He was a simple man, living in a complicated city.
He was a construction worker, with a wife and two children at home. He liked to think that in a city with so many people leading so many complicated lives, he was able to just do something honest and simple. He worked with his hands and his arms, building the towers of tomorrow. He wouldn't live in them; that wasn't his lot in life. He was merely there to do his job and provide for his family, who loved him dearly.
At the moment, he was in the driver's seat of a crane, atop a partially-finished skyscraper. He felt glad that he wasn't afraid of heights, as all he had to do was lean a bit too far to the left and he'd be falling out of the crane's door and down fifty stories to the ground.
All was peaceful up atop the tower. Metropolis was bathed in warm yellow sunlight, and the air was disturbed only by a breeze so gentle that it was barely noticeable. The man smiled to himself, listening to the low rumble of the crane's engine as it slowly lifted a steel beam. Without warning, the man heard a loud "CRACK" beneath his seat, and the crane seemed to shake a little. As he looked up through the crane's windshield, he saw the world in front of him slowly tilting to the right. With a chill of horror, he realized that the crane's base had cracked. He was slowly, but surely, tilting to the left, towards the empty space between buildings.
He hurriedly scrambled for the right side of the crane's two-seat cockpit, hoping to climb out the other side. The seats were leather, however, and very slippery. Before he could move very far, the crane was already tilting far enough to make him slide downward and out the door. He managed to jump a little, grabbing the rightmost edge of the seat with his fingers. The crane gently stopped tilting, but it was too late. He couldn't stop his sweaty fingers from slipping off the leather, and he fell.
As he passed through the left door, however, he abruptly stopped in mid-air: something had caught the back of his jacket collar. He saw a blur of red and blue out the corner of his eye, and twisted his head up and to the left to see what it was. He saw a young man—no older than seventeen—dressed in jeans, a red t-shirt, and a blue jacket. The boy's hair was black as night, but his eyes shone with a piercing blue determination. His left hand was placed on the side of the crane, and his right hand firmly gripped the man's collar. As the man collected his thoughts, he noticed that the boy was literally floating in the air, as though his own strength was enough to fight back gravity itself.
The man felt his body being lifted upwards, and the crane slowly began to lean back into its original position. The boy hovered towards the building and gently lowered the man to safety back aboard the roof. The man was dumbstruck, and didn't know what to do or say. Before he got the chance, however, the boy's head swiftly turned to the side as he peered over his shoulder at something he'd missed: the steel beam was still falling.
The boy disappeared, replaced by a gust of wind and a blur of blue and red.
:D
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