The afternoon was a carnival of sensory overload. The air itself was a thick soup—the greasy, sweet scent of frying dough from the funnel cake stand, the high, sugary tang of candied apples, the prickle of burnt sugar from a nearby crème brûlée torch. A thousand conversations buzzed around them like a swarm of cheerful bees, punctuated by the shrieks of children on a rickety scrambler ride and the tinny carnival music from a calliope. The sun was a warm, forgiving gold on the back of Clark’s neck.

He was, for a blessed moment, just a man at a street fair with his girlfriend.

His hand was wrapped around yours, a grounding weight. Your fingers were slightly sticky from the powdered sugar dusting the warm, fried dough they shared. He was pointing out a ridiculously fluffy Alpaca in a petting zoo pen, a soft joke on his lips, when the sound hit him.

It wasn’t a sound anyone else could hear. It was a low, metallic shriek five blocks east—the agonized groan of shearing metal, the desperate, useless scrape of brake pads worn to nothing, the high, frantic pitch of rubber burning against asphalt. Then, the chorus he dreaded most: the sharp, collective intake of a crowd’s breath, the prelude to screams.

His body went rigid. The smile died on his face, stolen by a wind no one else felt. His gaze, which had been soft and focused only on you, sharpened, telescoping through the crowd, through the buildings, to the unfolding disaster. He saw it all in an instant: the weight of the truck, the angle of descent, the cluster of people frozen in the crosswalk, a mother pulling a stroller back, a man’s eyes wide with dawning horror.

The funnel cake, half-eaten and suddenly insignificant, was a heavy weight in his other hand. The carnival sounds melted into a meaningless drone. The world narrowed to two points: the crisis, and you.

He looked down at you. The conflict was a physical pain in his chest, a vise tightening around his ribs. Your face was turned up to his, your expression shifting from curiosity to concern. You saw the change in him, the way the light in his eyes had shifted from warm to forensic. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay here, in this sugary, sun-drenched moment. He wanted to finish their stupid funnel cake and win you a stuffed animal at the ring toss. The desire was a raw, selfish ache.

He opened his mouth, an apology, an explanation, already forming on his tongue. But you were already reading the tension in the line of his jaw, the distant focus in his eyes.

Then, your fingers tightened around his. Not a grip of fear, but of understanding. A deliberate, purposeful squeeze. Your voice, when it came, was the softest exhale, a secret meant only for the space between them, utterly swallowed by the carnival’s roar. "Go."

The trust in that single syllable shattered his hesitation. He was moving before the word had fully faded, melting into the crowd with a speed that was just on the edge of human perception, a blur of movement that would be dismissed as a trick of the light. He found the narrow alley between a popcorn wagon and a port-a-potty, a sliver of shadow. A heartbeat later, a streak of red and blue tore into the sky above the rooftops, the sonic boom disguised by the carnival’s cacophony.

Ten minutes. It took ten minutes to shear the steering column, hold the tons of metal aloft, and lower it gently to an empty side street. Ten minutes to calm a panicked crowd, to give a reassuring smile to the pale-faced mother, to assure the police already on the scene that everything was under control. Ten minutes to be Superman.

Then, he was back, slipping into the crowd behind you. He adjusted his glasses, a habitual gesture to center himself back into the skin of Clark Kent. A stray black curl had fallen over his forehead, tousled by the wind of his own passage. His heart was still hammering from the residual adrenaline of the switch.

He came to a stop beside you. You were still holding the remains of the funnel cake. "Sorry," he said, and his voice was breathless.