Not completely—there was still dripping from rooftops, puddles that refused to die, and the occasional gust that made loose branches creak like the storm was whispering threats on its way out. But the worst was over. The kind of quiet that followed a typhoon settled in: soft, heavy, and strangely intimate, like the world had leaned in too close and now didn’t know how to step back.
Clark sat on the edge of Takumi’s futon with the Superman comic resting on his knees.
He’d waited until Mrs. Shibata was asleep. He’d waited until Koji’s “good night” text—Don’t do anything weird. —arrived and Clark could tell himself, very honestly, that reading a comic book could not possibly count as “doing something weird.”
It did. It counted.
The room was dim, lit by the weak glow of Takumi’s phone screen propped beside him like a tiny lantern. The ceiling above him was plain and quiet. No crab stain here—different house, different judgment. Clark almost missed the crab. Almost.
He placed the comic on the futon, smoothed the cover with his fingertips, and stared at the S-shield.
In his world, it wasn’t merchandise.
It was his mother’s hope, stitched in red and yellow. It was a symbol people looked up at when everything else fell apart. It was an explanation he could never give fully and a promise he kept anyway.
Here, it was ink.
Cheap, glossy ink on paper that smelled faintly of old cardboard.
Clark swallowed hard and opened to the first page.
Metropolis.
It wasn’t perfect. The skyline was drawn slightly different, the proportions stylized, the colors a touch brighter than reality. But the bones were there. The bridge. The daily traffic. The tiny drawn people moving like ants beneath towers. And there, printed in big block letters that made Clark’s chest tighten:
THE DAILY PLANET
Clark’s eyes drifted to the next panel. Lois Lane’s face. Her posture. The sharpness in her expression that wasn’t cruelty, but conviction.
He read the dialogue.
Not the exact words she’d said to him in his world—comics never got the details right—but close enough to hurt. Close enough to feel like someone had been listening to his life through a wall.
He turned the page.
Clark Kent appeared—glasses, awkward smile, a tie that never sat quite right. The comic made him look a little goofier than he remembered being, like a caricature of the mask he wore. Clark stared at the drawing and felt something unfamiliar, sour, twist in his stomach.
In this world, his secret identity wasn’t a real identity.
It was a punchline.
He flipped through more pages. Villains. Rescues. A bank robbery. A collapsing crane. The art showed Superman catching steel like it weighed nothing.
Clark’s shoulder throbbed in sympathy and spite.
He reached a page where Superman lifted a bus with one hand.
Clark stared at it for a long time, then whispered, “Show-off,” to himself, and hated how quickly his voice sounded small afterward.
He kept reading.
And then the comic hit him where it couldn’t be laughed off.
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A panel of Kansas farmland. A small house. Martha’s hands. Jonathan’s face. A line of dialogue that wasn’t his mother’s voice, but carried the shape of it.
Clark’s vision blurred. He blinked hard, once, then again. He told himself it was the phone light. He told himself it was fatigue. He told himself a lot of things.
The truth was simpler.
He missed them so much it hurt.
Clark set the comic down and pressed his palm against his eyes until the pressure made the ache change shape.
He forced himself to breathe.
In. Out.
Human lungs, human limits.
When he picked the comic back up, his hands were steadier, but his chest felt like it had been hollowed and filled with wet sand.
He flipped forward and found a small editorial note on the inside of the back cover—tiny print, the kind no one read unless they cared too much.
A “History of Superman” blurb.
Clark’s eyes scanned it.
He read about Superman’s “creation.” About “writers” and “artists.” About “reboots.” About “alternate timelines.” About “story arcs” that treated his life like a product that could be rebranded.
Clark’s stomach turned.
It wasn’t the idea of fiction that hurt—he understood stories. He understood myth.
It was the idea that his pain, his love, his losses… were here as content.
As something people bought between cooking magazines and puzzle books.
He read a line about Superman being “a symbol of hope.”
Clark’s throat tightened.
Hope.
Hope was real. He had made it real. He had bled for it. He had exhausted himself for it. He had thrown his body into disasters because hope was the only thing that kept people from becoming monsters.
Here, hope was a marketing bullet point.
Clark exhaled slowly, then flipped the page again, searching for something—anything—that would tell him this was a coincidence.
It wasn’t.
A later issue referenced something that made Clark’s blood go cold: an event he remembered as lived reality, drawn as a “classic storyline.” The details weren’t perfect. But the shape was the same.
His memories existed here as narrative beats.
He wasn’t just “like” Superman.
He was the Superman the comic was about.
And that raised a question Clark didn’t want to ask, because once asked, it didn’t go away:
If Superman is fiction here… what am I?
Clark’s phone buzzed.
He flinched, heartbeat jumping.
He grabbed it immediately, half expecting another polite threat.
It was Koji.
You awake?
Clark stared at the message. He hadn’t heard footsteps. He hadn’t heard anything. He remembered again that his super senses were gone. That silence could hide anything now. His chest tightened.
He typed back: Yes.
Koji replied instantly: I saw your light. Don’t read weird American stuff all night. Sleep.
Clark’s mouth twitched faintly. Of course Koji had noticed. Koji noticed everything. Koji just pretended he didn’t because caring made him uncomfortable.
Clark typed back: It’s research.
Koji: You said that earlier. That’s suspicious.
Clark stared at the phone, then at the comic, and for a moment the absurdity of it all threatened to crack him open in a laugh that would have sounded too close to sobbing.
He typed: Good night.
Koji: Night. Don’t faint.
Clark stared at that last line and felt something warm and bitter mix in his chest.
Koji didn’t know what he was protecting.
But he was protecting him anyway.
Clark set the phone down and returned his attention to the comic. He flipped back to the beginning and looked at Clark Kent again—the drawn man with glasses, the mask, the gentle eyes.
He realized something uncomfortable.
The comic didn’t show the quiet parts. It didn’t show the weight of choosing not to sleep because someone might need you. It didn’t show the shame of failing to save everyone. It didn’t show the moments when he’d wanted to stop and couldn’t because the world kept falling.
It showed the symbol.
Not the person.
Clark closed the comic slowly and held it against his chest as if the paper could anchor him.
Outside, the village was quiet, damp, alive.
Mrs. Shibata was asleep down the hall, trusting the world to hold for a few hours.
Koji was somewhere nearby, watching windows and pretending he wasn’t.
Kobayashi’s words returned, cold as rainwater:
You’re not Takumi, are you?
Clark’s jaw tightened.
He reached for a notebook—Takumi’s old one, stained with mud and fertilizer smudges—and opened to a clean page. He wrote the date. The time. He wrote, in simple block letters, the facts he could not afford to forget.
-
Kobayashi is watching.
-
Kobayashi used Mrs. Shibata to pressure me.
-
Kobayashi suspects I’m not Takumi.
-
The village is strongest when it’s together.
-
Superman exists here as fiction.
He stared at the last line for a long time.
Then, beneath it, he wrote something else—smaller, but firmer:
-
I still have to be him anyway.
Clark set the pen down, exhaled slowly, and lay back on the futon, comic tucked safely beside him like a dangerous secret.
He didn’t sleep right away.
He listened to the quiet.
He listened the way he used to listen to Metropolis, the way he used to catch screams and sirens and split seconds.
Now there were no screams in his ears.
Just rain dripping from eaves.
Just the faint hum of a village trying to recover.
Just his own heartbeat, steady, human.
And somewhere in that quiet, Clark understood the cruelest joke of this world:
Here, Superman was “made up.”
But the choices that created him were still real.
And he was still the one making them.