Metropolis Guardian
Metropolis wakes up early.
By six o'clock in the morning, the coffee carts are on the corners and the delivery trucks are making their rounds and the first commuters are crossing the bridges with the river still quiet below and the sky still pearl-gray above. By seven, the city is fully awake — all of it at once, millions of people beginning their day in a hundred neighborhoods, from the glass towers of the Financial District to the painted stoops of Suicide Slum.
And somewhere above all of it, at a height where the buildings look like toys and the river looks like a ribbon, Superman is already awake.
He doesn't need much sleep. This is useful. He uses the hours between midnight and sunrise to circle the city — not looking for trouble, exactly, but listening. Super-hearing catches everything at that range: the particular creak of an elevator cable that is wearing thin, the gurgles of a water main that is about to give way, the hesitation in an old boiler's rhythm that says something is wrong. He makes note of all of it. He files anonymous reports. He sometimes fixes things in the dark, gently, without waking anyone.
By the time the coffee carts open, he has already prevented three things that nobody will ever know about.
The day unfolds the way days in Metropolis always do — quickly and loudly and with tremendous variety. At nine thirty, a window-washing scaffold on the forty-second floor of a downtown tower loses a cable. WHOOSH — Superman is there before the scaffold drops six feet, one hand steady under the frame, holding it motionless while the frightened window washers look down at him with very wide eyes. He gets them safely to the roof access door and sets the scaffold down on a lower ledge, calm and careful as a person setting a book on a shelf.
"Thank you," one of the window washers says, a man named Dario, who has been washing windows in Metropolis for fifteen years.
"Thank you for what you do," Superman says, and means it entirely. Then he is gone.
At eleven, a fire in a restaurant kitchen on Fifth Avenue. WHOOOOOF — his freezing breath hits the fire before it can reach the gas line. The kitchen is coated in a thin frost that is already melting by the time the fire truck arrives.
At one in the afternoon, the Metropolis City Hall steps, where Clark Kent — mild-mannered reporter, glasses, notebook — is interviewing a city councilwoman about the new parks initiative in the Bayside district. He asks her questions. He writes down her answers. He thanks her. He shakes her hand.
Later that afternoon, three miles away, Superman stops a high-speed vehicle chase on the waterfront expressway before it reaches the pedestrian bridge. Precise, economical — he steps into the road, holds up one hand, and the vehicle stops. Not because it wants to. Because you do not drive through Superman.
At dusk, he hovers above the city and watches the lights come on. Window by window, block by block, Metropolis brightens against the darkening sky. From up here, it looks like the Earth exhaling warmth. He can see the Financial District glittering. He can see the parks going dark. He can see, far across the city, the distinctive glow of the Daily Planet globe.
He loves this city with a ferocity that surprises him sometimes. He came to it as a young man from a small farm in Kansas, cautious and hopeful and full of questions, and the city had asked nothing of him except to show up and care. So he showed up. And he cared.
From the corner of Bayside and Fourth, a small girl named Priya is looking up at the sky. She has just seen a red and blue shape hover, still as a hawk, against the last pink light. She has seen it before — from the window of her school, from her grandmother's porch, from the backseat of her mom's car. She watches it now, small hand shading her eyes.
"There he is," she says. Nobody in particular needs to hear it. She just says it.
Superman does not hear her — there are six million sounds below him and he is not listening at this particular moment. But he would not be surprised by the words. He hears that sentence in a hundred different voices, from a hundred different directions, across this city every single day.
That is what he is. Not just the man who catches the scaffolds and stops the fires. He is the idea that Metropolis makes real — that the world can be better, that someone will always come, that the streak of red and blue in the sky is not a miracle but a promise.
Tomorrow morning he will be back before the coffee carts. He will circle the city in the dark and listen and fix what needs fixing and wait for the lights to come on.
He is the guardian of Metropolis.
He is its soul.