Chapter Text
If Bruce had known what the day was going to hold, he would have let Clark keep him in bed that morning. After nearly twenty years together, though, he’d developed at least partial immunity to sad Superman puppy eyes, particularly when Clark himself couldn’t even keep it up without giggling.
“No, I mean it,” Bruce had said firmly, finally managing to extract himself from warm, lingering hands. “Lucius will murder me if I don’t at least put in an appearance at this meeting.”
“It’s not until eleven,” Clark pointed out, curling one arm up and back to rest his head on it. It wasn’t the most blatantly he’d ever invited Bruce to ogle him, but they were both aware of how well that particular pose showed off his biceps and chest.
Bruce arched an eyebrow, but couldn’t help but smile. “Mr. Kent, if you’re trying to seduce me, need I remind you about your ten-thirty interview this morning?”
Clark rolled his eyes, and Bruce bit back a chuckle as he walked to the ensuite. “That would work better,” Clark called after him, “if it took me more than five minutes to get from here to Metropolis when I want it to.”
“You can’t show up windblown to an interview with a state senator,” Bruce said from the bathroom, knowing Clark could hear him just fine even as he turned on the faucet. “You need to take the train.”
A faint rush of air, and then Clark’s hands were warm on his shoulders, his breath even warmer as he nuzzled the back of Bruce’s neck. “Oh, the high-speed train you built specifically so my commute would only be forty-five minutes anyway? That train?”
“It was important for your cover,” Bruce said, as he’d said literally every time the rail had come up for the past dozen years. He tipped his head back against Clark’s even as he picked up his toothbrush, otherwise outwardly unmoved by the tender press of six feet and four inches of Kryptonian radiating heat and affection against his back.
Clark snorted. “Sometimes I still can’t believe you pushed through high-speed rail for the entire region just so I could have an excuse to move to Gotham.”
“I’ve never pretended my philanthropy is entirely selflessly motivated,” Bruce said around his toothbrush.
“Oh, believe me, I know.” Clark exhaled softly and wrapped his arms around Bruce’s waist, just resting his forehead against Bruce’s hair while he brushed his teeth. He wasn’t trying to drag Bruce back to bed anymore; sometimes he just wanted to listen to the sounds of his heart, his breathing, before they went their separate ways for the day.
It never failed to make something in Bruce’s chest go loose and shivery with helpless affection, even if he didn’t necessarily indulge it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go back to bed—it was never that he didn’t want to.
He bent to rinse his mouth, turning off the tap, and when he’d finished turned in Clark’s embrace, settling his arms around his waist in return. “I’m not missing something, am I?”
Clark didn’t pretend not to know what he meant. “No, just…been a long week.” He traced his nose against Bruce’s temple. “And we haven’t had time, especially after that thing with Killer Croc.”
Ah. Bruce had gotten used to the way Clark needed tactile reassurance after some of Bruce’s messier encounters with his rogues; he just never quite managed to calibrate his own estimation of ‘serious’ to exactly match up with his partner’s. “I know,” he said, and took one of Clark’s hands off his waist; he pressed it palm-down over his own heart, and covered Clark’s hand with his own. “Tonight, and then we’ll have a slow Saturday tomorrow.”
Clark sighed, flattening his palm against Bruce’s skin to touch his heartbeat, and the line of his shoulders relaxed slightly. “I appreciate it when you humor me,” he said dryly, one corner of his mouth turning up.
“As I said,” Bruce murmured, and tilted his head to catch Clark’s lips with his own. Clark hummed softly, warm and pleased, and kissed him back slowly, unhurried. Bruce’s voice was a low purr when they parted. “Not entirely selfless.”
Clark grinned against his mouth, swaying gently into him. “Any chance I can talk you into the shower, if the bed’s not happening?”
“And people call me single-minded,” Bruce drawled, and tapped Clark’s hands away when they fell suggestively to the waistband of his sleep pants. “No. If I’m going to this meeting I do actually have to prepare, and if I let you get me in there we’re never getting out in a reasonable time.”
“It’s sweet how you know me.” The preternatural blue of Clark’s eyes never failed to send a little jolt of electricity down Bruce’s spine when he was like this.
“Tonight,” Bruce promised, and kissed him again.
He should have known better than to jinx it.
-
“I swear I wouldn’t call everyone in for a regular smash and grab,” Green Lantern said, grimacing as he pulled up a series of images on the Watchtower briefing room’s screen. “The Lunderians are pissed, yeah, but when the Corps found out exactly what got stolen, they strongly implied it should be an all-hands-on-deck situation.”
“A science lab,” Bruce said, taking in the crime scene photos. He tapped the haptic control on the side of his cowl, capturing the images and sending it back to the Cave computer to go back over later, if needed. “What do they study?”
“Antimatter and parallel realities.”
Flash’s breath hissed through his teeth. “Oh, yikes.”
“Explains the call,” Clark said. He floated up near the screen, arms crossed over his chest as he studied the pictures. His face was serious and absorbed, wholly Superman. “One thief?”
“One thief,” Green Lantern confirmed, and added a few mug shots and surveillance pictures. John looked tired; he must have been wrangling a lot of inter-sector communications before calling the rest of the League in, given the time stamps on the lab images. “Pallem Byz. He’s been on the Corps radar for high-profile thefts before, but always manages to fence the contraband before they catch up with him.”
“He looks passably human,” Wonder Woman noted. Bruce had noted the same—some pictures showed a catlike reflective lens in Byz’s eyes, as well as frills along his neck that seemed to raise and lower.
Green Lantern nodded. “He’s a Pommerite, which is good news and bad news. Good news, it narrows down where he could subtly fence this kind of tech. Bad news—”
“That’s Earth,” Bruce finished for him.
Clark hmmed. “He has buyers here?”
“Black market for alien tech is always hot in Metropolis,” Bruce said, just to feel Clark’s annoyed gaze land on him. He glanced up to meet it, blinking placidly and knowing Clark could see it behind the lenses in the cowl, and Clark’s mouth twisted in irritated fondness before he looked back at the screen.
“The Corps intel points to him possibly fencing through Earth in the past,” John agreed. “The real issue is with the thing he took. It creates—” He glanced down at his notes to quote verbatim. “‘Localized concentrations of antimatter to access alternate realities,’ per the Lunderians.”
They all took a moment to parse that one.
J’onn sighed heavily. “A portal device?”
“Possibly, if it discharges,” Green Lantern confirmed. “If it malfunctions, it could hurt more realities than just ours. So we gotta lock this thing down.”
“Carefully,” Bruce cautioned. “To remind everyone of our protocols regarding potential alternate reality contamination—”
“Bats, much as I would love a twenty-minute lecture,” Flash said, and he pointed to the screen. Green Lantern had pulled up a bird’s-eye view of the Eastern Seaboard, and several dots labeled “potential contact” were flashing.
Clark bobbed in the air, cape flaring behind him. “B, give us the five minute refresher in the Javelin down. Let’s go, everybody.”
“I can give you the five word one,” Bruce said, stashing his data pad and following Diana out the door. “Don’t touch a goddamn thing.”
Two hours later, he’d be swearing to himself—he was getting that laser-engraved over the fucking briefing screen.
-
“No, south,” Bruce snarled into his communicator, racing along the top edge of the building. “Toward the goddamn plaza, I said—”
“This guy knows how to lose a tail!” Flash protested. It wasn’t Wally’s fault, Bruce had to forcibly remind himself; none of them had anticipated a personal cloaking unit being among the items Byz was trying to fence.
Predictably, it had taken barely an hour for things to go completely to shit. With limited time to plan, they’d disguised Diana as a potential buyer with J’onn polymorphed to a nondescript bodyguard—Superman had eavesdropped enough to guess at the gathering’s more regular nature, so assuming Diana and J’onn could bluff their way in, it wouldn’t be wholly out of the ordinary for new faces to appear. The business while they’d waited to make their move had revealed an eye-popping amount of black market alien tech, six months’ worth of work to track down after this; Bruce and John silently logged it all while they waited, including a truly concerning amount of ordinance. Byz had indeed showed off the portal device, an unassuming object that looked to Bruce like nothing so much as a small carriage clock, its face a dimmed lamp.
And of course, then someone’s show-and-tell had been and here’s something, great for work like this, if a Green Lantern’s within a hundred yards it lights right up, too fast for John to react and get off the roof. Chaos erupted, everyone grabbing their tech and stowing it in a hurry, and Diana threw pretense to the wind and made for Byz, who activated that personal cloak and vanished in front of her.
It apparently only worked in ten-second bursts before it had to recharge—Bruce begrudgingly had to admit it was perfect for a thief—so J’onn had spotted him near the exit in the mad scramble a few moments later. Then they were all on the chase, trying to cover all possible options. Without much thought, Bruce had snapped into the comm, “Superman, we’ll take him, follow the weapons,” because alien arms rarely showed outside of Intergang territory and much as Bruce regretted having to split their focus, those needed to be locked down just as badly.
So there they were, trying to track an intermittently invisible target without anything but the infrared in Bruce’s cowl. It wasn’t that Bruce was bad at calling audibles from a rooftop—he did it practically every night—but they were on the wrong foot and scrambling from the start, and Bruce couldn’t compensate for everything.
“Flash, forget tailing him,” he said, firing his grapple to leap to the next building. “You get ahead, get to the plaza and prepare to block the exits. J’onn, Diana, split up and go east-west—Lantern will keep trying to funnel him toward one of you.”
“Copy,” Green Lantern echoed, the only one of all them with proper radio protocol as always.
Bruce caught a glimpse of a figure appearing in infrared in the alley beneath him and dove into action. “Heading west now.”
His comm crackled, Superman’s voice staticky over the rush of wind. “I’ll be there in five,” he reported. “Caught up our arms traders, just need to get them and the loot in holding.”
“That was fast,” Bruce commented, keeping his voice neutral as possible around the surge of warm pride.
Clark’s smile was evident in his voice. “Well, you know I hate it when you’re at a party without me,” he said, and Bruce allowed himself a grin as he leapt across to the next building.
With a few more minutes’ maneuvering, they had the avenues of escape narrowed down, and Bruce and Green Lantern were herding Byz into the alley where the others were ready to spring. It was only two blocks from a busy square—they needed to lock this down, now.
“Now, Diana,” he barked as Byz flickered into view, and she dropped down off the roof of the bank building into his path. The thief swore, trying to duck around her, and in a red crackling blur Flash was there to grab the cloak and dart back out of reach.
Byz’s hand plunged into his bag as he staggered back, and he whipped out the portal device. Diana took a half step back, and he laughed wildly. “That’s right, back off if you know what’s good for you,” he said, his gravelly voice sneering. “Even I don’t really know how this works.”
“You’ll want to be careful with that,” Diana said, drawing her lasso.
“You’ll want to be careful,” the man repeated mockingly, instantly cementing Bruce’s dislike of him. “You want to back up, princess. I know you and your friends like to stick your nose in other people’s business—”
A glowing green stretch of horizontal bars materialized on both ends of the alley, John catching them up while Byz was distracted. “Oh, it’s our business,” the Lantern assured him, drifting down into view. “You come quietly, and I can recommend one of the more cushy interstellar prisons, if you like.”
Sweating, Byz held up the portal device like a talisman, waving it between them. “I’m not going to jail,” he said, and Bruce didn’t like the way he was looking more tense. Most people would have backed down, seeing how outnumbered they were. “I got priors in Proxima Centauri.”
“Well, you don’t want to add evading arrest,” Flash said, hovering warily behind Diana. Bruce could see his one hand trailing toward the lasso—with an opening and a few seconds, he could grab the end and have Byz trussed up.
“Just watch me,” Byz snarled. “I got more ways out than this—”
Fed up, Bruce dropped off the edge of the building he’d been perched on and landed directly behind Byz. “That’s enough,” he said, and Byz yelped, whirling around.
What happened next seemed to happen in slow motion.
Byz staggered backward, tripped and fell, and as he hit the ground, so did the device in his hand. It collided with the pavement with a flash of sparks, and a crackling violet beam of light erupted from the face.
It shot out of the alley toward the street—through John’s construct, toward the unsuspecting people of Metropolis—
—and in a heartbeat, a red-and-blue blur materialized, Superman racing to intercept it.
Bruce felt some sound tear out of his throat against his will—a useless, wordless cry of warning, denial, something—as the light hit Clark.
The narrow violet beam exploded wide into almost a spotlight, brilliant against the backdrop of the night. It was like a flat disc of light—and it suddenly flashed in on itself in an ultraviolet wireframe, and tunneled into a photo-negative rip in space.
Like a boom tube, Bruce had half a second to think—before Clark, still in motion, was thrown into that tunnel and vanished.
Dimly Bruce was aware he was already running, sprinting toward the light—portal—whatever it was, eyes locked on the place Clark had been last—
—when he suddenly came flying back like he’d bounced off something, Superman ejected back out of the rip as it imploded into itself and was gone, and the violet light died.
It had been three seconds, if that.
Bruce didn’t break his stride, sprinting to where Clark had landed in a pile of limbs and cape—behind him Green Lantern was diving for the device, ring safely encasing it and Byz both, Wonder Woman calling in an emergency holding cell in the Watchtower, and with the situation contained he felt free to ignore them all. “Kal!”
At the sound of his voice Clark waved a hand, rolling onto his side and groaning, and the knot of terror in Bruce’s chest unwound itself somewhat. “Ow,” Clark said eloquently, pushing himself up on one arm. He shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “My retinas.”
The afterimage was indeed searing, and that was Bruce’s only excuse for how close he got before he realized what was wrong.
But then as the figure on the ground straightened, cape falling around his shoulders, Bruce caught a glimpse of the crest on his chest—the S-shape strangely angular, instead of the familiar rounded curve. Bruce blinked, hard, and realized it wasn’t his eyes: the cape was the wrong color. It was still red, but not the same shade—nor the blue of the suit, deeper and darker than the one he knew.
Bruce skidded to a halt, breath hissing through his teeth.
Superman’s head came up sharply, like the sound of Bruce’s shock still meant something to him—and it was Clark, but he was different. Different lines on his face, a subtly different curl to his hair, and as he looked Bruce up and down his eyes blew wide.
Bruce’s hand dropped immediately to his belt, a chill sweeping through him. “Not our Kal.”