The vision sheared away. The Speed Force pulled them deeper, leaving the confrontation between Clark and that universe's Lois to dissolve into the rushing blur around them.
More fragments flared and vanished. Mostly battles. Lois in the black suit, dismantling opposition with sterile, mechanical efficiency. Clark watched. His jaw tightened, eyes fixed on the timestream as he chewed on the silence.
Was I wrong? Have my choices been right? Should I have done more? Could I have made it different? Does she really think that—does my Lois think that too, somewhere underneath—
"Stop."
Jude's voice was quiet, cutting clean through the noise. Clark blinked, his shoulders dropping a fraction.
"Don't run those thoughts to their conclusion," Jude said. "The Dark Multiverse functions on different architecture. These universes are structurally flawed. The decay isn't incidental, it's constitutive. A small trigger appears to cause the collapse, but the collapse was inevitable. Everyone inside carries blind distortions. Some just broadcast them louder." He held Clark's gaze. "The Lois in this universe and your Lois are not the same person. That isn't meant to comfort you. It is simply a fact."
"But what she said wasn't entirely wrong," Clark said. "I do have the ability to do more."
"How much is enough?" Jude asked. "If a child is carried everywhere, he never learns to walk. If a man lives in a life vest, he never learns to swim. If an omniscient, omnipotent God stood on the street corner, humanity's only industry would be prayer. They don't love you for your power."
Clark looked away. "That has to account for part of it."
"A fraction. You'll see the relevant comparison soon." Jude tilted his head. "What else is bothering you?"
Clark fell quiet. The shifting light of the Speed Force washed over his face. "My principle about not killing. I want to know your thoughts."
"You've held that code for years. Why ask now?"
"Because of what I just saw." Clark turned his attention back to the rushing timestream. "Our universe runs on a loop. Someone commits a crime, they get locked up, they break out, they repeat the cycle. I've watched it happen with the same faces. Over and over. Luthor. The Joker. It never stops. If making it physically impossible for them to hurt another person is an option... isn't taking that option the responsible choice?"
Jude let the question hang in the rushing air.
"It depends on what you are," he said eventually. "Not who. What."
Clark waited.
"Bruce is Batman. You are Superman. People rarely praise Clark Kent's integrity or critique Bruce Wayne's spending habits, because Clark and Bruce are human beings. Humans are messy. Batman and Superman are something else entirely. The second those identities were born, they became symbols. Symbols require absolute purity. Any static ruins the signal."
"Batman will always be Gotham's nightmare. He could simply glide across the skyline, throwing a single shadow, and criminals would scatter. The citizens would still feel a chill. The image does the work. Superman operates in the exact opposite direction. You are the daylight in Metropolis. People aren't unafraid of you because you lack Batman's edge. They are unafraid because they know you only do good. They pull strength just from the fact that you exist."
Jude watched him. "Symbols cannot kill. The moment they do, they cast a shadow over the concept they represent. What does it mean to punish evil if the punishment has no ceiling? Extrajudicial execution by a figure with your power isn't justice. It is a single, subjective will operating with zero accountability. Even if your control is absolute, people will wonder. Once they wonder, the image fractures. And once it fractures, what remains is no longer Superman. What remains is a god people are right to fear."
Clark shifted his stance. "But we are real people. Not symbols. Neither of us is perfect."
"That brings us to the second reason." Jude kept his tone measured. "Have you noticed that Bruce is, in a strict clinical sense, not entirely well?"
Clark opened his mouth. He closed it again.
"Not killing is the one line he refuses to cross. People look at that and see restraint. Self-discipline. A code. In reality, it is the last dam keeping the water in the reservoir. A Batman who kills doesn't become more dangerous because of a rising body count. He becomes dangerous because the act of killing removes the final mechanism keeping his mind functional. The line is not a shackle. It is a load-bearing wall." Jude paused. "Knock it down, and whatever walks out of the rubble isn't a more effective Batman."
"For you, the slope is different, but equally steep," Jude continued. "Today, you eliminate supervillains. In a year, someone argues that ordinary murderers are also a solved problem, provided you choose to solve them. Then the standard shifts again. Low morality. Petty corruption. The threshold for execution keeps moving because the standard is subjective, and so is the man enforcing it. Everyone is subjective. That is fine when the consequences are local and your neighbors can stop you. It becomes a catastrophe when the subjective man can level a city block with his eyes before anyone can draw a breath."
"Procedural justice exists so that no single will—including a good one, including yours—can decide alone who lives and who dies. It is slow. It has gaps. People exploit it constantly. But repairing those gaps is humanity's job, not yours. The flaws in the system are not an argument for giving you the override codes."
Clark digested the words. "So it is right for me to refuse to kill."
"For you? Yes."
The Speed Force hummed around them.
"For me, it is more complicated."
Clark blinked.
"I am not joking," Jude said, cutting off the question forming on Clark's face. "I don't carry the title of hero. My moral framework is considerably more flexible than yours or Bruce's. If the two of you didn't hold the stance you do, I would have already put a bullet in several people. I don't kill. But the reason is respect for the two of you, not principle."
"But—" Clark stopped, his brows knitting together. "You just argued that humanity needs to correct itself. Doesn't killing criminals contradict that entirely?"
"I am humanity." Jude's expression went entirely flat. "A life for a life. A debt for a debt. Defending the people who need defending. Those are humanity's oldest self-correcting mechanisms. The legal process addresses the root causes. Killing the absolute worst addresses the immediate symptoms. If one proves insufficient, the other compensates. Explain to me why utilizing both is wrong."
"Because you just said we have no right to decide life and death based on subjective judgment."
"I said you have no right. Because you are a symbol, and the consequences of your subjectivity are civilization-ending." He held Clark's gaze. "When I bypass procedural justice—if I ever do—it will be because procedural justice has already failed the situation so thoroughly that there is nothing left to bypass."
Jude turned his head, watching the jagged streaks of alternate histories fly past.
"The absence of rules creates a void. The rage of ordinary people fills it. That has always been true." A slight lift of his shoulders. "I am simply the most restrained of the ordinary people."