He woke to the sound of the city arguing with itself.
Horns. A truck backing up. A couple in the next room slamming drawers. His head felt packed with wires that hummed different pitches. He lay still on the sagging mattress with his hands flat on top of the blanket, like that would keep him from breaking anything.
Light pushed around the curtains. Morning. He sat up slow. Every movement he measured, counting under his breath. One. Two. He opened the door with two fingers and almost laughed when it didn't snap the frame this time.
Outside, the walkway smelled like wet and cigarettes. He kept his eyes on his shoes and went down the stairs. The man from the landing was gone. The paper cup was still there, a curl of smoke frozen to ash.
He needed food and he needed a plan.
The bodega clerk leaned on the counter, watching the small TV. Same footage looped: a giant suit of metal, the red-and-gold flash, a blurry figure rocketing into frame. A still image popped up with a big text bar: WHO IS SUPERMAN?
He looked away fast.
"Morning," the clerk said, like nothing had happened. "Bagel?"
"Two," he said. "And coffee."
He paid with the bills that still felt wrong in his fingers.
He took his bag outside. The sidewalk was a river of people again. He ate standing by the door, tearing the bagels in half and swallowing without tasting. The heat in his chest had settled to a quiet coal. He hoped it stayed that way.
He thought about going back to the motel to hide all day. The thought filled him with a quiet panic : muted, but still pressing. He needed to move. He needed noise and tasks, something that would make his hands do normal things.
He walked.
The morning built itself around him: school kids with backpacks, a man yelling into a headset, a woman dragging a rolling suitcase that rattled on every crack. He kept to the edges, palms open, shoulders turned. A bus wheezed by and, for one second, the pitch of the engine lined up with something behind his ribs. The world went sharp. He stopped and breathed until the feeling passed.
On the next block, a fire truck screamed past, lights painting the street red. Another followed. Then an ambulance. People started to look up. A column of smoke rose a few streets over, dirty and fast.
He should keep walking.
He didn't.
His legs were already moving, before his head agreed. He followed the smoke.
The building was old brick with a corner market on the ground floor and three apartments stacked above. A second-story window burped fire. People stood on the sidewalk with hands over their mouths. A woman beat on the front door with her fists and screamed in a language he didn't know, then switched to broken English: "My baby! Please, my baby!"
The fire crew piled off the truck and worked without wasting a motion, unrolling hose, shouldering axes. One firefighter went for the door and then looked up, cursed. The stairwell inside had flashed, he could see the orange glow from within.
gg
He felt everything at once—the heat coming through the brick, the dry sting of smoke in his throat, and the faint, struggling sound of a baby upstairs, too weak to cry properly. The sound cut straight through him. His chest tightened, like something behind his ribs was starting to give way.
He didn't ask permission. He didn't look at the crowd. He hit the door with his shoulder and it gave.
The air inside was a wall of heat and chemicals. He held his breath and took the stairs two at a time, careful, careful to put his weight where the boards still held. He listened for the baby and for the building.The old beams creaked overhead. Someone had left a stroller on the landing below the apartment. He moved around it carefully, without touching it.
The second-floor door was stuck. He heard coughing inside, a heavy wet cough, and a woman's voice, small and broken. He could kick the door, but the frame would shatter and the pieces would fly. He set his palm flat on the doorknob instead and turned, counting out the pressure, feeling the metal give like warm clay. The latch snapped and the door swung.
Smoke billowed out, thick and low. He crouched instinctively and crawled. The apartment was two rooms. The kitchen had caught the curtains above the cheap stove were a sheet of flame. The fire climbed across the ceiling like it had fingers. On the floor by a couch, a woman lay on her side coughing, one arm thrown over a small shape bundled in a blanket.
He slid to them. The woman stirred and tried to push the bundle at him. "My son," she said. "Please, he....."
"I've got him," he said. He didn't recognize his own voice through the smoke.
He picked up the bundle wrong and almost crushed it. He froze. He adjusted. He cradled the baby with both hands and made his hands gentle. The baby's chest fluttered. He pressed his ear to the bundle; he could hear the tiny heart trying hard. He didn't let himself hear anything else.
The exit was behind them. Fire spread across the ceiling, blocking the door with growing flames. The heat pressed down. His lungs were starting to burn. He needed air. The baby needed air.
He could carry one. He had to carry two.
He slid his arm under the woman's shoulders. "Up," he said, not loud, not soft. "We go now."
She tried. Her legs didn't want to work. He hooked her right arm over his neck and put the baby against his chest and stood, slow, feeling the floor under his boots complain.
The couch frame sputtered under new flame. Something popped in the kitchen—maybe a bottle, maybe a pot lid and fire skittered across the floor like spilled paint. He took a step and felt heat on his face like a hand.
The baby made a thin dry noise. His chest reacted. The coal in him broke open.
Heat built behind his eyes fast, a pressure that was more than pain. His vision went white at the edges. He blinked and the white didn't leave.
"No," he said, to his own body. "Not now."
The pressure became a line. It wanted out. He squeezed his eyes shut.
A cutting sound answered, high and clean. The wall opposite the door hissed and glowed. He opened one eye a slit and saw two thin red lines burning a path across plaster and lath, neat as saw blades. A pipe screamed. Steam blasted into the room and hit his face like a wet slap.
He threw his head away. The beams died the instant he broke the line, but the damage was done. Water and steam turned the air into a new kind of dangerous. The woman coughed into his shoulder. The baby made his thin noise again and his heart finally came back.
He pushed for the door, eyes squeezed tight enough to hurt, trusting the memory of the rooms and the feel of shapes with his shins and shoulders. He could hear the building like a living thing now, the way people sound when they're holding their breath too long. He stepped over something soft. He didn't look down to know it was a rug. He didn't look at anything. He counted and moved and breathed when he could and didn't when he couldn't.
The door frame scraped his shoulder. Cool air hit his face like a gift. He turned sideways and slid through with the woman and the baby together. The stairwell felt like a tunnel. He went down careful, careful even now, because the baby weighed almost nothing and the woman felt like she might float away if he wasn't paying attention.
At the bottom, hands reached for the baby and took him and another pair of hands took the woman. The building gave a deep, strained creak, and somewhere inside, something crashed with a heavy, jarring thud. He let go and almost collapsed when his knees suddenly remembered they belonged to a person, not a machine.
People were talking at him. Questions. Praise. A firefighter with black stripes down his helmet said something he didn't catch. He tasted smoke and ash and something else: fear, bright and cold.
His eyes stung. The heat behind them had faded back to a coal, but he could still feel where it wanted to go if he let it. He looked away from everyone and found a spot of brick with no people in front of it and stared at it until the stinging became just tears.
The baby started crying for real, a loud healthy sound. He let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. One of the firefighters gave him a bottle of water without asking any questions. He drank half. The other half steamed a little at the rim. The firefighter pretended not to notice, the way professionals pretend when the truth doesn't fit the scene report.
Phones were up again. A shaky voice said, "He's here again, Superman's here," and he flinched as if that could bruise him.
.......
He backed away. A medic reached for him. "Sir, you inhaled smoke...."
"I'm okay," he said. He wasn't. But he couldn't stay.
He cut down the side of the building and into an alley. He leaned against the cool brick and closed his eyes. He saw the neat red lines cut into the plaster again and felt sick.
He hadn't meant to do that.
He didn't know how to stop it next time.
Footsteps scraped behind him. He turned, expecting to see a firefighter or a cop. The words he meant to say caught in his throat.
A woman in a gray hoodie stood at the mouth of the alley, half in shadow. She wasn't looking at him like a fan or like she wanted a picture. She was looking at him like she was measuring a doorway. Her hands were empty. Her eyes weren't.
"Hey," she said, like she was asking a stray cat not to bolt.
He didn't answer.
"You okay?" she asked.
He shook his head and stepped sideways. She didn't move to block him. She let him go. He walked past her and onto the next street and kept going until the sirens faded and the usual city noise took over again.
He didn't realize he'd cut his palm until he saw the smear of blood on his jeans. He couldn't track where it happened. Maybe the door frame had bit him harder than a normal door would. The cut was shallow and healed at the edges already. That scared him more. He didn't want to think about what his body was doing without asking him.
He found a public restroom in a park and rinsed his hands in cold water. He watched the pink swirl down the drain. He waited to see if his eyes lit up. They didn't. He didn't trust them anyway. He splashed his face and tried to breathe without tasting burned plastic.
He sat on a bench with his hood up and counted. Pigeons argued on the rim of a trash can. A kid threw them a french fry and they forgot what they were mad about. A plane wrote a thin line across the blue and he refused to look at it too long.
If he went back to the motel, he would punch a hole through something. If he stayed here, someone would recognize him. He stood up and turned himself toward the one person who might give him an answer he could live with, not because he trusted the man but because the man owed him now. Tony Stark had a building with his name on it and a face on every screen. Stark would find him eventually. Maybe it was better if he risked finding Stark first, while he could still pretend he was choosing.
He got two blocks before doubt caught up with him. Stark had looked at him like a problem pretending to be useful. S.H.I.E.L.D : a name he knew from movies and internet conspiracy theories back in a world without this one would want him in a lab.
He turned down a narrow street to think. A woman with a stroller navigated around a pot hole with the focus of someone who had memorized every broken spot on her route. He stepped aside and let her pass before the thought had finished forming. Later, he would remember that as the moment he didn't bolt because he remembered someone else existed.
He took a breath and pulled his phone out of his pocket on reflex. It was still dead. He laughed once, short. He looked up at the sky like maybe the clouds had an answer printed on them. The sky didn't look back.
He started walking again, sticking to side streets where the glass towers didn't loom and the old brick buildings had narrow fire escapes like thin ladders. He listened for the usual city sounds: an argument at a crosswalk, a bike screeching to a stop, someone dropping groceries. He didn't listen for police chatter. He didn't listen for his name. And he tried not to listen for the baby's heartbeat, the proof that he'd done the right thing, and also the wrong one.
On a block with no trees and a lot of old signs that had never been taken down, he stopped at a pawn shop window. Guitar. Camera. Rings in a velvet tray. His reflection looked back at him with the hood shadowing his eyes. Superman. The word didn't fit his face.
He raised his hand like he might touch the glass and then didn't. The memory of the doorknob and the rail and the soft unpleasant give of metal stopped him.
"Don't touch," he told himself softly. "Not unless you have to."
He turned away from the window and nearly ran into a man in a suit with kind eyes. "You all right?" the man asked. "You look.... lost."
"I'm fine," he said. He wasn't convincing. The man smiled the way people smile when they want to help a stranger without getting too close.
"Lots of folks lost after last night," the man said, nodding toward the general direction of Stark's fight. "City's tough. It keeps going."
He nodded. "Yeah."
"Take care," the man said, and moved on.
He walked until the sun was high and the heat of the day pressed down even though it wasn't summer. He had looped without thinking. He was back near the motel before he realized it. He should have felt safer. He didn't.
The door stuck less this time. He set his bag on the bed and stood in the middle of the room and tried to make himself into a statue, like the problem was motion and not the fact that his blood sang with power he hadn't asked for.
He needed to practice. The thought scared him more than the idea of being dragged to a lab. Practice meant admitting that the beams behind his eyes were real and would come when they wanted if he didn't learn to call them on purpose.
He pulled the rickety table away from the wall and set the disposable water bottle on it. He took two steps back. He stared.
Nothing happened. Good.
He narrowed his eyes, not because he thought it would work but because that's what cartoons taught kids. He felt stupid. He thought about the heat in the apartment, the white pressure, the clean cutting sound, the red lines. Something in him flinched away from it. His hands were already up in front of his face before he told them to move, as if he could catch light.
"Don't," he told himself. " Not now."
He picked up the bottle and crushed it out of habit. Water sprayed and dripped on the carpet. He swore under his breath and wiped it with the towel. He threw the bottle away.
His eyes stung again. He blinked. Nothing burned. He sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees, and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes until stars popped under his lids. He counted until the noise in his head matched his breath again.
A small sound came from the walkway. Not a step. A scrape. He lifted his head. The sound happened again. Soft. Patient. Someone stood outside his door.
He looked at the knob. It didn't move. He watched the shadow under the door. It stayed a shadow.
A gentle knock. Once.
He didn't speak.
Another pause. Another knock. Then a woman's voice through the door, calm, low, with a little smile in it for anyone who knew how to hear it. "If you open fast, you'll break the chain," she said. "If you open slow, you'll keep your deposit."
He didn't move. He closed his eyes and heard her breathing, steady and controlled. He heard the hallway. He heard nothing else.
"I'm not here to arrest you," the woman said. "Someone just wants to make sure you're breathing."
He stood and took the chain in his fingers and held it the way he held the doorknob earlier: carefully, like it was a thing that could forgive. He slid the lock free slow. He opened the door two inches.
The woman from the alley looked back at him. No gray hoodie this time. A plain shirt. Calm eyes. No badge in sight.
"Hi," she said. "I liked what you did." A beat. "I didn't like what happened to the wall."
He said nothing.
"I'm here to make you an offer you can refuse," she said. "Food. A quiet room. Someone who won't freak out if the metal bends."
He swallowed. "Who are you?"
She smiled just enough to be polite and not enough to be warm. "Nat," she said. "For now."
He should slam the door. He should run. He should fly into a cloud and stay there until the earth forgot him.
Instead, he stepped back from the door so he wouldn't snap it by accident and let her in.