(THE “S” STANDS FOR HOPE) CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN: CLARK

There was, Clark reflected, a certain irony in how often trouble seemed to find him when he was doing nothing more suspicious than existing.

He stood very still, hands relaxed at his sides, posture loose in a way that suggested neither fear nor defiance, the careful balance of someone who understood how easily tension could escalate if misread. The alley smelled faintly of damp concrete and old refuse, the residue of a city that was never quite clean no matter how many cleaners were set upon it. Somewhere beyond the narrow walls, the sound of distant traffic bled through from the main road. Closer still was Victor’s breathing, loud enough that Clark could hear it over everything else. That, more than the gun aimed at his chest, told him a great deal about how this encounter was meant to end.

Victor looked exactly as Clark remembered him from their previous encounters, though those memories were drawn from glimpses at a distance and moments that had ended with Victor believing himself in control until events inexplicably went awry. He was tall and broad shouldered, carrying himself with the solid confidence of a man who trusted absolutely in his own competence. His eyes were hidden behind a mask, but Clark could still track the way his gaze flicked over his stance, his clothing, and the conspicuous absence of any visible weapon. And when Victor smiled, it was faint and satisfied, the expression of someone convinced that all the variables had finally been accounted for and that the outcome was in his favor.

There was a science to preserving one’s secret identity, Clark thought, and he nearly laughed at how distant that concern felt now. Still, it was a simple science, built more on restraint and foresight than cleverness. You avoided patterns that could be traced, avoided witnesses who might think too hard about what they had seen, and above all avoided any situation where the similarities between the man and the mask could be noticed by someone with enough patience and paranoia to connect the dots.

Having a gun pointed straight at him rather flew in the face of that.

It was not that Clark was afraid, not for his life and certainly not for the integrity of a secret that had already been loosened, if not entirely discarded. Back on his own Earth, this would have been the moment where he would be running through many contingencies, or even subtle ways to disarm Victor without revealing anything more than exceptional luck or timing. He would have been thinking about cameras hidden at corners, about potential witnesses just out of sight, and about Lois waiting at home with a raised eyebrow and a question he would pretend not to understand if he messed up.

But this was another universe entirely, one that had never known Kal El and had no claim on the life he had left behind. 

Here, Clark Kent existed without parents whose pasts could be dug into, without a childhood that could be endangered, without a Lois Lane whose safety depended on a carefully maintained lie. There was no personal history to protect, no roots that could be scorched if the truth came out. He had already crossed that line with Carol, already allowed one person to know the other side of him, and extending that honesty to a few dozen more, even unintentionally, would not meaningfully change his circumstances.

And yet, he still found himself wanting to preserve his secret identity for as long as possible. More than that, he realized he wanted to enjoy this.

Victor shifted his weight slightly, finger tightening on the trigger as he spoke, his voice filled with something very close to triumph. To him, this was the culmination of careful planning, the moment where a nobody reporter turned out to be exactly as disposable as expected.

“You know, you have been an interesting problem, Kent. Every time I think I have you figured out, something goes wrong. Weapons jam, or people trip.” His smile sharpened. “Tonight, I thought I would simplify things.”

Clark gave him a small frown, as if considering his words. “Simplifying is usually good,” he said mildly. “Less room for error.”

Victor snorted. “You think you are funny.”

Clark did, actually. Earth Bet was a bleak place, weighed down by crisis after crisis and disasters that seemed to grind everyone down into harder, meaner versions of themselves, all under the ever present sense that the worst day imaginable was always waiting just around the corner. 

He did not mind the rescues, did not mind stepping in when buildings collapsed or people screamed, but the absence of small, ordinary joys weighed on him more than he liked to admit. Without Lois, with hero work here being less about inspiration and more about containment, and without those moments that reminded him why the mask mattered, encounters like this felt almost indulgent.

A quiet alley, a villain convinced of his own control, and no civilians nearby. It was, in its own way, a vacation.

Victor clearly believed he was holding all the cards, but Clark could have ended this in a hundred different ways. He could have pinched the barrel into uselessness, or used his heat vision to subtly warp the firing mechanism and watched confusion bloom as the weapon misfired or failed catastrophically in a way that injured the man holding it. He could have let Victor pull the trigger and stepped aside at the last possible second, allowing the bullet to ping harmlessly off brick before feigning shock at his own survival. But all of those options would accomplish the same thing. They would tell Victor, unmistakably, that Clark Kent was not normal.

And in this world, not normal meant parahuman.

People on Earth Bet were conditioned to look past coincidence, to assume that if someone walked away from the impossible, there had to be a power involved. Even the most mundane miracle would put a target on his back, and Clark had no interest in making his civilian life any more complicated than it already was.

No, the best way to deal with Victor was not to tamper with his equipment yet again, but to turn the pressure inward, to make the man doubt his own position, his own certainty, and perhaps even his own competence, and to leave him unsettled long after this encounter ended.

Clark’s eyes softened and his shoulders slumped just a little, as if tension had finally caught up with him. He raised his hands slowly, palms open, a universal gesture that Victor’s instincts immediately interpreted as compliance. The man braced himself, confidence reinforcing itself as he saw what he expected to see.

“That’s better,” Victor said. “You make this easy, and maybe I let you walk away.”

Clark nodded, swallowing, slipping into the role with ease. “Look, if this is about money or information, we can talk about that. I do not think anyone needs to get hurt here.”

Victor laughed, the sound coming out harsh in the confined space. “You really believe that, don’t you? That talking fixes things.”

“I have found it helps more often than people think,” Clark replied.

As he spoke, he watched Victor closely, noting his breathing, the subtle tremor in his hands, and the way his gaze flicked again and again toward the alley entrance behind Clark. He saw the cracks in the confidence, the tiny tells of a man who relied on stolen skill and borrowed expertise to feel whole.

Victor prided himself on using his abilities to their fullest extent, on taking what others had earned and layering it over his own inadequacies until the result resembled mastery. Clark wondered, not for the first time, how terrifying it must be to know, deep down, that none of it was truly yours.

“You have been following me for weeks,” Clark continued calmly. “If you wanted me dead, you would have taken the shot already.”

Victor’s smile faltered, just a fraction. “Careful.”

“I am being careful,” Clark said. “I am also being honest.”

The gun wavered, barely perceptible, but enough. Clark did not move to exploit it. He simply waited, letting the silence stretch, allowing Victor to fill it with his own doubts.

This was not about strength or speed or invulnerability. It was about pressure, applied in exactly the right place, until the structure gave way under its own weight. It was about turning certainty into hesitation, and hesitation into fear.

Clark let out a slow breath and met Victor’s eyes, really met them, with a calm that had unsettled far more dangerous men than this. He felt a hint of anticipation stir within him, the familiar thrill of trying something new in a world that so rarely allowed him to be anything other than a blunt instrument of hope. And then, the corners of his lips twitched, the beginning of a smile he had been carefully restraining finally breaking through.

Let’s see if Clark could take a page out of Batman’s book and put the fear of God into the villain.