bagheera_san (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bagheera_san) wrote2007-08-08 04:00 pm
bagheera_san) wrote2007-08-08 04:00 pm
Fic: The Light and the Silence (2/?)
Here's chapter two, now with added Bat-characters and more Smallville cast. I'm using a lot of minor Smallville characters in this as well as the regulars, for no reason other than it's fun. And like Lost, this chapter answers absolutely none of your questions, but raises a couple of new ones.
Title: The Light and the Silence (1/?)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Clex, but there are other pairings, slash, het and...um... other.
Fandom: Smallville, a couple of DC characters, inspired by the Man of Steel Annual #3, an Elseworlds Superman story called "Unforgiven", of which I posted scans here.
Genre: AU, science-fiction, action/adventure
Warnings: some violence
Summary:
Two
Grey dust whirled in their wake as the Sunrider shot over the surface of the moon, its wingtips almost touching the ground. Kal-El gripped his seat tightly whenever the space glider lurched and bounced, at once terrified and elated by Lex's determination to break any reasonable speed limit. And then all of a sudden they shot over the edge of a dark abyss, the ground plunging away beneath them.
Resembling a thorny, many-legged spider, Arkham crouched in the shadows of the Mare Marginis, on the edge between the near side and the far side of the moon. The prison sat in the center of the dark volcanic crater, glowing red firepits surrounding it like a clutch of infernal eggs. Only the highest of its black spires reached up into the sunlight; this was where Lex guided their small glider.
With shaky fingers and a dry mouth, Kal-El hailed the prison colony and requested permission to land, giving them his name and his ID as a student of the Archives and stating his request to interview a prisoner. There was a long silence before they answered, and Kal heard Lex exhale in relief when they did.
"We need to verify your signature, Sir," a scratchy voice came over the com. Kal-El reached into one of the small pockets on his body suit and pulled out the blue crystal that carried his house signature in the shape of the El family crest. He inserted it into the proper slot on the communication console, which read it and transmitted the data to Arkham. Again there were a tense few seconds before the prison replied.
"Permission to land granted. Prepare to dock at airlock seven."
The channel went dead. The firepits cast a ghostly red glow on their faces as they flew towards the docking ports, which were located on the single high turret reaching up towards the stars like the hand of a drowning person.
"What about you?" Kal-El asked his companion when he remembered that he would not descend alone into that hell.
Keeping one hand on the flight controls, Lex reached inside his patched jacket and rummaged in an inside pocket, then held up a servant collar. The black material was slack and as smooth as the jacket he wore, but it was not animal hide. A touch from a Kryptonian would turn it into a hard and near unbreakable crystalline material. Most servants more an ear tag or a wristband instead; masters who insisted on collars either wanted to remind their servants of their status, or feared they might run away. An ear tag could be cut off, a hand severed, but only a Kryptonian could take off a collar without beheading the wearer.
"No one will ask a question about a servant," Lex replied slyly.
With a graceful arc, they swooped down on the docking bay and docked at an airlock. Lex turned towards Kal and offered him the collar. It was the first time Kal had touched one; he rubbed the strange material between his gloved thumb and index finger with a mixed sense of curiosity and apprehension. His father, he knew, frowned on the collars. "A barbaric habit", Jor-El would say with the distantly sour expression of disapproval he so often wore, although Kal was not sure what exactly made it more barbaric than the tiny ear tags the Kents wore: was it the fact that you had to touch your servant to put it on, or was it the need to stress your dominance thus?
"Well?"
Kal looked up from the collar, startled, and found Lex watching him with raised brows.
"Sorry," Kal mumbled and opened the collar awkwardly. Lex tipped back his head, exposing his slim neck. Kal could not help but stare at the pale skin stretched over taut tendons and at the groove between his collarbones. It was quite possibly the most bare skin he had ever seen. To fasten the collar, he had to reach around Lex's neck and lean quite close; the blood thundered in his veins as he did so and a heavy warmth pooled his legs and belly.
It was the same feeling he sometimes got when watching sports. While physical exertion was unsuitable for Kryptonians, it was fashionable to be a patron or owner of a successful human athlete, and many of Kal's richer classmates would even go to the arenas and stadiums to watch the human competitions. The archaic team sports that had been popular with humans before the liberation were prohibited now, but swimming, tennis and sprinting were still highly popular, despite the among of skin visible thanks to the athletes' skimpy costumes. When he had been younger, Kal had often tried to argue with his father to let him at least watch this or that game, but Jor-El disapproved strongly of it.
Kal tried to ignore his body's reaction, but it still made him uneasy. The thin black band kept slipping through his fingers. When he managed to fasten it, he was presented with a new problem – in order to activate the collar, he had to touch his thumb to it without the layer of fabric of his gloves between his skin and the collar, so the material could verify his Kryptonian thumbprint.
Trembling, color high in his cheeks, Kal pulled off his right glove and reached out. But he was clumsy, he always had been, it had often made Nanny Kent laugh and tease him. His thumb found the collar, but the bare knuckles of his hand brushed against Lex's jaw and the touch was electric, petrifying. He could not move, could not drag his hand away, because his body was frozen in shock. His heart had stopped beating, his brain had stopped working, and all he knew was a sense memory of salty tears in his mouth, and the warm touch of motherly fingers wiping his cheek –
"I see they're designed to never let the slave forget his station," Lex's dry voice mused, and Kal jerked his hand back, the spell broken. He opened his eyes just in time to see Lex rub at the uncomfortably tight collar, casting a thoughtful look in Kal's direction. Mortified, Kal rose from the co-pilot's seat and squeezed out of the cock pit into the storage area, heading for the airlock.
*
The welcome committee was not what Kal had expected. There was a tall woman in a battle-suit similar to the ones the city guard of Metropolis wore, but bolstered with far more armor and a helmet with an opaque visor. She carried a huge laser gun and looked ready to fight of a battalion of Apokoliptian parademons. As soon as he exited the airlock, she gave a snappy military salute.
By her side stood another tall woman. This one was dressed in clean white coat and had her dark wavy hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She had eyes like black kryptonite, sharp and hard, their stoniness in stark contrast to her lush red lips. She carried a data pad and a stylus, and in the breast pocket of her lab coat a pair of glasses. The label on the pocket read, "Dr. Helen Bryce."
The third in the group seemed to hide behind the woman with the big gun, in spite of the fact that he was the only Kryptonian in the room besides Kal. The man was so short Kal wondered how he had ever been allowed to hatch from his birthing matrix, and he had a sallow, tired face. The crest on his bodysuit denoted him as member of the House of Ur.
Maintaining the proper distance, Kal offered a nervous greeting.
"Undersecretary Tan-Ur," the man replied, his voice dull with either boredom or exhaustion. "This is an unusual request…"
Kal stuttered through his explanation, repeating the excuse Lex had invented for their visit. He nearly forgot to hand Tan-Ur the datapad Lex had prepared for him. The Kryptonian's dull eyes lit up for a moment when he noticed the amount of money transferred to his accounts, just as Kal's voice nearly faltered when he said the words, "I would like to speak to the Batman in person."
Tan-Ur murmured something under his breath, then said to his staff, "Take our guest to Kerr. This is his business."
With a curt not to Kal-El, Tan-Ur excused himself. Kal stared after him and felt uneasiness like suffocating vines crawling over his body. He had known, from lacking it, what power money possessed, but he did not like handling that power at all.
"Follow me," the armed woman bellowed and turned on her heels.
*
Through a succession of badly lit elevators and too bright corridors, they finally arrived at Arkham's main control room.
The blue glow and flicker of holographic monitors, many of them turned to a dead channel, cast an eerie light into the otherwise pitch black room. Furtive technicians and doctors worked at their stations, while heavily armed guards hulked in the shadows by every door. It was filled with buzzing and humming, like a beehive, and similarly hot. Kal felt sweat break out under his body suit, and the familiar pressure that meant that the suit's fabric was working hard to absorb the transpiration and keep him clean. At the end there was a wide desk, behind it a huge chair, and above and behind the desk, watching the watchers, was the window of another room, looking down on the control room.
The glass off that room had a greenish tinge, and it gave the hair of the man standing behind it the same green hue. He was tall and thin as a reed, with a mop of wild hair.
Unsettled by a human staring down at them like this with a smirk as if this were his kingdom and they but powerless supplicants begging for an audience he would not grant, Kal-El asked the armed woman, "Who is that?"
"Joe Kerr, Sir," she answered. "The director. He runs this place, at least the civilian part. Believe me, you don't want to talk to him. He's – " she lifted a hand from her gun, and made a vague gesture.
"Crazy?" Lex asked, making Kal jump. He had almost forgotten his presence. She obviously hadn't, because she barely tilted her head back at Lex. Through the visor, Kal could just barely make out her face – she was young and she flashed an unexpectedly roguish grin before going serious again.
"So crazy he's sane again. No, you're gonna talk to Dent."
At her words, there was a motion in the shadows behind the desk, and Kal spotted the dark shape of a broad-shouldered man slouching in the chair. He moved forward, and one half of his face was suddenly lit by the blue flicker of a screen, the other still barely visible. He had wavy brown hair and face that reminded Kal faintly of Jonathan Kent's face when a smile softened the servant's frown for a moment – they had the same broad, plain and pleasant features, although Dent had to be many years younger, being closer to Kal in age.
Dent was fiddling with something, tossing it back and forth between his hands. One of his hands moved over the desk in the blue twilight like a pallid spider and suddenly flattened with a loud snap. All around them, technicians and orderlies winced and bent a little closer to their work stations.
"Visitors, Sir," their armed guard said bravely as she strode towards Dent's desk; Kal, Lex and Dr. Bryce trailing after her.
Dent did not answer, but lifted his hand from the table and gazed at what was under it for a moment. Then he smiled apologetically and an palpable sigh went through the room. Even the machines seemed to hum louder again. "Thank you, Colonel Lane," he said to their guard. His voice was deep and pleasant. "What brings you to Arkham, gentlemen?"
A subtle shove against the small of his back made Kal flinch and lurch forward. "I – I am Kal-El of the House of El, a student of history from the Archives of the Protectorate Metropolis and we – I wish to interview one of your prisoners."
Dent fixed first Kal, then Lex, his eyes glittering as they lingered a moment.
"Metropolis," he mused and reached up to run his fingers thoughtfully over the silken tie he wore. His suit was old-fashioned, the kind of attire a human male might have worn before the liberation, only the color scheme was odd. The jacket was a pearly white, the shirt underneath black and the tie white again. "A beautiful city. I remember going there on a school trip as a boy – but you don't want to hear that. I'm Assistant Director Harvey Dent. Interview a prisoner, you say? That is a first. Aren't your history books already written?"
Gradually, Kal realized that he was more terrified than ever before in his life. His teachers and his father had on occasion intimidated him, but here he was, in a roomful of humans, and every single of them seemed dangerous and threatening, and Kal felt very far from home. He wanted to run, instead he had to answer, to justify himself,
"I have additional questions."
Dent smiled again, placid and a little melancholy, "Who do you want to speak to, then?"
"The Batman."
The sound of his own voice in the otherwise deadly silent room deafened Kal-El. Dent stilled, then rose suddenly from his chair and paced a few feet, his back to them, his face hidden. He had a slight limp, but still there was power behind his large steps, commanding respect.
When he spoke again his voice sounded eerie and faint from the shadows. "The Batman. Yes. Do you know how many people have managed to escape from Arkham?"
Wincing at the barked question, Kal shook his head.
"One. Exactly one. And do you know how many times this one prisoner has escaped? No? Colonel Lane?"
"Seventeen times, Sir," Lane answered, a note of awe carrying in her voice, the kind of awe reserved for geniuses and madmen.
"Seventeen times, Mr El. And each and every single time they've brought him back in. Questioned him. Straightened him out. Punished him. Forgotten him down there – and each time he has escaped again. Director Kerr has personally handled his case for a while now." Dent stopped pacing to stare up at the observation window. Joe Kerr stood still as a statue, but a mad slash of a smile distorted his face now, as if he had heard every single word of their conversation and found it terribly amusing.
"They're having private therapy sessions," Dent continued softly. "Director Kerr is very… dedicated to his case."
He turned on his heels and the other half of his face that had so far remained in the shadows suddenly came into light. Kal sucked in a shocked breath. Dent's handsome face was badly disfigured, ravaged by scars and colored purple like old bruises. He had never seen anything more hideous – just looking at it was painful.
"I brought him in myself, the first seven times," Dent said, the normal side of his face tired while the scarred side seemed to be grinning. He touched the scars with the tips of his fingers, "The seventh time Bruce nearly got me."
Bruce? Dent's tongue must have slipped – or was this the Batman's name? He had to have a normal name, he was human after all, although the thought of a man behind the dark mask still seemed strange to Kal.
Dent lifted his left fist, badly scarred as that side of his face and suddenly tossed the small round piece of silver metal high into the air. It seemed to fly for endless seconds, glinting in the dark, then finally he caught it in his fist. Slowly, he uncurled his fingers and stared down at his palm. The scarred side of his mouth twisted downwards, and he pocketed the silver disk. "So do you still wish to see him?"
Kal did not. But he knew that this was more than a simple question, and he had the sudden absurd idea that if he said 'no' now and tried to leave, every single human in the room, in the whole prison perhaps, would suddenly turn against him, tearing him apart like bloodthirsty predators. And when it came down to it, to flesh and bones, a Kryptonian was no less vulnerable than a human, and he was alone here , all alone among aliens.
Kal's breath hitched, and his answer broke the tension. "Yes."
Dent sank down in his chair. All life seemed to seep out of him, like a fading hologram of a man. "Give them the tour, Lane," he sighed tiredly.
*
They descended into Arkham using an escalator. "Level One," the writing on the wall said in huge, faded white letters as they entered the working halls. A cacophony of noise rose from beneath them, and Kal felt sweat break out anew under his bodysuit that had nothing to do with heat and everything to with pure dread. Metropolis was a quiet city, only pedestrians and softly humming hover cars and bikes now filled the lanes once built for stinking, noisy combustion engine automobiles. This was a hellhole of noise, the very air singing and shivering with it, blasting against his cowl-covered ears.
The different working areas were separated by high walls, like rooms lacking a ceiling, and autonomous robotic drones patrolled over the heads of the prisoners, some flying, some skittering across the walls and floors like large bugs.
They descended in the centre of what was a star-shaped structure, with five wings going off into different directions, each as wide as whole blocks in Metropolis and longer than Kal-El could see. The ceilings and far ends vanished into dim twilight, so far away they were. It was the hugest building Kal had ever been to, larger even than the Palace of Science, as big as a whole district of Metropolis.
"How many people are there in Arkham?" he asked Colonel Lane, horrified at the complex's size.
She tipped up her visor, and now for the first time Kal could fully see her face: she had to be his age, and while her brown eyes sparked with unexpected spirit, she had faint lines around her mouth and between her brows that had to come from frowns, not smiles. "Didn't do your homework, huh?" she asked, seizing him up critically.
"Colonel," Dr Bryce admonished stiffly. Of all the humans Kal had so far encountered in Arkham, she was the only one who paid proper respect to him, but her cool deference was as unnerving as the others' brazen disrespect.
Lane shot Dr Bryce a look that made Kal swallow. All good humor suddenly drained from her eyes and they became hard and hateful. "You got a problem?"
The other woman didn't answer, and Lane eventually averted her gaze with a dark glower. The tension between the two women remained palpable.
"Approximately two million inmates," Lex said when no one else answered. "It would be more if children being born in Arkham wouldn't be shipped off to the farming belt."
Kal turned around and stared at him, aghast, but Lex returned only an impassive look, volunteering no more information.
"Level Two" of Arkham was a huge circular shaft going down from the center of the star shaped upper level, a vast grey abyss reaching many stories into the ground. Here the infernal noise was gradually replaced by exhausted silence. Cells were stacked one over another like a skyscraper-high pile of tiny grey shoeboxes, all of them with a transparent fourth wall, so the occupants could at all times be observed by the black drones flitting back and forth, security cameras and small laser guns mounted on their backs.
They got on an elevator that was no more than a platform with a railing suspended from strong cables, shaking and shivering as it went down. The shaft was drafty and down from the depths the smell of ozone and human bodies drifted up, and many other elevators like their own carried grey-faced prisoners in stained prison overalls up and down. Kal clutched the railing and tried very hard not to look down or up.
"The elevators are safe, but we have a couple of suicides each day," Lane said when she noticed his discomfort. "There's drugs in the food to prevent it, but they go on hunger strikes. They've got this saying – 'only two kinds of people get out of Arkham: dead men and the Batman'."
Dr Bryce made an indignant noise at Lane's lack of respect in addressing a Kryptonian, but Kal was too far from everything that made sense to care.
At the very bottom, after long minutes of descending, there was a single door. "Level Three," it said in English and Kryptonese. They walked towards it, their steps echoing loudly, from the dull thud of Lane's boots to the sharp clicking of Bryce's heels. Kal craned his neck, but there was only grey twilight and the endless shaft with elevators.
Lane pressed a metal key into the octagonal groove to the left of the door and it slid to the side. The corridor behind it was surprisingly bright and clean.
"This," Dr Bryce said, speaking up without having to be provoked for the first time, and with obvious pride, "is the only part of Arkham that actually is productive. We have made immeasurable progress in the study of metahumans."
Kal-El had heard of metahumans. The human genome contained certain sequences that, when activated by mutagenic substances or radiation, could lead to dangerous and unpredictable mutations even in adults. All humans had to undergo routine tests to prevent any threats to the general populace, and active metahumans would be sent to Belle Reve to be evaluated and, if possible, undergo behavioral correction measures. The system worked very well, there hadn't been any metahuman related incidents in years.
Colonel Lane was clutching her gun tightly to her chest, and had given the lead over to Dr Bryce, who guided them through a maze of identical corridors. A few times a doctor in a lab-coat passed them by, and once, a subdued prisoner on a stretcher was wheeled past them. It all seemed relatively peaceful and clean, and Kal breathed a little easier again.
A few corners further into the maze, a bespectacled doctor was gently herding a female prisoner in hospital scrubs towards them. She was young, her face pale and her blonde hair shorn without great care. Her cheeks were hollow, her walk jittery as that of an old woman, and she had dark smudges under her eyes. Colonel Lane stopped dead and after a few steps, Dr Bryce turned around with an annoyed look, while the doctor was still leading the young prisoner towards them. "Colonel?" Bryce asked impatiently. "Is there a problem?"
The other doctor nodded at Dr Bryce, and he and his charge shuffled past them, but then suddenly the girl lifted her head and stared straight at Lane. She faltered in her step, opened her mouth and swayed against the wall, then caught herself and suddenly jumped towards Lane, seizing her by the lapel of her uniform.
"Lois," she whispered, her eyes suddenly wide and feverishly bright, as if the person behind them had woken up from a long stupor, "Lois, I knew you'd get me – "
Lane's face was white, all hard angles, and she raised her gaze above the poor girl's shoulders and stared straight ahead as she pushed past her, sending her stumbling away again. "Let's go," she said roughly. "We haven't got all damn day."
The girl started wailing and ranting, and the doctor grabbed her, attempting to subdue her as they quickly put distance between them and the uncomfortable display of human frailty. Kal felt the deep need to stop and turn back and do something about it and he was not sure if he was supposed to feel that way or if it was this horrible place confusing him so.
"Will it take much longer?"
"No," Lane said. "We're there."
It was a door like all the others, but it had no numbers or letters on it. First Bryce, then Lane put their keys into the slots and had their retinas scanned. The door opened. Dr Bryce stepped inside, while Lane stayed outside the door, guarding it with a stony, faraway expression.
The cell was the bare minimum of a room: four grey walls, a ceiling, bare stone floor, and a toilet. Worse than the overpowering smell of bodily wastes however was the lingering scent of decay, as if the very room was dying.
A heap sat in the middle of the square cell. It might have been a man. There was a head of dark hair, shaggy and long, interspersed with grey strands. He had broad shoulders and one sinewy arm, the other one, though, only reached to the biceps – from there on down it was a mutilated robotic arm, a tangle of metal plates and wires. The only piece of cloth on him was a pair of ragged grey shorts, his legs and feet were bare. Every inch of skin was covered in scars and bruises, in grime and hair. Some scars were tiny, criss-crossed silver lines, others furious red gashes and grooves as if the flesh had been carved out with a spoon. And yet it was skin, bare-naked human skin.
For the first time in his life Kal-El was not shocked by nakedness. There was no capacity for shock left in him. The creature cowering before him on the floor was beaten, abused and emaciated. It was powerless, merely a spot of pain and despair, alive only by stubborn willpower.
Kal was too horrified to be afraid. The question wrangled its way out of his throat. "Why?"
Very, very slowly the dark head lifted. A skull stared at Kal, just barely covered by skin. And yet, beneath all the wasted, deadly horror, there was the shape of a face that must once have looked remarkably like Kal's own.
A single blue eye, for the other was replaced by a dull cybernetic prosthesis, stared up at him. It wasn't mad. It wasn't brutal. It wasn't afraid or broken. This seemed to be single unscathed part of the man; this steel-blue eye and the will behind it. Kal's breath grew ragged, all the carefully maintained boundaries between species crumbling with that single gaze into a human eye.
What he had felt seeing the sick girl in the corridor, the aching need to do something, to comfort, to alleviate pain, to save this man, came back with thousand-fold force.
The cybernetic eye whirred and blinked, but Kal-El could only stare at the human one.
"Fool," Batman rasped hoarsely, and in the blink of an eye unfolded into a whirlwind of destruction, knocking Kal into the wall with bruising force and grabbing Dr Bryce by the lapel of her labcoat to swing her around until she stumbled on her high heels and fell. For a second he stood with her data pad clutched in his fist, then he hurled it down on the floor hard enough to break it. Sparks and metal parts flew around as Kal gasped for air, his stomach constricting painfully, his eyes swimming with tears.
"You won't get out this time," Dr Bryce hissed, then shrieked at Lex, "Don't stand there and gape, do something – "
"Freeze!"
They all did. Colonel Lane stepped into the room, her mighty gun held high. "No one moves. You, get out of that corner to where I can see you." Lex obeyed and carefully stepped around Dr Bryce's fallen form into the middle of the room, his hands held palm-out in front of his chest in a placating gesture, while his eyes met the Batman's. They stared at each other like large cats, betraying nothing, never blinking.
Title: The Light and the Silence (1/?)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Clex, but there are other pairings, slash, het and...um... other.
Fandom: Smallville, a couple of DC characters, inspired by the Man of Steel Annual #3, an Elseworlds Superman story called "Unforgiven", of which I posted scans here.
Genre: AU, science-fiction, action/adventure
Warnings: some violence
Summary:
Two
Grey dust whirled in their wake as the Sunrider shot over the surface of the moon, its wingtips almost touching the ground. Kal-El gripped his seat tightly whenever the space glider lurched and bounced, at once terrified and elated by Lex's determination to break any reasonable speed limit. And then all of a sudden they shot over the edge of a dark abyss, the ground plunging away beneath them.
Resembling a thorny, many-legged spider, Arkham crouched in the shadows of the Mare Marginis, on the edge between the near side and the far side of the moon. The prison sat in the center of the dark volcanic crater, glowing red firepits surrounding it like a clutch of infernal eggs. Only the highest of its black spires reached up into the sunlight; this was where Lex guided their small glider.
With shaky fingers and a dry mouth, Kal-El hailed the prison colony and requested permission to land, giving them his name and his ID as a student of the Archives and stating his request to interview a prisoner. There was a long silence before they answered, and Kal heard Lex exhale in relief when they did.
"We need to verify your signature, Sir," a scratchy voice came over the com. Kal-El reached into one of the small pockets on his body suit and pulled out the blue crystal that carried his house signature in the shape of the El family crest. He inserted it into the proper slot on the communication console, which read it and transmitted the data to Arkham. Again there were a tense few seconds before the prison replied.
"Permission to land granted. Prepare to dock at airlock seven."
The channel went dead. The firepits cast a ghostly red glow on their faces as they flew towards the docking ports, which were located on the single high turret reaching up towards the stars like the hand of a drowning person.
"What about you?" Kal-El asked his companion when he remembered that he would not descend alone into that hell.
Keeping one hand on the flight controls, Lex reached inside his patched jacket and rummaged in an inside pocket, then held up a servant collar. The black material was slack and as smooth as the jacket he wore, but it was not animal hide. A touch from a Kryptonian would turn it into a hard and near unbreakable crystalline material. Most servants more an ear tag or a wristband instead; masters who insisted on collars either wanted to remind their servants of their status, or feared they might run away. An ear tag could be cut off, a hand severed, but only a Kryptonian could take off a collar without beheading the wearer.
"No one will ask a question about a servant," Lex replied slyly.
With a graceful arc, they swooped down on the docking bay and docked at an airlock. Lex turned towards Kal and offered him the collar. It was the first time Kal had touched one; he rubbed the strange material between his gloved thumb and index finger with a mixed sense of curiosity and apprehension. His father, he knew, frowned on the collars. "A barbaric habit", Jor-El would say with the distantly sour expression of disapproval he so often wore, although Kal was not sure what exactly made it more barbaric than the tiny ear tags the Kents wore: was it the fact that you had to touch your servant to put it on, or was it the need to stress your dominance thus?
"Well?"
Kal looked up from the collar, startled, and found Lex watching him with raised brows.
"Sorry," Kal mumbled and opened the collar awkwardly. Lex tipped back his head, exposing his slim neck. Kal could not help but stare at the pale skin stretched over taut tendons and at the groove between his collarbones. It was quite possibly the most bare skin he had ever seen. To fasten the collar, he had to reach around Lex's neck and lean quite close; the blood thundered in his veins as he did so and a heavy warmth pooled his legs and belly.
It was the same feeling he sometimes got when watching sports. While physical exertion was unsuitable for Kryptonians, it was fashionable to be a patron or owner of a successful human athlete, and many of Kal's richer classmates would even go to the arenas and stadiums to watch the human competitions. The archaic team sports that had been popular with humans before the liberation were prohibited now, but swimming, tennis and sprinting were still highly popular, despite the among of skin visible thanks to the athletes' skimpy costumes. When he had been younger, Kal had often tried to argue with his father to let him at least watch this or that game, but Jor-El disapproved strongly of it.
Kal tried to ignore his body's reaction, but it still made him uneasy. The thin black band kept slipping through his fingers. When he managed to fasten it, he was presented with a new problem – in order to activate the collar, he had to touch his thumb to it without the layer of fabric of his gloves between his skin and the collar, so the material could verify his Kryptonian thumbprint.
Trembling, color high in his cheeks, Kal pulled off his right glove and reached out. But he was clumsy, he always had been, it had often made Nanny Kent laugh and tease him. His thumb found the collar, but the bare knuckles of his hand brushed against Lex's jaw and the touch was electric, petrifying. He could not move, could not drag his hand away, because his body was frozen in shock. His heart had stopped beating, his brain had stopped working, and all he knew was a sense memory of salty tears in his mouth, and the warm touch of motherly fingers wiping his cheek –
"I see they're designed to never let the slave forget his station," Lex's dry voice mused, and Kal jerked his hand back, the spell broken. He opened his eyes just in time to see Lex rub at the uncomfortably tight collar, casting a thoughtful look in Kal's direction. Mortified, Kal rose from the co-pilot's seat and squeezed out of the cock pit into the storage area, heading for the airlock.
*
The welcome committee was not what Kal had expected. There was a tall woman in a battle-suit similar to the ones the city guard of Metropolis wore, but bolstered with far more armor and a helmet with an opaque visor. She carried a huge laser gun and looked ready to fight of a battalion of Apokoliptian parademons. As soon as he exited the airlock, she gave a snappy military salute.
By her side stood another tall woman. This one was dressed in clean white coat and had her dark wavy hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She had eyes like black kryptonite, sharp and hard, their stoniness in stark contrast to her lush red lips. She carried a data pad and a stylus, and in the breast pocket of her lab coat a pair of glasses. The label on the pocket read, "Dr. Helen Bryce."
The third in the group seemed to hide behind the woman with the big gun, in spite of the fact that he was the only Kryptonian in the room besides Kal. The man was so short Kal wondered how he had ever been allowed to hatch from his birthing matrix, and he had a sallow, tired face. The crest on his bodysuit denoted him as member of the House of Ur.
Maintaining the proper distance, Kal offered a nervous greeting.
"Undersecretary Tan-Ur," the man replied, his voice dull with either boredom or exhaustion. "This is an unusual request…"
Kal stuttered through his explanation, repeating the excuse Lex had invented for their visit. He nearly forgot to hand Tan-Ur the datapad Lex had prepared for him. The Kryptonian's dull eyes lit up for a moment when he noticed the amount of money transferred to his accounts, just as Kal's voice nearly faltered when he said the words, "I would like to speak to the Batman in person."
Tan-Ur murmured something under his breath, then said to his staff, "Take our guest to Kerr. This is his business."
With a curt not to Kal-El, Tan-Ur excused himself. Kal stared after him and felt uneasiness like suffocating vines crawling over his body. He had known, from lacking it, what power money possessed, but he did not like handling that power at all.
"Follow me," the armed woman bellowed and turned on her heels.
*
Through a succession of badly lit elevators and too bright corridors, they finally arrived at Arkham's main control room.
The blue glow and flicker of holographic monitors, many of them turned to a dead channel, cast an eerie light into the otherwise pitch black room. Furtive technicians and doctors worked at their stations, while heavily armed guards hulked in the shadows by every door. It was filled with buzzing and humming, like a beehive, and similarly hot. Kal felt sweat break out under his body suit, and the familiar pressure that meant that the suit's fabric was working hard to absorb the transpiration and keep him clean. At the end there was a wide desk, behind it a huge chair, and above and behind the desk, watching the watchers, was the window of another room, looking down on the control room.
The glass off that room had a greenish tinge, and it gave the hair of the man standing behind it the same green hue. He was tall and thin as a reed, with a mop of wild hair.
Unsettled by a human staring down at them like this with a smirk as if this were his kingdom and they but powerless supplicants begging for an audience he would not grant, Kal-El asked the armed woman, "Who is that?"
"Joe Kerr, Sir," she answered. "The director. He runs this place, at least the civilian part. Believe me, you don't want to talk to him. He's – " she lifted a hand from her gun, and made a vague gesture.
"Crazy?" Lex asked, making Kal jump. He had almost forgotten his presence. She obviously hadn't, because she barely tilted her head back at Lex. Through the visor, Kal could just barely make out her face – she was young and she flashed an unexpectedly roguish grin before going serious again.
"So crazy he's sane again. No, you're gonna talk to Dent."
At her words, there was a motion in the shadows behind the desk, and Kal spotted the dark shape of a broad-shouldered man slouching in the chair. He moved forward, and one half of his face was suddenly lit by the blue flicker of a screen, the other still barely visible. He had wavy brown hair and face that reminded Kal faintly of Jonathan Kent's face when a smile softened the servant's frown for a moment – they had the same broad, plain and pleasant features, although Dent had to be many years younger, being closer to Kal in age.
Dent was fiddling with something, tossing it back and forth between his hands. One of his hands moved over the desk in the blue twilight like a pallid spider and suddenly flattened with a loud snap. All around them, technicians and orderlies winced and bent a little closer to their work stations.
"Visitors, Sir," their armed guard said bravely as she strode towards Dent's desk; Kal, Lex and Dr. Bryce trailing after her.
Dent did not answer, but lifted his hand from the table and gazed at what was under it for a moment. Then he smiled apologetically and an palpable sigh went through the room. Even the machines seemed to hum louder again. "Thank you, Colonel Lane," he said to their guard. His voice was deep and pleasant. "What brings you to Arkham, gentlemen?"
A subtle shove against the small of his back made Kal flinch and lurch forward. "I – I am Kal-El of the House of El, a student of history from the Archives of the Protectorate Metropolis and we – I wish to interview one of your prisoners."
Dent fixed first Kal, then Lex, his eyes glittering as they lingered a moment.
"Metropolis," he mused and reached up to run his fingers thoughtfully over the silken tie he wore. His suit was old-fashioned, the kind of attire a human male might have worn before the liberation, only the color scheme was odd. The jacket was a pearly white, the shirt underneath black and the tie white again. "A beautiful city. I remember going there on a school trip as a boy – but you don't want to hear that. I'm Assistant Director Harvey Dent. Interview a prisoner, you say? That is a first. Aren't your history books already written?"
Gradually, Kal realized that he was more terrified than ever before in his life. His teachers and his father had on occasion intimidated him, but here he was, in a roomful of humans, and every single of them seemed dangerous and threatening, and Kal felt very far from home. He wanted to run, instead he had to answer, to justify himself,
"I have additional questions."
Dent smiled again, placid and a little melancholy, "Who do you want to speak to, then?"
"The Batman."
The sound of his own voice in the otherwise deadly silent room deafened Kal-El. Dent stilled, then rose suddenly from his chair and paced a few feet, his back to them, his face hidden. He had a slight limp, but still there was power behind his large steps, commanding respect.
When he spoke again his voice sounded eerie and faint from the shadows. "The Batman. Yes. Do you know how many people have managed to escape from Arkham?"
Wincing at the barked question, Kal shook his head.
"One. Exactly one. And do you know how many times this one prisoner has escaped? No? Colonel Lane?"
"Seventeen times, Sir," Lane answered, a note of awe carrying in her voice, the kind of awe reserved for geniuses and madmen.
"Seventeen times, Mr El. And each and every single time they've brought him back in. Questioned him. Straightened him out. Punished him. Forgotten him down there – and each time he has escaped again. Director Kerr has personally handled his case for a while now." Dent stopped pacing to stare up at the observation window. Joe Kerr stood still as a statue, but a mad slash of a smile distorted his face now, as if he had heard every single word of their conversation and found it terribly amusing.
"They're having private therapy sessions," Dent continued softly. "Director Kerr is very… dedicated to his case."
He turned on his heels and the other half of his face that had so far remained in the shadows suddenly came into light. Kal sucked in a shocked breath. Dent's handsome face was badly disfigured, ravaged by scars and colored purple like old bruises. He had never seen anything more hideous – just looking at it was painful.
"I brought him in myself, the first seven times," Dent said, the normal side of his face tired while the scarred side seemed to be grinning. He touched the scars with the tips of his fingers, "The seventh time Bruce nearly got me."
Bruce? Dent's tongue must have slipped – or was this the Batman's name? He had to have a normal name, he was human after all, although the thought of a man behind the dark mask still seemed strange to Kal.
Dent lifted his left fist, badly scarred as that side of his face and suddenly tossed the small round piece of silver metal high into the air. It seemed to fly for endless seconds, glinting in the dark, then finally he caught it in his fist. Slowly, he uncurled his fingers and stared down at his palm. The scarred side of his mouth twisted downwards, and he pocketed the silver disk. "So do you still wish to see him?"
Kal did not. But he knew that this was more than a simple question, and he had the sudden absurd idea that if he said 'no' now and tried to leave, every single human in the room, in the whole prison perhaps, would suddenly turn against him, tearing him apart like bloodthirsty predators. And when it came down to it, to flesh and bones, a Kryptonian was no less vulnerable than a human, and he was alone here , all alone among aliens.
Kal's breath hitched, and his answer broke the tension. "Yes."
Dent sank down in his chair. All life seemed to seep out of him, like a fading hologram of a man. "Give them the tour, Lane," he sighed tiredly.
*
They descended into Arkham using an escalator. "Level One," the writing on the wall said in huge, faded white letters as they entered the working halls. A cacophony of noise rose from beneath them, and Kal felt sweat break out anew under his bodysuit that had nothing to do with heat and everything to with pure dread. Metropolis was a quiet city, only pedestrians and softly humming hover cars and bikes now filled the lanes once built for stinking, noisy combustion engine automobiles. This was a hellhole of noise, the very air singing and shivering with it, blasting against his cowl-covered ears.
The different working areas were separated by high walls, like rooms lacking a ceiling, and autonomous robotic drones patrolled over the heads of the prisoners, some flying, some skittering across the walls and floors like large bugs.
They descended in the centre of what was a star-shaped structure, with five wings going off into different directions, each as wide as whole blocks in Metropolis and longer than Kal-El could see. The ceilings and far ends vanished into dim twilight, so far away they were. It was the hugest building Kal had ever been to, larger even than the Palace of Science, as big as a whole district of Metropolis.
"How many people are there in Arkham?" he asked Colonel Lane, horrified at the complex's size.
She tipped up her visor, and now for the first time Kal could fully see her face: she had to be his age, and while her brown eyes sparked with unexpected spirit, she had faint lines around her mouth and between her brows that had to come from frowns, not smiles. "Didn't do your homework, huh?" she asked, seizing him up critically.
"Colonel," Dr Bryce admonished stiffly. Of all the humans Kal had so far encountered in Arkham, she was the only one who paid proper respect to him, but her cool deference was as unnerving as the others' brazen disrespect.
Lane shot Dr Bryce a look that made Kal swallow. All good humor suddenly drained from her eyes and they became hard and hateful. "You got a problem?"
The other woman didn't answer, and Lane eventually averted her gaze with a dark glower. The tension between the two women remained palpable.
"Approximately two million inmates," Lex said when no one else answered. "It would be more if children being born in Arkham wouldn't be shipped off to the farming belt."
Kal turned around and stared at him, aghast, but Lex returned only an impassive look, volunteering no more information.
"Level Two" of Arkham was a huge circular shaft going down from the center of the star shaped upper level, a vast grey abyss reaching many stories into the ground. Here the infernal noise was gradually replaced by exhausted silence. Cells were stacked one over another like a skyscraper-high pile of tiny grey shoeboxes, all of them with a transparent fourth wall, so the occupants could at all times be observed by the black drones flitting back and forth, security cameras and small laser guns mounted on their backs.
They got on an elevator that was no more than a platform with a railing suspended from strong cables, shaking and shivering as it went down. The shaft was drafty and down from the depths the smell of ozone and human bodies drifted up, and many other elevators like their own carried grey-faced prisoners in stained prison overalls up and down. Kal clutched the railing and tried very hard not to look down or up.
"The elevators are safe, but we have a couple of suicides each day," Lane said when she noticed his discomfort. "There's drugs in the food to prevent it, but they go on hunger strikes. They've got this saying – 'only two kinds of people get out of Arkham: dead men and the Batman'."
Dr Bryce made an indignant noise at Lane's lack of respect in addressing a Kryptonian, but Kal was too far from everything that made sense to care.
At the very bottom, after long minutes of descending, there was a single door. "Level Three," it said in English and Kryptonese. They walked towards it, their steps echoing loudly, from the dull thud of Lane's boots to the sharp clicking of Bryce's heels. Kal craned his neck, but there was only grey twilight and the endless shaft with elevators.
Lane pressed a metal key into the octagonal groove to the left of the door and it slid to the side. The corridor behind it was surprisingly bright and clean.
"This," Dr Bryce said, speaking up without having to be provoked for the first time, and with obvious pride, "is the only part of Arkham that actually is productive. We have made immeasurable progress in the study of metahumans."
Kal-El had heard of metahumans. The human genome contained certain sequences that, when activated by mutagenic substances or radiation, could lead to dangerous and unpredictable mutations even in adults. All humans had to undergo routine tests to prevent any threats to the general populace, and active metahumans would be sent to Belle Reve to be evaluated and, if possible, undergo behavioral correction measures. The system worked very well, there hadn't been any metahuman related incidents in years.
Colonel Lane was clutching her gun tightly to her chest, and had given the lead over to Dr Bryce, who guided them through a maze of identical corridors. A few times a doctor in a lab-coat passed them by, and once, a subdued prisoner on a stretcher was wheeled past them. It all seemed relatively peaceful and clean, and Kal breathed a little easier again.
A few corners further into the maze, a bespectacled doctor was gently herding a female prisoner in hospital scrubs towards them. She was young, her face pale and her blonde hair shorn without great care. Her cheeks were hollow, her walk jittery as that of an old woman, and she had dark smudges under her eyes. Colonel Lane stopped dead and after a few steps, Dr Bryce turned around with an annoyed look, while the doctor was still leading the young prisoner towards them. "Colonel?" Bryce asked impatiently. "Is there a problem?"
The other doctor nodded at Dr Bryce, and he and his charge shuffled past them, but then suddenly the girl lifted her head and stared straight at Lane. She faltered in her step, opened her mouth and swayed against the wall, then caught herself and suddenly jumped towards Lane, seizing her by the lapel of her uniform.
"Lois," she whispered, her eyes suddenly wide and feverishly bright, as if the person behind them had woken up from a long stupor, "Lois, I knew you'd get me – "
Lane's face was white, all hard angles, and she raised her gaze above the poor girl's shoulders and stared straight ahead as she pushed past her, sending her stumbling away again. "Let's go," she said roughly. "We haven't got all damn day."
The girl started wailing and ranting, and the doctor grabbed her, attempting to subdue her as they quickly put distance between them and the uncomfortable display of human frailty. Kal felt the deep need to stop and turn back and do something about it and he was not sure if he was supposed to feel that way or if it was this horrible place confusing him so.
"Will it take much longer?"
"No," Lane said. "We're there."
It was a door like all the others, but it had no numbers or letters on it. First Bryce, then Lane put their keys into the slots and had their retinas scanned. The door opened. Dr Bryce stepped inside, while Lane stayed outside the door, guarding it with a stony, faraway expression.
The cell was the bare minimum of a room: four grey walls, a ceiling, bare stone floor, and a toilet. Worse than the overpowering smell of bodily wastes however was the lingering scent of decay, as if the very room was dying.
A heap sat in the middle of the square cell. It might have been a man. There was a head of dark hair, shaggy and long, interspersed with grey strands. He had broad shoulders and one sinewy arm, the other one, though, only reached to the biceps – from there on down it was a mutilated robotic arm, a tangle of metal plates and wires. The only piece of cloth on him was a pair of ragged grey shorts, his legs and feet were bare. Every inch of skin was covered in scars and bruises, in grime and hair. Some scars were tiny, criss-crossed silver lines, others furious red gashes and grooves as if the flesh had been carved out with a spoon. And yet it was skin, bare-naked human skin.
For the first time in his life Kal-El was not shocked by nakedness. There was no capacity for shock left in him. The creature cowering before him on the floor was beaten, abused and emaciated. It was powerless, merely a spot of pain and despair, alive only by stubborn willpower.
Kal was too horrified to be afraid. The question wrangled its way out of his throat. "Why?"
Very, very slowly the dark head lifted. A skull stared at Kal, just barely covered by skin. And yet, beneath all the wasted, deadly horror, there was the shape of a face that must once have looked remarkably like Kal's own.
A single blue eye, for the other was replaced by a dull cybernetic prosthesis, stared up at him. It wasn't mad. It wasn't brutal. It wasn't afraid or broken. This seemed to be single unscathed part of the man; this steel-blue eye and the will behind it. Kal's breath grew ragged, all the carefully maintained boundaries between species crumbling with that single gaze into a human eye.
What he had felt seeing the sick girl in the corridor, the aching need to do something, to comfort, to alleviate pain, to save this man, came back with thousand-fold force.
The cybernetic eye whirred and blinked, but Kal-El could only stare at the human one.
"Fool," Batman rasped hoarsely, and in the blink of an eye unfolded into a whirlwind of destruction, knocking Kal into the wall with bruising force and grabbing Dr Bryce by the lapel of her labcoat to swing her around until she stumbled on her high heels and fell. For a second he stood with her data pad clutched in his fist, then he hurled it down on the floor hard enough to break it. Sparks and metal parts flew around as Kal gasped for air, his stomach constricting painfully, his eyes swimming with tears.
"You won't get out this time," Dr Bryce hissed, then shrieked at Lex, "Don't stand there and gape, do something – "
"Freeze!"
They all did. Colonel Lane stepped into the room, her mighty gun held high. "No one moves. You, get out of that corner to where I can see you." Lex obeyed and carefully stepped around Dr Bryce's fallen form into the middle of the room, his hands held palm-out in front of his chest in a placating gesture, while his eyes met the Batman's. They stared at each other like large cats, betraying nothing, never blinking.