of monitors and the faint, endless shift of data across the screens. Fawcett burned before him in pieces. Maps, surveillance feeds, projected routes of entry and collapse, troop placements, communications grids, resistance strongholds marked for immediate suppression. Clark stood at the center of it all with one hand braced against the table, the blue glow of the city’s schematics cutting hard lines across his face. He did not turn at once when he heard Bruce land behind him. He only dragged one marker across the display, tracing a path straight through the heart of the city as though deciding where best to place the knife.

“Apparently,” he said at last, voice low and even, “you do.”

Only then did Clark glance back over his shoulder. His expression was composed, but there was a heat banked behind it that made composure feel more dangerous than anger would have. “If this is about Fawcett, say what you came to say quickly.” His gaze flicked once toward the spread of plans before returning to Bruce. “I am not in the mood tonight for cautionary speeches or appeals to restraint.”

He straightened slowly, turning just enough to face him fully now, though one hand still rested against the table beside the glowing outline of the city. “Lois is there. Batson is there. The resistance has chosen to gather what remains of itself in one place and call that courage.” A brief pause. “I intend to correct that mistake before dawn.”

The television had never looked so harsh in the Kent living room.

Its light washed the farmhouse walls in cold blue-white flashes, flattening everything familiar into something strange. Martha stood near the arm of the couch with one hand pressed tight over her mouth, unable to sit, unable to look away. Beside her, Jonathan had gone very still in his chair, the sort of stillness that only came over him when something was so bad there were not yet words for it. On the screen, her son stood beneath brighter lights than these, taller somehow than he had ever looked in this house, dressed in darker colors and speaking in a voice the whole world was expected to obey. Around him moved the others- The "Justice Lords". Faces she knew, faces she had seen at their table, in photographs, in the easy, laughing company of brighter years, and now every one of them looked sharpened into something harder. Official. Final.

Martha did not understand all of it at once. She understood it in pieces, each one worse than the last.

The killing. The coldness. The way Clark did not look horrified by what had happened, only certain. The terrible, sick certainty in him was what struck her deepest. Her boy had always been strong, yes, and when he was frightened or hurting he had always had a way of going still before he broke. But this was different. This was not a young man reeling. This was a man who had decided, fully and completely, that whatever came next belonged in his hands. Martha felt tears sting her eyes before she even noticed she was crying. “Jonathan,” she whispered, though she did not know what she was asking him. Whether he was seeing it too. Whether he knew how to stop it. Whether that was still their son standing there in that changed, terrible shape.

When the broadcast ended, the house seemed to ring with its absence.

Neither of them spoke right away. Outside, the fields stretched dark and quiet under the Kansas night, the porch light throwing its little pool of gold across the yard like it always had. Everything beyond the television remained painfully, offensively ordinary. Martha wiped at her face with trembling fingers, then turned and walked down the hall before Jonathan could stop her, or perhaps because he knew better than to try. She opened the door to Clark’s old room and stood there for a moment with one hand on the frame, looking in.

It still smelled faintly of cedar and summer dust.

The bed was made. The old trophies sat where they had always sat. There were books on the shelf, school things tucked into drawers, the small, scattered remains of a childhood she had never quite had the heart to pack fully away. A flannel shirt still hung in the closet. A baseball glove rested on the dresser. On the wall were traces of him everywhere, not in grand symbols but in the small, human evidence of being raised and loved in this house. Martha crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, then reached for one of the old shirts and gathered it in both hands like she could still hold onto him through cloth and memory alone.

For a long while she just sat there in the dark.

She thought of scraped knees and feverish nights. Of muddy boots kicked off by the door. Of Clark at twelve, trying so hard to hide his tears after realizing he could hear people crying from half a county over. Of his great careful hands, even then, gentling baby chicks and splintered fence posts like he was born knowing strength had to be kind or it would become something terrible. She thought of every lesson they had tried to give him, every prayer she had breathed over him, every time she had looked at that impossible child and thanked God not for making him extraordinary, but for making him hers.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Martha whispered into the quiet, and then her face crumpled, because it was not the whole truth. Hope was there, yes, stubborn as anything in her. But fear was there too, bigger than she wanted to name. She lowered her head and held the shirt tighter. “And I hope-” Her voice broke. She tried again, softer this time. “I hope you’re still my boy.”

It doesn't make senseeeeeeeeeee how'd you get rid of it all? I don't even have superpowers, I can't do anything with the knowledge!

Please? 🥺

Why are you asking?

@ithinkimaclonenow

@catsarenotrebels