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thejusticelounge2013-06-20 06:00 pm
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2013-06-20 06:00 pm
Entry tags:
his father's footsteps
It had been a routine shift in the monitor womb, albeit a short one, since he couldn’t begin until Tower School had let out for the day. Diana, ever patient and satisfied Billy has finished his homework, allowed him to sit with her, and do the lion’s share of the work to further his training.
It seemed Clark Kent had to book off work early from the Daily Planet for a previously unmentioned dentist appointment, while an ocean away, British Airways Flight 196 has reported a hijacker with a bomb, and the on-board air marshal shot and unconscious. Superman responded to the alert before the Watchtower could even dispatch him, but this wasn’t unusual, not with the Kryptonian’s super-hearing and telescopic vision at his disposal.
This meant, however, that Clark was as yet unaware just who was on duty in the monitor womb at the moment. Once the situation was under control, the air marshal flown to hospital and hijacker left with the authorities, it was time to surprise him.
With a grin at Diana that could be easily heard in his voice, Captain Marvel responded to his father’s sitrep to the Watchtower. “Acknowledged, Superman, good to hear. Will you be coming up to the Watchtower for a debrief?” he asked hopefully.
Superman shook the hand of each passenger who exited the plane, some of them thanking him for stopping the situation before it escalated out of control and one or two berating him for not arriving sooner. “Godfrey’s right about you capes,” an elderly woman barked at him while her husband looked sheepish and tugged at her arm. “You don’t care about us. You swoop down just in time for the papers to catch you playing hero! We’re on to your Just Us League now.”
Clark apologized to those he had disappointed, checked the injured air marshal one last time, and left the airline to sort out the rest. Incidents like these occurred more frequently now, people whose lives he’d saved questioning his motivations. He hated to admit even to himself that a hack like Godfrey was having any kind of impact on the people Clark had served and protected for most of his adult life. It offended him as a hero and as a journalist.
Perhaps it was time to talk to Kate again, to see what their options were for handling Godfrey and his media ring once her instructions to not engage him stopped being effective. And Clark was fairly certain that point had been passed. He signaled the Watchtower over his comm, thinking he might find her aboard.
“Billy?” He wasn’t expecting Captain Marvel’s voice to answer his call. He shook his head and instructed the boy to transport him aboard.
It was more difficult to think of him as ‘the boy’ when Marvel was before him in the control room, large and resplendent in red and white, but the eager grin on his face kept it from being impossible. “Hello, Billy,” Clark greeted him warmly, clapping his shoulder in greeting. He folded his arms as he spoke to him, but there was humor in his voice. “Is monitor duty an afterschool activity of yours that you didn’t tell me about?”
“Yes, Sir!” Marvel beamed at him, searching his father’s face for a smile. “I wanted to surprise you. Diana’s been teaching me, among others, but mostly Diana. That was awesome work you did with the plane, Dad!”
His smile faltered slightly. He’d slipped up; usually he didn’t address him as ‘Dad’ when he was in Captain Marvel’s form. Not because he was uncomfortable with it, but because he sensed Clark was. He still recalled the talk they had when Marvel’s true age was revealed, and how Clark had observed they looked close to the same age. It was bound to make the Man of Steel uncomfortable, being called “Dad” by a 30-something-year-old.
“I…thought about what you and Mom said, about me not doing dangerous things. I talked to Green Arrow, and he said it was okay for me to get training to do monitor duty. Maybe other things, too. It is okay, isn’t it?”
Clark nodded, keeping his expression neutral. He could be a bit overprotective of Billy, he realized, but he didn’t want to discourage him. At least he was safe here in the Tower, and he was trying so hard to obey Clark when it came to mission assignments. It was a matter of compromise for he and Billy both.
“It’s certainly okay, son,” he said, smiling and sitting next to him. The screens flicked overhead, changing to various vantage points around the world every few seconds. Monitor duty wasn’t a task anyone envied, and he’d served his time keeping watch on several occasions. But he made certain he sounded truly interested when he said, “Why don’t you show me what all you’ve been doing to take care of everyone from up here?”
His son was delighted to oblige, even though he knew full well his father knew how everything worked. Rather than explain the controls, he just explained what he’d learned thus far, interspersing it with an anecdote or two about some of the recent incidents to which he’d successfully dispatched League members. As he began, Wonder Woman excused herself to get a coffee and give the two of them some much-needed father-son time.
“…and since he wasn’t doing anything and the crisis was under control, I told Booster Gold to return to the Watchtower. All he was doing at that point was signing autographs, and the others were handling things okay,” he told Superman.
“Watchtower, are you seeing this? Turn on Fox, GGG’s got a hell of an interview tonight…” came Wildcat’s voice over the comms. Marvel reached over and brought up a new screen, and was stunned to see who was being interviewed on The Glorious Gordon Godfrey Show.
“Holy Moley! Darkseid!” He looked over at Clark, concerned as he watched his reaction.
For a moment, Clark thought about turning off the screen. The less Billy was exposed to Godfrey and Darkseid alike, the better.
But he sat rooted to his chair instead, eyes darkening and growing thinner the longer he listened to the interview. Godfrey’s constant criticism of the League, while troubling, hadn’t yet been a major cause for concern from Clark’s point of view. But if he was presenting Darkseid— Darkseid! for the love of— as a sympathetic figure to the people of Earth, he’d succeeded in his apparent effort to make himself a legitimate threat.
Clark said nothing until the interview ended, nearly forgetting Marvel’s presence in his stunned fixation. He shut down the monitor when commercials rolled, turning his attention to his son once more. “You’ve done a good job up here, Billy,” he said softly, the red folds of his cape pooling around his legs as he stood. The moment he almost made an irrevocable choice flashed through his mind, the screaming of time and space around the portal to earth when he came so close to ignoring it in favor of revenge. He rubbed at his temples with a heavy sigh.
“I don’t have to tell you how seriously I take any sign of a threat from Darkseid,” he told Billy. “I’m not going to send you away right now, but I need you to promise me you won’t give me trouble if I do eventually decide you’re safer at home.”
The world’s mightiest mortal rose to his feet as well, bringing himself up to full height and looked his father in the eye, not in an attempt to intimidate, not even as a challenge to his authority, but simply to remind his father that physically, he was likely his equal.
“If you send me off the Watchtower, I promise I’ll leave it, Sir. I wish you would let me help if it comes to that, but, I do understand how you feel about this, and why.” He glanced towards the room entrance, wondering if Superman had to leave right away.
“I was wondering…maybe we could patrol together? I’d really like to fly with you. You could watch me work and tell me how to improve, and I could watch you and learn stuff? …Please?”
The gesture was misinterpreted at first, and Clark’s jaw locked when he thought Billy was rising in preface to a challenge. If the boy thought his present size was merit enough for defiance, Clark was prepared to inform him of the extent to which he was sorely mistaken.
But his son was as respectful as always he was, and Clark bit his lip against a rush of guilt for assuming otherwise. He’d always chided Bruce for being too hard on his children, but now that Clark was a father, he was beginning to understand the blurred boundary between being firm and being overbearing. “Yes, of course,” he said quickly, setting aside his concerns about GGG for the moment and squeezing Marvel’s shoulder. “We could patrol Metropolis together, and it’d give me a chance to see you in action without worrying about a worldwide threat at the same time. Be patient with me, Billy. I know you’re a good kid, and I know you’re a good hero, too. I can’t promise you I’ll ever be able to separate the two, but I do promise I’m trying to be fair to them both.”
Marvel beamed at him as he agreed, but then looked solemn again as Superman asked him for his patience. ”I know…Sir.” He still struggled with being totally comfortable calling him “Dad” in this form. ”You try to be fair to everyone, after all, you’re Superman! Could we go now, do you think?”
Wonder Woman returned with her coffee and eyed the two of them with an appraising but pleasant look, as if gauging the mood between them. “Diana, would you mind if I left early, to patrol with Superman?” he asked, so eager he had forgotten to wait for his father to answer his question. No matter, if Superman wanted to do it another time, they could at least fly back to Metropolis together for supper.
Diana took a sip of her coffee, her eyes flicking over the monitors, “Not a problem Captain Marvel,” she looked between Clark and Marvel with a smile. She was happy to see the two of them spending time together both as father as well as heros. Kal had a lot of wisdom he could pass onto Marvel, and Billy- and the both of them had plenty of excitement to share with their father figure.
“In fact…” she pointed towards a monitor displaying a raging house fire spreading through a neighborhood, “I could use your help there first before you two head out on patrol, if you’re up for it.”
Clark smiled at Diana and drained a cup of coffee himself, plunking the empty mug down on the cart. Caffeine didn’t technically have any physiological effect on him, but, much like alcohol, exposure to its impact on most humans had conditioned his mind to respond to what it thought the substance should do. He felt more alert, ready to face the task before them.
A domestic blaze would be a good place to begin with Billy. They acknowledged the location Diana provided and used the zeta tubes to transport to the suburbs of Chicago, where five houses in a subdivision were caught in the blaze. Clark penetrated fire and plaster with his sight as they flew to the scene, spotting a cat hiding under a bed in one house, a man trying to free his elderly mother from a fallen dresser in a bedroom two doors down, and a small child curled inside a kitchen cabinet in the home next door. The fire must have been sudden and quick-spreading, or else everyone here needed to be trained in emergency evacuation.
“Get the child and the cat,” Clark directed after sharing what he’d seen with Marvel, and crashed through a window of the house where the mother and son were trapped.
“On it!” he replied as he took off in a red streak towards the house with the child. What he lacked in x-ray vision, he made up for in speed, or so he hoped…there were so many cabinets in the large kitchen, and the smoke, it was so thick.
The fire made plenty of its own noise, but Marvel could just barely hear the sound of high-pitched coughing, and honed in on it. “Of course, under the sink!” In his rush, he pulled the cabinet door off its hinges, and the little person inside jumped and squeaked in surprise, his knees pulled to his chest.
“It’s all right, I’m a superhero. My name is Captain Marvel, and I’m here to save you!” Cap explained as he untied the gold cord and tugged off his white cape.
The child - it looked like a boy, from what he could see of his haircut - stared back at him wide-eyed but at least stopped cowering. “I’m scared!” he wailed. Marvel realized he was about 6 or 7 years old, not all that much younger than himself. Well, in some people’s eyes, anyway.
“I know! It’s okay to be scared, as long as you trust me so that I can get you out of here.” He reached past the boy’s knees and grabbed the thin copper pipe in the back that fed water to the sink above, ripping it out so water sprayed everywhere. ”What’s your name?” he asked as he shoved his cape at the leak, soaking the fabric.
“Jason Peterson.”
“Jason, like the brave hero that searched for the Golden Fleece! Well Jason, I’m going to let you wear my cape, so you can be a superhero too, and then you don’t have to be scared. But you have to wrap it all around you, even your face. It’ll protect you, okay?”
The child seemed calmed now, and crawled out from the tight space under the sink into Marvel’s arms, and allowed himself to be bundled in the dampened material which covered his small body head to toe. “Okay, Jason, let’s fly!” He picked the boy up and flew through the thinnest part of the fire, shielding him with his own body as he burst out through the large front window of the living room, then delivered him safely to paramedics.
They wanted to speak to him, even as they were removing the wet cloth from Jason, but he raised his hand. “Can’t talk, more to rescue! Back in a minute!” he told the EMTs as he flew for the first house his father had pointed out: the one with the cat under the bed, completely engulfed in flames…
It took some coaxing for Superman to convince the elderly woman to come with him after he lifted the dresser that had fallen upon her leg. Her adult son spoke rapidly to her, words blurring together as he begged her to allow Superman to carry them both to safety. But she was frightened and confused, and Clark didn’t want to risk giving her a heart attack by grabbing her against her will.
He patiently blew back the encroaching flames with his arctic breath, waving his arms in rapid windmill circles to clear the surrounding air of smoke. There was a part of him that was anxious about not checking on Billy, but he knew he had to trust Marvel to complete his part of the job. Routine house fire. This was the easy stuff. If Clark couldn’t allow Billy some free reign on basic patrol, he feared the boy truly would grow to resent him.
The older woman calmed down when the air was easier to breathe, and she finally conceded to taking Superman’s offered hand. He lifted her and her son, one cradled in each arm, and carried them through the opening in the partially-collapsed roof. He delivered them to the paramedics and helped the firefighters extinguish the flames, the last of the blaze finally surrendering to the high-pressure hoses and the frigid winds whistling from Clark’s mouth as Marvel emerged with a shaking cat in his arms.
Superman smiled and walked over to him, scratching the cat on top of its head. It smelled like singed fur, but seemed unharmed otherwise. “Did everything go okay? It looks like everything went okay,” he added quickly, trying to assure his son of his confidence him as he glanced around at the scene. “Good work, son.”
“Thanks, Dad!” Marvel beamed at him, before looking back down at the cat in his arms. “Jason’s fine too, the little boy. He’s over there with the paramedics. I need to get my cape back, though, I had to wrap him in it.”
He handed the cat to a firefighter, telling him which house it was from, and headed over to the boy. They’d traded the wet cape for a wool blanket, and had an oxygen mask on his face, but he was sitting up and looking happy. A few people recorded it on their phones as Marvel patted his shoulder and congratulated Jason’s bravery, then was handed his cape.
He walked back to Superman, smiling. That had felt good, putting his powers to real use. ”What now? Are we done here? More patrol?”
It seemed Clark Kent had to book off work early from the Daily Planet for a previously unmentioned dentist appointment, while an ocean away, British Airways Flight 196 has reported a hijacker with a bomb, and the on-board air marshal shot and unconscious. Superman responded to the alert before the Watchtower could even dispatch him, but this wasn’t unusual, not with the Kryptonian’s super-hearing and telescopic vision at his disposal.
This meant, however, that Clark was as yet unaware just who was on duty in the monitor womb at the moment. Once the situation was under control, the air marshal flown to hospital and hijacker left with the authorities, it was time to surprise him.
With a grin at Diana that could be easily heard in his voice, Captain Marvel responded to his father’s sitrep to the Watchtower. “Acknowledged, Superman, good to hear. Will you be coming up to the Watchtower for a debrief?” he asked hopefully.
Superman shook the hand of each passenger who exited the plane, some of them thanking him for stopping the situation before it escalated out of control and one or two berating him for not arriving sooner. “Godfrey’s right about you capes,” an elderly woman barked at him while her husband looked sheepish and tugged at her arm. “You don’t care about us. You swoop down just in time for the papers to catch you playing hero! We’re on to your Just Us League now.”
Clark apologized to those he had disappointed, checked the injured air marshal one last time, and left the airline to sort out the rest. Incidents like these occurred more frequently now, people whose lives he’d saved questioning his motivations. He hated to admit even to himself that a hack like Godfrey was having any kind of impact on the people Clark had served and protected for most of his adult life. It offended him as a hero and as a journalist.
Perhaps it was time to talk to Kate again, to see what their options were for handling Godfrey and his media ring once her instructions to not engage him stopped being effective. And Clark was fairly certain that point had been passed. He signaled the Watchtower over his comm, thinking he might find her aboard.
“Billy?” He wasn’t expecting Captain Marvel’s voice to answer his call. He shook his head and instructed the boy to transport him aboard.
It was more difficult to think of him as ‘the boy’ when Marvel was before him in the control room, large and resplendent in red and white, but the eager grin on his face kept it from being impossible. “Hello, Billy,” Clark greeted him warmly, clapping his shoulder in greeting. He folded his arms as he spoke to him, but there was humor in his voice. “Is monitor duty an afterschool activity of yours that you didn’t tell me about?”
“Yes, Sir!” Marvel beamed at him, searching his father’s face for a smile. “I wanted to surprise you. Diana’s been teaching me, among others, but mostly Diana. That was awesome work you did with the plane, Dad!”
His smile faltered slightly. He’d slipped up; usually he didn’t address him as ‘Dad’ when he was in Captain Marvel’s form. Not because he was uncomfortable with it, but because he sensed Clark was. He still recalled the talk they had when Marvel’s true age was revealed, and how Clark had observed they looked close to the same age. It was bound to make the Man of Steel uncomfortable, being called “Dad” by a 30-something-year-old.
“I…thought about what you and Mom said, about me not doing dangerous things. I talked to Green Arrow, and he said it was okay for me to get training to do monitor duty. Maybe other things, too. It is okay, isn’t it?”
Clark nodded, keeping his expression neutral. He could be a bit overprotective of Billy, he realized, but he didn’t want to discourage him. At least he was safe here in the Tower, and he was trying so hard to obey Clark when it came to mission assignments. It was a matter of compromise for he and Billy both.
“It’s certainly okay, son,” he said, smiling and sitting next to him. The screens flicked overhead, changing to various vantage points around the world every few seconds. Monitor duty wasn’t a task anyone envied, and he’d served his time keeping watch on several occasions. But he made certain he sounded truly interested when he said, “Why don’t you show me what all you’ve been doing to take care of everyone from up here?”
His son was delighted to oblige, even though he knew full well his father knew how everything worked. Rather than explain the controls, he just explained what he’d learned thus far, interspersing it with an anecdote or two about some of the recent incidents to which he’d successfully dispatched League members. As he began, Wonder Woman excused herself to get a coffee and give the two of them some much-needed father-son time.
“…and since he wasn’t doing anything and the crisis was under control, I told Booster Gold to return to the Watchtower. All he was doing at that point was signing autographs, and the others were handling things okay,” he told Superman.
“Watchtower, are you seeing this? Turn on Fox, GGG’s got a hell of an interview tonight…” came Wildcat’s voice over the comms. Marvel reached over and brought up a new screen, and was stunned to see who was being interviewed on The Glorious Gordon Godfrey Show.
“Holy Moley! Darkseid!” He looked over at Clark, concerned as he watched his reaction.
For a moment, Clark thought about turning off the screen. The less Billy was exposed to Godfrey and Darkseid alike, the better.
But he sat rooted to his chair instead, eyes darkening and growing thinner the longer he listened to the interview. Godfrey’s constant criticism of the League, while troubling, hadn’t yet been a major cause for concern from Clark’s point of view. But if he was presenting Darkseid— Darkseid! for the love of— as a sympathetic figure to the people of Earth, he’d succeeded in his apparent effort to make himself a legitimate threat.
Clark said nothing until the interview ended, nearly forgetting Marvel’s presence in his stunned fixation. He shut down the monitor when commercials rolled, turning his attention to his son once more. “You’ve done a good job up here, Billy,” he said softly, the red folds of his cape pooling around his legs as he stood. The moment he almost made an irrevocable choice flashed through his mind, the screaming of time and space around the portal to earth when he came so close to ignoring it in favor of revenge. He rubbed at his temples with a heavy sigh.
“I don’t have to tell you how seriously I take any sign of a threat from Darkseid,” he told Billy. “I’m not going to send you away right now, but I need you to promise me you won’t give me trouble if I do eventually decide you’re safer at home.”
The world’s mightiest mortal rose to his feet as well, bringing himself up to full height and looked his father in the eye, not in an attempt to intimidate, not even as a challenge to his authority, but simply to remind his father that physically, he was likely his equal.
“If you send me off the Watchtower, I promise I’ll leave it, Sir. I wish you would let me help if it comes to that, but, I do understand how you feel about this, and why.” He glanced towards the room entrance, wondering if Superman had to leave right away.
“I was wondering…maybe we could patrol together? I’d really like to fly with you. You could watch me work and tell me how to improve, and I could watch you and learn stuff? …Please?”
The gesture was misinterpreted at first, and Clark’s jaw locked when he thought Billy was rising in preface to a challenge. If the boy thought his present size was merit enough for defiance, Clark was prepared to inform him of the extent to which he was sorely mistaken.
But his son was as respectful as always he was, and Clark bit his lip against a rush of guilt for assuming otherwise. He’d always chided Bruce for being too hard on his children, but now that Clark was a father, he was beginning to understand the blurred boundary between being firm and being overbearing. “Yes, of course,” he said quickly, setting aside his concerns about GGG for the moment and squeezing Marvel’s shoulder. “We could patrol Metropolis together, and it’d give me a chance to see you in action without worrying about a worldwide threat at the same time. Be patient with me, Billy. I know you’re a good kid, and I know you’re a good hero, too. I can’t promise you I’ll ever be able to separate the two, but I do promise I’m trying to be fair to them both.”
Marvel beamed at him as he agreed, but then looked solemn again as Superman asked him for his patience. ”I know…Sir.” He still struggled with being totally comfortable calling him “Dad” in this form. ”You try to be fair to everyone, after all, you’re Superman! Could we go now, do you think?”
Wonder Woman returned with her coffee and eyed the two of them with an appraising but pleasant look, as if gauging the mood between them. “Diana, would you mind if I left early, to patrol with Superman?” he asked, so eager he had forgotten to wait for his father to answer his question. No matter, if Superman wanted to do it another time, they could at least fly back to Metropolis together for supper.
Diana took a sip of her coffee, her eyes flicking over the monitors, “Not a problem Captain Marvel,” she looked between Clark and Marvel with a smile. She was happy to see the two of them spending time together both as father as well as heros. Kal had a lot of wisdom he could pass onto Marvel, and Billy- and the both of them had plenty of excitement to share with their father figure.
“In fact…” she pointed towards a monitor displaying a raging house fire spreading through a neighborhood, “I could use your help there first before you two head out on patrol, if you’re up for it.”
Clark smiled at Diana and drained a cup of coffee himself, plunking the empty mug down on the cart. Caffeine didn’t technically have any physiological effect on him, but, much like alcohol, exposure to its impact on most humans had conditioned his mind to respond to what it thought the substance should do. He felt more alert, ready to face the task before them.
A domestic blaze would be a good place to begin with Billy. They acknowledged the location Diana provided and used the zeta tubes to transport to the suburbs of Chicago, where five houses in a subdivision were caught in the blaze. Clark penetrated fire and plaster with his sight as they flew to the scene, spotting a cat hiding under a bed in one house, a man trying to free his elderly mother from a fallen dresser in a bedroom two doors down, and a small child curled inside a kitchen cabinet in the home next door. The fire must have been sudden and quick-spreading, or else everyone here needed to be trained in emergency evacuation.
“Get the child and the cat,” Clark directed after sharing what he’d seen with Marvel, and crashed through a window of the house where the mother and son were trapped.
“On it!” he replied as he took off in a red streak towards the house with the child. What he lacked in x-ray vision, he made up for in speed, or so he hoped…there were so many cabinets in the large kitchen, and the smoke, it was so thick.
The fire made plenty of its own noise, but Marvel could just barely hear the sound of high-pitched coughing, and honed in on it. “Of course, under the sink!” In his rush, he pulled the cabinet door off its hinges, and the little person inside jumped and squeaked in surprise, his knees pulled to his chest.
“It’s all right, I’m a superhero. My name is Captain Marvel, and I’m here to save you!” Cap explained as he untied the gold cord and tugged off his white cape.
The child - it looked like a boy, from what he could see of his haircut - stared back at him wide-eyed but at least stopped cowering. “I’m scared!” he wailed. Marvel realized he was about 6 or 7 years old, not all that much younger than himself. Well, in some people’s eyes, anyway.
“I know! It’s okay to be scared, as long as you trust me so that I can get you out of here.” He reached past the boy’s knees and grabbed the thin copper pipe in the back that fed water to the sink above, ripping it out so water sprayed everywhere. ”What’s your name?” he asked as he shoved his cape at the leak, soaking the fabric.
“Jason Peterson.”
“Jason, like the brave hero that searched for the Golden Fleece! Well Jason, I’m going to let you wear my cape, so you can be a superhero too, and then you don’t have to be scared. But you have to wrap it all around you, even your face. It’ll protect you, okay?”
The child seemed calmed now, and crawled out from the tight space under the sink into Marvel’s arms, and allowed himself to be bundled in the dampened material which covered his small body head to toe. “Okay, Jason, let’s fly!” He picked the boy up and flew through the thinnest part of the fire, shielding him with his own body as he burst out through the large front window of the living room, then delivered him safely to paramedics.
They wanted to speak to him, even as they were removing the wet cloth from Jason, but he raised his hand. “Can’t talk, more to rescue! Back in a minute!” he told the EMTs as he flew for the first house his father had pointed out: the one with the cat under the bed, completely engulfed in flames…
It took some coaxing for Superman to convince the elderly woman to come with him after he lifted the dresser that had fallen upon her leg. Her adult son spoke rapidly to her, words blurring together as he begged her to allow Superman to carry them both to safety. But she was frightened and confused, and Clark didn’t want to risk giving her a heart attack by grabbing her against her will.
He patiently blew back the encroaching flames with his arctic breath, waving his arms in rapid windmill circles to clear the surrounding air of smoke. There was a part of him that was anxious about not checking on Billy, but he knew he had to trust Marvel to complete his part of the job. Routine house fire. This was the easy stuff. If Clark couldn’t allow Billy some free reign on basic patrol, he feared the boy truly would grow to resent him.
The older woman calmed down when the air was easier to breathe, and she finally conceded to taking Superman’s offered hand. He lifted her and her son, one cradled in each arm, and carried them through the opening in the partially-collapsed roof. He delivered them to the paramedics and helped the firefighters extinguish the flames, the last of the blaze finally surrendering to the high-pressure hoses and the frigid winds whistling from Clark’s mouth as Marvel emerged with a shaking cat in his arms.
Superman smiled and walked over to him, scratching the cat on top of its head. It smelled like singed fur, but seemed unharmed otherwise. “Did everything go okay? It looks like everything went okay,” he added quickly, trying to assure his son of his confidence him as he glanced around at the scene. “Good work, son.”
“Thanks, Dad!” Marvel beamed at him, before looking back down at the cat in his arms. “Jason’s fine too, the little boy. He’s over there with the paramedics. I need to get my cape back, though, I had to wrap him in it.”
He handed the cat to a firefighter, telling him which house it was from, and headed over to the boy. They’d traded the wet cape for a wool blanket, and had an oxygen mask on his face, but he was sitting up and looking happy. A few people recorded it on their phones as Marvel patted his shoulder and congratulated Jason’s bravery, then was handed his cape.
He walked back to Superman, smiling. That had felt good, putting his powers to real use. ”What now? Are we done here? More patrol?”