Seeing it was one thing. Understanding it was another.
Clark stood inside the Speed Force. He looked at what remained of the world. Mountains of bodies. A sea of blood. The heavy silence that had replaced a civilization. He almost stepped through the barrier anyway. The impulse hit him in the chest, a fast, hard physical reflex. Go. Help her. Every instinct demanded it.
"Don't." Jude gripped his arm. "We're moving against the current. This is the end of the timeline. A fixed point. The damage is done. If we want to change anything, we have to find where it started."
Clark watched Lois cradle the body of Superman in the dark. He drew a slow, deliberate breath.
"You're right." He kept his voice flat, locking down the tremor in his throat. "Let's go back further."
The timeline shifted to another scene.
Earlier. The wounds still fresh.
This version of Clark was still standing. He wore a black suit. He faced Lois across the rubble of a shattered street. She wore the dark Kryptonian suit Jude and Clark had just seen at the end of the timeline. Her shredded cape caught the ash-heavy breeze. Behind her, Metropolis burned.
The city was unrecognizable. The skyline Clark knew—the towers of steel and glass, the city he had lived in for over a decade, the place where he became a journalist—was reduced to rubble and fire stretching to the horizon. The streets ran red. Sounds drifted from the ruins. A woman shouting a name over and over. A man falling silent. An old man staring, making no sound at all.
Superman stood in the middle of the wreckage. His hands hung open at his sides. His shoulders bowed.
What he could not reconcile was how the survivors looked at Lois. Not with gratitude. Not with relief. They stared at her with fear. With hatred.
"Clark." Lois's posture shifted when she saw him. Her jaw tightened, and she looked down for a fraction of a second before meeting his eyes. "I thought you were dead."
"The Life Matrix brought me back. It took longer than expected." He studied her face. "What happened here? What happened to you?"
"It was the Cyborg Superman." She pointed at a pile of broken mechanical components on the ground—the remains of Hank Henshaw. "He told everyone he was the reborn Superman. He wasn't. I knew he wasn't. So I fought him."
Her voice hitched.
"I didn't know you were coming back. I thought you were gone. When I fight... when I'm that angry... I don't have enough left over to also be careful."
Clark looked at the burning city behind her. He understood. He looked back at her face. He opened his mouth to speak, but another voice cut through the silence.
"She's lying!"
A boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen, knelt in the rubble over a body. He shook violently. Tears streaked through the ash on his face. He glared at Lois.
"She used her laser vision to cut my dad in half! I saw it! She wasn't protecting anyone, she was just—she was just—"
His voice cracked.
"I remember her." An older man stepped forward, his hands trembling. "She killed Luthor with her bare hands. And the Batman in Gotham, and the Joker, and members of Congress, and generals, and the other Justice League members—" He pointed a shaking finger at Lois. "She wasn't a Superman. She was a killer."
Clark stared at Lois.
"Is this true? You killed Bruce—"
"Bruce was never going to end what's wrong with Gotham City." Her voice rose. She squared her shoulders. "He played games with those criminals for decades. He lectured everyone about justice while the same people kept coming back. I turned the Joker into glass in three seconds. Three seconds. Batman couldn't manage it in fifteen years."
She stepped forward. Clark held his ground.
"If the League had operated this way from the beginning—Luthor, Mongul, Ra's al Ghul's people, Ares, Black Adam—all of them dealt with, permanently, years ago. The body count would have been a fraction. Do you understand? A fraction. I did the math."
Her cadence quickened, the words sharp and rehearsed.
"The warmongers. The warlords who ran famines as policy. The arms networks across three continents. The officials who took the money and let it all happen. I ended them. Not warned them, not imprisoned them so they could be broken out later. Ended them. And humanity should be on its knees thanking me, but instead—" She gestured at the rubble. Her lower lip trembled. "Instead they look at me like that."
She turned to Clark. Her gaze hardened.
"You could hear all of it. You always could. Every atrocity, every war crime, every child dying of preventable disease while a man in a suit signed the order that caused it. You heard it and you didn't act. You could have purified this world completely. Why didn't you? Why didn't you save them?"
Clark remained silent.
He looked at the woman standing in front of him. She had killed his city. She had killed his friends. She had killed his enemies. They stood on opposite sides of a line he had spent his entire life holding.
"Lois." He kept his voice quiet. "We are not qualified to save everyone. Humanity doesn't need a saviour." He met her gaze. "And we cannot purify the world. The world doesn't need us to purify it."
She opened her mouth to answer. He kept talking.
"Superman can kill a supervillain. He cannot kill evil. Superman can kill a warmonger. He cannot kill war. Superman can kill a warlord. He cannot kill strife. Superman can take down an arms network. He cannot take down violence. Superman can remove one corrupt official. He cannot remove greed." He paused. "Our methods are efficient. Our power is real. But neither of them can save everyone. Only humanity can save humanity. We don't get to make that choice for them. We are not gods."
The fire burned behind her. The boy remained kneeling in the ash.
"I've lived on this Earth for more than thirty years," Clark said. "And I've learned one thing. One. I've learned to control my power."
Lois stared at him. The muscles in her jaw worked. Then her expression blanked.
"You're wrong," she said. Her tone flattened. "Humanity doesn't want to save itself. They've never wanted to. They want an omnipotent god to solve every problem so they don't have to. Otherwise they just run the same circles for a hundred years and call it progress."
"Lois. Stop. Come with me."
"You want to imprison me." She did not phrase it as a question. "Like a criminal."
"I have to. You've killed too many people."