#gerard christopher

You wake to a sound that shouldn’t exist: a man made of thunder, moving like he’s trying not to wake the dust.

Clark is at the dresser, buttoning a white shirt that will be a rumor by noon. He notices your eyes and his smile hits first—small, domestic, the one he saves for kitchens and quiet.

“Morning,” he says. “Didn’t mean to—”

“You didn’t.” Your voice is sleep-raspy. “You’re stealthy today, Smallville.”

“Journalists stalk quietly,” he says. The tie is loose. He leaves it imperfect because perfect knots, you once told him, look like handcuffs.

Your phone is dark; his lights up with two League pings—priority gold. He glances, then pockets it, and comes to kiss your temple, slow as a promise. Citrus, soap, and something sky-cold cling to him.

“How bad?” you ask, because you both pretend not to already know.

“Routine checks,” he says, then amends, honest, “Two possible calls. I committed to the first. The second—standby.”

The second sits between you like a third chair no one invited.

When he goes, the apartment inhales. You lie there and count cracks in the ceiling like tallies on a cell wall. Then you get up before the bed convinces you to drown.

Shower. Softest sweater. The mirror gives you a face that learned new math this last year—how much grief weighs, how to carry it without folding. On the counter, your old comm waits like a coin you swore you’d never spend. You pick it up. It fits. You put it down like it bites.

You try a grocery list and write I want back in three inks. You reorganize the first-aid cabinet because control looks like cotton and gauze today. At eleven, the city is glass and geometry outside your window; at noon, he texts: Lunch? You type Always, delete it, send Yeah.

The deli pretends not to know him, which you both appreciate. He orders your soup without asking. You order his nostalgia sandwich and watch him insist it’s “not real barbecue” while finishing it in four impossibly neat bites. You talk about apples and your neighbor’s cat and a source who will upend her life next week. The second ping buzzes his pocket like a trapped bee.

“Clark,” you say. The word comes out steady. “I want to go back.”

His thumb circles the soup lid. “I know.”

“I know you were relieved when I quit.” You keep your eyes on the steam. “I was, too. It saved me then. It can’t be the only thing about me anymore.”

He thinks in visible gears. He will never lie to you, even when he wants to. “I don’t know how to be brave about you.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to listen.” You lay it out—how purpose feels like breath; how grief sits with you either way; how you’d rather carry it doing the thing you were built for.

His phone buzzes. He hears a distant shape only he can hear—something that smells like river and concrete. “Dam breach,” he says, apologetic. “Edge of the county. I told them I’d cover a second event after, if needed.”

“I know,” you say. “Go.”

He squeezes your hand, kisses your forehead, and the bell over the deli door jingles once like a chime. He is gone.

You walk home, pour coffee you don’t drink. The League wideband ping—muted ages ago but never disabled—slips past your settings. The dispatcher’s voice is calm over controlled chaos: Primary—dam breach. Kent on route. Secondary pending escalation.

You thumb your comm on. The private line labeled Farmboy warms in your ear. You don’t touch it. The general band crackles.

Metropolis Metro Control to League—priority. The voice is young, too fast. We’ve got a MA-90 southbound with an overrun. Systems compromised. Emergency brakes unresponsive. Passengers aboard. Repeat, runaway train.

The word train strikes your bones like a tuning fork.

Kent— the dispatcher says into the primary, ETA?

On scene, Clark replies over a roar of water.

Secondary needs a cape, someone adds. Can you double?

He hesitates. You can hear him assessing the dam’s spine, thirty thousand moving parts, fifteen thousand lives downstream. If I stabilize the spillway and handoff to Fire & Guard, I can—

You are standing before the dresser without remembering getting up. The drawer opens. Your suit—graphite weave, matte black panels with pallid thread you stitched yourself—moves like it’s breathing. You swallow. Decisions have weight; yours makes the floorboards groan.

You tap the channel. Your voice is steady in a way that makes your ribs ache. League Control, this is Gravity. Put me on the secondary.

Silence is a living thing for half a second. Then the rookie dispatcher: Gravity? I— I have you as inactive.

Then update it. Send the packet.

The coordinates hit like a heartbeat. Tracks south of the river. Overpass work ahead. If the MA-90 doesn’t stop, it will plow through scaffolding and into a dead curve. You are already moving.

The suit remembers your body; the bracers kiss your wrists; the boots seat your arches like hands. You braid your hair with surgical speed. The old weight—a different weight—settles and you feel it with relief: this gravity, at least, belongs to you.

You leave a note on the counter that says We’ll finish later and a drawn heart because you are many things but not cruel. Then you jump.

⸻

The rail corridor howls. Steel sings in a way you would call beautiful if it weren’t screaming. The MA-90 barrels down like a silver artery; sparks kick from undercarriages; faces are jammed to windows, small and white.

“League, Gravity on scene,” you say, landing on the edge of the ballast, knees flexed, palm on cold rail. The world narrows to vectors and mass. Your gift lights up behind your eyes—numbers made into instinct. Speed. Weight. Drag. Distance to curve. Safe decel. Where to anchor. What to bend.

Copy, Gravity, Control replies—older voice now, the senior dispatcher you remember. State of play?

“Overrun confirmed. Emergency brakes offline. I can shape the field and bleed speed, but we need the cross streets clear and the work crew evacuated off the red curve.”

Already moving. Metro to all—clear the curve.

You inhale past the diesel and pulse. Lighten your body until the ballast crunches like sugar under your boots. You leap—grace over stupid. Wind slaps your face. You catch the maintenance catwalk along the engine, fingers biting steel, and haul yourself up in three movements your muscles remember like a poem.

The nose of the train is a furnace. The operator’s cab window is spider-webbed but intact. The operator—sweaty, terrified—jumps as you appear.

“Hi,” you say like you’re borrowing sugar. “I’m Gravity. Don’t touch anything unless I tell you to. I’m going to ride the field under us.”

“You— what?” he manages.

“You know how you feel heavier at the bottom of the hill on a roller coaster?” you say, already moving. “I’m going to give the tracks a roller coaster’s bottom. You just keep us pointed straight.”

You step onto the coupler, place both hands on the spine of the engine, and push. For a second, nothing; then physics says fine, let’s dance. You throw a net under the train—a dome of dense gravity that rubberizes the railbed and drags at the wheels. The MA-90 shudders like a living thing. Your teeth chatter with the feedback. The speed ticks down—barely. You will take barely and order seconds at a time like they are gold coins.

A voice pops over open city band, breathless, reverent: Who is that—? Is that Gravity? Thought she retired.

Dispatch: Focus, Unit Seven.

You smile and would roll your eyes if your skull weren’t busy with calculus. “League, I need the southern switch thrown to the service siding before the curve. It buys us a longer decel.”

Control—on it. Someone curses; someone else sprints. Switch will be green in thirty.

“Copy.”

You widen the field, then spike it—quick pulses stacked like stairs. The MA-90 yowls. The operator cries into his mic that the brake indicator’s alive again; you tell him to ignore it. You step, heel-toe, down the roofline to car two, plant, and pin—increase weight at the rear bogies until they kiss the rail like lovers who’ve decided to stay. Speed bleeds another slice. Sweat runs down your spine; your vision starts narrowing the way it does when you stare at an eclipse.

A young security contractor on a maintenance cart sees you and makes a terrible decision. He levels a non-lethal launcher (rubber slugs, bad angle, worse timing). You don’t have attention to spare. The slug catches you high under the clavicle—sharp, ugly thunder that steals your breath. Your field wobbles. The train bucks.

“Hey!” you snarl, and drop gravity under his cart just long enough to bounce his teeth. He rethinks his life choices, throws the launcher, and goes to help the evac crew like a smart man.

You breathe through the pain. You anchor the engine nose to the rails, then lighten the tail just enough to take the curve if you miss the switch. You are juggling a mountain.

Switch set, Control barks. Siding green. Forty meters.

“Copy.” You brace. You drag. The siding takes the MA-90 with a shudder that rattles your soul. You hold the field steady through the first third of the siding, then begin feathering it—less, less, less—don’t lock the wheels; don’t melt the pads; don’t throw; don’t—

The train grinds under you, a groan that climbs into a scream that drops into a moan that drops into silence. The wheels turn. Then do not. The last meter is the loudest thing you’ve ever heard. You taste copper and sweat and relief like a drug.

Your knees soften. Your hands shake. Your body remembers that you are not a lever—you are a person.

You blow out a breath you’ve been keeping all year.

A passenger near the front breathes into his phone, She did it—oh my god—she did it. A kid presses both palms to the glass and waves like you’re a cartoon. For one dumb second you wave back.

And then the saboteurs try to finish the job.

Two of them pop from under the scaffolding near the dead curve you avoided—hard hats, masks, one with a baton humming blue. They rush the stalled engine to get to the cab, panic and purpose mixed. Your field is still half-locked on the chassis; rolling it out of your nervous system and into your hands hurts like digging a splinter with your teeth. You drop off the roofline, land wrong, swear, and meet the first with an elbow to the shoulder. He pinwheels. The second catches your thigh with the baton; the shock crawls your nerves and your knee buckles. You spike gravity under his boots—cement feet, welcome to the earth—and strip the baton, kill the charge, toss it into the ballast.

“Police are thirty seconds,” Control says into your ear, calm as tea. “Hold or disengage.”

You want to disengage. Your ribs argue. Your heart says we’re not done.

You hold. It’s clumsy and close and ugly; you hate ugly fights because they mean you hadn’t planned well enough. He clips your cheek; you see white. You pin him with a concentrated press to the pelvis and he wheezes cuss words that sound like apologies. You are gathering your field back in when the air changes.

It always does right before he arrives—pressure dips, temperature shifts, sound learns about silence. Somewhere over the county, a dam is safe. Somewhere at your back, a cape cuts the wind.

Someone on a nearby radio says, awed and doomed, Oh no, she didn’t— and then louder, to everyone with ears— Superman inbound.

You don’t turn. Pride is petty and you have a little. You press your palm flat to the engine and breathe, letting the last of the heavy bleed away until the train is simply a train again.

Boots hit ballast. Quiet lands with him.

“Gravity,” he says, except he doesn’t, not in this voice. “Sweetheart.”

You finally look.

He takes in everything in one pass: torn seam, blood at your lip, the way you’re favoring your left side, the small tremor wicking along your fingers as your power settles. The wrecked curve ahead. The passengers craning through glass. The saboteur stuck to the earth like a paperweight, cursing softly.

His jaw works like he’s chewing glass. He tips his chin at the train. “You stopped it.”

“Anchored and bled,” you say, breath hitching as your ribs complain. “Siding bought us distance. Control was perfect.” You mean don’t be mad at them; he hears it.

His eyes flick once toward your shoulder. “You got hit.”

“Rubber. Clipped.” You say it like you’re reporting a weather front. You sway a little because gravity isn’t just a power—it’s also the part where the adrenaline leaves.

“League, secondary contained,” he says into the band, voice calm enough to hold other people together. “MPD and Metro can assume. EMT to track 17 for one civilian.”

“Which one?” you mutter, confusion an automatic defense.

He looks at you. “You.”

“Me? I’m fine.”

“I know.” He steps closer until the world is his chest and his cape and the green of his eyes when he lets the light through. “Let me anyway.”

You could argue. You do not. Your hands find his forearm—not to lean, exactly; to admit you’re orbiting something steady and intend to stay.

Police haul the saboteurs away. EMTs jog up, do the ritual with competent hands—light, pupil, pulse. You answer; you lie once; Clark clears his throat and you correct yourself. The operator in the cab gives you a thumbs up like he’s five and just learned to swim. You return it. The rookie dispatcher whispers she’s really back like he’s telling a secret to the room.

Clark takes you home the long way—low over the river, no sonic boom, the city spread out like a quilt. He lands on the balcony, opens the door with the gentlest nudge because his hands are on you. Inside, the apartment smells like coffee you didn’t drink and the lemon oil you used on the table last Sunday.

You reach for the hem of your suit; he turns away purely out of habit, then laughs at himself and turns back when you say, “It’s me.”

He kneels in front of the couch and opens the first-aid kit you organized like you saw the future this morning. He doesn’t ask may I—he is the question and the yes. He cleans the lip cut with saline; you flinch; his eyes meet yours every time like a call and response. He smooths a butterfly strip across the shallow end, neat as a surgeon, annoyingly perfect.

“Ribs?” he says, quiet.

“Left, three and four. Bruised, not cracked.” You try to sound casual. It comes out thinner.

He hovers a hand an inch above your skin, not touching, feeling. His brow knits. “Correct.” He’s the only person who can confirm an injury like that without machinery. He warms his palm and cups your side—not heat vision, not a trick, just body warmth focused with a tenderness that could be classified as a scientific anomaly—and you melt into it with a groan that is embarrassingly sincere

He tapes your shoulder where the rubber slug kissed wrong. He massages arnica into the purple already clouding your thigh, thumbs wide, pressure just this side of too much, exactly what your muscles are begging for. When he reaches the torn seam, the corner of his mouth tips.

“I’ll fix the suit,” he says.

“I can sew.”

“I know.” He brushes his knuckles along the frayed edge, reverent. “Let me anyway.”

You let him. You let him a lot tonight.

He brings you water, pain meds, then soup—the second quart he insisted on at lunch, of course he did. He sets you in a soft tee and those awful beloved drawstring shorts and does not comment on the print; you will love him forever for that alone. The afternoon angles into evening. You both move around each other like you are remembering a choreography your bodies invented.

When he finally sits, the couch sagging under the weight he lets it take, the room is quiet in a way that feels chosen, not empty.

“You did great,” he says. He’s still angry. You can hear the ore of it in his voice, buried deep where love and terror make their alloys. “I hate that I have to say that.”

“You hate that I got hurt.”

“I hate that I wasn’t there.” He rubs his sternum like a man easing a stitch. “The dam—” He stops, reorders his mind. “We kept the spillway. No casualties. I handed off when I heard your name on the open band.”

“How far?”

“Across the river.” He huffs a laugh with no humor. “I think I broke some personal records.”

“Show-off,” you say, because joking is easier than saying you know what ten seconds of oh God not again feels like.

He takes off his glasses and the world blurs, which he likes when he’s not working. His eyes are wet. You put your thumb under one like you’re going to catch whatever falls.

“I was relieved,” he says, the confession raw and simple. “When you quit. Because fear is smaller when the thing you fear is farther away.” He swallows. “But I watched you try to fit into a life that wasn’t your size. You were still you. Just… flattened.” He touches your cheekbone like it’s a holy thing. “I don’t want that for you. I don’t want this for you either.”

“Pick one,” you murmur, and he actually laughs a little, eyes closing like the smallest relief counts.

“Rules,” he says finally, like he’s offering you rope and asking you to help him tie the knot so it doesn’t choke. “If you go back, we do it with rules.”

“You get rules too,” you counter, stubborn by reflex.

“Deal.” He ticks them off without breaking eye contact. “No solo secondaries without telling me.”

“Reasonable.”

“Live comm whenever you’re out.”

“You, too.”

He winces as if caught. “Fair.”

“No skipping meals.”

“Sweetheart.”

“I’m serious. I’ve seen you eat a peanut and call it dinner.”

“It was a large peanut.”

“Clark.”

“Fine.” He’s smiling now without realizing. “And if either of us feels the other is… bending wrong—”

“Breaking,” you supply.

“—we say it out loud. No hero voice. No brave face.”

“Out loud,” you echo.

⸻

He tucks you into bed like you’re precious cargo—because you are—and braids your damp hair with the competence of a man who practiced on a cousin once and then became terrifyingly good at everything. Midnight smudges the window. The city sings its far, warm hum.

In the dark he says, quiet as weather, “When I heard them say your name, I thought I’d lost you twice.”

“You didn’t,” you say. The truth is the kindest thing you own.

“I know.” He kisses the place where your temple meets your hair. “But for ten seconds the world was only that thought. A… gravity well.”

You nudge his shoulder with your nose. “Thief. That’s my brand.”

“You can have it back.” He breathes, and the breath is steadier now. “I’m proud of you. But I’m still mad.”

“Good.” Your eyes are closing even though you want to keep him. “Means you care.”

“Means I’m hopeless about you,” he corrects, because he’ll always reach for the plainest, truest word.

“Mm. Tuck me or keep philosophizing?”

He huffs, scandalized, and tucks you: quilt smoothed gentle over bruised ribs, palm resting warm on your stomach like a promise. He kisses each of your knuckles—one, two, three, four—as if taking inventory of what the day returned intact.

You sleep because you can, because he is here, because you did a hard thing and it didn’t break you. Before he follows you under, he thumbs his phone, sends three messages to Control:

Gravity is back, probationary.

Training schedule incoming.

Order more butterfly strips.

The dispatcher’s reply pings before he can set it down: Copy. Welcome back, Gravity. Good work today—both of you.

He sets the phone on the nightstand between the folded suit and your comm. His hand returns to you like a needle to north. The world holds.

You do not dream of endings. You dream of mornings.

⸻