As they left the hospital, all Clark could think about was what he had promised Gail, about what he had realized back in her room. He needed Bruce’s help! The same guy who they’d freed back in the hospital, and then had left them to face Gail alone. He hadn’t even bothered to check up on her, he raged, and she still expected Clark to help him. The stupid, ungrateful, uncaring- Clark bit off the thought and forced himself to calm down. No matter what he thought about Bruce, he needed him. One thing Gail had been right about was that despite everything else, Bruce was an amazing fighter. He’d hurt Richie, maybe not badly, but he’d done more damage than Clark had. Maybe together they could figure out a way to bring Richie down. Sure, he told himself, that wouldn’t be too hard. Beat a guy who’s got skin like a razor; that shouldn’t be too difficult. Yeah, and all he had to do first was find Bruce, and who knows where he could be.

“And there’s another thing I have to worry about,” Clark muttered. “What if Bruce finds Richie before I find him?”

“Don’t tell me your actually planning on going after him,” Chloe said. They passed the Beanery as they walked down the street. From the hospital on the outskirts of town to the school it was about a half hour walk.

“Which one?” Clark asked, still thinking.

“Take your pick! First we’ve got a wanted felon, a guy who almost made a shish kabob out of you last night; and next there’s a guy whose been kicking the tar out of wanted felons. I mean,” she said quickly, “not to criticize you or anything, but what can you really do? Even if you bump into Bruce on the street, like right now, what could you do? Make him go back to the hospital? Or tell him not to go after Richie?” She frowned and looked behind them, checking the street.

“What’s the matter?” Clark asked her.

“Sorry,” she explained, “Pete’s just shown me too many horror movies I guess. When you say something like that, then whoever you didn’t expect to pop up just then, does.” Suddenly she shrieked as a hand clutched her side. Clark nearly jumped out of his skin as he turned around, expecting the worst. Instead he saw Pete grinning from ear to ear.

“Sorry, Chloe,” he apologized, still laughing, “couldn’t resist.” Chloe yelled at him and hit him with her bag. “What were you expecting someone else?” Pete laughed as he jumped back.

“Jerk,” she muttered sullenly. “I thought you were supposed to be at school, doing research for me, not making me lose ten years of my life.”

“I was, I hit pay dirt and decided to find you guys early,” he said. “How’d things go at the hospital? What’d Bruce say?”

“Not much,” Clark replied. “He barely thanked us for getting him out of there before giving us the slip. I think he’s going after Richie by himself, even if it gets him killed.”

Pete’s face grew serious as he listened. “I can almost understand why,” he said, nodding.

“What do you mean?” Clark asked.

“Well, you really have to see this,” Pete explained to them as they started back towards the school.

Ever since Chloe had taken charge of the school newspaper, The Torch, she had slowly transformed the newsroom into her own private shrine to investigative reporting. She had two computers hooked up to an online reference guide of bizarre and unexplainable phenomenon as well as scientific and historical search engines. Her back office, the home of the infamous ‘Wall of Weird’, had newspaper clippings that dated back to the founding of Smallville. She had even gathered, at her own expense, several old almanacs and journals from the earliest settlers and traders that had passed through this territory. In short, her office held literally anything and everything that a person could ever want to know about Smallville, and it’s unique history. When they entered, Clark saw that Pete had staked a claim to the computer in the far corner. It was surrounded by candy-wrappers and plastic cups.

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“I guess you’re not the only one who’s been up all night,” Clark told Chloe as they sat down at the desk. She ignored him and stared at the wrappers in disgust.

“Pete,” she asked him, “what have I told you about cleaning up when you’re done in here?”

“Sorry,” he apologized quickly, “I started doing a bit of research at home, and when I found something, I had to use the computers here to confirm it.” He rubbed his eyes and blinked several times. “Actually I took a break to find you guys when I started to see double. Way too much coffee for me.”

“Well before the sugar rush ends,” Chloe said, “why don’t you show us what you found?” Pete smiled and motioned her to a seat. He sat down next to the computer and pulled up a picture of Bruce that looked fairly recent. He was slouched over, giving the camera a bored smile as he stood next to a bar.

“This is an Inquisitor picture of him taken two years ago,” Pete explained. “It’s the kind pretty much everyone knows about, ‘Rich kid enjoys life of leisure at Florida hot spot’. There’s almost an identical one about Lex a few pages over actually. Anyway, this is the Bruce Wayne we all know, right?” he asked them.

“Not hardly,” Chloe stated, staring at the photo. “You should’ve seen him at the hospital, completely different.”

“No, we do know this one,” Clark disagreed. “We met him at the Beanery, remember? When Lex was first introducing him. He was exactly like that,” he said, pointing at the screen.

“So what? Does he have split personalities or something?” she asked him.

“Wait a second,” Pete told her, “it gets better.”

“Last night,” he explained, “I kept finding these kind of articles about him. Everywhere I looked all I’d see were Inquisitor and even Daily Planet stories about what a mess this kid is.” He started to hand them printed out sheets, one by one explaining them. “’Wayne fortune in hands of high school dropout.’ ‘Wayne heir goes on wild romp through hotel’. ‘Wayne midterm party torches half of college hall’. There’s even one linking him and Brittany Spears, but I won’t go into that,” he said quickly, catching Chloe’s eye.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I was going to close out when I hit the sort button to go by earliest date, just to see if I could find out when these wild stories about him started. That’s when I found this,” he said passing them a single sheet of paper.

Clark read it over Chloe’s shoulder as she read aloud. “Gotham Socialite and Wife Murdered’.” She looked up over the paper to stare at Pete. “His parent’s?” she asked. Pete nodded and motioned her to go on. “’Dr. Thomas Wayne and his wife, Martha, were gunned down last night as they, along with their son, Bruce, 8, were walking home from a movie. The murder is believed to have motivated by greed; the assailant demanded Mrs. Wayne’s jewels along with money, though it is unclear if the two resisted. Their son was the only apparent witness to the attack. Police have no leads to the whereabouts of the killer.’” She lowered the paper. “Oh my God. He watched his parents get gunned down. I had no idea.”

“Yeah,” Pete said, “me either. You’d think someone with his track record for irresponsibility would cart it around wherever he went. Use it like an excuse for how he acts or something. But in all the articles I read last night, I don’t think he ever talked about them once.”

Clark pulled out a sheet of paper from the stack Pete had given them. It was a picture of a much younger Bruce, leaning against a lamppost, staring at the camera. The caption read: ‘Wayne tragedy survivor, Bruce Wayne stands by the spot where his parents fell’. Clark stared at the look of stern resolve on the boy’s face. It was as fierce as the one he’d seen on Bruce the night before, when Clark had left him at the circus. “That made you, didn’t it,” he muttered, shaking his head. “That’s what created you.”

“Did you say something, Clark?” Pete asked.

“Just that, I guess this is might be an explanation,” he said. “I mean, why else would someone like him go out and hunt down people like he does. He wants revenge.”

Chloe looked at him and then turned back to her computer. “Maybe so,” she said quietly. “Maybe he deserves it. I don’t know.”

Pete leaned over her shoulder and stared at the screen. “So what are we going to do with this?” he asked her.

“What do you mean?” she asked, sorting through the files again.

“I mean, what are we going to do with this story?” he asked her. He held up the printed out article and waved it in the air. “Do we trash it, go to the Inquisitor, what?”

“No!” Clark and Chloe both said at the same time. They glanced at each other and then looked away.

“Let’s just hold onto it for now,” Chloe said, moving the data into a secure file. “We can always decide what to do with it later. I’ll encrypt the article in here, I guess you can just give the printout to store somewhere.”

“I’ll hang onto it,” Clark spoke up. Pete and Chloe looked at him, surprised. “If that’s okay,” he added.

“Sure, I guess,” Chloe said, and Pete handed over the article. Folding it up carefully, Clark tucked it into his pocket. “Well now that that’s out of the way, what about Richie? Any more news on him while we were gone?” she asked Pete. He shook his head and slipped back seat to face the computer.

“Nothing new,” he said, brining up the Smallville Ledger homepage. I went to the Daily Planet site a few minutes before I left and they had as much as- hold on,” he said suddenly as he brought up the site. “Uh oh,” he said quietly.

“Uh oh,” Chloe asked. “Uh oh, what? Is it bad?”

“Since when is uh oh, good?” Pete remarked. “It says here that the governor’s just decided to call in the National Guard. They’re making this a full manhunt for Richie, I guess.”

“The National Guard,” Clark breathed in amazement. “This just goes from bad to worse, doesn’t it?”

“So what now?” Pete asked.

“We find Bruce,” Clark said firmly. “We have to tell him about this. If the National Guard moves in, and Bruce gets caught between them and Richie, he’ll get himself killed that much quicker. And I promised I wouldn’t let that happen.” Pete and Chloe exchanged a worried glance and nodded in agreement.