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It starts with the birds.
Birds aren’t exactly an unusual sight in Metropolis, but the cloud of black feathers that seems to follow Clark Kent as he walks down the sidewalk are…odd. These aren’t the dopey pigeons he’s used to seeing in the bustling streets of the city, or even the normal finches or cardinals that congregate in the park.
No, these are crows.
Hundreds of them, perched on rooftops and store awnings like a crowd of gargoyles. Glossy bodies shining like drops of freshly spilled ink, talons dark and curving, and beady black eyes that he swears he can feel on his back as he enters the Daily Planet building. He can still feel them as he joins the morning crowd in the elevator and crunches his large body into a corner to try and take up as little space as possible.
The ride up is quiet, and Jimmy catches him on the walk across the bullpen to his desk.
“Hey, big guy.”
”Hey, Jimmy. Have a good weekend?”
”Oh yeah, fine. Just fine.”
Jimmy is unusually quiet this morning, and it’s only as they pass your desk - he still thinks of it as your desk - that Clark can see why.
Someone has placed a vase of roses on your desk. A dozen long-stemmed, red roses. It’s a shock to his system as his eyes cross over the tableau of items that haven’t been touched in nearly a year. Lois nearly screamed at the poor reporter that Perry had asked to take your spot, and he’d stopped assigning people to that particular desk shortly after. They’d left it just as it was on your last day; even your notebook hadn’t been touched, still cracked open with your scrawling handwriting penning the last notes, as if you’d come back and finish your thoughts on your latest front-page piece.
Never mind it had been the piece that had gotten you killed.
“It’ll be a year, this Friday,” Jimmy says weakly, as if Clark didn’t know.
As if he wasn’t waiting for you to walk in from the elevator, for the scent of your perfume to fill his nostrils as you clapped him on the shoulder and laughed at his corny jokes. You got along with everyone - you could banter with Lois, talk about the latest pop culture trends with Jimmy, and you could make Clark Kent’s heart skip a beat when your gaze would linger on him.
It’s been almost a year since he’s seen your eyes in anything but pictures.
“Yeah, I know.” Clark’s tone is more clipped than he means for it to be, and he wants to curl into himself as he catches Jimmy wince slightly out of the corner of his eye. He opens his mouth to mumble out a weak apology when Lois enters from across the other side of the bullpen and squeezes his arm. Her eyes are red, and Clark can smell the faint tang of salt from spilt tears.
“We can move them, if you want. Some of us just thought, y’know…”
Clark shakes his head, his hand finding Lois’s and holding it gently. “No, it’s nice. She would have laughed though, thinking they were cliched or something. But she would have liked them anyway.”
Lois snorts at that, and the tension begins to fade for a moment as the three of them stare at the frozen monument of office supplies and flowers on your desk. Jimmy is the first to move away, Lois following and finally Clark tears himself away to find his own desk and bury his head in the myriad of notes and edits he’s supposed to have finished by the end of the day.
He tries to ignore the slight tremble in his fingers, the catch in his throat as a beam of sunlight crosses the office and shines directly onto your desk as if to put an exclamation point on your absence. Clark Kent, man of steel, feels himself begin to crumble under the weight; he’d never bought you flowers, never found the nerve to even tell you how he felt, and he hadn’t been able to save you.
He’s brought out of the trance by the sound of Perry’s thundering footsteps and the door to his office being thrown open.
”Channel nine news, now.” He growls at the nearest body, and the TV flickers to life and fills the room with the reporter’s voice.
“-has been found dead as of this morning. Police on the scene are ruling out a potential robbery or mugging, as the victim still had his wallet and personal belongings on his person. We take you now to the scene with our field reporter -"
The voice of the anchorwoman fades into background noise as the scene on the television switches to another reporter standing in front of a line of yellow police tape. She’s speaking to a police officer, but Clark isn’t paying attention to him either. No, what catches his attention is the mark on the wall behind them, cordoned off by more police tape but impossible to miss even in the chaos of the crime scene.
It’s the outline of a bird. Burned into the wall, impossibly large with each wing spanning well over three feet across. Each end is jagged, the outline still smoking slightly. He feels his stomach drop, thinking of the crowd of birds that greeted him outside this morning.
“Jeeesus,” Jimmy whistles, suddenly beside him and making a face of disgust. “This is new. You’d think all the weirdos would stay in Gotham, or Blüdhaven at least.”
Clark can’t argue with that; giant robots or kaiju running rampant in the park are one thing, but this…this sets off a whole different set of alarms in his head. Last night had been quiet, uncharacteristically so, had he missed a cry for help? No, he would have heard it; he can still hear your cries for help in his ears, even after all this time. He shakes his head, trying to clear those thoughts and hides the movement as adjusting his glasses as Perry rounds on the room and trains his gaze on both he and Lois.
“Kent, Lane - police are holding a press conference this afternoon. You both are there covering it, got it? They’re going to be cagey with details, they’re spooked. Get after it.”
He and Lois pass the rest of the morning trying to glean as many details as they can from their sources before the press conference. It’s slim pickings, and Clark bites his lip as he scrolls through another list of possible leads and finds absolutely nothing. No recently released dangerous criminals from Arkham or otherwise, nothing that came across on the police scanner last night other than the run of the mill Metropolis crime; on a whim, he even searches up any reference of the strange bird symbol on the wall.
“You think that has something to do with the murder?” Lois asks, her head over his shoulder and her hair falling slightly into his face. “That bird-thing that was on the wall?”
“Just a hunch, could be nothing.”
”Could be something. C’mon, we’re gonna be late if we don’t leave now.”
The conference is starting just as they arrive, and the Chief of Police is already sweating despite the cold October. His voice is calm and metered, but Clark can hear his heart beating just a bit faster than the normal resting rate, the slightest hint of a tremor in his voice as he recounts the details of the body being found in an alleyway just on the outskirts of Metropolis proper. How the victim was found with all his belongings, but was severely disfigured and killed in an act of ‘immeasurable and indiscriminate violence’. Clark sits up a bit straighter at that - how had he not heard anything? How had anybody not heard anything, seen anything?
It’s when they announce the name of the victim that he feels Lois stiffen beside him, her own heart faltering a bit and the grip on her pen tightening. There’s a vague ringing of remembrance in his head as he turns the name over and over in his head; why does that name sound so familiar? His head feels too tight, the air too thin as he turns to ask Lois why that name sounds so familiar, only to be interrupted by the call for questions from the press and Lois is already up on her feet with her recorder in hand.
“Lois Lane, Daily Planet. Is the Metropolis PD examining any possible connections between the deceased and last year’s death of the Daily Planet reporter, given that the victim was a person of interest in the case?”
Clark can feel his heart drop to his knees, suddenly putting two and two together as the Chief of Police recites a canned answer that’s equal parts dismissive and infuriating in its lack of information. The name, the victim, he had been a lead from your story; Clark’s head was spinning, thinking of the many late nights he had spent with you and Lois as you poured over payroll documentation. You’d slowly uncovered a paper trail of persons linked to a shell company inside a shell company, the story peppered with evidence of embezzlement and fraud that you had suspected went to the very top of Metropolis’ own LutherCorp.
But you’d never get the chance to prove it. It was the story that had gotten you killed, and every stone that Clark had tried to turn over as Superman turned up empty. Nobody would talk, the records had been sealed into legal oblivion, and the whole staff of the Planet had been climbing the walls looking for answers for nearly a month until Perry told everyone to drop it. The case was being closed, and there was nothing they could do about it; he’d been stony faced as he said it, but the man had nearly been in tears himself. Clark got the distinct impression it hadn’t been Perry White’s decision, that he would have been out there looking for information himself if he didn’t have paper to run.
Clark Kent is up and asking a question in front of the Chief of Police before he can truly register his body moving. When he speaks, his voice is uncharacteristically loud over the crowd of other reporters
“Does the Metropolis PD have any explanation for the strange symbol that was found at the scene of the crime by the deceased?”
The silence is his only answer, but he catches Lois’ smile out of his periphery and her mouthing ‘nice’ as he sags his posture a little bit out of habit.
They go for coffee afterwards, comparing notes and Lois dumping her third packet of sugar into her cup. Clark can barely taste his coffee as Lois speaks, her voice increasing in fervor as she looks through her notes.
“You see the way he nearly shit his pants when I asked about her? Something’s up. Almost a year to the date, and a person of interest in the case turns up dead - and that symbol! What’s that about? The bird-thing.”
”Crow. I think it’s a crow.”
Lois raises her eyebrows at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “What makes you say that? It could be any bird.”
“Uh, ignore me. Just have crows on the brain lately. I couldn’t find anything referencing it other than, y’know stuff like… superstition, but I took some notes here.”
Lois takes his offered notepad and skims through it, her eyes narrowing as she half reads, half mumbles under her breath. “-'believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead.' Okay, so…what? Victim is killed by our perp, perp puts up the bird-thing, which may or may not be a crow as…some sort of omen? A sign to carry the victim’s soul on?”
“Or a calling card. A message.” Clark says after a long pause, his eyes staring down into the depths of his coffee cup as if it could contain the answers.
“To who?”
Clark sets his mouth in a firm line and shrugs, his hand palming the wallet in his pants as he thinks of the picture he has tucked within. It had been at the last fall fair, and you’d drug him into the Photo Booth beside you even though he barely fit. His body squished around yours as the flash went off, both of your faces contorted in goofy expressions and laughing like maniacs at how ridiculous you both looked. The last picture was his favorite - you’d been caught mid-laugh at his expression, head thrown back and eyes sparkling like gemstones.
You’d be dead a week later.
He’s sullen on his patrol that night, giving the saved victim of a carjacking a weak smile before jetting off in a flash of blue and red. Clark finds himself hanging there in the clouds for a minute longer than usual, thinking of you.
He wonders if you would have liked flying, if you would have laughed incredulously as he revealed his secret identity to you; you wouldn’t have screamed. No, you were fearless. You would have laughed at not being able to put it together sooner, and then maybe he would have taken you flying. Your arms around him, the scent of your shampoo and perfume filling his lungs as the two of you would stay suspended midair with his cape whipping around you in the cold autumn night.
Clark closes his eyes as he feels tears begin to prick at the corners, stretching his hearing out beyond the edges of his perception to listen to the hum of the city. He lets himself breathe it all in. The buses, the people, and…the birds.
His eyes shoot open at the sound of wings. And then there’s the scream. His tears are forgotten as he’s dipping below the clouds back to the city, body cutting through the sky and the air rushing around him. He pivots mid-air at the growing sound of panting breaths and the hurried footfalls of someone running for their life as they continue to scream.
The streetlight shines off the blue of his suit as he touches down just as the man runs out of the alleyway. He’s panting, eyes wide with unrestrained terror and sudden gratitude as he nearly collapses in Superman’s arms and babbles between gasping breaths.
“Oh, god. Thank god, thank you. She - down there!”
Clark looks up to where the man’s trembling hand is pointing, catching the figure at the other end of the alley just as the streetlight suddenly flickers and goes out above him. There’s the sound of flapping wings, hundreds, thousands maybe as he stands to his full height and pushes the terrified man behind him. The light above buzzes back to life for a moment and the man behind him whimpers. He’s got his hands wound in his cape, clutching the red material like a child holding a security blanket against the monster in their closet.
“What are you waiting for?! Get her, she’s trying to kill me!” He screams.
“Ma’am, stay right there. Do not come any closer,” Clark says in his full Superman voice, the sound booming from his lungs as he puffs out his chest and stands firm even as the streetlight flickers once more above him. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
The figure doesn’t listen, and that’s when he catches the heartbeat. Not the frantic pulse of the man behind him, nor of any of the other residents of Metropolis who each have a heartbeat as unique as a fingerprint.
He recognizes this one just as the streetlight goes out, and the scent of you fills his nose.
“Y/N?”