CLARK/SUPERMAN

I was still on the rooftop with Mark when my phone buzzed, it was one of the three secure lines Cecil had given me years ago, but had rarely used more than a couple of times in years.

Mark was still riding the high of his first night out as a Superhero, grinning like an idiot, talking about the mailbox incident, joking about his first nemesis being Mr. Mailbox, which made me chuckled. 

"Cecil."

"I need you at the following coordinates. Now. Alone."

He gave me the numbers. The Guardian’s base… had something happened? Was that… what I had heard, when I thought someone was calling my name?

"What's happened?"

I could hear a pause on the phone and the slightest change in his heartbeat through it, which on its own… only added to my concern. Cecil wasn’t one to pause or beat around the bush, he lied, he schemed, he planned, but he never danced around the subject, never, no matter what he did, or what his goal was, lies or not, and he was a good liar, he always went straight to the point, without any interest in your feelings about it, so… sensing any level of hesitation from him was more than concerning for me, it meant that whatever he was about to deliver was something even himself found troubling.

"Just get here." 

He hung up.

I looked around for a bit, and then told Mark to go home. He asked why, reading the poorly concealed worry in my face, so I just told him his dad had asked me to keep him east of the river and it was past the river and past his curfew and past the point where I could justify keeping him out here on a school night.

He groaned, and complained, but eventually… Mark went home.

While I went west, expecting the worse and hoping for the best.

The base was underground, accessed through a maintenance hatch in the middle of a snowy mountain stretch in Utah, and even from afar, I could smell the distinctive scent of fresh blood, lots of it.

Cecil was waiting for me outside, with a winter coat, and just as I feared his eyes were different. Cecil's eyes had a default setting, which was kind of hard to… explain, he reminded of Batman or how he was portrayed in the comics, he had the look of a man who has seen everything and more, and yet… something had disturbed him.

"Clark," he said.

Don’t say it…

"Cecil."

Please don’t say it, please let it be my imagination. They can’t be dead.

"The Guardians are dead."

The sentence didn't land right away, even though I had heard every syllable, every consonant, the slight click at the end of the word "dead" where Cecil's jaw tightened, and my brain refused to accept it.

They couldn’t be dead… they were the guardians, the strongest beings on Earth.

"What?"

"I know it is hard to believe, kid, but it's the truth," he said. "War Woman. Aquarus. Red Rush. Martian Man. Green Ghost. The Immortal and Darkwing." 

I should’ve been here instead of babysitting Mark. I should’ve heard them… why didn’t I hear them?

"How?"

"That's what I need you for."

I stood very still for a moment, before looking at him, asking. "Where's Mr. Grayson?"

Cecil looked at me for a long beat, and I watched his eyes do something careful, something that, on anyone else, I might have called calculation, but on Cecil, it was just... the machine running.

"He's the only survivor," Cecil said, and there was something on his tone that said: I don’t like it.

"How bad?"

"Bad. Intensive care. He's breathing, but that's about all he's doing right now." Cecil sighed. "He took a beating, kid. Whoever did this was trying to kill him the same as the others, he just happened to be the lucky one."

I felt my jaw tighten. Mr. Grayson. The man who'd taught me to fight, who'd sat across from me at the Graysons' kitchen table and told me I kept getting up, the man who taught me everything I knew…

"I called you because you can see what others can't," Cecil said, opening the base for me to enter. "I would love to let you grieve, I really would kid. But whatever did this is still out there, and I need to know what we're dealing with before it decides to finish the job."

I nodded and without a word, I walked past him through the door.

The smell of blood was even worse in the inside. They hadn’t even cleaned the area yet, I could see… parts of the guardians around, Aquarus brains, Immortal’s head… and so much blood. 

I let my eyes adjust, through the electromagnetic spectrum looking for clues, for anything that I could use to help Cecil solve this case. The blood was everywhere, the iron in it glowing faintly in infrared, the oxygen-depleted veins of it darker, the arterial spray in patterns that told me directions and velocities and force of the strikes. 

I could see where each Guardian had been standing when they were hit. I could see where they'd been standing when they'd been killed. I stood in the middle of the room, looking at their corpses, their remains, as I turned in a slow circle, trying to gather as much information as I could.

Blood. 

The Guardians' blood on every surface, every molecule, every atom of it belonged to one of the seven people who had died here.

And Mr. Grayson's.

Where was the attacker's blood or residues? No matter how skilled you are, you leave something behind, where was theirs?

No foreign DNA. No skin cells, no hair follicles, no sweat residue, no saliva, nothing. Nothing from anyone who wasn't already accounted for in this room. Whoever had done this had not bled. Had not been touched. Had not left a single microscopic trace of their presence in a room where seven of the strongest people on the planet had been torn apart.

"Cecil."

“Got anything kid?”

"Whoever did this," I said, "is at least as strong as Omni-Man or me."

Cecil didn't react, which told me he'd already come to that conclusion by himself.

"Can you recognize anything from the attacker?" he asked. "Anything at all?"

I shook my head slowly. "There's no blood from the attacker. No residue. No biological material of any kind, nothing that I can perceive. Just the Guardians and Omni-Man." I paused. "It's like... whoever did this wasn't even here."

Cecil looked at me, as if I was confirming something he wasn’t willing to share just yet.

I stood there in the middle of the room, surrounded by what was left of people who had mentored me, who had taken me under their collective wing when I was still young enough to need it, and tears began to drop from my eyes.

Whoever had done this was so far beyond the Guardians in speed and strength that they had simply never been touched. Not once. Not a glancing blow, not a scratch, not a single moment of contact that would have left a cell behind. In a fight against seven of the most powerful beings on the planet, this attacker had been so dominant, so utterly out of their league, that they had walked through it the way I might walk through a room full of toddlers.

That possibility terrified me, because I was not sure I could do what had been done in this room. I was not sure I could defeat all seven Guardians and leave without a mark.

The second explanation was worse, but more... realistic.

The second explanation was that the attacker had been hit. That the blood was already in this room, already accounted for… because the attacker was one of the people whose blood was on the walls.

And the only person in this room whose blood was on the walls and who was still breathing was Nolan Grayson.

No.

No… that… no… — Mr. Grayson wouldn't— He'd trained me. He'd been like a second father to me, a pillar of my life, the person I knew I could always count on, he… he wouldn’t—

But as much as the idea disgusted me, the thought was there now, because it was the only logical explanation… Could Mr. Grayson have done this? No… He wouldn't. He loves these people. He's fought beside them for years. He's—

Unless…

What if he was controlled? Mind control. Someone could have gotten to him. There were telepaths strong enough, technologies advanced enough — the Maulers had built mind-control devices before, and there were others, others I didn't know about, and if someone had turned Omni-Man into a weapon and pointed him at the Guardians...

That would explain the blood. That would explain why only his blood was present alongside theirs. That would explain why he was still alive — because the controller needed him alive, or because the control broke at the last moment and whoever was pulling the strings fled.

"Cecil," I said, and my voice was steady, which surprised me, because the rest of me was not, I was shaking, I was trying not to, but I was. "Either whoever did this is so powerful that they weren't touched once in a fight against all seven Guardians — in which case we are dealing with something I'm not sure I can handle alone — or the attacker was hit, and their blood is already here, mixed in with everyone else's."

I looked at him.

"If that's the case, then the only person in this room whose blood is present and who is still breathing is Omni-Man. Which means either he did this of his own will..." I let the sentence hang for a moment, feeling my heart drop a beat. "...or someone made him do it. Mind control. Compulsion. Something external."

Cecil looked at me for a long, silent moment, and I couldn't read him. I've never been able to read Cecil the way I read other people — he doesn't fidget, he doesn't shift his weight, his heart rate, most of the time, is a fucking metronome, and either the man has the best poker face on the planet or he genuinely doesn't feel the things the rest of us feel, and I've never been sure which.

"That tracks with what I was thinking," he said finally, flatly. "Thank you for coming."

"Cecil—"

"Take it easy tonight, kid." He turned toward the corridor, then stopped, and looked back over his shoulder. "I mean that. Go home. Be with your family. If I need you, I'll call."