98Bruce argued, but even he knew it was just form; he couldn't walk all the way to the crash site. He had an infected leg and a barely-controlled fever, so he finally shut up and let Clark load him into the hollow log. He watched Clark strap on the harness he'd rigged and start swimming before he let himself lie down, head resting on the now-useless husk of their radio. He didn't know why Clark had insisted on bringing it with them, any more than he knew how many hours passed like that, Clark pulling the canoe, Bruce staring up at the sun: dozing, waking and sleeping again. Once he woke and it was night, but still they were moving and then it was daylight again and Clark was pushing liquids at him. "Drink. You're going to get dehydrated. Drink," Clark said, so he did. He must've eaten something too, but he couldn't remember. There was just floating and sun or cloud or darkness and then there was Clark, pulling him from the little boat and dusting him off, hauling him, half-dragging him up the bank, toward a hill, green grass and pines and rocks, toward the base of a mountain. "It's here," Clark said, his voice cracking on the words. "It's here."
Bruce stumbled, doing his best to keep up, Clark's hand digging into his armpit to support him, and he craned his neck to see.
"No, that way." Clark grabbed his chin and turned his head and there it was: The Voskhod 7. Lodged halfway up the mountain, half-covered in rocks and rubble, was a spacecraft. Their spacecraft. Poised precariously and at an angle, sat the rusted-out star of the Soviet Space Program, circa 1972.
Bruce was the one who found the bodies. Left behind like an invalid while Clark scouted for the best route up the mountain, propped against a tree, he sat there for a while, rough bark at the back of his head, eyes half-closed. He couldn't see the craft from where he was, so he waited, and after a long while of staring at nothing in particular, he realized what he was seeing, a few yards away. Pulling himself to his feet, he investigated, and he wasn't mistaken. The mounds were too regular, too even. He brushed away years of leaves and pine needles and after digging clumsily with his hand into the mound of dirt, a cosmonaut. He was considering whether it was worth expending his limited energy to dig up the others when Clark's shadow fell across him, blocking out the sun. "Never missed my utility belt so much."
Clark grunted a non-response and crouched beside him. "My money's on Koslov."
"What?" Bruce squinted at him.
"The one who survived to bury these three."
"Probably." Bruce's mind drifted to thoughts he didn't need to be dwelling on, thoughts of loss and uselessness and futility. "Nothing here," he finally said, giving up and rubbing his muddy hands on the tattered remains of his flight suit.
"I found the best route up."
Grabbing Clark's shoulder to hoist himself he said, "Come on, let's go," when Clark didn't move.
Clark scraped a hand over his face and sighed, but finally stood, shuffling a little. "I just think…"
Bruce narrowed his eyes, bracing himself for whatever was coming. He could already tell he wasn't going to like it.
"I think…" Clark squared his shoulders, crossing his arms. "I think you should stay here."
"Stay behind." Bruce snorted. "Superman have to give himself a pep talk to say that to me?"
"It's not an easy climb."
"So?" Bruce started walking. "I didn't come all this way to miss the main attraction."
"This like Disneyland, then?" Clark called.
"Bizzaro Disneyland."
Clark sputtered a noise and finally started to follow. "To your right," he called. "The grade's easier."
It was a grueling climb. Bruce felt like he was walking horizontally half the time and he glowered at Clark, useless radio under his arm and still making decent strides over the dirt and rubble. Clark caught the glare when he turned around to check on him after stepping up onto the next ledge. "Want a hand?"
Bruce shook his head 'no' but Clark helped him anyway, grabbing his arm and hauling him up to stand beside him. "Hey, watch it," Bruce said, looking down at the bicep Clark was gripping. "Little tight there, Charles Atlas."
"What?" Clark wasn't listening, he was looking up ahead. They'd come around to where the spaceship was visible again.
"Go ahead," Bruce said, and maybe this was Disneyland, because Clark was like Dick at the circus now, he was that excited, and Bruce… Bruce's head was starting to really pound-his fever was kicking in again. He pinched his nose and stood there, resting a minute while Clark ran ahead, scurrying over rubble like a mountain goat. A really large one. The big Billy Goat Gruff and Bruce sat down in the dirt and rocks to catch his breath, hoping he wasn't already getting delirious.
He must have passed out for a while because when he opened his eyes, Clark was crouched beside him, scanning some kind of report he'd gotten from the ship. He'd smeared the hell out of the paper, and for the first time in a while Bruce wondered how filthy he must look, if Clark looked that dirty and unkempt. He guessed he must be worse, since Clark had charcoal smudges everywhere but Bruce had been the one rolling around in the charred canoe.
Rubbing his eyes, he read over Clark's shoulder and tried not to let his eyes cross. Attempting to translate Russian to English didn't get him very far so he looked past the book at the spaceship, a huge, sad hulk of metal collapsing in on itself, a screw driven partway into the mountain at a forty-five degree angle, the rear of the craft dangling some thirty feet in the air. To the west, if he looked, he knew he'd see the river they'd used to get here, now a good ways below. Somewhere nearby more water was pouring; he could hear it, flowing down in tributaries to join the waters of the river. Maybe, in other circumstances, this would have been beautiful. "So," he finally said, and Clark looked up from the page. "What have you got?"
"Found it in the wreckage."
"Anything helpful?"
Clark hummed, ignoring the question while he finished the page and skimmed the next few. "Two of the cosmonauts died on impact, one later. Our guy, Koslov, came here to try and use the ship's radio."
"Any sign of him or the radio?"
"No. But I'm going in."
"What's your idea, Clark?"
Clark had buried his nose in the book again. "What?"
"I can tell you're mulling something."
"I think… I'm still thinking it through, but I've got an idea. If we could recharge the battery…" Clark shaded his eyes and looked up at the rusting ship. "We just need a source of power. Think of all the options there have to be on that thing. Stored energy waiting for us to take. At the very least there are mercury-oxide cells, hydraulic acid…"
"Nickel-hydrogen's right for the time period. A little early for general usage, but not the military."
"Proton-exchange membrane fuel cells were fist used in '67. So PEMs…"
"PEMS? No shelf life. They'd all be dead."
"We don't know that."
"What? That's crazy, Clark."
Clark shrugged. "The super hydrazine system's still classified. Wouldn't surprise me if PEMs worked better than anybody at NASA admitted."
Now Bruce really did think he was delirious. "Military-industrial conspiracies? Clark Kent?"
Clark looked at him shrewdly. "WayneTech's a bastion of transparency, is it?"
"When did you get so cynical…?" Bruce turned to squint at the ship, glinting in the sun. If they could find a power source, cannibalize the right parts, rerig a battery… if, if, if. He held back a groan as he got to his feet. "I'm going in with you."
Clark shook his head, pushing the journal into his hands. "You're going to review this book. There's something here. 'Project X'. They were trying to break the speed of light."
"How'd that turn out?"
"Not even sure I care." Clark swiped a hand through sweaty hair. "But I want to know what they used to power it."
Logbook, Day 140, 09:17:42 hours: Conditions point to another six hours left in our window of atmospheric and magnetic reprieve, during which time a signal could (theoretically) reach the JLA. Preparing to search craft for auxiliary power source with which we can equip battery in order to send said signal.
"So find the details. Detect," Clark said, hoping Bruce would actually listen, and Bruce grumbled, but it seemed like he was going to stay put. In the shade of the wreckage, he opened the book and Clark backed away in order to get a running jump at the ship. He was aiming for the entry platform, two-thirds of the way up the craft. His first run failed, but on the second try he was able to grab the footplate, and clutching it, haul himself inside the jammed half-open door.
He was standing in the main chamber, everything at a topsy-turvy angle. He did a quick search and found nothing helpful but there was a metal spiral staircase a little to the side, and up there another chamber. This room had signs of encampment: debris, a blanket, and there, beside the blanket, was Koslov's radio. He moved too fast to get it, though, and slipped on the crumpled cloth. There was a corpse under it, desiccated and shrunken, visible as both the blanket and Clark slid down the forty-five degree angle that was the floor. He pinwheeled back, grabbing the stairway rail to catch himself but instead of supporting him, it started to give, and Clark watched in horror as the rivets pulled from the wall. He flailed, the radio smashed somewhere below him, and the stairs crumpled like an accordion.
Hanging in midair, Clark's knuckles were white on the rim of the hole for the stairway until he pulled himself up and back into the tilted room. It looked as though there were no other way out, but he found a hidden maintenance panel and jimmied it off the wall. Behind the panel was a crawlspace, which led to a bigger space which slid out into a tiny room, and Clark just took a moment to stare, in awe. It took him a good ten seconds to even make sense of what he was seeing because… It was an escape pod. Over seven feet long, smooth gray metal, and made for a single passenger. Shaped like a capsule-like a giant cold pill for Rau's sake, there was a glass panel where a cosmonaut's head would go, but the rest was sleek silver. He circled it, gauging the location of the power source. Not enough room at the top end so… his heart stopped beating while he checked the foot, which looked, when you really studied it, longer than…yes. There was a propelling mechanism to power it through space for escape. It wouldn't have enough power to get it off the planet, or out of the atmosphere, and that, he supposed, was the only reason it was still here. It was made to be launched by the mother ship, but once launched; it ran on its own power source. A power source he could steal and use for their own radio.
It was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
In 1972, the escape pod had been loaded into the craft through a hatch, a square opening not much bigger then the pod itself, and the hydraulics, of course, no longer worked. But Clark's adrenaline was pumping, and through what had to have been sheer strength of will, he got his fingernails, then his fingers into the crack around the edge of the hatch, and pulled. The sunlight that hit his face made him smile, and after a moment or two of protesting muscles and protesting metal, he had the crack a foot wide, and then further and further open. A hinge gave way and instead of sliding back into the interior of the craft the door folded outward, peeling up and away from the ship, but it didn't matter. He could get leverage from here. He stuck his head out into the fresh air, waving. "Found it, Bruce!"
Bruce was about twenty feet below, grinning up at him. "Project X was time travel!" Bruce yelled, but Clark just waved and kept his shoulder against the door, pushing until he had enough room, skinning the door hatch from its frame.
"Get out of the line of fire!" Clark got behind the pod and slid it forward, shoving it toward the opening. When the thing was three-quarters of the way out he yelled, "Timber!" and the pod was slipping out of the craft and landing with a loud thumping crash on the dirt below. He stuck his head out of the window. Bruce was already examining the capsule and Clark was halfway out the window himself when he heard an ominous metallic creak from just above his head. It was the door he'd opened, the hatch he'd peeled back, loose from the spacecraft. Somehow when he'd pushed the capsule through he'd dislodged it further, and now a large, bent piece of metal was only hanging by a thread. Before he could even quite process it, the metal sheared away and began to fall, plummeting toward the ground. "Bruce!" he yelled, or must have, because Bruce turned to look up, but everything was a blur and all Clark knew was surging down, diving through the air, racing the falling panel to beat it to Bruce. He did, swooping down, and instead of being hit by the falling hunk of metal, Bruce was hit by Clark, landing with his shoulder in Bruce's chest and propelling him roughly but safely out of the line of fire just as the panel hit the earth with a heavy thud, barely missing both them and the silver pod.
Bruce lay there on his back, breath knocked out of him for a moment before he propped himself up on his elbows, eyes wide and startled. "Clark," he said to the man beside him, between pants and wheezes. "I think you may have gotten your powers back."
Superman couldn't fly. He couldn't even leap small buildings. But he could clear the width of the escape pod and he was grinning and Bruce was grinning after he did it. "See if running helps," Bruce egged him on, and Clark tried that next, dropping back far enough for a test. He did, and it did, running always helped, and he leapt a long, high arc before collapsing on the ground beside Bruce, still sitting in the dirt, laughing. "So what's next?"
"I don't know."
They both sat there, staring over at the escape pod. "I guess we still need it," Clark finally said.
"Plan A and Plan B."
"Which one's which?"
Bruce splayed his hands, for once out of opinions, but his eyes were lit with hope. "You got me." He sat back on his elbows, looked up at the sun. "It's better the higher we go, right?"
"I think so," Clark said. "I mean, obviously. I couldn't do this a few hours ago."
"If this is our window, we better head up." Bruce jerked his head toward the top of the mountain. "Time's running out."
"I can't handle the pod and you, too."
Bruce stared at him blankly. "And?"
"I'll come back for you."
"Like hell you will." Bruce clambered to his feet. "Let's go."
Logbook, Day 140, 13:48:02 hours: S for B. We have reached the top of the mountain in an effort to succeed with either escape plan but both possibilities have failed. The radio, even with power from the capsule, cannot maintain signal strength to reach outside of this planet's atmosphere. And I am unable, still, to fly. Bruce's infection has worsened to the point that sepsis is definitely present, poisoning his blood, and the window of opportunity re: magnetic field is closing in under an hour.
Clark stood in the light layer of snow at the apex of the mountain, staring down at terrain they had traversed to get here, at the far-away mountains that had housed them for so long, then past them at the horizon. Behind him, Bruce tried to make the radio cooperate and ahead, he saw the world. He could see for miles and he could see things that he now knew for sure human men could not see. The point of a hawk's beak overhead, the small white tail of a rabbit far below. He heard a fish splash in the mile-away river they'd rafted as easily as he could hear Bruce's accelerated heart rate, rapid with fever. He could do all of things and probably more. Yet he could not do the one thing that could save them. He could not fly.
"Clark, what are you doing?" Bruce said, face flushed with the sickness that was edging up on him, which had been edging up on him for days. That was overtaking him. "I know what you're thinking, and don't."
"Don't what?" Clark stalled, because of course he knew. He was thinking it. "A jump-off might work. It's got me up in the air before." Once, he didn't say. And just barely. Under very different conditions.
"I'm not saying don't try a jump. I mean don't try it alone. You're right, it might work. A running start helps you leap, a falling start might help you fly."
Clark didn't answer.
"Step away from the edge."
Clark turned to him but didn't move from his perch.
"Okay, I give up." Bruce dropped the radio in the snow. "So help me if you jump off this mountain without me I will kill you, Clark." He stumbled toward him.
"I'll come right back for you. It might work."
"And it might not, but whichever way it goes, but if we go down, we go down together."
"If I don't make it, you still could, Bruce." Clark tried to find the words. What he said next was technically true, even if he didn't buy it himself. "You may be able to get radio reception if you keep working on it."
"Clark," Bruce said. "Shut up."
"Are you sure?" Clark swallowed, searching Bruce's face. "I haven't flown in months. I've-"
"Practice run. We come back for the pod if we don't die from the fall."
Despite the sick dread filling his chest, Clark felt a smile tugging at his mouth. "Nice optimism."
"That's you, remember? On three."
They both stepped to the very edge of the precipice and Clark watched the snow his step dislodged crumble and fall away into the abyss. "I've never felt like there was so much at stake in my life," he said, voice barely audible. "I mean, intellectually, that's not true, but…" He stopped talking, because he was rambling now, nervous. "It's you." He wrapped his right arm around Bruce, hooking it around his chest and under his arm and holding tight. For over four months he would have died had he tried this. For the last twenty weeks he'd been hobbled and injured or stumbling; occasionally walking but never, ever flying. If he had tried this at any time in the last four plus months, he'd have sunk like a stone and Bruce too, dashing themselves to death on the rocks below. Yet now he was stepping into nothing and bringing his best friend with him. His best friend who surely couldn't fly, who would always fall like a stone and land broken on the rocks below.
"It'll be fine," Bruce said, and his voice didn't even shake, perfectly convincing. Or would've been, if Clark couldn't hear his heart speed even faster.
"On three, then."
Bruce nodded, he knew what that meant. Clark gripped him tighter. "One…"
They both, in tandem, said "Two," and stepped from the ledge.
Falling. Bruce had jumped plenty of times before. Batman jumped every night, and he knew falling and jumps and grapple guns and ziplines, and this was none of that. This was a horrifying, stomach-turning freefall that went on and on as his fever-addled mind watched the ground surge up to meet them. This was it, and it was over and they were hurtling down and down and down until… they weren't. Until everything was flipped and spun and the world rotated on its axle and they were on their way up. Beside him and against him Clark was laughing, joyous and laughing and they were soaring up into the cold, beautiful sky like they had not in so long that it was a lifetime. Swoops and dives and Clark even tried a full flip, because apparently Clark, once able to fly again was like a bird too long-caged, or Dick, once you let him touch a trapeze. His breath was gone, and he was laughing and Clark was laughing, giddy and ecstatic and then they were on solid ground again where Bruce had to lean against the cool metal of the escape pod to recover his breath and sanity until his body stopped shaking.
"We haven't broken the planet's gravity," Clark said.
"Put on your cape." Bruce pulled it from escape pod and passed it to him. "We're just about to."
Clark stood there frozen, staring down at the red fabric in his hands, eyes unfocused.
"I have faith in you, Superman."
Clark nodded, still silent.
"Not that you're perfect. You are a very obnoxious patient. Remember that if you ever have to convalesce again."
"Because you're a bundle of pleasant, warm compliance," Clark said but his mind was still obviously miles away, his eyes distant. "I would've died four or five times over if it wasn't for you."
"Pretty sure the imminent death's been mutual." Bruce gave up on waiting for Clark to do it and fastened the cape around Clark's neck, over the filthy Soviet flight suit. "Your point?"
Clark lips crooked into a smile, finally coming fully back to himself and looking right at him. "Thanks, Bruce. No matter what happens-even if the g-force tears us apart- I'm glad. It's selfish, but I'm glad it's been you."
Bruce smoothed Clark's cape. "Says the man who risked his life to find me."
"That was… that was a spur of the moment thing." Clark inhaled and exhaled and opened up the pod so Bruce could climb in. "Of course I'm glad I did," he said, now really smiling, though mostly to himself, and for the first time in a long time Bruce thought of apple pie and cornfields, of skyscrapers and traffic cops and country roads and baseball. Of friends and family and home. He blamed septicemia.
"Clark, neither one of us would be even this close to getting home if we weren't… who we are." Bruce's gaze found the mountains from which they'd started the journey, far in the distance. Fever was making his head pound and obviously it was getting to him because his next words were even rawer. "Neither one of us would be here if we weren't who we are to each other, either." His heart felt like it would burst so he gave himself a full breath before continuing, swallowing the hitch in his throat. "And now, if you don't mind, I think I want to table this discussion until we get home, because temperature spikes are compromising my emotional filter."
Clark laughed and hugged him, thumping his back and Bruce allowed it for a moment before extricating himself to climb into the silver capsule. Clark checked the latches, pulling the thing to the edge of the mountain. He felt the capsule slide, then heard the thump of Clark's arm wrapping around the circumference, and then together, Clark, and Bruce, in the escape pod, both fell. For the second time in a few minutes, Bruce watched the world go by, first on a descent, then on ascent, hurtling up. Through the little clear panel he watched, as long as he could, the world they'd lived in for the past twenty weeks as it fell away. Its rivers and mountains melted into a patchwork quilt below him and then he looked up, up at the clouds and blue sky and sunshine. As the planet's atmosphere thinned, he shook and the capsule shook. He felt the planet try to keep them, suck them back down and keep them, but Clark powered through and they were breaking the damn hellhole's hold, shooting up into the dark void of space. Through the window then were just stars, and visible just at the edge of the viewing panel, as it had been the whole time, was the hem of Superman's red cape, trapped between two of them as Clark brought them home.