"Clark Kent, from Metropolis." Clark shook Jude's hand with the easy warmth of someone who had never once in his life found small talk difficult. "Reporter — Daily Planet."
Jude shook back and managed what he estimated was a reasonably natural smile.
"Clark Kent," he said. "That's a name with a certain — numerical quality to it."
Clark blinked. "A numerical quality?"
"Never mind. It's nothing."
He kept the smile in place through what he privately considered a heroic act of self-control.
Superman. He was shaking hands with Superman. He had seen Clark Kent's face on the news twice before and somehow, standing here in a Gotham cemetery with the biofield doing whatever biofields did, the connection had not fired once. He'd just thought: tall, good-looking, handshake calibrated not to break fingers. That was it. That was the whole read.
Which was — fine. Good, even. It meant the disguise worked exactly as designed.
The problem was the implication.
Jude ran it quickly, the way he'd learned to run every unexpected variable: the DC universe had a matching mechanism, elegant and ruthless in its logic. Gotham's flavour of chaos — human, psychological, operatic — belonged to Batman. Metropolis got aliens and superhumans. Central City got metahumans with a residual moral compass. The supernatural pipeline ran through Constantine. Each tier of crisis had a corresponding tier of hero, and the system didn't misallocate resources.
Which meant that when Superman showed up in Gotham City on what looked like a casual afternoon visit, it was worth asking very seriously what was coming that required both of them in the same place.
He did a quick scan of the cemetery. Peaceful. No visible portents. The trees were simply trees.
"So," Jude said, with the careful tone of a man taking a very casual stroll past a live wire. "What brings you all the way from Metropolis? Friends in the area?"
"No, nothing like that." Clark shook his head. "Work, actually. I'm a journalist — I mentioned that. I heard about the mourning ceremony here by chance and came down to Gotham for a feature."
"That's it? Just the story?"
"It's not just a story." Something in Clark's expression shifted — settled into a kind of earnestness that would have looked performative on anyone else but on him looked entirely constitutional. "Before this, most people in Metropolis had a very fixed impression of Gotham. Dark, dangerous, not a place where people were — happy. I'll admit I shared some of that impression."
That impression, Jude thought, is statistically well-founded.
"And then I heard about what happened here," Clark continued. He was looking at the grove as he spoke, and something in the quality of his attention made the word heard do a small amount of quiet work. "Elderly people and children and gangsters and ordinary citizens, all standing in the same cemetery. Planting trees for the same dead. I was — I found that very moving." He paused. "The kind of story I've always wanted to write. People setting aside what separates them long enough to recognise what doesn't. Different lives, different histories — but the grief is the same. The hope is the same. Something in us answers to both."
A beat.
"Including you?" The voice came from behind Jude's left shoulder.
Bruce. Jude had not heard him approach. He was fairly confident Bruce had not been there a moment ago, and he was slightly less confident that Bruce had been in the grove the entire time.
Clark met his eyes. "Including me. Especially me."
Jude looked between them with the expression of a man watching two chess players exchange the first move of a game he hadn't been told he was attending.
He already knows, Jude thought, watching Bruce's face. Or he suspects hard enough that it amounts to the same thing. The world's greatest detective, Gotham's protector, the most paranoid mind in a city full of dangerous minds — standing in a grove of saplings, locking eyes with a reporter from Metropolis and asking including you? in a tone that had nothing to do with the trees.
Clark appeared to decide, with admirable grace, to let the moment slide.
"In any case," he said, turning back to the conversation with the ease of a man who had considerable practice at redirecting, "the editor-in-chief doesn't usually greenlight pieces like this. Most of our coverage is Superman sightings, celebrity gossip, political angles. The meaningful stories get deprioritised because they don't move traffic. I've been there long enough to know how it works." A slight smile. "This time, somehow, I got the approval."
"You probably picked the wrong era," Jude said. He didn't say it unkindly. "Capital runs everything now. Metrics, engagement, who's watching and for how long. A journalist who wants to cover something that matters is fighting the algorithm. The money has opinions, and the people with the money have affiliations. There are things you'd want to write that your editor-in-chief would never let see print."
Clark's face showed a brief, honest shadow of that — the weariness of someone who has spent years knowing the system is broken and working inside it anyway.
Then it cleared. "Maybe so," he said. "But I'm here. The piece ran a month ago. People seemed to receive it well." His voice was simple, without performance. "That matters to me."
"Might just be curiosity," Bruce said. "Gotham as spectacle, not as symbol." He paused. "But my impression of you has changed, Mr. Clark."
Clark tilted his head. "Have you heard of me before?"
"I've seen you before." Bruce's voice was measured, exact — the tone of a man recounting something he had observed carefully and remembered precisely. "At the previous memorial service. It was raining. There was no one near the grove. You planted eleven saplings by yourself."
Silence.
"Some time ago, Superman was swapped into a different body. During that incident, eleven employees of a Wayne Enterprises branch died from the damage caused by the impostor." Bruce let that statement occupy the air it occupied. "You planted those trees for them."
He stopped there.
You looked very sad at the time.