Trinity

Before Jonathan Kent’s death, Clark’s attendance at Central Kansas University spanned only months before he was forced to drop out permanently. During that brief time, he only considered journalism as a career largely due to the disintegration of dreams of college football. Signing on for a degree in journalism and communications, Clark’s life in college for the rest of the year was one distraction after another and it was no surprise to anyone when he finally left.

Who knew that driving himself crazy about Lana and Lex during Classical Studies instead of paying attention was going to come back and bite him on the ass?

“Tartarus!” Clark demanded as he swept his gaze across the stygian world whose like was last described by Dante, with growing apprehension, “we’re in the Tartarus?”

“Is there any other?” the Batman retorted sarcastically, impatient with Clark’s hysterics about their situation. Then again, Bruce came from Gotham and in his mind the differences between this hell and the city of his birth wasn’t by much. “We’re here, that makes it real enough. Now we got to figure out how to get out of here.”

Diana was also looking around the place known to her only by description. “I do not understand why Harmonia’s talisman would bring us here,” She replied, confused by this latest turn of events. The Batman’s reasoning was sound. Even if it did not show them an answer, she had hoped they would at least be a step closer to Lord Ares’ plan. Blues eyes were searching the darkness, following the spidery tendrils of rock they were standing upon to other chambers where only horror existed. The malevolence in here was what the Amazon nation had spent two thousand years guarding at the loss of many lives. “It was meant to bring a step closer to Ares’ ultimate plan.”

“We’ll I’m finding a way out of here,” Clark declared, preparing to launch himself off the ledge. Even if he could see what was ahead, that did not mean he couldn’t reach it. He wasn’t staying in this dungeon while Lois and the rest of his friends at the Daily Planet were dying.

“Kal do not,” Diana warned and she approached him quickly. She understood his impatience and saw the fear for his lover in every word he spoke. Placing a hand on his shoulder, she tried to explain why it was not wise for them to separate. “This place is not for those who are unfamiliar with the gods. It is best if we remained together. I cannot imagine that our being here is accident even if I cannot fathom the reason.”

“She’s right,” the Batman added moving further up the ledge, side stepping a gurgle of sulfur and ash from one of the fissures. “The talisman brought us here,” he speculated, “there might be something it wants us to find.”

“Should we?” Clark countered feeling wholly out of depth but sensible enough to listen to those who knew better. “I thought Tartarus was where they kept the bad guys right. If something is down here, it might be for a good reason.”

“Good point,” Bruce paused as he looked over the ledge into the abyss below. Retreating, he bent over and broke off a piece of rock from the gravelly walkway with his gauntlet. Straightening up, he dropped the stone edge and listened closely.

Seconds ticked past and the rock continued to fall beyond the ability of human hearing. Turning to Clark, he asked, “can you hear it?” Even if his hearing was better than most, honed through years of discipline, Bruce knew that Clark could hear the prattling of an entire planet.

Clark listened, taking up Bruce’s request. He could hear other things. Slithering things. Things that breathed hard and wailed like a banshees, things that crawled and shrieked, chilling his blood to the bone but not the rock that Bruce had thrown.

“No,” he shook his head. He didn’t tell the dark avenger what he could hear.

“You cannot measure this place by conventional means Bruce,” Diana explained to these men who were governed by things tangible and scientific. “This place was meant to hold creatures that are unnatural.”

“How comforting,” Bruce retorted dryly. “I say we don’t stay in one place to let these things find us then, we should get moving.”
Clark was all for getting underway but that brought up an obvious question.

“In which direction?” He was still trying to see through the walls with his x-ray vision without much success. It was as if everything was made of lead and he was blind. X-ray vision was something he possessed since he was a teenager and it unnerved him how much he relied on it.

“I think we should take to the air,” Diana suggested. “Aloft we will be more difficult to attack.”

“I admire your ability to make the distinction,” Bruce complimented, unable to deny that her tactical mind impressed him. It was so easy to forget that within that dazzlingly beautiful woman was the discipline of a warrior.

“Come on, you can ride with me,” Clark retorted coming up alongside of the Bruce. It wasn’t just his desire to get to Lois that was nagging at him but being so far away from the sun was unsettling. “Unless you want to ride with Diana.” That almost made Clark smirk.

Bruce threw him a look, “don’t be juvenile.”

Diana, however, was not paying attention to the mild ribbing between the two friends. Something else entirely preoccupied her. Eyes searching the darkness, she tried to pinpoint the source of the tremor she felt within her heart, a shudder in her bones she had felt only once before. Her mother said that she was not born as others were. Diana had come into being by goddesses breathing life into clay.

“Diana what is it?” Bruce asked immediately when he caught sight of her expression of bewilderment.

“Something…” she mused, still searching the black, “Something is coming.”

Her heart was pounding because she felt this sensation only once before.

The night before the commencement of the tournaments to decide who would wear the red, white and blue standards of the Patriarch’s World, Diana had been walking alone on a beach in Themiscyra. While all her sisters would be participating tomorrow, her mother forbade Diana to compete. In disappointment, she had fled the palace, frustrated because she knew she could win but too bound by duty to disobey the Queen.

Saddened by the emptiness of unfulfilled destiny, Diana had walked for hours, not even taking to the skies because her heart felt so heavy, she thought she would drop like a stone if she tried. In the moment of greatest despair, a sensation had filled her, equal parts of foreboding and uneasiness. It was a feeling that touched her to her core and though she was brave as any warrior of Themiscyra, she felt could not forget the chill that ran through her bones. As if she had strayed into the presence of something beyond her ken.

Instead, all she saw was a woman on the beach. A woman she had never seen before and knew without doubt was not one of her Amazon sisters. The woman stood tall and strong, with dark hair and eyes of green that were flecked with gold. She wore the armor of a queen and on her shoulder sat an owl with saucer like eyes.
Diana had remembered dropping to her knees, head bent because she was realized at that moment, she was addressing a goddess.
Athene had told her that night that her destiny would only come to her if she dared seize it.

What followed was Diana’s determination to do just that. She competed against her mother’s wishes, disguising herself to win the right to be the Amazon champion in the Patriarch’s World.

This time however, she suspected the experience would not produce an outcome as positive.

“Diana?” Bruce approached her slowly, “what is it?” He asked her in a gentle voice than was common for the persona of Batman. “What do you see?”

“I do not see anything,” she whispered. “I can feel it, we must go. Something powerful approaches.”

Clark was looking around, trying his hardest to see or hear whatever Diana had claimed was coming at them but in this place, he was blind and helpless to shed any light on the situation. “I can’t see anything…” he added.

“You need not look far mortal. I can see you well enough,” a voice appeared out of nowhere almost, materializing from a speaker who had appeared at the end of the walkway they were standing upon.

He stood at least eight feet tall, towering over them with an almost skeletal gait. Clad in a dull, sliver armor with ornate patterns of Grecian design, his face was concealed by the Corinthian helmet that protected the eves and showed only his long this nose and jutting jaw. His eyes were nothing but dark sockets and where there was should have been hair was long, writhing snakes of green. They coiled around him, hissing and spitting, a living crown surrounding the man.

“Jesus…” Clark muttered, having though he hadn’t seen anything more terrifying than the Decay creature.

Diana was at Clark’s side in seconds with Bruce close behind.

Which one are you?” She demanded fearlessly, understanding now what had precipitated that sensation. “Which one of Ares’ servants are you?”

“I am no servant you pathetic Amazon whore,” the being glowered, flashes of red gleamed where eyes should have been. “I am Deimos, God of Dread. Give me the talisman Amazon and you and your companions may yet live to see the end of this day.”

The threat barely registered and Diana faced down the creature claiming to be a god, without flinching. “Is that why you sought us here? To steal it like a thief?”

“Sought you out?” Deimos uttered a dry, sneering laugh. “You misguided imbecile! I brought you here. Do you dare to presume to interfere with the plans of my father? His plan is inviolate and all of your efforts to halt it will only ensure this wrath upon you! Tonight was only a taste of what he could do to you,” he looked past Diana’s shoulder and sneered at Clark, “and your loves ones.”

“I’ve heard enough,” Clark declared angrily, launching himself at the being, giving not a damn if this was in fact a god or not. He didn’t believe it for a second and after what these so-called deities had done to Lois, didn’t care anyway.

“Kal no!” Diana shouted, leaping into the air to stop him when suddenly, Deimos’s dark eyes flashed and Clark saw the world evaporate before him.
[center]
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He was lying face down in sand.

He could feel grains of it under his fingers.

Raising his head, he immediately blinked because the light was so bright that he could do nothing else. Above him the sky wasn’t blue. It was red, bright red. Like someone had taken a brush and painted it with shades of crimson. The sun in the sky wasn’t the reassuring yellow star that he knew but was instead a red giant looming enormously in the sky.

Where the hell was he?

Removed from the darkness of Tartarus, his new environment was very different indeed. He could see craggy cliffs in the distance, baking under the hot sun. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought that he was back in the Zone but something told him that wasn’t right either. He was standing on the foot of a sandy embankment and while the way behind him offered no clues to where he was, Clark considered the path ahead might shed some light regarding as to his present location and what had happened to Bruce and Diana.

Leaping into the air, expecting to be airborne, Clark had a rude awakening when he landed hard on his face, gaining a mouth full of sand in the process. He couldn’t fly. Sweeping his gaze across the landscape, he realized he couldn’t see far ahead either. He was powerless. Panic began to set in as Clark realized that the lack of a yellow sun might be the reason for his loss of ability. Scrambling up the slope, he reached the top and hoped that he might understand what had happened to him.

Reaching the top, he felt his breath catch involuntarily.

In the distance, separated by what should have been Metropolis Bay, Clark saw no body of water but a sandy plain and the ruin city beyond it. Instinctively, he knew it was Metropolis. While not exactly the city remembered, some of the buildings were new to him, there was other features that simply stood out. He had flown over Metropolis enough times to recognize the contours of the land, the shape of the New Troy Island on which the city was built.

It was Metropolis before him and the city was dead.

Stunned and horrified at the same time, Clark found himself walking forward, unable to think of anything else to do. Where was everybody? If this was Metropolis then he wasn’t on any alien planet but Earth. The sun above him was the star Sol, he realized. A yellow sun became a red giant when it was dying, when fusion had stopped and the star was reaching critical mass. Inside his chest, Clark’s heart was pounding so loudly, if there was anyone left alive on this dead rock, they would surely hear it.

During his training with Jor-El at the fortress, Kal-El had been taught the science of the cosmos and he knew that if Sol was a red giant than life no longer existed on Earth. The sun would expand five times its size, swallowing up Mercury and Venus as it grew. While Earth was not yet within its reach, it wouldn’t matter. There would be no oceans, no atmosphere. He shouldn’t even be breathing right now. Why hadn’t he died with the others?

God, what if he couldn’t?

What if being Kryptonian didn’t allow him to die?

All his life, only one thing had terrified Clark Kent more than anything in the world, more than losing Lois or the people he loved and that was never being able to die. When he was a teenager, a chance encounter with an elderly lady named Cassandra Carver had given him a preview of a future where he was surrounded by tombstones. A future where he would outlive everything. Now as he stood in the ruins of Metropolis, seeing the sun above him gasping its last, his worst nightmare appeared to be unfolding.

“No,” he shook his head, running down the embankment, his red cape covered in dust and sand, trailing behind him impotently. He wasn’t alone! He had been sent here by that spooky son of a bitch with his eyes, This wasn’t his future.

“DIANA! BRUCE!”

There was no answer and his voice faded into the rasping wind, scouring the barren landscape. He continued to call after them, praying that he wasn’t alone in this place. That he wasn’t doomed to enduring an end where he would be faced with his worst fear. Running forward, his boots leaving footprint against the sand, Clark ran up another slope, searching desperately for his friends.

Suddenly, he tripped and went over the edge of another steep incline. Rolling down the hill like a boulder, he felt a shoulder snap in pain as he landed a few seconds later, spitting out more dust. Getting on his hands and knees to stand up, Clark froze as he stared at what was before him.

Tombstones.

Breathing hard, not just from his run in this parched desert but because he knew the name etched into the baked stone. Letting out a slight gasp of anguish, Clark knew that this couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t but seeing what was in front of him was agonizing just the same.

[center]LOIS LANE KENT
Beloved Wife and Mother
1985 – 2065[/center]

“This isn’t real!” He shouted at it, defying the headstone to say otherwise. “I am not here! This isn’t goddamn real!”

It had to be a trick, it just had to be, Clark Kent thought to himself.

It had to be because the alternative was unimaginable.

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The Batman saw Diana trying to stop Clark from reaching the creature calling itself the God of Dread. Of course it made perfect sense if you knew your classical mythology, Deimos was the child of Ares and Aphrodite. In the literature, Deimos accompanied his father into combat. If Ares was indeed planning global Armageddon, why wouldn’t his children be involved. While Deimos had been hurling insults at Diana, the Batman had been busy studying the god closely. Ignoring his chilling physical characteristics, what Bruce was most interested in was the talisman he was wearing as part of his armor. He was going to tell the others of this discovery when Clark rushed in prematurely against Diana’s warning.

There was barely enough time for Bruce to register the dark sockets of Deimos’ eyes coming to life with two red pinpricks of light. The glow lasted a millisecond and then everything went dark and the Batman as no longer standing in the middle of Tartarus facing an Olympian.

He was standing in the middle of a dark alley.

The smell of stale liquor and dry piss assaulted his nostrils almost immediately and he flinched, thinking that sometimes a finely honed sense of smell wasn’t the best thing to have in a place used by man and animal as a toilet. In the distance, he could hear the chatter of voices and cars driving roads. A street lamp illuminated the alley and helped him to focus after the disorientation of being transported here so abruptly had worn off.

It took the Batman approximately half a second to realize WHICH alley he was in.

The logical mind told Bruce immediately that this was an illusion, a mental trick, conjured up by a god who knew exactly which buttons to push. Deimos didn’t even have to look very far to recreate the setting. The images had been burned into his mind ever since that terrible night. A psychologist might say that he never left this alley.

Still, despite the Batman’s discipline, being here was unsettling. The scene was picture perfect thanks to him. No expense spared to ensure it was presented in Technicolor, probably with THX sound too, he thought ruefully. Behind him was the theatre door that emptied into the narrow space between two old, dilapidated buildings. The brick of each wall on either side were slick with grime and a lamppost in the middle of the alley, illuminated the puddles of foul water and rotting garbage. A dumpster sat ominously against one wall, flies buzzing above it, circling the stench.

"Come on Bruce," he heard a voice and it hollowed his stomach, shaking the discipline he had tried so hard to maintain when confronted with this one memory.

"Dad..." he wanted to say, his voice a strangled whisper.

Thomas and Mary Wayne were smiling at him, gesturing him to follow but he was rooted to the spot. They walked forward anyway, still expecting him to follow. They saw him as their little boy, not as a grown man in a costume that brought terror to criminals and ensured his life would never be normal. Each step they took, brought them closer to inevitability, to the end he did not wish to see.

It’s an illusion he told himself but Bruce still wanted to shout at them not to go.

He stepped forward and suddenly the costume felt heavier, as if it was weighing him down because it wasn’t part of the show. He glanced at his reflection in a puddle and saw a little boy, not the Batman. He knew he was wearing the suit. He lifted his hands and saw the gauntlets. He touched his face and felt the cowl. He was dressed as he should be, something dark and dangerous.

Something elemental.

It was at that moment he saw the shadow suddenly stepping out of nowhere from behind the dumpster, waiting for them like a predator in the dark. It was just as he remembered. How terrible it had seemed, how it had haunted his dreams for so many years after. How larger than life.

When it started towards his parents, it didn’t matter whether or not this was an illusion, Bruce Wayne was that child again and he could no more endure seeing his parents gunned down today than he could when he was eight years old.

"Dad, mom!" Bruce called out as he ran towards them, the Batman’s dark cloak billowing behind him.

The shot rang out within inches of Bruce reaching them. Freezing his tracks, he saw his father collapsing, blood splattering over the bat insignia on his chest. The look of surprise was just the same, the pain that followed equally so. The second shot drew his attention away from his father to his mother, the bullet hit her in the neck, splashing the exposed part of his face with a spray of arterial blood.

When the gun fell on the ground, it did so like the hammer of some cosmic mechanism slipping into the place.

The shadow looked at him and smiled with a harlequin's crimson grin, "it doesn't matter who you are or who you try to be, Bruce. You can’t save them all."

Bruce let out an anguish cry of rage as he saw the bodies of his dead parents lying against filthy concrete and felt something inside his snap. Illusion or not, the fury he restrained so tightly exploded with the ferocity of a black star.

He reached the shadow creature like a dark, angry storm and began pummeling the murderer of his parents like a man possessed. Jackhammer blows propelled by a lifetime of anguish and despair, one after the other. Until the harlequin smile beneath him was covered in blood, like he was covered in its blood. It intermingled with the blood of his parents who were still on the ground behind him, dead. Their life were pooling around them in a widening puddle of dark blood.

Beneath him, the raspy voice sneered. “Still dead Bruce, you can beat down the whole world but it won’t change anything. They will still be dead and you’ve become a monster. A freak of the night that will scare everything that sees you and you still won’t be there in time to save anyone. You couldn’t save them any more than you could save Chloe.”

And Bruce screamed in fury and anguish because the shadow thing was right about that. He hadn’t been able to save anyone, least of Chloe.