Hi! This story is going to be at least a little ridiculous. It will have a plot, but a whole lot of it is going to be sex (and hopefully fun). As for consent and such, please just accept that this story is operating under crazy sex fantasy rules.
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The Daily Planet was buzzing with activity when Clark Kent received the phone call that changed his life forever. He was juggling three different reports on the unusually violent outbreaks while also taking another phone call and wrangling the photographers. Normally he wouldn't have answered, but the call came on his special phone.
Only his closest allies had access to that phone. They usually contacted him directly, but he wanted to have an alternate channel in case emergencies came up. He disengaged from his other work and accepted the call.
"Clark." It was Bruce Wayne's voice, rougher than usual.
"This isn't the best time, Bruce. Unless-"
"I don't have long left to live, Clark. Shut up and listen for once."
Clark let go of his phone. By the time it started to drop, he had left the building and abandoned his civilian clothes. In the time it took the phone to fall, he arced into the atmosphere and flew halfway to Gotham City.
As he flew, Clark began scanning through the city for any sign of Bruce. It wasn't much of a search. The very first place he looked was the Batcave, and he found his friend lying there at the end of a trail of blood. He hesitated for a split second, searching for any sign of a trap, but there was only one heartbeat in all of Wayne Manor.
He smashed straight through the earth, plunging into the Batcave and landing beside Bruce. His rib cage was bloody and filled with shrapnel, wounds that would have killed an ordinary man. Batman chuckled.
"You shouldn't have come here."
"Who did this to you?" Clark knelt beside him but didn't dare lift him for fear of making the injury worse. His mind raced for solutions but came up with nothing.
"It's too late for you to do anything. Just listen to me."
"Too late? We have a thousand aliens' advanced technology! We have fucking magic! You can't die fr-"
"Shut up, Clark!" Bruce scowled at him until he went quiet. "Listen carefully. You remember how you asked me to investigate why your powers fluctuate wildly?"
"That's... that doesn't matter right now!"
"It matters more than you know. This may be difficult to believe, but listen to me." Bruce closed his eyes and gathered his remaining strength. "Our universe is controlled by impossibly powerful extra-dimensional beings who call themselves 'Writers.' We're nothing more than their playthings.
"Some outside force, likely something we cannot even comprehend, changes how the Writers manipulate our world. That's why your powers vary. When certain Writers are in control, you are a living god, but other Writers weaken you substantially. I have no idea why."
"Bruce, you're not making any sense."
"Dammit, listen to me! The Writers are making our world darker. Grittier. We need to adapt, or I'll be far from the only casualty."
Clark clenched his fists, fingers tearing through the stone of the Batcave's floor. "These Writers did this to you?"
"Not directly." Bruce took a slow, painful breath. "But they created a terrorist bombing and somehow blinded me so that I didn't notice any of the warning signs. That's why you can't save me - it only happened to kill me in the first place."
"The Batman dies in a terrorist bombing? That's... that's stupid."
"No, Clark, it's
edgy
."
For a long time he knelt on the ground, helpless. Not Superman, just a mortal helpless to save his best friend. As he watched Bruce bleed out on the ground, rage started to rise within him. His eyes glowed red, and at that moment a black-clad fist grabbed the front of his suit.
"Listen! My control won't last much longer, so I'm out of time to explain. You're the only one who has a chance of saving us, but if you go into this acting like a boy scout it will get even worse. I've only pieced together what I know over the past few days, so fragments should still be around Gotham. You have to keep the city safe to find... find..."
"Bruce?" Clark knelt closer. His friend was still breathing, yet something had changed. His eyes became bloodshot and his jaw unshaven. Abruptly he sneered.
"I'm the goddamn Batman!"
"...goodbye, Bruce."
Clark slowly rose to his feet. The heartbeat and breathing continued for several seconds after that, but his friend was already gone.
X X X
Over the next week, Clark stumbled through his life. Part of him insisted that everything was perfectly fine, that he should just move on. But when he attended Bruce's funeral, he was struck with an intense feeling that it had happened before. Maybe more than once.
The more he thought about what Bruce had said, the fuzzier his memory became. Sometimes Clark remembered that he himself had died, other times the idea seemed absurd. How exactly had Krypton been destroyed? Was he married, or had he even met Lois Lane? It all shifted through a haze of contradictory variations until eventually he gave up on trying to sort it out.
What he knew was that Bruce had been on to something and it had something to do with Gotham. Following the loss of the Batman, crime had spiked and the police had stopped patrolling. Reports indicated that the city's supervillains were preparing for a bid to take control of the city.
Worst of all was the change in the world. Villains that had once focused on battling superheroes now massacred civilians. Deaths in collateral damage skyrocketed. Every time Clark tried to take the noble path to save lives, more people died. As if some terrible force was working to spite him at every turn, to insist that what he believed was wrong. Eventually he decided that he had no choice but to investigate the reason everything had changed.
