Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s a disaster of Bruce Waynian proportions that lands a summons to Wayne Tower, in writing, on the kitchenette table before Bruce finishes brewing the morning coffee. The silver-embossed Wayne Enterprises stationery sticks out from the other mail like Oswald Cobblepot at a black-tie dinner. No postmark on the envelope. No perimeter alarm tripped. Someone must have hand-delivered it to Alfred outside of the estate. It’s curious--but not, Bruce decides, all that important.

Alfred opens it while Bruce picks up the invitation to Lex’s library charity.

Months of interrogating mid-level traffickers as the Bat has netted him zero useful intel. No one knows the White Portuguese. No one has done business with the White Portuguese. And yet, after one night of playing the rich fight enthusiast, Bruce has a viable lead. The Russian, Knyazev, transmits blacked-out data to Lex Luthor’s personal servers, which in turn store and re-transmit it to other locations. Terabytes of it. The invitation to Lex’s library charity event is a convenient cover to burgle the mansion, but the timing of it raises questions. One could almost believe the invitation’s arrival has been planned to perfection. Paranoia stretches out in Bruce’s mind like a self-satisfied cat--

But he still manages to catch Alfred’s consternation before it’s smothered under a long-suffering frown.

Bruce raises his eyebrows, plain as a question.

Alfred hesitates slightly before he speaks. “You’re required at Wayne Tower today. It’s a matter of some importance.” Light, casual--instantly suspicious.

“Who wants me?”

The question has an existential dimension that both men ignore.

“Lucius Fox for the quarterly shareholders’.” The Aston Martin gleams in the mid-morning sun, uncovered and newly polished. “Should have just enough time to nip down after the morning traffic clears.”

“The quarterly shareholders’ meeting is next week.” Bruce fixes Alfred with a level stare, and takes a swig of coffee.

Alfred’s bluff is flimsy, but he looks as mulish as Bruce has ever seen him. Alfred hauls an empty Château Margaux bottle from under his chair, and thumps it against the table, the specter of an old argument about the Wayne family legacy hanging over them. Even now, Alfred appears to be approaching a limit on Bruce’s dissolute wastrel bullshit. A storm is brewing between them, and Bruce is not sure when it will break.

Their current stalemate eases when Alfred throws down the letter. There’s only one line of text, in Lucius’ insistent hand, across the center of the page:

12:30. Today. Use whatever excuse is most convenient.

Alfred taps the summons with an impatient rat-ta-tap drumming that’s as familiar as his footsteps. “You can’t ignore this, sir.”

There’s no more time to play around as Bruce Wayne. The White Portuguese has to be his top priority. A better chance to secure a weapon against the Superman might never come--but Bruce knows that he’s already used up his good supply of half-truths deflecting Alfred’s initial curiosity about the kryptonite shipment.

Bruce slides the invitation to Lex Luthor’s charity event into his coat pocket. He’ll decide which suit to wear to the Luthor residence later. After he, apparently, answers to the keeper of the kingdom.

Lucius isn’t in when the executive assistant escorts Bruce Wayne into Mr. Fox’s office--the one attached to the meeting room large enough to fit the entire board, with a bank of television monitors on one end. Before Bruce had retired to a largely ceremonial position as CEO of Wayne Industries, the office had been Bruce’s. It had been his father’s before him. The wall-to-wall ironwood isn’t meant to enclose a workspace; it’s a showroom for competitors that need to be impressed or intimidated.

The larger-than-life portrait of Thomas Wayne casts a long shadow over the desk in the afternoon light, and it falls on Bruce like a weight.

Today, it’s intimidation.

When the executive assistant says that Mr. Fox is touring WayneTech today and doesn’t have an ETA back at the office, Bruce throws himself into a chair near the televisions and says as obligingly as possible, “I’ll wait.”

The executive assistant regards Bruce icily. The impassive but tight-lipped look on his face is familiar to Bruce: it means he’s trying to decide whether or not Bruce needs to be chaperoned. Bruce shrugs--pleasant, but ultimately indifferent--and pulls out his tackily oversized Bruce Wayne phone. Its titanium and gold Gresso case looks garish even in Wayne Tower, and Bruce tries to look occupied as he browses his weekly schedule.

The assistant must decide that Bruce is harmless enough because he leaves, and he doesn’t even prop the office door open.

Bruce doesn’t relish the noise (not when he could fit in a twenty-minute power nap before Lex’s gala), but he locates the control app for the televisions, turns one of them on, and tunes it out completely.

For the last five years, Bruce has slid his persona down the reliability scale from feckless playboy to distracted trendchaser. On principle, Bruce refuses to answer any summons in a timely fashion--except for the ones that he’s legally bound to. Punctuality might encourage unwanted thoughts about Bruce’s participation in Wayne Enterprises by the younger board members whose respect for the family name hadn’t been poisoned by Wildchild Wayne’s more notorious exploits. The Clocktower Scandal. The Holiday Regents Affair. The interlude in Monaco that never received a proper scandal name.

Lucius remembers.

After a few minutes, the office phone buzzes. Bruce answers before the third ring.

“Bruce,” comes the acknowledgement.

“Always a pleasure to hear from you, Lucius.” Bruce doesn’t even have to lie; he has as much affection for Lucius as he does for anyone who wasn’t family--and after twenty years, he isn’t sure that Lucius doesn’t count.

That’s it for pleasantries--Lucius Fox’s grasp of small-talk rivals Bruce’s own. A pause, and then--“Channel 552. Are you watching?”

“I’m there now,” Bruce says, clicking over to the entertainment news channel. “What am I--”

“Shut up and watch the TV, Mr. Wayne,” Lucius says pleasantly.

Bruce cranks the volume up on the television. A gaudy lightning-and-stripe logo streaks across the screen. The camera pans to reveal two made-for-TV faces, standing in the studio. Bruce knows them well enough: a middle-aged man and a bright young woman, the pulse of Gotham celebutainment.

“--Hello, I’m Dallas Gains--”

“--And I’m Melissa Martinez--”

“And tonight we're in the Gotham Underground Studio talking about a multi-million dollar deal over the newest Wayne embarrassment.”

Bruce racks his memory, but he can’t come up with anything particularly embarrassing that he’s done in range of a camera in the last eighteen months. He’s careful: he vets his partners, and he always practices safe sex. The wafer thin electronics jammer sits snugly next to a condom in Bruce Wayne’s wallet. Maybe he’d been a little sloppy, picking up a knockout brunette at the underground fight club last night, but he hadn’t done more than run his hand down her throat in public. Everything else had happened at the lake house.

For a dark moment, Bruce considers that someone has done to him what he’s planning to do to Lex. The fear of an information leak has driven all of the security upgrades at the lake house: bug sweeps twice a day; interference generators; bio-dampeners; no repeat visitors to the house; no household staff; no one in Bruce’s life aside from Alfred. Since Superman stepped out of the shadows in the wake of Metropolis’ tragedy, it’s been more than a concern. The media hasn’t managed to capture the alien’s face yet, but it’s there in the blur of the photographer’s lens, the grainy cell-phone footage. Superman doesn’t wear a mask. Can’t wear one, if anyone’s ever going to trust him in the wake of Black Zero, the terraforming engines tearing up chunks of the Earth and flattening it like it was clay. The question has whispered itself in the back of his mind:, how long until they come for Batman’s mask, too?

With the added security precautions, Bruce is certain the lake house can’t be the leak. Unless Alfred is selling his sex tapes on the side as an alternate revenue stream--in which case, Bruce’s well and truly screwed.

A tinny laugh snaps Bruce back to the present--Lucius knows Bruce’s sense of humor almost as well as Alfred. “Just wait, Mr. Wayne,” Lucius says.

“--Dallas, this is the big news of the day. Look out Nairomi coverage, that was so last week. Every channel has been talking about the biggest sex tape mystery of the decade. After an voice authentication test today, Gotham Underground was handed exclusive footage from Visual Entertainment, the largest celebrity entertainment broker… We’ve played this footage for you several times already, and now we’d like to welcome VE media rep LeeAnn Sanders to the studio. Thanks for being with us, LeeAnn!”

“It’s good to be here, Melissa. Visual Entertainment’s attorney confirmed to us that yes, there is an offer on the table to remove the latest footage from VE’s website.”

“Are you considering it? How much money would it take to pull this video off the internet?”

--that one forces a chuckle out of Bruce, albeit unwillingly. He would love to see someone scrub a video from the internet. Not for lack of trying have WayneTech’s experimental data-leeches delisted and corrupted old Batman footage on the web, taken from before he’d developed the electronics jammer with Lucius. Fifteen-year-old videos of the Batman facing off against the Joker at Ace Chemicals still plague him. Once footage is out, it’s out.

“--We put out the number of 10 million. A comparable cash offer would be hard to walk away from.”

A thought occurs to Bruce, probably too late to keep his reputation as a whip-sharp mind. On the face of it, the idea is ridiculous. But-- “Don’t tell me that we’re the ones buying it,” Bruce says slowly. To anyone who knows him, he sounds aghast.

“We are, Mr. Wayne,” Lucius says levelly. “It’ll be worth the price if we can legally pull it from the biggest video aggregators.”

“Wow,” Bruce deadpans. “I’ve never had ten million dollars worth of sex before.”

“LeeAnn, I know you don't give out numbers, but this video has been huge, hasn't it? It's been a snowball effect.”

“The traffic is unbelievable, Dallas. Bruce is a huge celebrity. Anytime his name is connected to a story, we see huge numbers…”

“Talk about huge numbers. Let’s play that video one more time, for our viewers at home.”

The video plays. The blood drains from Bruce’s face.

Jesus.

It’s edited. His face never appears on-screen. Nothing beyond a hard R happens in the sanitized news footage. But it’s not what Bruce does that’s particularly scandalous, it’s what he says...what he implies…that’s the problem.

The video ends; the line is silent. Bruce doesn’t know what to say to Lucius.

“Jesus,” Bruce says.

“An interesting choice of words, Mr. Wayne.” There’s a pause--Bruce suspects because he’s about to receive a second nasty shock. He doesn’t have to wait long. “The publicist will be in my office in five minutes. You will be on your best behavior. You will allow her to shadow you to all of your events. You will give any interviews she deems necessary. You will not talk to the press without her approval.”

“That bad, huh?” Bruce’s fingers skim Bruce Wayne’s phone. The morning trading for Wayne Enterprises pops up instantly. WAYN stock has tanked, shedding market share faster than it had during the last economic downturn. And there’s still three more hours of trading to go.

“Worse,” Lucius agrees. “Do we have an understanding?”

Bruce’s shoulders bear the weight of his father’s shadow. He can’t agree to these terms. The library benefit tonight will require all of Bruce’s finesse to schmooze, cavort, and burgle Lex’s private servers in a single evening. He’s not a young man anymore; it’s not as easy for him to slip between personas when all he can think about is he can’t let this chance slip through his fingers, this may be the only kryptonite sample they ever pull out of the ocean that’s worth a damn.

He glances at the stock report again. Wayne Enterprises is an economic bellwether--the ripples are beginning to spread through related industries. The company’s earning reports haven’t even hit the public yet.

The quarterly stockholder meeting next week begins to take on a Faustian dimension in Bruce’s mind.

The alternative is to tell Lucius in no uncertain terms why he can’t accept a shadow.

After all of their years of friendship, Lucius knows that Bruce is no slouch mentally or physically. Lucius has enough evidence to both believe and disbelieve what his mind must be screaming at him whenever a WayneTech prototype turns up in a Batman sighting. But--there have been enough moments when Bruce and Lucius have been trapped in the same room while “Batman” saves a Wayne Enterprises employee from some freak in a costume… Until Bruce confirms it to Lucius personally, he’s Schrödinger's Batman. For Lucius’ and the company’s sake, Bruce needs to maintain that fiction for as long as he can.

Bruce sags against the desk. “We have an understanding.”

“I'm not sure who’s offering, but I sure would like to find out. Maybe it's Bruce, or someone connected to Wayne Enterprises. That would be this expert’s opinion, anyway…”

“Well, Melissa, we're in discussions with the attorneys, and we'll see. It’s going to be an interesting night in Metropolis tonight, that’s for sure!”

Chapter Text

The publicist arrives with an entourage, floodlights, and a filming crew. Like a marine drill team, white-gloved hands rearrange the boardroom, perfectly synchronized. The crew preps a corner of the office for an interview, as Bruce retreats behind Lucius’ desk to watch them.

Mindi Mayer, publicist-of-choice to the scandalized-and-famous, walks Bruce through what the company will need from him. Contrition, charity, public humiliation--Bruce is willing to give them everything they want on the spot--but the workers keep moving in and out of his eyeline, weaving their hypnotic question: how did Visual Entertainment dig up a professionally shot sex tape? The cuts and edits were unobtrusive, mainly done for pacing and flow. But it didn’t change the basic fact that the sex tape had been edited together from at least three different camera feeds.

The more energy Bruce devotes to the question, the more intractable the problem becomes. Who knew Bruce was going to be at the Metropolis Regency? Were the cameras planted for a single op or an ongoing scam? Why has the video leaked now?

When it becomes clear that his attention has wandered, Mindi places a hand on his knee. Bruce twitches at the unexpected touch. It’s not bad--merely surprising. These days, Bruce is only on the touch-receiving end of human contact when it’s a fist.

Mindi brightens when Bruce fixes her with a charming smile.

“We’re going to run you through a standard non-apology apology,” Mindi says, then dumbs it down a little when Bruce blinks at her. “For sex tapes, you don’t want to deny. Even though in this instance, you could. Voice matches are for crime labs, my darling. That’s a point we could exploit. But--” Mindi primps her furs, and her expression turns sharp. “Denial’s for politicians and moral hypocrites, and you’re not one, no?”

Bruce Wayne takes a moment; Bruce Wayne is the kind of man who needs to decide whether or not he’s a moral hypocrite.

“I’m not planning to run for office, if that makes a difference,” he says earnestly.

Mindi laughs and flutters her hand onto his bicep. The touch is insincere, ingratiating. He glances at the hand, and then back at her. This game has familiar rules: disarm, engage, direct. Mindi’s pulling his attention from something. Softening him up.

“You want to push people’s attention somewhere else,” Mindi continues. “Onto the person that released it, or--maybe, and this is just a thought--some of the issues that you raised in the tape.”

“Some of the issues,” Bruce repeats, perfectly aware of the issue that Mindi wants to deal with.

He must have miscalculated his delivery, because the metaphorical temperature in the room cools. Mindi reappraises him, and far too perceptively withdraws her hand. The sweet-talking act drops as she drapes the furs over the back of a conference chair, shed of the costume that she uses to charm dumb assholes like Bruce Wayne.

“Yes, Mr. Wayne, the Superman issue. You can say whatever you want to the press, but you have to address the Superman issue or the company’s stock is sunk.”

“I’m aware Superman plays well with Mr. and Mrs. Joe America,” Bruce says slowly, too low to be overheard by the entourage. Because this is it. This is his line. The line he can’t cross, not even for Lucius. He’s not going to apologize for his opinions on Superman, publicly, privately, on national television, for money, for anything. “I’ll go on national television and apologize for being a pervert. I’ll grovel, I’ll joke, I’ll let pundits take cheap shots at me. But let’s understand each other. I have no intention of elaborating my position on Superman at this time.”

“Fine,” Mindi returns, squaring off with Bruce on the opposite side of Lucius’ desk. She leans forward. It isn’t intimidating, not entirely, but a prescient bolt of ice runs down Bruce’s spine. “We’ll have plenty of time to discuss your positions. I’m with you sunup ‘til sundown from now until Lucius tells me to stop.”

Bruce hums his careful but breezy agreement.

“We’re going to get along famously,” Mindi says, narrowing her eyes. “I can tell.”

In the sunlit office of the late Thomas Wayne, Bruce presses his hands together, and adopts a contrite expression. The crew has managed to make the wood-paneled heart of Wayne opulence the picture of downhome charm. The camera rolls. One of the entourage--a journalist of some repute at Good Morning Gotham--smiles at him. The softball questions come first. More challenging ones pepper the exchange, until they come to the sex tape, and then all bets are off. Bruce doesn’t break character, and he doesn’t bring up that issue, no matter how many leading questions push the conversation towards the S-word. He doesn’t even acknowledge the question about Nairomi; he spins a yarn about docking fees in Dubai, instead. The journalist is flustered by his non-denials and non-answers. She’s too young to remember that this isn’t Bruce Wayne’s first sex scandal.

Afterward, Bruce ducks into an elevator three paces ahead of Mindi.

“My place in an hour?” Bruce says warmly, as the door shuts in her aggrieved face.

He slams the floor-stop button, pries up the control panel, and flips the door override switch that’s hidden in every elevator in the city. The doors open on an unlit pocket of space between floors--like a crawlspace on steroids. Several of these have been built into Wayne Tower, slipped into the blueprints during a renovation thirteen years ago. He pulls himself out into the space between floors, and shimmies his way down to a small black box--a nerve center in Wayne Enterprise’s information backbone. Bruce Wayne’s phone isn’t a particularly sophisticated tool, but it’ll have to do. He connects up to the WE servers, and contacts Alfred through a secure VoIP tunnel. The precaution seems a touch paranoid, but someone could be tapping his phone. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

“Alfred, I’m going to need you to clean house. We have guests for the foreseeable future.”

“Ah,” Alfred says, the Lucius’ doing hanging in the air between them. For a beat, it’s awkward--and Bruce projects all of the possible scenarios where Alfred didn’t turn on the TV during his morning routine. One of them features rogue moose. “I’ve seen the news.”

Suddenly, Bruce feels small--like the teenager caught sneaking out of the Mansion to attend kempo lessons three weeks after the fifth anniversary of his parents’ death. Alfred’s disapproval had hung around Bruce like a shroud for months, but it hadn’t stopped Bruce from going to the dojo. The instructors were more concerned with belt promotion than self-defense. A younger Bruce hadn’t known that until he’d squared off with a mugger at a bus stop. If you use a tool improperly, you’re going to wind up dead, Alfred had said, taping up his ribs afterward. Chastened, breathing through the sharp pain, Bruce had never felt so miserably far from his goals, nor so foolish as to think that he could achieve them alone.

Bruce’s not thirteen anymore, but his observations stumble out of his mouth like he is.

“What I don’t understand is who benefits from the leak? Wayne Enterprises will rebound. In the meantime, the entire market takes the hit.”

Alfred hums in agreement; it’s an old habit, something he does to soften up his complete disagreement with Bruce’s reasoning. It’s calming, in its way. If Alfred’s treating this like a case, Bruce can--focus through it, and do the same.

Awkwardly, Bruce narrates the night of the Regency charity to Alfred from the crawlspace inside of Wayne Tower. Paring down the facts to where, when, with whom, he leaves out editorializing or speculating about the hotel, the host, the actor, or the reason why he was in Metropolis in the first place. He wants Alfred’s unbiased opinion. Alfred’s memory for scandals is longer and more bitter than his own, and includes some that touched his parents’ name. Prior to their canonization in the public eye, the Waynes had to weather several nasty blackmail scandals that spilled into the national press; Bruce has the distinct impression that Alfred will never share how those cases were resolved--or what happened to the blackmailers at their conclusion.

Alfred picks through Bruce’s evasions, respects certain elisions after Bruce reaches the part of the story where he enters the suite, and (mercifully) refrains from the safe sex speech because, yes, they both know it’s second-nature for Bruce to activate the jammer the moment he enters a hotel room.

“And the name of your partner,” Alfred asks, no doubt ready to enter the name into their cross-agency database.

Bruce doesn’t know it. He can’t explain why...why he didn’t ask.

Alfred says after a beat: “Facial recognition, then.”

“Could this be about money--us paying to make this go away? Ten million is chump change compared to the amount they could have bled out of the Wayne Foundation over five, ten years.”--There was no way a common blackmailer would know that they would never see a dime.

“Master Wayne, publicly shaming you has never been about money. I suspect that our voyeur had quite a different motive.”

“Someone wanted someone else to see the video, you mean.” Bruce considers: this could be a power-play by Stagg Industries. Press hard enough on one scandal-averse investor, and the balance of funding could tip towards Stagg’s favor in the short-term. “Somebody in particular,” Bruce repeats aloud. Except he couldn’t think of any Wayne Enterprises investors who weren’t already very aware of his personal reputation. “Who?”

Alfred hums in his particular brand of agreement again, and then says--uncharacteristically soft: “Maybe the value of the video is in its repetition, sir. Good Morning Gotham has run it four times in the past hour. It’s as good a way to get someone’s attention as I’ve seen.”

“This is worse than the Holiday Regents Affair,” Bruce mutters darkly.

“Perish the thought, sir. Nothing’s worse than the Holiday Regents Affair. The video is getting play because of the Superman issue. Damage control seems to be the prudent course.”

Damage control.

Bruce feels hollow. He may not have to explain to the public, but he’s damn well going to have to explain it to Alfred when he shows up with a chunk of kryptonite and his plan to resolve the Superman issue. He can’t start in on that now. Not until the kryptonite is more than wishful thinking. When he has the White Portuguese, then. Then he’ll talk to Alfred.

“Mindi has set up a full-court press,” Bruce says, maintaining a carefully neutral tone. Alfred can read his silences better than anyone; and he hopes this one will merely imply ‘skirting emotional disaster,’ rather than the truth. “Bruce Wayne can’t do much to control the damage he does, but--”

“But Lucius asked nicely.” Alfred snorts. “You’re a soft touch in your old age, sir.”

Something has been tugging at the corner of Bruce’s mind since the boardroom. Everything about the video screams that it’s a professional job: the editing; the three different camera feeds. Why the video was captured might not even be as interesting as the how: with cameras more advanced than Wayne Enterprises jamming tech, that somehow came to be planted in a hotel suite that somehow happened to host Bruce Wayne on one night that he decided to come to Metropolis.

Coincidences that don’t add up. Alfred wants him to think of this like a case--so if this were a case, Bruce would need to review the raw feeds: look for timestamps, video metadata, angle of capture, anything.

“Do you have access to the unedited footage?” Bruce asks, a shade too eagerly for his own comfort.

In the background, Bruce can hear fingers hit keys. “Too morally outraged to pay for it yourself?” Alfred inquires lightly.

“It’s recon, Alfred. I’m going to have to visit the Regency tonight. The timing on the video is...suspicious.”

“You say suspicious, but I hear inconvenient.”

The tapping continues, and Bruce stretches out in the crawlspace, at ease in the darkness. It’s familiar to him in a way that the sun-drenched halls of Wayne Tower have never been. Mindi would have a field day with that, if she knew.

“Have you decided which suit to wear?”

Bruce grunts noncommittally.

“Your usual, then?”

“I don’t have a usual,” Bruce says, ruffled for a moment. Fashion’s a discipline like any other, and Bruce Wayne’s sartorial presentation is a masterpiece of time and planning. It takes effort to dress well enough for the cameras, but poorly enough in detail to land on every fashion blogger’s DON’T list. It needles Bruce to think that he has committed the only true sin of fashion. He’s not predictable.

“Come now, Master Wayne,” Alfred chides, with some amusement. The typing stops, and with a flourish, there’s a final keystroke and data begins to upload to the phone. “Elegant, Italian-cut with a classic touch of fuck-off around the collar.”

That earns a genuine smile from Bruce. There’s no harm to his reputation; Alfred can’t see it. “Black on black with my father’s collar pin,” Bruce confirms. He transmits the code for the tracker he planted on Mindi’s furs.

“Target aquired. Closing in on the lakehouse, ETA 25 minutes,” Alfred says. “I’ll bring up the suit before the fleet descends.”

Bruce closes the VoIP tunnel, and reclines against a structural support beam as the data finishes uploading. The raw footage of the sex tape blinks on his screen. Bruce swipes out of the player, to head to the metadata--reconsiders, then brings it up again.

It’s at least an hour until he has to pretend to be a person again. The sunlight never reaches here, in the nerve center of his empire. Burning with the need that’s driven him off sixty story buildings without a grapnel line--more than anything else, Bruce needs to know if he can endure this test.

He presses play.

Twelve minutes later, the raw footage ends. Bruce thumbs the replay button, and watches it again, helplessly. He hears Alfred’s voice, maybe the value is in its repetition. There can be no value in this.

He scans the video for tells: location of the cameras; complicity of the partner. Bruce’s back is to the camera for most of the video. Overhead and profile shots are zoomed and cropped so that his face never appears on screen. He only says one sentence, and a name--but it’s his voice on tape, alright.

The night a year ago, when he’d been at his lowest ebb since Black Zero, a costume charity ball for the reconstruction of Metropolis had drawn his interest. The city had touted the Man of Steel as its guest of honor. Bruce had suspected it wasn’t going to be the alien--but on the slimmest glimmer of possibility that it might be Superman, he had attended incognito. It had been a particularly maudlin week--the Black Mask had sprung up again, that perennial weed in Gotham’s criminal world, and Jason’s public memorial had just been held. Otherwise Bruce wouldn’t have done it. He wore one of Nightwing’s old compression leotards and domino masks, with the blue V that slashed deep across his chest, and ran down to the fingertips. The “Man of Steel” hadn’t been the alien--the hair color from his Metropolis footage seemed to be right, but the build was all wrong. Too narrow in the shoulders, too slim, too short.

It didn’t stop Bruce ending the evening with the man’s mouth around his cock, moaning the alien’s name as he came.

Bruce palms his erection through his slacks, bunching up around his crotch in stiff waves, pretending it’s an accident of timing. In the video, ‘Superman’ falls to his knees in front of Bruce, and he… he… Bruce groans, and lets his head fall back against the crawlspace wall. The kryptonite arrives in the country in less than a week. He has a plan to contain the threat. He knows the facts of Black Zero. He fucking knows.

‘Superman’ looks up at Bruce through his eyelashes.

Bruce, in the Nightwing costume, grips the man’s chin hard. His eyes water, and Bruce’s cock pops free.

“You fucking belong to me, Superman.”

Superman whimpers, and Bruce lets himself forget everything: the stock numbers; the names on the Heroes’ Park plaques; the White Portuguese; the fact that, even now, America is watching him face-fuck an actor in a lycra suit. He drags his hand up and down his fabric-covered cock, once, twice, and he’s gone. He rides the aftershocks, carving out a part of his soul, and locking it away as deeply as he can as the video continues to play.

When it finishes a second time, Bruce drags his fingers across the wet patch on his slacks. Jesus.

How the hell is he supposed to endure this?

Chapter Text

In the heat of the moment, a trip to Gotham’s docks seems like the best idea that Clark’s had about this whole Gotham fiasco since he started chasing down leads on the Bat vigilante. Especially after Perry fobs the Library Benefit assignment off on him. It’s a Society section story, Clark points out, not Crime and Current Events--Clark’s actual job, if his paystub is any indication. Perry leans against the partition of Clark’s workspace, and levels Clark with a stare that’s cut bigger men down to size.

“You’ve been requested by some old charity crone who has a thing for nerds,” Perry scoffs. “Get it done, Kent, and have it on my desk tomorrow.”

Normally, the first thing out of Clark Kent’s mouth is, Sure thing, Chief. Clark has had plenty of stories shot down in staff meetings. He’s learned to take his lumps like any other stringer. Today, though, Clark is a little too much himself.

“That’s it?” Clark asks challengingly.

“That’s my final decision, Kent,” Perry returns, and he assigns Clark to a Society photographer for tomorrow’s Library benefit.

A muscle jumps in Clark’s jaw as he bites back a retort, and reminds himself that the Daily Planet bullpen is sink-or-swim, big-fish-eat-little-fish, and all of the other helpful metaphors Lois has thrown at him over the past eighteen months.

Blowing off steam together at the Ace O’ Clubs has become something of a tradition, but Clark doesn’t have to check Lois’ desk to know she’s in the elevator on the way down past the third floor, rifling through her purse for her cell phone. The telltale jingle of her keys filtering its way back to Clark’s hearing. Perry wants her at the Capitol, so she’s on her way out to catch a redeye to DC. As far as Perry and the news networks are concerned, Nairomi is the story of the year. The Congressional Superman hearings are poised to sweep the nation. The Superman Question is all anyone who’s anyone on the Current Events beat will cover, and Clark’s alone in the bullpen, spinning in his wheels over his dead Bat vigilante piece.

As though he can hear the bent Clark’s mind has taken, Perry yells, “Crime doesn’t pay, Kent!” from Editorial, before ordering him to file the Knights-Metros football piece by the end of working hours on Friday.

The hell he will.

Maybe he would have given it a second thought if he had important work to distract him--but he doesn’t. Clark grabs his messenger, his cell, and logs out of his workstation.

He’s still seething as he breezes past the Daily Planet’s elevators and heads for the stairs. Taking them four at a time, he loosens his tie. It’s not shrinking LexCom budget dollars for the Planet that Clark doesn’t understand. It’s Perry’s refusal to even consider the Bat vigilante piece that sets his teeth on edge. Gotham is drowning in crime, and all Perry cares about are paper circulation numbers.

The roof is empty when he bursts out onto the helipad. Clark pats his shield, hidden in his coat pocket, but doesn’t bother with a costume change; he darts into the sky, and a few seconds later, lands behind a vacant warehouse in the Gotham Port. He chooses a perch on the warehouse roof and settles in for a long night. Batman targets the ports and its adjacent neighborhoods. There’s no guarantee that the Bat will show but but--hey--tonight, Clark might just get lucky.

The sea breeze that pours off the bay is thick with brine and chilly, promising another cold autumn this year. Clark drags his stakeout perch to the easterly edge of the roof for a change of scenery. The peace of the night harbor is broken by the whistles of tug boats. Across the bay, in the Port of Metropolis, the stevedores shout out cargo estimates over the roaring motors of their state-of-the-art freight cranes. The freighter Odessa has docked, offloading materials bound for Metropolis reconstruction sites. A cry goes up from the stevedores that the shipment is less than they’d been scheduled in, and segues into a squabble about who takes the forced hours cut--in the background, Metropolis hums along, an efficient urban machine.

Clark feels a pang of affection for her indomitable spirit, before he builds a wall over his super-senses.

He needs to focus on Gotham tonight.

Reining his senses in, the way that Ma describes it, is like pulling on a pair of woolly earmuffs. Everything becomes so much more immediate; Clark can hear his heart beating, the small puffs of air from his lungs, the low hum of blood through his arteries before everything evens out. Walls in place--not quite human-range hearing--he’s no longer able to hear stockbrokers crying prices in Shanghai--he can focus on Gotham--

And with a start, Clark realizes that the Gotham docks are an entirely different story.

The Gotham Port has been losing business to the Metropolis side of the bay for years, and blight settled in the area in the form of drugs trafficking, human trafficking, and contraband smuggling. Clark overhears the offloading of what appears to be a shipment of knock-off designer purses that are destined to find their way into mid-range Gotham shops.

Clark’s fists clench, and he leaps up from his perch. With great difficulty, he forces himself to dial it back down, and to sit. Punching a few off-the-clock stevedores won’t solve child labor problems in Sri Lanka.

Clark mentally adds a pitch about the perils of an economy failing to upkeep its ports to his next staff meeting docket. Perry will love that.

An hour later, Clark discovers how hard it is to keep his senses attuned to only the two square miles of Gotham Port. Very little happens that escapes Clark’s attention, but that is because very little happens at the port in general.

It’s not that Clark’s bored, per se. It’s just that every journalist needs two things on a stakeout: a king-sized thermos of coffee and a partner. And Clark, for one, misses his partner.

Working with Lois at the Planet has been a crash course in journalism, every inch of her hard-won insight brought to bear on Clark’s rough but earnest prose. Even after they called things off romantically, and Lois took a couple months on assignment in Cairo, their working partnership at the Planet remained intact. If there’s one thing that Lois has taught him, it’s that the prime virtue of the investigative reporter is patience.

(That, and one should always be ready to deploy a take-no-shit attitude to the wealthy and the powerful.)

Living in a porcelain-thin world has trained Clark to take things slowly.

It’s that stakeouts require a different kind of patience.

Forty-five minutes in, and Clark’s feet itch to hit the pavement, to poke his nose into every warehouse, to do some good ole fashioned digging. Lois says the art of the stakeout is knowing how to sit still, and let the world come to you. Something that he cannot, by definition, do if he makes himself the story. Clark rocks back on his heels and tries his hand at simply being.

Ninety minutes later, Clark wonders how far he can travel while keeping his senses attuned to the port. Can he surveil the docks while he swims laps in the Mid-Atlantic trench?

At hour five, Clark thinks he might have better luck interviewing inmates in Blackgate who have been interrogated by the Bat.

By hour eight, Clark has exhausted the Gotham Bingo game with every possible combination of nefarious activity and its probable cause. The port’s alive with morning traffic and...

Still no Batman.

Maybe even he gets time off for good behavior.

A warm pink line spreads across the horizon. It’s morning, finally. Hovering an inch off the warehouse roof, Clark flexes out the cramps in his calves. Seems once flying gets into a Kryptonian, it doesn’t feel right to be earthbound for too long. A strange effervescence churns through his blood until he shakes off gravity--even if it’s only for a few minutes.

On the docks below, the stevedores unload cargo and swap stories with each other over the squeal of freight-truck tires. A freighter called the White Portuguese docks tomorrow night, and there will be no extra shifts for a few days after that. All of the rest of the week’s shipments are berthing at Metropolis instead. Clark feels a pang of empathy; he spent a season working a dock in Halifax before he’d shipped out with crabbers, and he knew the port drying up was as much a cause for the vitality of the Gotham gangs as anything else.

Today’s the last reprieve he’ll receive for the Knights-Metros story. All he needs to do is sit down, bang out a thousand words, send the copy to Lois for edits, process through her laughter, and polish the copy. Three hours of work, tops. But he’s in Gotham already… one last polish on his Bat expose couldn’t hurt.

Clark runs his finger over the back of his cell phone case, processing the bits and flashes of data until he finds the clock, and visualizes the data as physical numbers. It’s 6:10 am now.

Visiting hours at Gotham Central begin in two hours. He’s not pre-approved to visit Cesar Santos, but the guards in Gotham are notoriously open to Lois’ favorite form of persuasion. Clark pushes off the roof and lands several blocks away, strolling out of an alleyway, nonchalant, like he belongs here. He grabs a bag of crullers before he hails a taxi. Behind him Wayne Tower looms, its shadow deep over the waking city.

Clark doesn’t make it to Gotham Central. The bag of crullers and a twenty dollar bill are abandoned in the back seat of the taxi as Clark shoves the door open in traffic, and darts out into the oncoming cars.

The cabbie is screaming at him, what are you doing? Are you insane, you’ll get pancaked! Get back in the cab! It can’t be helped. He can hear the other scream all the way from Metropolis.

A home invasion is about to turn deadly--he arrives in time, so it doesn’t. Five men are subdued, and Clark bends a rain gutter around them before a young girl, whose mother has gone out to the market, shakily dials the police. Clark stays as long as he can, speaking quietly and gently to the girl, until her mother arrives home and nearly faints when she sees the men, the bent rain gutter, her daughter, and Superman arranged into a Norman Rockwell-esque spectacle. Clark promises to return the gutter when the cops finish transporting the criminals and takes to the sky again.

The entire day proceeds apace. One crisis after the next. Flooding in Louisiana; an earthquake outside of Hanoi; a factory fire in Mexico City.

By the time he touches down on the balcony of his apartment, Clark has less than forty minutes before the red carpet roll-out. Less than ten minutes if he wants to arrive in a way that won’t raise red flags with the Planet accounting department.

He strips out of the Kryptonian suit, launching himself at the shower at near sonic speeds. In under five minutes, he’s dressed, primped, and combed. A light touch to the House of El crest, and it folds up in thin, tapering petals. The inert pentagon-shaped solid of his shield could pass for a fancy business card case, just so long as they didn’t examine it closely.

Clark slips the shield into the hidden pocket in his jacket, and checks the lines of the suit.

Good, not great.

Herringbone tweed over the one button-down collar plaid shirt that fits across his shoulders. The American-cut jacket will obscure his bulk, but Clark knows that he’ll stick out amongst Metropolis’ social elite.

With a sigh, he pushes the glasses onto his nose. The first time he’d worn them, Clark had been unrecognizable to himself. Now--he’s accustomed. The brown starburst in his left iris is almost invisible in their deep shadow. The frame softens his sharp jawline, subtly altering the shape of his face.

It’s been eighteen months with the glasses, his daily companion, the proverbial pebble he can’t quite shake out of his shoe. As with any annoyance long borne, he’s become accustomed to the pretense of playing Clark Kent, Reporter. His Metropolis persona might be meeker, more sociable, more eager to please than all of the years of keeping to himself in the backroads and fishing towns of the Great White North, but it’s not entirely an act, either.

He has been eager to fit in.

The indifference of the city, the way he can melt into a lunchtime crowd, earn no more than a little chit-chat with a waitress in a diner--it’s different from anything he’s ever known. Smallville was claustrophobic, when it wasn’t actively up in the Kents’ business. (How were harvests this year, Jonathan? What’s the news on the back 40? How’s Clark doing these days--growing a little quickly, isn’t he?). Being the perennial new hire in fishing towns wasn’t any better; his work constantly scrutinized, always asked, where are your people from? Where you heading to?, pointed out and gossiped and marked as an outsider. Being nobody special has unwound a fear that’s been tied tight in his heart since Jonathan died: the paranoia that he might, at any moment, be discovered. The months of staring a newshound like Perry in the face without him recognizing even a spark of Superman has relaxed Clark a little--enough to let his natural affinity for Crime over Current Events shine through at the Planet. Well. Clark supposes that’s when the problems with Editorial started--

Not that the pursuit of justice should ever be considered a problem, in Clark’s opinion.

He skims his finger over the back of his phone. Two minutes left. Enough time for one last check.

Clark turns himself in front of the full-length mirror on his wardrobe. What he sees in it surprises him: two dark circles under his eyes.

Clark’s tired. He hasn’t slept in days. Running down leads for the Bat vigilante for three days, followed by the impromptu stakeout--aside from the half-cruller that he left in the back of the taxi, he can’t remember the last time he ate, either.

No time to do either before the red carpet roll-out.

Clark allows himself to feel uncharitable towards the universe, for a moment, as he tosses his press pass onto the kitchen counter. It can stay home for the night; he has an invitation, and he won’t advertise his connection to the Planet unless it’s absolutely necessary. Maybe if he’s lucky, he’ll get a splashy quote about the magic of reading, duck out of the party early enough to resume his stakeout, and the entire evening won’t be a complete waste of time.

In the end, Clark flies most of the way to the Luthor residence and jogs the last half-mile. If the Planet Accounting cares enough to ask why he didn’t file for mileage reimbursement, he’ll say he rode his bike. In his best suit.

Clark’s on the red carpet before the smattering of papos coalesce along the side to photograph the night’s parade. Clark spots the photographer from the Planet, and plants himself at the end of the carpet after he vouches for Clark with security. Maybe Clark should have brought his press pass after all, but before he has time to regret it, the first guests arrive.

The first limo pulls up, and the red carpet becomes a shooting gallery.

Airy, blank smiles; dresses, suits, and accessories of every description; more Bugattis, Bentleys and BMWs than Clark’s ever seen assembled in one place--all captured in the flashes between frames. To Clark’s dismay, he knows none of these people. The power brokers of Metropolis are a different species to the white-collar whistleblowers that inhabit his world of investigative reporting. Less, perhaps, a kindness than a general sort of defense mechanism for a person who has endured too many red carpets, the photographer keeps up a steady stream of commentary on the arriving guests. He hits the major highlights for Clark: who’s selling whom, who’s the CEO of which company, who’s wearing last year’s fashions.

Soon, Clark imagines he knows at least one important fact about everyone who’s arrived. An antiquities dealer in a gold-collared backless red dress appraises him thoroughly as she whisks down the carpet. She doesn’t stop, but her eyes linger, even through the glass door. Clark quirks his head at her, and she raises her hand in acknowledgement before she mingles with the guests inside the mansion.

“Is she a regular?” Clark asks, unsettled.

“Nope,” the photographer says, without looking up from the LCD screen on the back of his camera. “Gorgeous, though. Her, I’d remember.”

The photographer clicks through his photos as they wait for the next celebrity to arrive.

“Could have sworn I’ve seen you before somewhere.” The photog darts a glance at him. “Not just a red carpet schlub, are you, Kent?”

“I must have one of those faces.”

Clark forces himself not to fiddle with his tie.

The celebrities slow to a trickle, but the papos multiply in number. The red carpet is thronged, standing room only. An eager photographer jostles Clark’s elbow, and half-mumbles her apology as she hoists her camera over the stanchions. Clark is resigned to a night of non-events, sipping champagne with strangers, catching quotes from society mavens who wouldn’t even speak to him if they saw him on the street, when a signal spreads--the cameras come up, and are already flashing. There he is, and he actually showed up, and who’s that with him? Who would be seen with him tonight?

A vintage Aston Martin pulls to the curb. A man climbs out, surveying the crowd with the satisfaction of a prisoner standing before a firing squad. Gray touches his temples, to set off a strong jaw with the silvering of age. He’s older than Clark expected (usually the feeding’s only this frenzied on young stars and starlets), but he isn’t entirely unfamiliar. Even from this distance, Clark can tell he’s built like a small mountain. He waits until the valet has opened the passenger door, and a woman stands at his elbow. She’s only a head shorter than him, but her plunging neckline and piled white furs appear designed to focus attention toward her shockingly blue dress--and away from her companion.

“Who’s that?” Clark asks. “The man,” he clarifies, after the photographer says Mindi Mayer without pausing.

The photographer stops then, and gives Clark the full once-over. “You must be from another Planet, because you certainly aren’t a reporter.”

“Print journalism,” Clark says, projecting his dutiful contrition. This isn’t the first news-cycle faux-pas he’s had to fight his way out of, but from the photographer’s disbelief, he’s starting to think this might be the most severe.

“That’s Bruce Wayne, Playboy Prince of Gotham. Once upon a time.” The photographer laughs. “Reclaimed the title, though, with the--don’t you watch the news?”

Clark’s answer is lost in the furor: the moment Mindi takes Bruce Wayne’s arm, the crowd surges forward, and Clark is caught in the riptide of a human ocean.

Clark grabs a toppling stanchion. Exerting the smallest amount of strength, he hoists the velvet rope--and all of the photographers behind it--away from the carpet. His hand is back in his coat pocket lightning fast, but no one even spares Clark a second look; everyone’s focused on the couple as Mindi primps for the cameras and Bruce Wayne smiles with half of his face.

“Mr. Wayne, do you have any--” “Mr. Wayne, what is your response to--” “Mr. Wayne! Mr. Wayne! What do you have to say to--” “Mr. Wayne, do you know Superman?” “Mr. Wayne, what’s your response to the Superman Question?” “Mr. Wayne, are you going to meet Superman later tonight?”

Bruce and Mindi catwalk dance down the line, slowing every few feet to cheat for the cameras, turn themselves to the most flattering angles. Over the click of a hundred camera shutters, Clark can hear Bruce’s jaw grinding. Security flanks them, and blocks the tide that threatens to crash against the glass when they disappear into the building.

Bruce Wayne of Gotham City, who’s somehow linked to Superman.

Clark’s brow knits. He remembers the face of every person he’s saved. (And the ones he hasn’t.)

This is a man that Superman has never saved.

Clark turns back to his photographer for clarification--to ask about the story he’s apparently missed--but the photographer is fighting his way upstream, heading back to file the photos for tomorrow’s Society spread.

Bruce Wayne is a small mystery.

Clark’s good at solving mysteries, even if he doesn’t have any first-hand knowledge of Mr. Wayne. Offhandedly, Clark recalls that Wayne had been invited to a Rebuild Metropolis costume ball at the Regency last year, but had failed to turn up to swill the Daily Planet’s free champagne. Around the same time, the figurehead CEO caused a stir in the bullpen last Christmas when Wayne Entertainment dumped all of the Planet’s shares. Wayne was outbid for the company by LexCom, and the whole mess had ended up before the SEC on a whistleblower's tip. Hadn’t Clark heard something about WAYN stock tanking today, in-between his frantic dashes across the world?

That would certainly explain Wayne’s frustration.

As the paparazzi buzz around him, bragging about their shots, the potential for two-page interior spreads, Clark checks the time. He’s been here for an hour. Technically, he has fulfilled the parameters of Perry’s assignment. The celebrities have arrived, Clark has heard a couple choice, if unprintable, quotes, and he now understands that all anyone will talk about tomorrow is the stampede on red carpet.

Clark could file the story on his phone and call it a night. Spending the rest of it at the docks will provide only the slimmest chance of catching the Bat vigilante in action; Clark’s immediate future is more likely staking out the thrilling loading and unloading of cargo.

It is tempting, Clark’s big enough to admit that--but if he has one character flaw, it is this: Clark’s curious. How often did the Playboy Prince of Gotham visit Metropolis? Maybe once, twice in the past twenty years?

On the best of days, Clark can barely resist the mystery of who’s stealing bagels in the bullpen, and he finds he can’t resist this one.

If nothing else, Mr. Wayne might be good for a quote to stick in Perry’s craw. Everyone in Gotham has an opinion on the Bat vigilante. As long as Clark can get someone to explain the story that’s whipped everyone into a frenzy--and avoid the country hayseed routine in front of Mr. Wayne--the party shouldn’t be a complete bust.

Chapter Text

It’s humid in Lex Luthor’s mansion; no one’s comfortable; and there’s nowhere to sit down. The glass and steel palace is fiercely warm for November. Clark fights the urge to roll up his jacket sleeves; he suspects society would consider it gauche. Instead, he drops his core temperature a few degrees below normal until his skin is chilly to the touch.

Not that anyone is touching him, even through his jacket sleeves.

The party is an organism fighting an invader: Clark’s marked as an outsider, and the socialites grimace before they turn their backs on him to regard Lex’s idea of décor contemporain.

The stun-and-shun technique wouldn’t seem so familiar--really, Clark’s a hit at parties--except that Clark’s watching it happen to Bruce, too. His broad back cuts through the party, a sleek black scalpel that leaves severed conversations and furtive whispers in his wake. Maddeningly, no one says anything that can help Clark piece anything together. Shame, scandal, and the Waynes would be so disappointed could be said about anything from car theft to, he suspects, being seen with the wrong partner.

Mindi doesn’t seem to be the wrong kind of partner. While the crowd reacts frostily to Bruce, Mindi schmoozes with ease. She glides through the drab affair, dragging a splash of color in her wake. She greets a senator, a CEO, a land developer with the same familiarity as a campaign booster. She lingers around those in power, rather than the merely wealthy, and maybe that’s the angle. Maybe Mr. Wayne is running for office, and some small indiscretion has poisoned the well.

Or--maybe not.

Bruce--doesn’t actually seem that concerned. He grabs a martini glass off a passing tray, and flourishes it front of him. Each minute that no one approaches him, he appears fractionally more relaxed. If Bruce hadn’t been alone, Clark might have written off Bruce’s behavior as the ebb and flow of a crowd, but there are no conversation partners to disguise what Bruce is doing. No matter who his partner schmoozes, Bruce keeps half of the room between himself and Mindi. Over the rim of his martini glass, he tracks her relentlessly.

Clark’s curiosity swells by the minute. He’s setting down his drink to duck into an alcove to find the story himself on his phone, when the Metropolis Foundation chairwoman taps the microphone. Turning towards the stage, Clark claps politely when Lex Luthor is introduced.

That’s when Bruce speaks for the first time.

“Alright, where am I going, Alfred?”

Clark looks up sharply. Has someone from the party broken ranks to speak to Bruce? Clark can’t tell at first, because Bruce’s back is retreating through the rows of donors, patrons, and friends of the library who have stationed their glasses at their elbows to listen to their host’s paean to knowledge. Then he hears the response, metallic and filtered--the sound of a voice through an earpiece.

“Go past the elevator, to your left. That's right--down the service corridor, in the basement.”

Bruce buttons his jacket and heads out through the archway at an amiable pace. Easy. Natural. Completely suspicious. For a moment, the situation is incomprehensible: Why would Bruce Wayne be micced? Why would he need an earpiece?

But the voice directs-- “Down the stairs. You saw them when you came in,” and Clark realizes there has to be a reason. A goal.

It’s risky to use any of his powers in a crowd, especially one as inattentive and visibly uncomfortable as this one--grimacing at one another as Lex’s rambling speech takes a sharp detour into his childhood. Clark’s irises take on an eerie blue cast when he’s peering through solid objects; one stray glance at his face will give up the game.

Clark clears his throat and surreptitiously adjusts his glasses, pulling the thick black rims down to block his irises. Only then does Clark open his vision. He feels the sclera of his eyes reshape and firm as his eyes focus through the concrete and steel of the floor. The layers of the house peel back one by one, transparent as glass, until he’s peering into the basement. There’s a wine cellar, a sizeable kitchen, and...he blinks into infrared. An unusually warm spot with circulating cold pockets. Clark blinks back into the visible spectrum. The unusually heated room is packed with data servers.

Suddenly, Clark remembers why the Daily Planet kerfuffle happened at all: Bruce and Lex are fierce business rivals. What could Bruce possibly want with the data servers of a competitor? The question practically answers itself: corporate espionage in progress. Corruption in the heart of Batman’s Gotham. This could be a hell of a story.

The outraged hitch in Lex’s speech barely registers as Clark eagerly follows Bruce down into the belly of the Luthor mansion.

There’s an artistry to moving through a space without being seen. As Clark threads his way through the society set, he passes as invisibly as a waiter holding a tray of empty champagne glasses. On the stairs, it’s a different story. Clark, unlike Bruce, doesn’t have the air of someone who knows they won’t be questioned; no less than three servers stop to ask Clark if he’s lost. He answers all of them with a polite no, and if you’ll excuse me? and descends into the heart of the mansion.

The constant flow of staff from the kitchen restricts him to human-normal vision. So--Clark’s surprised to find that Bruce is already deep in the server room, having done whatever it is he was there to do, by the time Clark pushes the door open.

Bruce’s head comes up, as casual as if he nipped down here to check stock quotes on his phone. He can’t just be--lingering here? Is he waiting for his confederate to join him?

The voice on the other end of the earpiece is silent, failing to divulge more of their secrets.

“You’re not dressed well enough to be waitstaff,” Bruce says gruffly. “Wait--don’t I know you?” Realization inches across his brow, slowly enough, dimly enough that for a moment, Clark wonders if he simply imagined the intrigue. “You’ve been watching me all night,” Bruce says, pulling his gaze up and down Clark’s body as though it’s another one of those useless objets d’art from Lex’s foyer, here to look pretty and nothing else. “Long-time admirer or fan of my recent work?”

“Clark Kent, Daily Planet,” Clark says automatically, adopting the most officious tone in his reporter’s repertoire. “I think this might be considered trespassing.”

“Well then. That makes two of us.” Bruce smirks, raising Clark’s hackles.

Before he’s entirely aware of it, Clark’s crossing the room. As he approaches, Bruce readjusts his body to continue blocking whatever’s behind him. That sets Clark’s jaw. He’s got Bruce Wayne dead to rights.

“Is there something that you don’t wish me to see, Mr. Wayne?”

“I don’t think there’s anything you haven’t seen,” Bruce teases, flirtatious and... bitter?

Clark can’t tell how much of the mockery is self-directed, but from the exhausted countenance--Clark will bet it’s that story that he doesn’t know about. Again. Has to be.

“Care to see more?” Bruce offers, a finger casually hooking into the knot of his black tie, and pulling.

Even though the tone’s rough, hardly flattering, Clark’s never been good when someone flirts with him directly. The tops of his ears burn--and this does not go unnoticed by Bruce, damn him. Bruce’s expression softens around the eyes in amusement.

Clark crosses his arms across his chest, puffing up with his best I don’t believe your bullshit attitude that he’d learned from Lois.

“I assure you,” Clark says hotly, “this is all I’ve seen of you, and it’s already enough.”

Bruce’s shoulders hitch. He’s actually laughing, and Clark--Clark doesn’t see the humor in this at all.

Bruce’s game is obviously deflection. Fine. Clark doesn’t have to buy it. Bruce is guilty of something--that’s not in question, now. The only unanswered question Clark has is why Bruce decided to commit the data breach himself. It was only a month ago that the Metropolis Star ran the headline BURGLARY AT LUTHOR RESIDENCE, NOTHING STOLEN! without any on-the-record sources. That incident had probably been a data breach too. If someone else could do the job cleanly, why couldn’t Bruce Wayne, richest man in the universe, hire someone competent to do the job for him?

“Don’t own a tv, do you, son?” Bruce murmurs.

“I--”

The tap-tap-tap of two sets of heels heading towards the server room brings Clark up short. A thrill of apprehension shoots through him. When Clark was standing in the doorway, he was an innocent bystander that happened to stumble on a possible crime-in-progress. Up in Bruce’s space, Clark feels complicit in whatever plan is unfolding.

“Someone’s coming,” Clark says urgently, glancing over his shoulder, calculating how best to extricate himself from this situation.

A swift retreat to the doorway to flag down the approaching people?

An appropriately shocked ‘discovery’ of whatever Bruce is concealing behind him?

The blood is humming through Clark’s veins--he’s never been this close to danger in the city as Clark Kent--there are so many ways this could go badly--for the Planet--for his story--for his job--but he’s fairly certain that with some quick thinking, he’ll be back on safe ground by the time company arrives.

Clark isn’t paying attention--so he’s surprised when it happens.

Bruce’s hand closes over his upper arm in an iron grip. The second Clark feels Bruce’s fingertips against his skin, he forces his body to go limp. Allows himself to be be open, unresisting for whatever happens next.

Callused fingers dig into his bicep as Bruce shoves him up against the wall and whispers fiercely against his ear: “I will give you whatever exclusive you want, if you--go with it.”

Clark rears back. Bruce’s eyes are flinty, hand resting against the wall next to Clark’s waist, leaning into him. Bruce’s body language is strange, too. It must have taken tremendous strength to haul him against the wall (single-handed!), but Bruce isn’t winded. Determined and a bit faded around the edges like a pencil sketch that’s been erased one too many times--but oddly resigned.

Under that bravado, Clark hears a plea for help: This is it. Help me or don’t.

Damn it all--Clark has never been able to say no in the face of someone’s heartfelt need.

“Okay,” Clark breathes.

Bruce’s grimace cracks. For an instant, he looks genuinely surprised. Then he’s going to work.

“Grab me--” Bruce positions one of Clark’s hands at the base of his neck, and encourages Clark to thread it through his long, peppered hair---“here. Pull.”

The tips of Clark’s ears are burning red, but the clinical nature of Bruce’s direction allows him to go through with it--and, well, Clark’s not one to do anything by half-measures--

Clark pulls, yanking Bruce’s head back, exposing his throat. Bruce grunts, surprised, and taps his hand. Shit. He needs to be careful. Meek mouse reporter Clark Kent shouldn’t be able to manhandle someone as solidly built as Bruce Wayne. Easing up the grip, he lets Bruce slide his hand around to the base of Bruce’s throat, while Bruce pulls the silver barbel out of his starched collar, and loosens his tie. Clark’s pulse hammers in his veins.

“You’re ice cold,” Bruce gripes, and then--the door’s opening. The suave Bruce of a few minutes ago has left, and the words tumble out of this new, awkward Bruce all at once: “I’m going to--jesus, I’ll make this up to you, son.”

Bruce clenches the collar pin between his teeth, and leans forward to slip it to Clark. Shocked, Clark allows it to pass between his lips.

A throat clears.

“Don’t drop it,” Bruce murmurs. “It was my father’s.” It’s not a command--but it was my father’s carries the force of responsibility as strongly as if it were. There’s no way Bruce can know the heirloom is as delicate as silk thread between jaws that can crush diamonds. Clark’s lips close over the silver pin, gently, and hold it.

“Excuse me, Mr. Wayne--”

He doesn’t get the chance to see who's discovered them; there’s a faint brush of knuckles under his chin, and he reflexively glances up at Bruce at the same moment that Bruce leans forward onto his elbow.

(Bruce is taller than him, Clark realizes.)

Bruce is close, and then closer. Their noses bump against each other as Bruce tucks his face next to Clark’s cheek. And then--and then Bruce drags his very expensive slacks against Clark in a slow, dirty grind of hips. Firm, heavy against him; panting almost inaudibly, even next to his ear. The tweed catches on the next roll of hips, as Clark feels a matching hardness against Bruce’s.

There’s a shocked intake of breath, so quiet that Clark wonders if it was even meant to be heard. Then a small stutter of motion. Tentative, almost hesitant--a question that Bruce is asking him, encouraging Clark to move with him. It’s awkward, barely practiced. And it flips a switch in Clark’s mind. Suddenly, everything feels too much. The heat of Bruce’s cock, the press of skin through four layers of fabric, as though they were touching skin to skin--an electric spark of connection that dances up his spine. Clark’s can’t be more surprised, but he doesn’t gasp. His eyelashes flutter against the rush of sensation, pursing his lips over the pin, but he doesn’t open his mouth. He doesn’t drop the pin. Bruce’s thumb brushes across his jaw, coaxing him back. Clark can’t. He can’t. He can’t focus. Heat rushes to his face, and he stamps down on it, fast, before his veins begin to glow--

“Excuse me, Mr. Wayne--” The voice repeats.

Bruce--the very picture of an entitled asshole, every inch the charmer that he was not as he had begged forgiveness from Clark--pulls back and smiles magnanimously at the women in the doorway.

“Mercy,” Bruce says. “Mindi. That’s lovely, you’ve met. I’m, ah, in the middle of an interview. Can we do this in five minutes?”

Chapter Text

Bruce has the grace to look apologetic as Mindi herds him out of the room. The expression isn’t meant for Clark; but since Clark includes himself in the category of people that should be apologized to, he takes a fraction of Bruce’s contrition for himself. Mindi excuses her client to Mercy, Lex Luthor’s personal assistant, with publicist speak for Yes, he’s an idiot. We’re all very proud of the fact that his idiocy in no way impedes his ability to fuck up his life. All three of them ignore Clark as the glass door of the server room clicks shut behind them—Clark’s a non-entity in this drama.

Just as well.

Clark leans heavily against the wall, the reinforced concrete groaning and resettling with his weight. He—needs a second.

The sound of his breathing echoes around the room, dimly lit by the blue glow of Lex’s blade servers; swimming through the slow tide of time, Clark’s heart hammers in his chest. That sharp inhale of breath, as Bruce touched him. That quiet encouragement for them to move together. How close had he come to—the veins incandescing around his eyes—

It’s all too much.

Brick by brick, Clark builds a wall around his senses.

The Bruce Wayne show is apparently not over; to Clark’s surprise, Mercy doesn’t hustle them upstairs. Not right away. They block the flow of traffic from the kitchen reroutes around them, swinging trays of puff pastries wide of that emotional disaster zone—Mercy stoically disapproving, Mindi interposing herself to shield Bruce, one of her hands clamped tight around Bruce’s wrist.

Bruce’s posture cycles through several stages of sorry-in-theory. Twenty years in front of the company’s shareholders, the media, the SEC as Wayne Enterprise’s CEO; Bruce Wayne must practically live the body language equivalent of the non-apology apology. Because aside from his tousled hair, Bruce is unruffled. Even his Italian suit, tight around all of the corners of his body, appears to be freshly-pressed. Bruce Wayne doesn’t look like a man who has been caught debauching the local journalist; he certainly doesn’t look like a man who was (probably) committing a felony data breach. As far as Mindi and Mercy are concerned, Bruce is no more than a puppy who’s been caught chewing the wrong toy.

The conversation seems to teeter on the edge of politeness, as Mindi’s knuckles whiten with the strength of her grip—

Clark could listen in. All it would take is the slightest loosening of his walls...

No.

He doesn’t think that he’ll do that.

Not while Bruce is—still in his mouth.

Staring at the back of Bruce’s head, Clark blows out a series of slow breaths around the pin. He runs his tongue across the smooth ends of the barbel—the crisp, surgical edge of silver, with a faint trace of something tart and sweet. He drops it into the palm of his hand, and turns it over softly, reverently. The silver pin is flawless—not even the imprint of teeth. It was Bruce’s father’s. Clark suspects there’s a story in that. He wonders, in an abstract way, if Bruce would tell him if he asked.

Clark’s heart rate is oddly sluggish as he slips the collar pin into his coat pocket.

A device chirps on the server racks next to him, and Clark looks at it lazily.

Then the smudged, fuzzy edges around his mind recede, and Clark looks at the device.

The small black piece of hardware is plugged into a data port, a transfer bar at the bottom of its screen and an IP location (for tracking of some sort?), which gives him an idea about what Bruce was doing in the server room in the first place. Clark runs a finger experimentally over the casing. Simple electronic devices—flash drives and the surface functions on phones—are easy for him to read, but the system architecture of this device is beyond anything he’s encountered. It’s a storage device; he knows that much, and the files on it are encrypted. Beyond that, the device is completely unlike any technology he’s encountered before.

Oh, he has several theories about what could steal twenty server racks full of data in such a short period of time and all of them come up WayneTech CEO steals firm’s own prototype to aid in corporate espionage. Ha. Now that will be a Gotham headline Perry can’t ignore.

Clark palms the device, straightens his jacket, and (when he’s finished collecting himself) steps out into the hallway.

The best lies don’t use any words. Under most circumstances, Bruce is a world-class liar, but he’s struggling to keep up Bruce Wayne’s slightly offensive charm for Lex Luthor’s rottweiler. She cuts through his bullshit faster than a tactical knife through the Batsuit. Off-balance (and maybe a little preoccupied), Bruce stammers the most inane observations to deflect her questions. He feels a giddy, almost out-of-body sensation, as he listens to himself compliment her shoes. Mindi’s pulling her weight—an unexpected surprise—but Mercy’s stonewalling.

“Mercy, darling,” Mindi says, taking Mercy’s elbow into a conspiratorial half-huddle, “can’t we come to an understanding? It would be a shame to ruin the donor speech. Let me take my client and go. I’m sure once our heads are clear, we can find some way to make it up to Lex. What’s he been after all these years with Bruce—a private lunch, an R&D tour?”

An R&D tour would be a complete waste of his time, but Bruce’s willing to promise Lex a live-and-in-person recreation of his sex tape if it will get him back into the server room before the countdown timer on the leech hits zero.

—Kent’s still in there, too.

Bruce shifts in place.

He’s worked up from watching his collar pin between those lips—just a few shades darker than Kent’s skin, this side of dry and firm. Under his own, warm, and granite-soft. The trusting look that he gave Bruce, as Bruce brushed his knuckles under that milk-soft chin to keep the kid from panicking. Even through those giant black frames (not a standard Bruce Wayne turn-on), Kent’s eyes were glassy with desire. Bruce has seen all kinds of desire directed at him: for the name, for who he knows, for what he can do. Clark’s seemed…genuine.

(Because he clearly hasn’t seen the sex tape.)

It’s not important.

(Why did Clark follow him downstairs, if he hasn’t seen the sex tape? What could he have possibly wanted from Bruce?)

Whatever drove Clark to break from the party to follow him down into the server room, to doubt Bruce Wayne’s motivations and still say yes—with enough trust to let Bruce trap him against a wall; it’s not enough of a reason to want to be back in the server room now, pushing a hand through Clark’s hair, moving against him—the fluorescent blue glow of Lex’s servers cutting high across his cheekbones as Bruce coaxes him to come against his jacket.

It’s not enough of a reason.

Bruce bites down savagely on his lip as he listens to Mercy and Mindi bargaining for Bruce Wayne’s reprieve, and waits for his opening.

Bruce Wayne, naturally, can’t be bothered with these minor issues—he has people who have people that explain little details like ethical culpability to him—so he makes a drink motion at a passing server, scoring himself a dire-looking green martini for the trouble. Bruce impassively chomps on a cherry as Mercy listens to Lex’s commands he can’t hear.

“Mercy—” Mindi protests, before she’s silenced by Mercy’s raised hand.

“Ms. Mayer, I must ask you and your client to wait until Mr. Luthor has spoken to you. He’ll want to know why Mr. Wayne was in the server room—”—Mercy touches her earpiece, skimming her finger over it in a circular pattern. Bruce instantly recognizes it as a haptic-control pattern from a patented technology, stolen from WayneTech years ago, before Bruce moved the research agenda to eye-motion tracking. Bruce does not fail to notice the brief flutter of Mercy’s smirk in his direction—“—and you are the best, ah, equipped to tell him that.”

Mindi arches her eyebrows at Bruce as she bites back something truly cutting. Oh, he knows this look; Bruce Wayne gets it a lot. Why the hell aren’t you defending yourself?, variation number ten.

Bruce shrugs his complete disinterest in protecting his reputation to Mindi, because she should know Bruce Wayne wouldn’t bat an eye being caught, metaphorically, with his hand down someone’s pants, and Bruce—

If he didn’t need Kent to focus on the pin, and not the reason he followed Bruce into the server room— Maybe if they crashed into each other at a different party, Bruce could have—

“Mr. Wayne, Lex requires you and your...companion upstairs.”

Companion—? Not Mindi, surely, Bruce thinks. Mercy inclines her head toward Kent, who has suddenly materialized in Bruce’s field of vision, attempting to slink past them. His gait is as stealthy as a mountain goat hot-stepping over granite cliffs.

Kent stops mid-step, guilty, a man about to jump out of his own skin. Yet—how could someone as awkward and bulky as Clark slip out of the server room without Bruce noticing? Hmph. He’s clearly distracted right now.

“Um, hi. Clark Kent, Daily Planet,” Kent says, adjusting his glasses.

“You’re not Society, are you?” Mindi folds her arms, radiating carefully channeled aggression— towards Bruce’s breach of public image or his breach of her No Press rule, Bruce can’t be sure.

“Crime and Current Events,” Clark corrects—because what else would someone that self-righteous be? “I’m writing a piece—well, a series of pieces—on Gotham’s Bat vigilante and crime in the Port—”

Bat vigilante exposés are a dime a dozen. No one’s thought of a new thing to say about the Bat in five years, and socio-economic sob-stories about Gotham get as much play in Metropolis as they do anywhere: that is, none. Every city has its own seedy underbelly. Why should Gotham’s hog the limelight, just because it has one persistent urban legend? That’s the way Wayne Entertainment’s lock on Gotham-Metro area newspapers likes it, and that’s how it stays. Even LexCom’s more reputable papers toe that line.

Exposure’s not a real concern, which frees Bruce up to—indulge a little.

Because Bruce’s attention, strictly speaking, isn’t on Kent’s rundown of the Bat’s recent activities.

His gaze follows Kent’s hand as it smooths his tie, then further down. Kent’s wrinkled in all of the ways a jacket can hitch up around a body. The extra fabric’s rucked up around his arms, back, and waist, everywhere except where it might be enlightening. The heavy tweed jacket hides any interesting details about Kent’s current emotional state, and that’s the true sin of American-cut suits: they drown the masculine form in cloth. The end result is a body that looks like it’s been through a stampede when anything interesting happens.

He definitely felt interest earlier. Even if it was only interest in the kind of evening that Bruce Wayne can offer at parties. A stolen touch behind Lex’s server racks—all tease, and no release—

“That’s eight minutes and counting, sir,” Alfred murmurs.

Bruce’s gaze sharpens. He’s careful not to glance at the server room. He’s indulged himself, but that’s as far as he’ll allow it to go. Mission parameters are clear: he needs to retrieve the leech with the minimum amount of suspicion. He needs a diversion.

“You shouldn’t have gone American,” Bruce finds himself saying, before the plan has solidified in his mind. He can’t tell much about what’s underneath the suit, but he had felt surprising muscle under that tweed, and he can use that. “With a body like that, you should have come in mine.”

He tags on another lingering perusal of Kent’s body, capping it off with a lewd grin. He wants that blush, that disarming shyness. If he throws attention back on Kent, maybe he can slip back into the room—

Mercy’s nonplussed. Mindi balls her fists. Clark—doesn’t react at all, not in the way Bruce calculated. No blush. No indignant come-back. Instead, he flashes Bruce a golly-gee grin as bright as the sun.

There’s not a single trace of shyness in that face.

With a dawning horror, Bruce realizes Clark is being clever.

Bruce shifts again. Maybe he shouldn’t have worn such closely tailored set of slacks after all.

Even if Clark wanted to return to the party unnoticed, superspeed is out of the question. Blasting through a closed basement--where the speedwake can’t be explained away by wind gusts or a vent malfunctions--would be a quick way to blow his cover, and anything that draws attention to him might draw attention to the experimental WayneTech tucked into his jacket.

If he can smuggle the leech out of the party, back to the forensic data analysts at the Planet, Clark knows that he can prove malfeasance of some kind. Whether it’s Wayne’s in stealing the information, or it’s Luthor’s in the shady accounting for Rebuild Metropolis...it’s going to be something big.

The only credible way out of the server room is to allow himself to be caught. Playing up his clumsiness, Clark ‘sneaks’ past Mercy’s disciplinary circle; a truly embarrassing stumble punctuates his entrance. Exit: Clark Kent, spy. Enter: Clark Kent, reporter.

As Clark reaffirms that he’s not Society, and not planning to write on Bruce Wayne’s party decorum in his next column, everyone’s on their best behavior: Mercy frowns consideringly at Clark; Mindi’s fingernails bite deep enough into Bruce’s wrist to leave red, angry half-moons; Bruce watches him over the rim of his martini glass.

Maybe Clark will pull this off after all.

It’s all small talk and easy charm, or the appearance of it anyway. Lois drilled Metropolis Charm into him last year for the Planet’s charity functions: strong eye contact, no sudden gestures, low to no touching. Clark’s fingers are on fire with the distance that he’s not allowed to close—that is, if he were talking to Bruce, and if they were standing nearer to the stairwell, where their arms wouldn’t be jostled by passing waitstaff, Clark could—Jesus, Joseph and Mary, what is he thinking, he has no idea if Bruce would even be receptive to touching him again.

Clark stuffs his hands into his pockets abruptly, earning him a raised eyebrow from Mercy.

But Clark’s...curious too.

About Bruce, who doesn’t so much as blink in his direction. Tapping into the small amount of his power, Clark slips his walls down far enough to hear the quick beating of Bruce’s heart—pulse elevated—a bead of sweat rolling down his back. Underneath it all, Bruce’s teeth grind.

He catches Bruce’s eye as he sets down his empty martini glass on a passing tray, maybe hoping to find that intent, intelligent focus that had laid him bare in the server room. Metaphorically speaking.

Instead, Bruce is half-lidded, languorous, rolling on the most insincere imitation of human affection that Clark’s ever seen.

It’s...fine.

The cotton button-up chafes against his neck. Clark digs a finger into his collar to relieve the pressure.

At that precise moment, as though he’s timed it to coincide with Clark’s maximum discomfort, Bruce Wayne cracks a joke about Clark’s suit, half dig at his fashion sense, half truly execrable come-on, and pairs it with a once-over as electrifying as a long drag of his fingers across his skin—as visceral as the warmth of his body that pinned Clark to the wall with more than a simple agreement to play along.

The clatter of pans from the kitchen as the line cooks call out the instructions for the next round of hors d’oeuvres break the awkward silence. There’s a beat, and then another, a kind of appalled numbness. Mercy and Mindi turn away from Bruce to register a kind, pained solidarity with Clark; he suspects it intersects everything they saw in the server room with everything he still doesn’t know about Bruce Wayne. He smiles tightly at them, unused to this kind of attention—

—And as soon as he turns away from the Playboy Prince, out of the corner of Clark’s eye, Bruce drops the entitled cant of his hips and slides toward the server room.

Clark’s head whips up in disbelief.

Hadn’t they fucked (pretended to, just pretended to) against the server room wall? Who would be tacky enough to use their (pretend) partner as a diversion? But—Of course. Bruce is going for the device. Of course. He blames the disorientation on having seen Bruce’s vulnerability crack through his plastered-on smirk; it made Clark forget that he’s also seen the asshole Bruce Wayne and the felon Bruce Wayne. Three differing faces.

It begs the question, how much of Bruce Wayne is an act? The only answer that makes sense is: all of it.

Clark’s suddenly tired. Tired of the innuendo interspersed with the little hints that internally, Bruce is laughing at him.

Well.

Two can play at that game.

Bruce is halfway to the server room when Clark plasters on his rosiest smile.

“Oh, Mr. Wayne,” Clark drawls, drawing the collar pin out from his pocket, and with it, capturing Mercy and Mindi’s full attention. “Don’t bother with the server room, I have your pin right here.”

If Bruce were an impulsive man, he would give serious thought to strangling Kent and his sun-ripened earnestness. Mindi and Mercy’s heads swivel from Kent, to the pin, back to Bruce, who freezes in the middle of a stream of waitstaff carrying up the second round of hors d’oeuvres to the main floor.

“Reporting a disconnect from the system. Do you have it?” Alfred asks.

“I don’t—” Bruce subvocalizes, for Alfred’s benefit. But he has a damn good idea of who does.

With effort, Bruce raises his voice back to a playful tone. “Ah, ha, the martinis are finally catching up. Didn’t know you still had my pin,” he says to Clark.

Too many persona swaps today, because being Bruce Wayne grates on him. Standing in this hallway grates on him. He doesn’t even want to add, It looks good on you. Hold onto it, but he does, because that’s what Bruce Wayne would do. Because Bruce Wayne will need to have an excuse to put his hand into Clark’s jacket in ten minutes’ time. Because Lex Luthor has no social stamina, and Bruce wants to sear the image of him groping an intolerably smug reporter into Lex’s brain.

“If you will follow me, gentlemen.” Mercy steps back towards the stairs with the authority of someone who knows they’ll be obeyed.

Bruce regards Clark warily as Mindi grabs Bruce’s arm. They ascend the stairs together. He taps the transponder in his cufflink to let Alfred know he’s incommunicado and that he has a problem. There’s no code to tell Alfred that problem is currently dimpling, but Bruce has enough time to think of one by the time they reach the main hall where Lex Luthor is waiting for them—as thunderous as the leading edge of a hurricane.

Bruce taps the cufflink nine more times, and hopes Alfred receives the SOS.

Chapter Text

After Mercy deposits Mindi, Bruce and Clark on the main floor near an incomprehensible twist of lacquered acrylic canvas, she peels off to check in with the waitstaff, pausing to take comments from an elderly couple who compliment the benefit’s turnout and lodge a weak complaint about the lack of air conditioning. Mercy exchanges a quick word with the antiquities dealer in the gold-collared dress and disappears from the room, leaving the three of them, as it were, to their fate.

Clark has never had the pleasure (if that's the right word for it) of meeting Lex Luthor before. The LexCom name might be on the masthead of the Daily Planet, but the big boss never turns up at the Winter Holiday of Your Choice parties. Clark does, however, know Lex by reputation. Among the many sins that the Daily Planet no longer publishes are the allegations that Lex funnels Metropolis reconstruction funds into military R&D. LexCom hinted that Lois’ features should be dropped for more column inches on the society page, and Editorial caved. In Lois’ first and last column on Lex’s Rebuild Metropolis fund, she described the city’s benefactor as eccentric.

Clark knows precisely one other billionaire, and it doesn’t prepare him for the full Lex experience.

Backlit by the track lighting along the base of the dais where he delivered his benefit speech (who builds a dais in their own home?), Lex is haloed by white light, and completely still. Clusters of donors have given them a wide berth, forming a wall of polite disinterest that is well within eavesdropping distance. Metropolis society circles around them, and Clark feels immediately uneasy.

It turns out Lois severely downplayed the nervous energy bursting from Lex’s wiry frame. Lex doesn’t step forward to shake anyone’s hand—he trembles with some withheld emotion as his eyes dart from Clark over to Bruce.

“Bruce Wayne. Clark Kent. Imagine my surprise to learn that you two know each other,” Lex says at last. It’s a false lightness, his expression clouded. “Imagine my absolute surprise.”

Clark waits for a question to materialize. Something about their presence in the server room. Or the CEO version of small talk. Instead, Lex mashes his index finger against his lips so hard that Clark expects blood.

Bruce seems to start a reply—but his attention is drawn away suddenly by the antiquities dealer in the striking red dress. Clark discreetly watches Bruce track her through the crowd, a small puzzled frown working its way into the crease of Bruce’s brow.

“Hello, Lex,” Mindi says instead, offering her hand. Lex regards it with a faint horror, before he grips the tips of her fingers and shakes them slightly. Mindi purses her lips, excusing the faux pas with a shrug. “What a charming benefit. Donations should roll right in! And isn’t that fabulous, the children of Metropolis will be thrilled that the library will make up its operational budget for the next fiscal year. Who would have thought that it would be rebuilt so quickly.”

Lex laughs. It’s a grating, unkind sound. “The safety of Metropolis has always been my number one concern.”

Clark’s perfunctory to this entire exchange—in the presence of the richest men in the Gotham-Metropolis metro area, he’s more a column than an estate. But he can’t let Lex’s hypocrisy stand unchallenged.

“Is that so,” Clark says, winding himself up for a fight. “In LexCorp’s latest budget, you slashed the Rebuild Metropolis Fund by twenty-five percent.”

Anger peels off of Lex like thunderheads from a derecho. Lex’s facial tics are 50-foot flashing billboards. He’s disgusted with something, truly repelled by what he sees. But Mindi’s inexorable, her own force of nature, ploughing through the oncoming storm.

“I’m sure Bruce would love to talk about a joint campaign. Gotham and Metropolis, sister cities, standing together once again against the indifferent tide of budget cuts? What do you say, Bruce?”

Mindi tugs on Bruce’s arm.

Across the room, the antiquities dealer disappears into the stairwell down to the basement, and Bruce whips his head back to the group. He can’t quite backpedal from his obvious inattention, but he slaps on a vacuous smile and tries.

“The Wayne Foundation is always proud to support...books,” Bruce ventures.

There’s a noticeable conversational pause; a spreading silence from Metropolis society around them. To his credit, Bruce does look proud of his statement, poised to continue if he’s pressed on the subject. Lex and Mindi are too stunned to follow up. Now that this weaponized act of Bruce Wayne—because it is an act, as surely as it had all been an act in the server room—isn’t aimed at Clark, and the joke’s not on him, he can appreciate the irony of it.

Lex looks like he’s swallowed something distasteful.

“We should...talk soon,” Lex says finally, maybe only out of defensive disbelief.

Mindi rebounds more quickly, dropping Bruce’s arm, and mock-pouting at Lex. “Now, Lex, you know I can’t let you go with such a vague commitment. Bruce—” She pats Bruce to punctuate her speech, a friendly, if diffident gesture, and Lex shudders—“is taking such a beating in the press. I don’t think a single guest has offered their sympathy, what with Superman being a pillar of the community.”

On the word Superman, conversation picks back up (louder than it needs to be)—a clear signal that the party is moving on, assured that no more needs to be said (or heard) on this particular topic. This is the first time since the red carpet than anyone’s even hinted at what that lurking Bruce Wayne story might be, and Clark burns with curiosity. Society’s distaste toward Bruce is too strong to be over something as trivial as being seen with the wrong partner, as Clark originally thought.

“The…Superman thing,” Lex repeats, his voice hitching until it’s hardly more than a whisper. It’s barely a statement, barely a question.

Clark tries not to lean forward too eagerly. He is arriving at the central truth of the evening. Clark considers for a moment that maybe Wayne Enterprises lost money, or property, or people in Nairomi. Lois hasn’t supplied him with the advanced course of Metropolis Charm; Clark has no idea if it’s gauche to talk about politics among the powerbrokers who—through their money, influence, and industry—transact the business of international war or peace as it benefits their profit margins.

“Horrible, isn’t it,” Mindi agrees in a tone Lois trained Clark to spot as publicist-speak for I have no feelings on the matter except your feelings.

Bruce flutters his eyelashes at Lex and purses his lips. “A shame. Maybe you should have invited him instead,” Bruce simpers. “I know Superman would be proud of the work you’re doing, Lex. Books are the cornerstone of important people’s lives.”

Clark presses his lips together to keep an unexpected peel of laughter at bay, and he clears his throat to cover his slip.

A frowns twitches across Lex’s face, so quick Clark almost misses it. “Bruce, who knew you were up to that kind of no good?”

“—Wouldn’t this be a grand time for a joint announcement?” Mindi presses. “All of the deep pockets are already in one place. I’m sure that Bruce could use the moral support.”

Lex circles closer to Mindi and Bruce, an animating gleam twisting his smile into something vicious. He’s a hairsbreadth away from grabbing Bruce’s arm when Bruce whispers another apology so low that no one else could possibly have heard it over the clink and swish of party guests. A Christ, I owe you another one, kid, and Clark finds himself tucked against Bruce’s side. Bruce—who’s freed himself from Mindi in a flash, faster than Clark’s seen an ordinary person move—snakes his hand under Clark’s objectionably-cut jacket to clench firmly around his waist, and suddenly that story is the furthest thing from Clark’s mind.

“Oh, I don’t know, Mindi...Mr. Kent’s offered to provide all of the moral support I need this evening.”

Bruce squeezes him once, warningly.

A miasma of disgust radiates from Lex, a palpable bitterness that lashes against Clark’s senses, targeted specifically at him. Clark wonders how Lex can summon this much hatred for him, personally, given that all of his and Lois’s exposés on LexCorp malfeasance are canned before they escape Editorial. When Lex risks a cutting side-glance at Bruce, something clicks. Clark gets it. It’s not him that Lex has a problem with. In this particular drama, Clark is the candy of the arm of a business rival and—as tempting as it might seem to knock Bruce Wayne down a peg or two—Lex can’t piss off the other half of the eastern seaboard’s GDP.

Clark’s annoyed.

Like any good reporter, Clark’s worked to earn the enmity of those in power honestly. To be the arm candy in a power struggle between titanic forces—Wayne Enterprises and LexCorp towering over him, inconsequential—insults the good work that the Planet does.

He doesn’t want to stoop to the level of Bruce Wayne, but Clark may never have this chance to rile Lex again.

“Yes,” Clark elongates the syllable, as though he has thought about it, and then snuggles up into Bruce’s touch, resting his head lightly next to Bruce’s chin. There’s a quick intake of breath, and he feels the heat of Bruce through his jacket. “And I do believe—” Clark strokes the frame of his glasses in a vaguely lewd manner. He hopes it’s suggestive enough to make his point. “Mr. Wayne has offered to give me his exclusive on Superman.”

Clark’s only aiming for Lex—how he pisses off three people simultaneously, he isn’t quite sure. Mindi sparkles with an effervescent, diamond-hard anger. The words no unauthorized interviews practically crystallize in front of her. Bruce—well. Bruce goes still beneath him. When Clark glances up, he sees that Bruce’s expression is flat, bordering on homicidal.

Lex gapes like yesterday’s catch.

LexCom doesn’t control the Daily Planet’s bullpen, but in the face of Lex’s purpling rage, Clark will have to double-check that he still has a job tomorrow. On balance, Clark would rather be facing down a battalion of Kryptonian soldiers. At least, he thinks with a sigh, the evening can’t get any worse.

Alfred breaks radio silence to inform Bruce SOS, four minutes in tap code and then that’s it, there’s no more time. Instinct tells him that Clark has the device; Bruce will have to trust it.

“I did promise you an exclusive,” Bruce agrees. His hand ghosts across Clark’s back, drawing a line across his skin. He leans in so his lips are touching Clark’s ear. “Why don’t you and I…swap credentials?”

And he slides his hand back out, across the lining of Clark’s jacket, the sleight-of-hand accomplished while Clark licks his lips nervously. Four’s a crowd when no one is talking, but Bruce lingers. If Clark notices the theft, it will be now. If not, Bruce is in the clear until Clark’s alone, looking to investigate the spoils of his daring.

Clark doesn’t notice.

Clark’s eye contact doesn’t waver, but his throat is bobbing, working through some emotion that’s not showing on his face. “If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Wayne, I’ll set up an appointment with your—”

“—Yes, let’s, we have so very much to talk about!” Mindi enthuses, cutting off Clark.

With a forceful tug of his arm, Mindi reminds Bruce that she has not agreed to an interview with an unvetted reporter, and therefore Lucius has not agreed, and who knows what his angle might be, anyway, isn’t the Daily Planet a LexCom holding? For all of her charm, Mindi trusts Lex not to smear Wayne Enterprises about as much as she trusts a pit of vipers not to bite. She had been very clear on this point at the lakehouse. For his part, Lex appears to be running scenarios in his head, Bruce and Clark, Clark and Bruce, working himself up, disgusted by every permutation he imagines. Good. Let him choke on Bruce Wayne’s reputation.

Bruce keeps the mental count, and waits until the last possible second before he excuses himself with a, I think we need another martini.

Thirty seconds later, the lights shut down in sequence and a siren breaks out in a deafening wail. It runs for a good twenty seconds before it wheezes and falls silent. The noise barely flusters the guests, who joke and jostle each other's’ elbows nervously. But the silence is too much for the canape-and-caviar crowd; in the stuffy, darkened foyer, a murmur rises, as everyone realizes that they can’t see the closest exits. In this temple to LexCorp corporate superiority, even the Lex-brand emergency signs have failed.

Bruce sprints for the back exit through the darkness, dodging bodies by feel and memory. Lex’s security detail bursts in through the front entrance, shouting at everyone to stay calm, escalating the situation into a full-blown panic. He rolls out of the glass doors before the security gates crash down, sealing everyone inside.

Bruce releases the mic with another tap to his cufflink. “Package acquired,” Bruce huffs. He doesn’t stop running until he’s cleared the open space. In the security of the tall grass around the estate, Bruce slows to a jog. The Aston Martin will have to stay behind.

“Well done, sir. You have seven minutes. With any luck, the security gates will come up before the lights return, and this won’t be a monumental risk to Bruce Wayne’s reputation,” Alfred grouses. “Whatever happened to discreet extraction.”

“There was a...complication.”

“Clark Kent, Daily Planet. Pity, he seemed such an honest sort.” Alfred sounds truly regretful.

“He’s many things, but honest isn’t one of them, Alfred.”

Bruce pushes his way through the thick reeds at the edge of an artificial lake that isn’t on any current map of Metropolis. Ducks float serenely on the surface. They should have migrated to their wintering grounds a month ago—except the unusual temperature spreads further than Lex’s house: the whole area is unseasonably warm, as though Lex’s property sits on top of a vast, incubating heat source. It’s a paranoid thought, even by Bruce’s standards.

And missing the point. He’s lost.

“Where am I, Alfred?”

“Twenty meters south-by-southeast of your secondary vehicle.”

“Good,” Bruce says, heading back into the tall sedges.

“And your primary?” Alfred inquires. The implicit question: whether the SOS has changed Bruce’s itinerary. It hasn’t. If anything, it’s enhanced the need for public exposure: if anyone asks where Bruce disappeared to, there will be respectable hotel reservations, a trail of concierges, porters, and attendants to back up his story. Because someone will be asking.

“Set her down on the Regency roof.”

“Entertaining again this evening, Master Wayne? Whatever will your reporter think.”

Bruce doesn’t rise to the bait. He simply gives Alfred his ETA of 45 minutes, and double-taps his cufflink to sign off.

He breaks through to one of the unpaved back roads that criss-cross the Luthor estate. A sleek black Yamaha motorcycle waits at the side of the road, helmet locked to the steering. Inside the seat, a suit bag with a set of lightweight carbon-fiber mesh riding leathers. Bruce had planned this escape in detail. Nothing on the cycle is branded or traceable to the Bat or Bruce Wayne.

He changes quickly, stripping off the layers of Bruce Wayne, until he’s down to a dress shirt and slacks. Bruce slips the device out of his jacket pocket to stow it in a stabilized compartment that Alfred builds into all of his toys...and comes up short. The leech was a miracle of engineering, fitting several terabytes of solid-state storage into a palm-sized hacking tool—but even it wasn’t this light. He feels the wrongness of it in his hand: wrong shape, wrong size, wrong goddamn texture.

The sinking feeling in his gut is confirmed when he gets a light on the metal object. He turns it over in the beams of the motorcycle’s headlamp. A silver pentagonal solid, stamped with an extremely fine pebbled texture. No seams, buttons, or hatches—just a swooping S set in a shield that Bruce knows better than his own face.

Chapter Text

The moment the lights cut out, cries of The security doors have come down! and We’re trapped! whip the crowd into a frenzy. Clark blinks his vision into infrared. If he were given to thinking in biblical metaphor, he’d say that pandemonium reigned; he’s seen riots with less energy than the wealthy of Metropolis rushing to save their own well-tailored hides. Tasting plates are shattered under scrambling feet as everyone streams towards their best guess of an exit. Mindi’s eyebrows have mounted her forehead in how-can-this-get-any-worse chagrin. Lex brandishes his phone, using the glow of its tiny screen to survey his immediate area. He appears stunned—truly gobsmacked—that a power outage might afflict him, Lex Luthor. Bruce is—

Clark scans the room, the bar, and then pushes his vision through the walls of the house to the surrounding pathways, if he maybe stepped outside to take a phone call.

—Bruce is gone.

“Remain calm,” Lex stammers, inaudible above the uproar of guests.

“REMAIN CALM,” Mindi bellows, throwing her arms out to catch the shoulders of an elderly couple who crash into her like gray-haired meteors. “Your host has an announcement.”

Lex’s hands ball into fists. “Security will resolve this little power glitch. In the meantime— MERCY!” he hisses into his phone. “Please, see to the guests, I have to—” He yanks his hands viciously through his hair, looking completely undone. “Have a team check the lab, now! We need to ensure project integrity! No, I’ll come to you!”

With all of the aplomb of a man elbowing his way through the corridors of a sinking ship, Lex Luthor shoves his way past his frightened guests and heads into the jowls of his mansion, abandoning the party to its fate.

“Mr. Luthor, have you called—” The rest of Clark’s sentence is cut off by a frantic shoving match that breaks out in front of him, as two patrons tussle for a flashlight. Clark elbows his way between the man and woman with a profuse apology, and redirects them towards the dais. When the man’s back is turned, Clark confiscates the offending object (which turns out not to work, anyway). By the time he’s stationed them on the platform, and cautioned them to wait for assistance, their panicking host has groped his way out of the foyer and disappeared into the service stairs.

Without a plan to safely evacuate the mansion, or someone with the authority to step forward to stem the rising panic, Clark knows it’ll get worse before it gets better.

As spectacular as his debut was in Metropolis eighteen months ago, Clark has never had to take charge of a situation that he couldn’t immediately punch or fly or lift his way out of. Rescuing families from the roofs of flooded homes, pulling the girl from the factory fire in Mexico City: immediate intervention against the limits of human ability has been the sum total of Superman’s public action before Nairomi. Even that rescue was accomplished in less than three minutes, in the relative safety of the desert. Not surrounded by the people of this city, who can destroy Clark’s anonymity if the lights choose an awkward moment to flicker back on, or if someone catches a glimpse of Clark smashing through a concrete wall. Or worse, records it. It’s not an ideal situation, and he’s not the ideal person, but if Lex Luthor and Mercy have abandoned them, it’s up to Clark to take charge.

Jogging the perimeter of the room, Clark forces himself to sweep the mansion in stages, checking for faults or breaks. The electrical lines light up around him: a living blue field, dormant, waiting for power to rush back through the wiring. He expands his search radius out to the immediate grounds, looking for downed power lines or shorted transformers.

“Everything looks fine,” he mutters.

Across the room, a woman turns towards him sharply, as if she heard him. (The antiquities dealer! When did she return from the basement?) Her gold collar seems to shimmer as she effortlessly catches a woman who stumbles over her.

Where’s the problem? Clark blows out a breath in annoyance. And where’s Bruce?

He darts into the stream of people to rescue a man who goes down under the stampede of Italian loafers. Through the press, Clark spots Mindi groping her way towards one of the walls, passengers in tow. She settles the elderly couple against the incomprehensible twist of black and red, more in the shape of the clawed talons of a fantastical beast than a piece of modern art in this chaos. The large pedestal helps shield them; the people shoving towards the front exit stream around them.

“Stay seated,” Mindi says. “It’s easier not to panic if you’re seated and calm, okay? We’ll get you water—”

The rest of the sentence is lost as Clark refocuses on the crowd. The flow of people has slowed to a trickle; the whole of Metropolis society have massed into a human wall around the security guards who hold the line at the front entrance, shouting at them to stay back from the doors, shoving back those who try to push past them, desperate to keep the crowd from surging towards the security gates. If the security line breaks, the rush to the gates could easily crush someone against the glass in a panicked tide.

A nagging doubt spurs Clark to x-ray the security gates. He immediately grits his teeth. The bars are passively conducting electricity. Great amounts of it. Anyone who touches them will receive a potentially fatal shock. Why Luthor chose to hook them up to an active backup generator, when the rest of the power grid is offline, is a question that Clark will have to ask. Later.

One thing at a time.

Clark calls out to Mindi, but his voice doesn’t carry over the crowd. Mindi’s head snaps up from the elderly couple, as she remembers her primary duty. “Bruce? Bruce, is that you? Where are you?”

Clark cheats to reach them (the security cameras are down, no one is going to notice that he leapt over the crowd), pitching his voice to carry over the shouting. “Mr. Wayne appears to have panicked.”

“Clark!” Mindi’s relief is palpable as she moves unsteadily towards the sound of his voice. When she reaches him, she grabs onto his arm, and Clark allows himself to be tugged toward her. “Can you find anyone who can help?”

Clark doesn’t know anyone else in the room—no one else had spoken to him that evening. As he evaluates potential helpers, he spots the antiquities dealer. In the middle of room, near one of Lex’s more frenetic sculptures, she is grabbing the remaining guests and settling them on the floor, passing water to those who are hyperventilating. She acknowledges him with a swift nod, and starts towards their position.

“Yes, I think I can—” Clark says. “She’s right here, Miss—”

“Diana Prince,” she says in lightly-accented English.

“Diana, lovely to meet you, I’m sure.” Clearly at the end of her politeness, Mindi seems determined to keep up her breezy charm despite their present circumstances. “Mindi Mayer. We need to keep people calm. Sit them on the floor—”

The room is now actively sweltering, hotter now than it had been a few minutes ago. In the dark, Clark can see guests flushed and sweating—too disoriented by the heat to have joined the stampede for the doors. If they wait in the room much longer, guests will begin to faint from panic and heat exhaustion.

Clark’s not aware that he’s made a noise of disagreement, until Mindi says sharply: “Do you disagree, Clark?”

“—Kent.” Clark completes the introduction by offering his hand to Diana. She finds it easily in the dark. Her handshake is firm. There’s a dry, papery feel to her skin.

“Delighted, Mr. Kent.” Diana purses her lips in an enigmatic smile. She’s clearly amused—as though it’s an open secret between them that this isn’t their first meeting. The uncanny feeling from earlier in the night returns full-force; yet Clark’s positive that he’s never met her.

“We need to open the security doors,” Clark says, on guard. “The temperature in the house is a concern. Lex said—”

“Oh god,” Mindi’s eyes widen into saucers. “There’s special lab in the basement—I—I don’t know what kind of projects Lex runs on his estate.”

“Open the security gates; evacuate the building,” Diana repeats, with the natural ring of authority of someone who is used to being obeyed. Clark hasn’t heard that bark of command since he crewed the Naiad, and wonders, perhaps, if she too has come from the sea. Diana catches Clark’s gaze, and with a quick dip of her chin, says, “we will assist.”

If Diana hadn’t pointed it out, Clark would have completely overlooked the side door; it blends seamlessly into the glass wall, covered with modern black fretwork. It’s sealed up by another steel security gate, but it’s not thronged by security or agitated guests—by far, their best choice for a stealthy exit.

Clark falls in line behind Diana as they cross the great hall underneath vaulted chevrons. Striking in their black and white paint job, they stretch out overhead like cracked ribs. They pass groups of guests in distress—some of them already sitting on the floor, clasping each other tightly in the dark—others hugging nearby objets d’art. Clark can’t turn a blind eye to suffering, even in its milder forms. Clark steadies arms, whenever someone loses their balance; he stops long enough to ask if anyone needs water; he assures them that security is working on a way to raise the gates. And he doesn’t hesitate to speed through those last few feet to arrive before someone collapses. The breeze from his speed is noticeable in the stifling air, but Clark can’t care about that right now.

Diana doesn’t turn around, but she does move at a sedate pace, giving Clark enough time to plausibly catch up with her whenever he lags behind to help a guest. It doesn’t feel right to follow after Diana—but it doesn’t feel wrong, either. After the night he’s had, Clark will take the comfort of neutral over moral judgment.

When they arrive at the side door, Clark understands the difficulty of the gate: it has no mechanical release. The security panel next to it is powered down, fed off the same grid as the lights.

Clark yanks on his tie. He doesn’t want to do this in front of witnesses. A quick leap over panicked guests is one thing; wearing the costume feels entirely too revealing. At least the darkness will hide his uniform swap. Diana will know, but he suspects that—somehow—she already does. As Clark dips his hand into his jacket, Diana lays her hand on his arm.

“I’ll open the gate,” Diana says. “That way, when someone asks, I won’t have to lie.”

Clark stares at her uncomprehendingly. What can she do while the power is off? Someone who could hack the security system could easily raise the gates—at least, that’s what Clark imagines. Unless Mr. Luthor uses the same military-grade encryption on his home security system as he does on his home data servers.

Diana smiles again.

She leans down, her muscles straining and flexing under her red dress. With a practiced motion, she grabs the electrified bars, and rips the gate out of the ground at the root—little more than a troublesome weed. Clark's heart constricts on a wave of powerful emotion; Diana is limned with a faint gold light against the inky darkness of Lex’s mansion. The radiance vanishes quickly, and Clark thinks he may have imagined it, except for the phosphenes of gold and silver bursting across his vision.

Diana waits until the crowd at the front entrance ripples with tension—an escalating roar for the security guards to do something—then tosses the gate aside with superhuman strength. It clatters against the floor, unheard in the din.

Sliding the glass pane open, Diana motions for Clark to follow her out into the night.

Clark hasn’t seen anyone as self-assured in their power since he fought Faora. Surely—it's not outside the realm of possibility—and his heart soars with hope. Could Diana be another refugee from Krypton living peacefully on Earth?

Trailing behind her, Clark exits the mansion. The heat barely abates, the night air choking with a roiling humidity and a crackle of unnatural energy. Weather-stripped emergency lights spider-web the pathways that lead away from the house out to the street. There is enough light to lead the guests away from the mansion--without any idea of what a minimum safe distance would be for an unknown threat. Clark has no idea how far away from the house will be safe, but he can make an educated guess. Away seems good enough for now.

Diana echoes his thoughts. “Good, there is light. We can guide them in groups to the street. Mindi, Mercy—are there any others that you know are trustworthy?”

“Are you Kryptonian?” Clark blurts out, chagrined at how eager he sounds; how irrelevant the question is.

Diana adjusts two thick bracelet-cuffs, and Clark almost misses the wistfulness that suffuses her face. “I am of this world, Clark.”

He swallows down his disappointment.

(It shouldn’t be this cutting, for how short a time he had to believe that he might not be the last of Krypton.)

“Let’s—”—get the civilians out, he wants to say, but Diana brings him up short with a hand splayed across his chest.

She studies Clark in the emergency lighting, her own face animated by the harsh yellow tones, eerie and otherworldly, carved into an expression of great concentration. She must find something satisfactory in him, because her next words are spoken carefully. “Before the lights went out, I was watching you.” Diana presses her lips together, perhaps deciding how much to confess. “The moment I saw you with him—I worried for you.”

Clark flushes. When he fiddles with his glasses, it’s not an affectation. “I…I thought you were watching Br—Mr. Wayne.”

Diana snorts, and flutters her eyelashes. “I watch him as I would watch a fox, because it is treacherous and not to be allowed to pass through the hens unnoticed. This fox took something from you, and then fled like a thief.”

The device! Clark reaches for it in the jacket flap where he normally stores his cape, and pulls it out.

“He didn’t, I still have—” Oh. He pats down his pocket where his shield is stored—a cold fear strangles any other feeling in his body. It’s gone. His suit is gone.

Time presents itself as a series of snapshots: Bruce’s hand on his waist, fingers digging into his skin, with enough pressure to whisper of the things they could do; the hand teasing across his body, under his jacket; a light pressure at his side which Clark had dismissed as Bruce pressing in closer. The hand he wasn’t paying attention to, slipping into his jacket with the shield, and pulling away with its treasure.

Clark doesn’t have words for the anger he feels. He wonders if Kryptonian has any words for how much of an idiot he’s been tonight.

He can sense a butterfly beating its wings a thousand yards away, but only if he’s paying attention.

Processing thoughts as quickly as he can move, Clark catastrophizes at lightning speed. All of the nightmares that he thought were behind him stand end to end in an infinite hall of mirrors, amplifying and distorting his fears. What if the media finds out—what if Perry finds out—what will happen to his job at the Planet? His effectiveness as a reporter will be shot; his face will be more well-known than Bruno Manheim’s, every moment of every day, papos crashing against him like the tide breaking against the last rocky pinnacle of his privacy. That’ll be the end of anonymous lunches at the corner diner, the end of beers with Lois at the Ace O’ Clubs, the end of his life in Metropolis.

A new idea twists itself out of his mind, indistinct at first, hovering over the edges of his well-worn fears. What if his identity isn’t revealed? What if he’s blackmailed? What lengths will Clark go to, to protect his life as Clark Kent, to protect everyone who loves him? Would he allow a man as distasteful as Bruce Wayne to have power over him to protect his mother?

His blood curdles; he knows the answer is yes before he even asks it.

“Go. I can handle this,” Diana offers.

“We don’t know what Lex keeps in his basement,” Clark says, shaken.

He pushes against the absolute exposure that he feels. One problem at a time.

The clamor recedes as Clark eases the wall around his senses. The full force of twelve million people living, working, breathing in Metropolis slams into him. The muscles in his jaw click as he streamlines the information into discrete channels, filtering out the noise. He listens for emergency sirens, police frequencies, dispatch codes. The city is sedate—no police, no fire, no ambulances.

“Luthor hasn’t contacted anyone,” he says, spitting the name like it’s a curse. "Take as many people as you can; guide them to the street. I’ll open the front entrance.” Clark’s already running when he shouts over his shoulder: “And have someone report this to emergency dispatchers! If a lab breaches containment, we’ll need someone out here in hazmat suits!”

Chapter Text

“The police scanner reports activity at the Luthor estate.”

Bruce curses his luck. He leans the bike into a tight turn as he whips through the Financial District, weaving through the slow crawl of downtown Metropolis traffic. He guns a tight U-turn to cut away from the multi-lane traffic trap at Seventh Square, where 7th Street meets 7th Avenue, darkly suspecting that much of Metropolis’ infrastructure is due to the city’s idea of a joke.

He picks his words carefully. Has the theft been noticed? ‘Theft’ instead of ‘shield’. It needles him to keep these details purposely vague, but he’s said as much to Alfred as he’s comfortable with: that the leech wasn’t recovered. No mention of what he recovered instead. No further intimation that Kent is involved at all.

“Unknown.” Alfred pauses, and Bruce hears bursts of the police scanner through the comm. “Emergency services are in route to the estate. SOS malfunctioned, sir. Instead of shutting down key systems for a ten-minute window, the protocol triggered a massive feedback failure in Lex’s power system. The guests are trapped inside. There’s been a stampede—two guests reported injured—”

Fuck. “Get it back online! Now!—Please, Alfred,” he adds as an apology.

Alfred huffs in disbelief. “I’ve already attempted a partial power restoration. It hasn’t had any impact on the—” A flurry of typing, and a significant pause. “Hmmm.” And it repeats: silence, followed by Alfred’s noises of consternation.

Bruce waits for Alfred’s assessment, regretting that stealth necessitated leaving the HUD with his normal kit—but when it comes to system engineering, if Alfred can’t handle it, there's little that Bruce can add.

“SOS triggered the initial overload, but something’s continuing to drain it at an extraordinary rate,” Alfred says at last.

Bruce thinks back to Luthor Sr. A venial and secretive man, he gifted his empire to his son before he was extradited to his home country for massive—even by American standards—fraud. Luthor Sr never mastered plausible deniability, because he had never understood trust; when the Feds raided the Luthor estate, all of the signed authorizations for his secret projects had been found in his personal vault.

And just what are the odds that Junior has learned a trick that his father never could have taught him?

Bruce recalls the blueprints from the Luthor mansion that had been seized by the FBI. He vaguely recalls sublevels. “Does the grid have any subnodes—something that might be powering an underground lab?”

“...In fact, it does. Registering at least ten extra power nodes in the basement. I suspect he has a cascading backup system hidden under all of this appalling wiring. Well spotted, sir.”

“Try not to sound so shocked.”

“Occasionally, your insights leave me bordering on stunned…” Alfred drops the ribbing tone. “It will take at least thirty-eight minutes to clear the overrides on the subnodes. Are you rerouting back to the Luthor estate, sir?”

He shifts on the bike. The shield, slipped into a hidden pocket in his dress shirt, grates against his skin. He can feel every pit and groove of it—separated by only one thin layer of cloth.

“No,” he says with a strange mixture of anger and lightness. “They’ll be just fine.”

Bruce carefully blanks his mind, and guns the engine.

It takes a better part of an hour to move everyone to the edge of the property after excited shouts of Superman! follow the destruction of the security gates. Clark’s careful not to be seen; he’s a dark silhouette against the yellow emergency lights. With a deep exhale, he freezes the gate, then two swift jabs smash the brittle bars to pieces. The work is less fluid than Diana’s—he has to clear jagged shards from the entrance before he gives the all-clear to Lex’s security—but it gets the job done. Before the first guests can reach him (to clutch at his arms, or to sob their relief), Clark’s halfway across the estate, hiding in the brush with a raft of inquisitive ducks.

He clenches and unclenches his fists, trying to collect himself. He wanted to tear Lex’s glass doors off their hinges. He almost had, opening them. He’s never had to tamp down on his power this severely, but he’s angry—no, he’s furious—and it’s playing havoc with his control.

The anger only ratchets higher when the S.T.A.R. labs team shows up in hazmat suits and Lex Luthor categorically denies the existence of a lab on his property. A sweep by both the authorities and by Clark (from the cover of the brush) turns up nothing in the basement aside from the server room, the kitchens, and the wine cellar.

(It’s progress, Clark thinks, that he only needs to loosen his tie when he sees the empty portion of wall next to the glass server case, a sudden sense-memory of its texture pressing against his back, the quick rub of fabric over his thighs, the lurking heat bubbling in his veins.

He shuts down that memory quickly.)

On the red carpet, Mercy excuses her employer from a ring of solemn-faced first responders and escorts him back into the house. She holds up the police tape that’s hastily patched over the gaping hole in the security gate; Lex sails underneath it, blithely unaware of the angry cloud of dissatisfaction he leaves in his wake. MetroPD shrug to the lab team. Without a clear and present danger, or a more wide-ranging search warrant, they’d can’t compel Lex to disclose the lab’s location, or seize his files to discover its location. If, in fact, there is an underground lab, which they are beginning to doubt. And that’s that. Clark watches the S.T.A.R. labs team pack up their equipment, peeling out of Lex’s driveway with a squeal of tires, flying to the next science emergency that warrants an immediate, aggressive response.

Floating near the edge of the man-made pond, where the river-reeds meet the tall sedges, the most amiable company Clark’s had all evening settle themselves in for sleep. Clark slumps onto the lake shore, trying to draw in a measure of the calmness for himself.

Lex is bullshitting. He has to be. The unnatural warmth of the grounds. The inexplicable power relays that terminate in the basement. Mindi’s confirmation of the lab’s existence. It should add up to something more. Clark scans the basement one last time, carefully picking his way through the temperature fluctuations for a sign of a sub-basement entrance, but he hits a brick wall, literally, and that’s all there is to see. There’s a blank spot in his vision, and it could be nothing, just a patch of bare wall next to some equally bare dirt and it probably is nothing, unless he’s paranoid enough to believe Metropolis’ wunderkind is lining random square patches of his basement with lead when no-one even knows about that particular Kryptonian weakness. Lois has scrupled to keep that particular detail out of her Superman coverage, and the military hasn’t taken to lining any of their anti-Superman project test sites with it.

Without catching Lex out in a deliberate lie, Clark Kent can’t prove that Lex had criminally endangered his guests tonight. And there’s nothing that he can do as Superman without calling down the wrath of the Senate Committee. Not for the first time tonight, Clark wishes Lois were here. She’s mid-flight on the red-eye to DC, her heartbeat evening out into the slow rhythm of sleep. He could really use an outside perspective on this mess.

Clark picks up a rounded river stone from the bank of the artificial lake. It’s been smoothed down by the action of millions of years of water. He aims it, and throws, watching it arc upward in a precise trajectory. A minute later, it splashes in the water through the water lilies. The ducks squawk their protest, and resettle their bills in their feathers.

Lex Luthor isn’t his immediate problem.

He needs to focus. Bruce Wayne isn’t here to get a piece of his mind, and he has plenty to say to him, too. Until he finds him, Clark’s anger is doing nothing but disturbing the waterfowl.

Forty minutes later, the power reactivates. Clark relaxes fractionally, but something gnaws at him, refusing to be rationalized away. The reporter’s instinct, Lois calls it. The more Clark turns it over in his mind, the more sure he becomes.

The outage was localized to Lex’s residence; it happened without structural damage to the electrical lines; and it coincided with Bruce’s disappearance from the party. A blackout would be the perfect cover for Bruce Wayne to slip away with information from Lex Luthor’s servers: the security doors would keep any pursuers buttoned up with the party guests; and any system glitches after the the servers reboot could be ascribed to the blackout.

There’s one inescapable conclusion: Bruce Wayne arranged the power outage.

It’s been an hour since Bruce left. The Aston Martin’s in the valet lot, and cabs don’t cruise this part of town. He wouldn’t have risked ridesharing his way out—the mini-riot on the red carpet earlier this evening is reason enough for him to keep a low profile. A gossip sponge wouldn’t risk photographic evidence of his escape. It’s galling for Clark to admit that he can hear an eruption from half a continent away, but he can’t pick out one undifferentiated heartbeat from twelve million others. Bruce Wayne has disappeared, and the trail’s gone cold.

Bruce Wayne is long gone by the time the black Yamaha pulls up to the curb, three blocks south of the Regency. The Prince of Gotham is a construct of the spotlight; in the shadows, all of the bad party talk, the grating stupidity of him, melts into the secondary mission parameters for the evening: secure the Regency; discover the cameras; find the connection; punish the culprit.

Parking structures are the same in every city. Drab concrete structures stacked like grey layer cakes, frosted with the choking stench of exhaust, motor oil, and burnt rubber. And if it’s of any significant age, sagging where the weight of thousands of tons of motor vehicle wear it down day in, day out. Much like any parking structure in the Gotham-Metro area, this one has a booth for a security guard to take parking fees, currently unmanned. Guards clear out once the sun dips below the horizon. In the glut of costumed villains a few years prior (before the Bat had turned violent and sent the themed ones scurrying out to Coast City), one had the misfortune to be commuting themed. GCPD Bomb Disposal still clears out a handful of novelty-car-shaped pipe bombs in Gotham City parking structures every year. Bruce actually doesn’t know if Metropolis suffered a similar fate, or if they simply keep competitive job hours with their sister-city, but the effect has been a significant uptick in nighttime automobile thefts, even in Midtown Metropolis.

But Bruce could be wrong; the guard could be in the middle of a shift-change.

He jogs the bike through the narrow gap in security camera coverage, ducking behind a pillar. He needs to ditch the bike. It shouldn’t have been spotted at the party, parked outside of the edge of Lex’s security nets, but who knows how far he might see with one casual glance around Lex’s property.

If it was him stealing anxious glances at him all night, constantly sizing up the distance between them, behind those thick black frames.

The shield burning a hole in his pocket isn’t proof. Simply because it feels extraterrestrial doesn’t mean that it is, or if it is extraterrestrial, that it’s Kryptonian. He has it on good authority that the Pentagon boasts at least one Martian spacecraft in its projects archive; and Lex’s people have had eighteen months to reverse engineer the scout ship.

What’s the more ridiculous supposition, Bruce muses. That milquetoast reporter Clark Kent stole the shield—that he’s a better thief than Bruce? That Clark is close enough to the alien to carry his shield next to his heart like a lover’s token? Or that in his off hours, Corn-Fed-Midwest dresses up in a leotard and rescues orphans?

Shit.

He needs to get the shield back to the Cave for testing, and he needs to do it without revealing the Cave’s location. If there’s even a chance that the alien tracked him to this parking structure...

All of his experience screams that now is the time to call Alfred for back-up, just as Bruce understands with equal conviction that he’s backed himself into a corner.

The web of half-truths closes like a steel trap over Bruce: a false evidence trail to redirect Alfred’s attention away from the kryptonite files; an outright fabrication that claimed Knyazev and the White Portuguese were plotting to smuggle a dirty bomb into Gotham; the lie that he’s gathering evidence on the Superman to hand it over to the Congressional Committee. Despite the lack of military or intelligence chatter to back up the claim, Alfred trusts him. Believes in him, so far.

Even before the sex tape, the Superman issue was a thorny one. Alfred hasn’t verbalized his disapproval of Bruce’s obsession, but Bruce knows that Alfred respects the superhero; Alfred also knows that Bruce has been calculating the liabilities from the Metropolis attack. The probability that Superman will do enough good in the world to offset the potential of another Zod, another Black Zero event. The situation is purely numbers to Bruce. Alfred...disagrees with his methodology.

How can Bruce even begin to explain the danger that Superman poses, without telling Alfred everything—without telling him why he needs absolute secrecy?

They’ll come to a head when he finds the White Portuguese, and either Alfred will agree with him about his plan for the kryptonite or he won’t. Bruce can’t risk exposure now.

Until then—there’s no reason Alfred needs to know about the shield. Or about his suspicions about Superman.

Bruce keeps one eye trained on the empty security booth as he strips out of his riding leathers, uneasy as the anonymous black leather is replaced by the visible markers of Bruce Wayne’s wealth and status.

He throws the riding jacket across the seat, and pushes the bike out from behind the pillar. At street level, out of sight of the booth, the bike should be attractive to a friendly neighborhood motorcycle thief. It should be gone by the time Bruce has completed his business at the Regency. One more layer of security between Bruce Wayne and his alibi.

He pulls out the garment bag with his suit, strips down the bike’s emergency kit (shuriken, throwing knives, a small taser, three knockout gas capsules, and a backup comm, ten non-descript tracking devices) and doesn’t think about much of anything until he’s strolled through the double doors of the Regency Hotel. He passes no security; no one stops him on the street; he feels no tell-tale prickle on the back of his neck.

Bruce Wayne has made good on his escape.

The Regency drips luxury with a distinctly Metropolis bent: art-deco that’s crash-landed on the black-and-white graphical pop of the sixties. A trail of pendant lights that are half-decorative, half-functional lead Bruce to the concierge. Sloping gold filigree ornaments the curved reception desk. Out of habit, Bruce glances up to gauge distances, exits, security camera coverage, and—pauses. He’s standing in the middle of an atrium that soars to the full height of the skyscraper; for a very short period at the turn of the century, this was the tallest building in the world, until relevancy bypassed it for the Ellsworth Building in Gotham. The steel fretting of its skylight is nearly invisible from this distance, so finely worked that it spider-webs across the glass. Bruce can’t help a momentary burst of feeling; he’s swept by the optimism of it all.

Optimism, an emotion that doesn’t find cause for expression in his city, most days.

Bruce approaches reception, and waits to be recognized by the clerk who’s speaking in low tones with a guest on the other end of the telephone line. The clerk seems a little abstracted, a little tired—near the end of his shift. He almost fumbles the phone when he recognizes Bruce, recovering it before he has to dive for it on the ground. Good. That’s one person who will remember Bruce Wayne.

“I’ll wait,” Bruce Wayne says magnanimously, unaware of the sheer amount of waiting that other people are expected to do throughout the day as a matter of course.

Bruce Wayne makes a show of perusing the reception desk’s Sights to See In Metropolis pamphlet carousel while Bruce familiarizes himself with the lobby.

The details of it are unfamiliar: black and white tiger print ottomans adorned with cabriole legs; mission-style curule seats at regular intervals, over-engineered and too uncomfortable to be actual chairs; macrame artwork hanging on antique metal stands. Amber curtains plunge from one of the higher levels of the atrium and flutter in a gentle breeze like a Roman triumph. Bruce almost expects to see open-glassed elevators scurrying up and down the height of the atrium; but no, that would inject a certain practicality into this display of luxury.

What he doesn’t remember in minutia, he feels in the cumulative weight of their effect. A hotel as striking as the treasures of Hannibal Barca; setting the scene the charity ball in the shadow of a Conquering Metropolis. And suddenly, feels the pique at the joke of it all.

Bruce suppresses a groan. At least there are no televisions in the lobby.

“Yes, sorry. Ah, can I help you?” The clerk stammers through the rest of his questions, not quite meeting Bruce’s gaze when Bruce fills in Mr. Pennyworth’s credit details, or when he produces an obvious fake to verify his identity.

“What room would you like, Mr. W—sir?” the clerk asks, humoring the lie and badly.

The clerk looks down at his hands, as Bruce leans in against the reception desk, and shifts the garment bag slung indifferently over his shoulder. “The Starlight Suite, if it’s available.”

“It’s usually reserved for guests of—charity events. Well. I mean, you know”—and the clerk sucks in a breath.

He pinks and then, understandably, has to check with his manager.

Bruce avails himself of that client’s name once the clerk is out of sight, a French name that doesn’t mean anything to him, aside from its obvious status as a shell account; the translation of it, True Men of Help. Maddeningly opaque, just smug enough to be Lex Luthor’s idea of a joke. The Starlight Suite is currently reserved through the end of the year for this unknown client, who in turn makes it available to their special guests during the Metropolis charity season.

Bruce remembers certain details of that night (and certain details have been recalled for him); but can’t recall if he’d gate-crashed the Starlight Suite by picking the electronic locks, or if ‘Superman’ slipped a key out of his tight Lycra pants.

A few more coaxing keystrokes fill in the gaps. Last year’s records show that the room was booked last November. He pages through to November 1st. That night, it was occupied by two guests. Only one is listed. A name that has a ring of familiarity. A name that reads as falsely as Bruce Pennyworth. Bruce touches an invisible button on the side of his phone, instructing the Cave terminal to set up a crawler alert for Guy Jordan.

The manager returns with the clerk hovering at her shoulder. The Bruce Wayne smile he puts on has worn thin, but he doesn’t need anything except the exact same room that half of the internet had already seen him in. The why is clear to the manager; her lips press into a disbelieving line and she pointedly does not ask. Bruce eases his way in, intimating a forthcoming Wayne Foundation contract with the hotel for all of the Foundation’s Metropolis accommodations. In the moment, Bruce is willing to say anything to hustle himself into that suite, and he almost over-promises. A twinge of responsibility shuts him down; he’ll not have Lucius cleaning up yet another Bruce Wayne mess tomorrow morning. Bruce demurs with a mild, No promises, I’ll have to check with Lucius tomorrow, and it’s enough. The Starlight Suite is his for three evenings.

The clerk, head down until the manager strides off into the atrium to attend to backoffice matters, pinks again as he looks up at Bruce, and offers to carry his garment bag to the suite, because he’s just on his break now, and—?

The rest of the question is implied; how could it not be. Kid’s probably seen his cock stuffed down a throat on repeat, and it’s either curiosity about the roughness of it, or it’s the celebrity halo effect, Bruce seeming like an attractive partner because he’s in the news, he’s rich, or both. Or he’s one of the cadre from the Holiday Regents Affair, patiently organizing the “Let’s Fuck Bruce Wayne” grassroots movement that had sprung up among both sexes in the wake of that public relations disaster.

(To the best of Bruce’s knowledge, they have been totally frustrated in their efforts to bed him. And Bruce...even if he weren’t working, he’s too tired to background check this one.)

“Don’t believe everything you see,” Bruce says, sharper than he needs to, because if this is the Holiday Regents Affair all over again, he’s going to have to take out a full-page ad in Friday’s Daily Planet to apologize to the good people of Metropolis, he just knows, and that means potential contact with Crime and Current Events—

The insight hits almost like a lightning bolt. Clark Kent is an investigative reporter. A Planet reporter worth his salt digs for his stories; Kent’s expertise should therefore include tracking a source that’s gone to ground.

A plan begins to form in Bruce’s mind as the shield chafes against his skin.

He cuts the the clerk some slack and slaps down a generous tip (with a small, apologetic smile) to point any inquiries for Bruce Wayne to the suite on the penultimate floor.

As Bruce waits for the black-and-gold deco elevators, partially hidden behind a cascade amber voile, he lays his trap neatly.

Bruce leaves a message with Mindi after receiving three from her (“We have a problem, Bruce darling, let’s talk.” “You’re booked on Late Night Gotham tomorrow afternoon. Let’s talk.” “If you don’t talk to me, I will send Clark Kent a monogrammed invitation to fuck you up; seriously, Bruce, we need to talk.”). He casually drops his location, and invites her to be furious with him with a breezy:

“Mindi, sorry I ducked out of the party. Prior commitment at the Regency. Wanted to rekindle old times. If I’m up before 3pm, Late Night Gotham sounds charming. Whatever you do, don’t interrupt unless you want a video with the full goods. I photograph better from the front, don’t you think?”

And then he turns his phone off.

As he rides up the elevator, he thinks about the slumbering Metropolis below his feet as he streaks up into the towering heights of the city’s past, wondering if the clerk’s not too put off to direct someone up to his room, if the bike’s already on its way to a chop shop, if Clark Kent is, even now, scouring the streets for any trace of Bruce Wayne. Absently, his fingers stroke the shield through his shirt as he tries to think about anything other than how utterly human he feels.

Diana finds Clark brooding under the sycamore trees that ring the Luthor estate. He has folded in on himself, barely cognizant of the world; no less intent on the puzzle laid before him for his obliviousness. He’s uncomfortable here—the way the tall grasses run right up to the Luthors’ paean to modernist architecture, a showy blend of the city and the country—but he tamps down on the feeling of wrong that scratches against his senses.

Diana lays her hand on his shoulder, deliberate and light.

Clark snaps his senses back from the guest parking lot, where he has been monitoring a single abandoned Aston Martin, as though it will divulge the whereabouts of one Bruce Wayne, Billionaire, Possibly Drunk, Definitely Missing.

They exchange a brief hello; Clark double-takes when he notices a foil blanket wrapped around her. On her shoulders, it gleams as fiercely as a silver mantle. A disguise to walk among the wounded, she explains.

They are companionably silent as the last ambulance pulls away from the house. The police are still on premises, taking reports of broken, pilfered, or mislaid items from the evacuation. Artwork apparently went missing during the Security Gate Debacle, a bronzed torus called The Speed of the Infinite. Clark wonders abstractly how he missed an entire statue leaving the grounds, but he could have easily overlooked it. For most of the night, he’s been hiding in the brush, or hiding next to the mottling sycamore trees. Other things have been on his mind.

“The Trebatoses are doing well,” Diana says. “Mr. Trebatos has a weak heart, and Mrs. Trebatos was treated for exhaustion. Thanks to you and your friend, they are safe. They were in the worst shape of all of the guests. Everyone else has been safely escorted from this estate.”

It’s a relief that no one was seriously injured in the evacuation—Clark wonders why he doesn’t feel relieved. All he feels is a looping cycle of numbness and horror.

Bruce Wayne has his shield, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Bruce Wayne has his shield, and he might ask Clark to do terrible things for him.

(Clark repressively ignores the small voice that says Bruce didn’t have to ask very hard to get him to aid and abet in the server room.)

“Mindi, too, is well,” Diana continues. “I escorted her to her car service. She wished to relay two messages. ‘We need to talk’ and ‘Please for the love of God do not print anything about Bruce before we talk’.”

Clark tears his eyes away from the Aston Martin, and nods once at Diana. Whether he’s acknowledging the message or the truth of Mindi’s request (that Clark has no plans to print anything about Bruce Wayne), it doesn’t matter. Clark can’t make any plans beyond getting his shield safely back into his hands. He’ll—deal with the rest as it comes.

The night’s as hot and humid as a Kansas midsummer evening, clinging and uncomfortable even when Clark lowers his core temperature. He can’t quite tune out the balmy blanket of air rolling off the manmade pond, where fireflies would be rising like candles for the dead if it were a lazy summer’s evening, and not the dregs of autumn. Diana leans against the trunk of a tree and touches it reverently. She doesn’t speak and she doesn’t pressure Clark to break the silence. He appreciates the gesture, but he’s homesick, and locked into the prison of his thoughts, terribly alone. He craves his Ma’s hand smoothing his hair back from his forehead, her sun-honeyed voice gone gentle: what troubles you, sweetie?

“What do you hear?” Clark asks, finally, for the sake of conversation. “When you concentrate.”

Her eyes slip closed, and her face softens. “Gaea singing through the sycamore heart of her children: who they are, what they’ve done, what they’ve yet to do. And you?”

Clark pinches the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “Tires swerving on Westbound 10. Three kids railgrinding on the corner of Lexington and Concord. Someone on the lower Eastside crying.”

“The heartbeat of the city,” she says quietly. “I hope you don’t forget that you are of this world too, Clark.”

The non-sequitur startles Clark out of his self-pity loop. It’s been a very long time since he’s thought of himself as anything but a part of this world. A small angry part of Clark wonders if that’s actually true, or if it’s another Clark Kent glasses situation, more grit he can’t get out of his shoe; that maybe, since his powers first manifested, he’s been reflexively minimizing his differences enough to feel human without counting himself among their number. He thinks of his Ma embracing him fiercely when he returned from the Northern Territories, and all of the times before and after, and dismisses the thought as unworthy of how hard he’s worked to fit in, how much he’s given to be in this world.

As Diana soaks in the song of Gaea—the slow turn of the Earth that he’s never heard as she does—he realizes that she would, in fact, understand.

“He took my shield, Diana. It’s more than Superman’s shield; it was a gift from my father. My Kryptonian father. It’s all that I have left of my world.”

Admitting it doesn’t make the reality any less bitter, but something eases fractionally in his chest.

Diana smiles wistfully. “I have such a gift as well. A tiara from my mother, the last piece I have of her in this world. They are valuable beyond measure, are they not?”

“Without it, I’m—” Clark can’t finish the thought.

It’s not even the potential for exposure to an unscrupulous publicity-hound who has committed at least one felony in Clark’s presence. It’s—the other thing that he can barely articulate to himself. A deep emptiness that comes with being orphaned to a world, and a way of life, without ever having known what might have been.

“How do you track a fox across the tundra?”

Clark’s surprised, again.

He feels a touch of melancholy and sweetness as he remembers Jonathan’s ‘hunting trips’ once he could see over the tall grass. Jonathan would pack the truck with coolers, slingshots, and thick boots, and they’d drive out to Miller’s Bend in the pickup with Shelby, swing their legs over the end of the truck bed, and count the grebes skimming through the fields out to the marsh. If any coyotes came through the grass, they’d frighten them off with rocks and shot. The birds were in their care as long as they watched them.

Clark sets his hand against the trunk of one of the sycamores. Through the dappled bark—broken in all of the places where the old bark has stretched out of the way for the new, the cracks and seams of its life a story that Clark could read, if he had the language to understand it—he can feel sap pumping through the heartwood. Beyond that, a deeper, wordless hum beyond sound, beyond memory, fills him with a familiarity that prickles at the back of his neck.

“Honestly, I have no idea,” Clark admits slowly, as he pulls his hand away from the tree, unsettled. “Dad wasn’t a hunter. I’m a farmer’s son.”

“I used to train young hunters on the steppe. The fox is white, and so is the plain. The driving snow obscures the hunter’s vision, the wind covers the fox’s tracks. How does she hunt the one-who-moves-like-a-ghost?”

Clark thinks of his restless night on top of a warehouse in Gotham. “You track its prey.”

“You track it home.” Diana folds up the foil blanket, and smooths down the creases. “On the tundra, everything struggles to survive. But if you fly like a hawk, you can spot the cultivations of the fox from the sky, the flowers that grow from the remains of what she eats.”

“What could I possibly see of Bruce’s from the sky? His car is still here.”

Diana crosses her arms, as if Clark is being very childish or very dense.

“How do you know Bruce, anyway?”

“How do I know you?” Diana retorts.

Heat rises to his face, and he can feel black veins writhing under his skin—a heady combination of dawning horror and fear.

No.

Clark gropes for the device in his inner pocket. He pulls it out, inspecting it intently. He flips it over, running his finger over the carbon-fiber casing. On the back, etched in a nanometer-thick tracing, the symbol he’s seen seared onto the chests of Gotham’s worst criminals, the one that marks them for nasty, brutish deaths. The emblem of Gotham’s Bat vigilante.

Chapter Text

How do you outwit a fox that’s gone to ground?

As the moon sinks on the horizon, Clark flies over Metropolis in the wrong suit. He risked it last night because (he thought) he was proving a point to Perry: Clark Kent can’t be ordered to waste his words on football, because Clark Kent is going to make the world care about Gotham’s Bat problem. At the time, he had the cover of thick fog that had settled over the harbor, and he had reached the Port of Gotham in seconds. He hadn’t flown this slow, or been this exposed. Scattered clouds thread themselves through the late-night city, and Clark hides himself in one after another as he darts above the streets, scanning for any sign of him. A spotlight for a fashion gala near the waterfront cuts through the sky; Clark swerves hard to avoid it as it arcs energetically through his path. It’s too early for the midnight crowd to stumble out of the downtown bars. A few boisterous pockets in the Arts District draw his attention, but the city is quiet.

There’s no sign of his quarry.

According to Diana, Mr. Wayne hasn’t left the city.

It shouldn’t be so shocking to Clark to know that the Earth is, in some capacity, aware of the beings that inhabit her. Jor-El’s hologram intimated that Krypton was aware of its impending destruction, and took steps to prevent it. But… it was one thing to know a concept in theory; another thing entirely when the song of Gaea surged up around him—a foaming green sea, a susurrus of wings—filling him with a reverent lightness.

(Clark didn’t understand what it meant. Diana laughed, light and airy, repeating Gaea’s words for him: Welcome, my son.)

In the sycamore grove, Diana murmurs, “Midtown. That is as much as she will say. Good luck, Clark,” and he hears it as clear as a bell ten miles away.

Clark grits his teeth. It’s good enough.

He swoops back toward the city’s commercial core, under the cover of LexCorp Tower. That’s when he spots a vehicle parked on a building that has no rooftop access for helicopters. Dark, angular, deadly—a flat-winged urban aircraft. The newspapers have never run a clear picture of it, but Clark is certain it’s whatever ridiculous name its owner would give an obvious show of intimidation wrapped in a skeleton of black matte metal. The Bat Plane.

Peering through the concrete, Clark sees Bruce Wayne lounging in the elevator on the far side of the building. Bruce’s face is neutral enough, one hand cupped over his heart, the other carrying a garment bag slung rakishly over his shoulder, one cuff rolled up to his elbow—looking for all the world like a tipsy socialite who stepped out of a party early. Clark can’t decide which idea is more ludicrous: that Bruce Wayne cares enough about crime in his city to fund a violent vigilante for twenty years, or that Always-Proud-To-Support-Books hunts the criminal underworld of Gotham dressed as a bat.

Whatever hopes Clark had—that maybe Bruce simply hadn’t checked what he’d stolen, or didn’t recognize its value, or something else equally implausible—dissolve when his vision slips between Bruce’s fingers. His shield. Bruce is cradling his shield in his shirt pocket.

Okay, Clark thinks. Everything is still okay. The fox isn’t in its own den tonight. He’s in a hotel, the Metropolis Regency. Clark’s been here once before, though he never got further than the ballroom. If Bruce is spending the night here, he can’t have had time to plan. That means there’s still an advantage Clark can gain; he can still get his shield back.

Clark presses himself into the shadow of the tower. And waits. And watches.

The elevator doors slide open, and Bruce’s heart is pounding. The penultimate floor of the Regency has only one stairwell, only one elevator, and only one room. Whoever had chosen the Starlight Suite for entertaining their guests had chosen one of the most defensible positions in the hotel.

He palms a tracker from lining of his cuff, and plants one against the side of the elevator when he leans down to adjust his shoe. The lightest double-tap switches it to tripwire mode.

Running his hand down the hallway wall, he touches everything, as though he’s too tipsy to give a shit about proper adult behavior. He plants another two near the stairwell while he admires the view, and another two on either side of his room door when he braces himself against the frame. He makes a show of fumbling the keycard (as he scrambles the lock), and feels a slight easing in his chest when he draws the bolt inside the room. Anything that breaks the plane of the tripwires will activate an alarm on Bruce’s phone; the door can only be opened from the inside—unless his expected guest decides to rip it out of its frame.

The probability that Superman makes a dramatic entrance will depend on how angry he is when he discovers the theft, how long it takes for him to track Bruce to the Regency, and whether or not he’s seen the tape by the time they talk.

From the kind of night Bruce has been having, he’s not optimistic about his prospects.

A good sex scandal doesn’t have legs until it has a hook and a catchy name. The press has fallen all over itself that the Super Sexcapade happened in the Starlight Suite; beyond the endless variations for alliterative block letter headlines on tabloid-sized sheets, the suite more than lives up to its name. Floor-to-ceiling windows provide a 270 degree view of Metropolis, sweeping across the harbor, and Hero’s Park. The vista doesn’t leave Bruce unmoved, even if the city spread out beneath him is too clean-cut for Bruce’s taste.

Cagily, he paces into the the room he’s secured.

When he’d dragged ‘Superman’ out of the ballroom, Bruce’s judgment might have been clouded by lust and spandex, but he wasn’t an idiot. The actor hadn’t been keen to leave the party (he was under contract to someone for the charity appear, after all), and had wanted a quick fuck in the mensroom. They’d stumbled into the black marble room, Bruce’s hands fumbling against the tight waistband of the actor’s suit. A quick recon of the room had shown him that the door couldn’t be secured, and Bruce had a notion about taking his time. So he’d sweet-talked ‘Superman’ into a room. Bruce hadn’t questioned how quickly or easily they had gained access to one of the most expensive accommodations in the hotel; hadn’t bothered to remember how they got into the room.

That had been a miscalculation on Bruce’s part, hadn’t it?

Running his fingers underneath a table-top that was about even with one of the shots from the sex tape, he discovers a break in the moulding. Bruce pries the woodwork loose, and pulls a thin jelly string out from the table. The three-inch long translucent tube squelches as he rolls it between his fingers. He’s never seen anything like it; the casing feels biological.

He flicks the tube onto the table and suppresses a shiver of instinctive disgust.

The comm crackles to life in his ear. “Burning the midnight oil, sir?”

Bruce’s entire body tenses up momentarily, and he forces himself to relax. What are the chances that Superman could be listening to this conversation right now? Bruce has given it thought, and the conclusion he’s come to is that he had overheard the comms chatter. That’s why he showed up in the server room with such prescient timing. Bruce savagely represses any other revelations from this knowledge, and fumbles his phone out of his pocket to pretend that he’s a hapless civilian.

He adopts a glib air. “Alfred?” he half-slurs.

“Cutting it a little late on check-in.” In the mild tone, Bruce can hear an edge of anger and worry. He wonders if Alfred thinks he had been drinking at the party.

And it is approximately—Bruce checks the time. He’s forty minutes overdue from his original ETA. That is actually late, even for Bruce.

“Something’s come up. Dunno when I’ll return to the house,” he says lightly. The Superman isn’t violent (except when he is), and he doesn’t kill (except when he did). Bruce hasn’t run the calculations on the possibility that, if he threatens the safety or security of a god, he might not make it out of this encounter alive.

Alfred hums, obviously displeased. “Still at the Regency, I take it. Business or pleasure?”

“Both,” Bruce says warmly.

There’s a tinny thunk of tools hitting the workbench, something hurled hard enough for the comms to have picked up the crash. “You’ve been acting erratically all night, Master Wayne. I’ll thank you not to cap the evening by lying to me.”

“You know how it is with billionaires,” Bruce says conversationally. “Service so good, I think I’ll buy the hotel.”

A shocked intake of breath. Alfred understands. Despite their quarrels, Alfred knows that Gotham relies on the Batman, and Bruce relies on Alfred. He’s a professional first and foremost. There’s a pregnant pause, and then quiet acknowledgement of the duress code: “Let me know if you need to access your Swiss accounts.” Alfred manages to sound not entirely pissed at him.

“That won’t be necessary, Alfred,” Bruce murmurs, feeling a surge of affection. This is the closest he may get to a goodbye. “Goodnight.”

Bruce pulls the earpiece out before Alfred can acknowledge, and lays it on one of the tables.

He knows two things: the Superman can track him wherever he goes; and that he doesn’t know how the Superman’s powers work beyond observation and conjecture. How did Superman discover the factory fire in Mexico this evening—did he have to wait for the headline to flash across a news ticker like the rest of humanity, or could he hear the crackling of the flames from two thousand miles away? Can he hear—or see—or feel where Bruce is now, the ruffle of Royal Oxford cloth as Bruce rolls down his cuffs touching him as intimately as a caress?

Bruce isn’t defenseless.

Every second that he isn’t here is another second to gain the upper hand for their next encounter. Bruce flicks on the lights over the center, surveys the suite. Then, methodically, he begins to unzip the garment bag.

A helicopter buzzes past the Regency. Clark puts on a burst of speed, and flattens himself against the glass. In the shadow of a balcony, his heart leaps into his throat. News chopper, which means a camera crew, and a steadicam sweeping the city for city coverage. He waits for it to circle the building and cut across to the Daily Planet. What if he’s caught this high up in his civvies. He should have taken the stairs—would have, in fact, if he could convince himself that the Bat Plane didn’t have automated sensors to pick up sound/motion disturbances around it.

As the sound of helicopter blades fades into the distance, Clark eases out of the shadow.

He’s floated far enough around the tower to determine that there is only one room on the entire floor, connected to a small unlight balcony via a sliding glass door.

While Bruce’s back is turned, Clark makes a quick decision. He lands behind a vine-draped pergola and ducks behind one of the wooden columns into the deepest part of the shadow as Bruce enters the main room. Clark brushes the trellised vines, thick with white flowers, down around him like a curtain.

Bruce doesn’t so much as glance through the windows.

Hiding on a hotel balcony as Bruce Wayne, or Gotham’s Bat vigilante, or both, settles himself in the Regency’s most lavish suite for a night of solitary debauchery is easily the stupidest decision that Clark has made tonight. Approaching Wayne in a way that won’t get his back up—setting up a meeting with him through Mindi or dropping by Wayne Enterprises for a casual chat with his Daily Planet badge and the leech from Lex’s servers as his shield and his sword—either of these plans would be the smart thing to do. But Clark’s here, the decision has been made to approach Wayne tonight, and Clark will stay the course.

He shouldn’t be hiding under a wreathed curtain of flowers and fairy lights, he should be in there, demanding to know Bruce Wayne’s price for his silence, but forcing the issue to its crisis won’t answer any of Clark’s lingering questions. (Has he told anyone else about the shield? Has he contacted the media yet? Has he decided on his pound of flesh?)

What Clarks needs, what those finely honed investigative reporter instincts demand, is more information.

Despite the strange churn in his stomach, the heightened awareness of the Regency suite, Clark’s not sure that this surveillance is more enlightening than his evening on the Gotham docks. Bruce is in control: a steady heartbeat, no indication of adrenalin, no heat signature to indicate fear or deception.

Clark’s not great at reading emotion in other people; not without cheating and slipping into infrared to watch where the heat pools in the human body. Ma drove that habit out of him as early as she could: It’s not always going to be easy, Clark, but people deserve some privacy. It’s one of his oldest and most dearly held rules that just because he can do something doesn’t mean that he must.

Clenching his jaw, Clark shakes his head to snap his vision out of infrared. That’s the last rule that Bruce Wayne will make him break tonight.

A garment bag is thrown onto the bed, and his other accoutrements—wallet thrown onto a nightstand, his shoes toed-off and left in Bruce’s wake—are tossed aside with the casual disregard of a man who has never had to care about making his space hospitable to other people.

Bruce answers his billionaire phone, set in a tacky gold-and-titanium case. His exchange with his accomplice is short. No mention of the shield. The mysterious Alfred doesn’t seem very tolerant of his tardiness. It’s something he’d expect from Bruce Wayne’s employee—but Batman’s? Who would Batman let speak to him like that? Bruce dismisses him with a glib excuse (Bruce doesn’t appear to be in a fit state for business or pleasure) as he walks through the suite with a noticeable weave in his step.

Clark’s gut screams that something is off about Bruce.

How many martinis did Bruce suck down at the party? There was the awful green one always on the way to or from Bruce’s lips--that Clark realizes he never observed Bruce sipping.

Bruce had been in control the entire time. Deft enough to lift his shield. Quick enough to sprint across a room undetected before the security gates descended. Could Bruce be play-acting here, even when no one’s watching?

Bruce steadies himself as he stumbles a half-step down into the sleeping area. Clark has to admit, if it’s fake, it’s a masterful performance.

The garment bag is thrown across the bed and Clark wonders with a growing horror if Bruce is going to strip. Bruce unrolls his cuffs, and smoothes down the fabric over his arms, and Clark swallows roughly.

Clark can’t actually give Bruce that privacy. He can’t let his shield out of his sight.

Clark thinks, with a thin resolve, if Bruce is going to strip, I am going to watch him do it.

Bruce Wayne dresses as efficiently as a man with three martinis in him.

Pressing his lips together to hold back a smirk (because, honestly, the alien is late; Bruce expected him to be at his door twenty minutes ago, with a frown as piercing as the last rays of sunshine touching the spires of Gotham), he winds the tie around a fist, as he flips up his collar— the vital first step to tying a drunk knot—but he ghosts the pads of his thumbs across the pin holes in his collar, his fingers become clumsy, leaden.

The realization he’s staved off all night collapses inward on itself like a building with a cracked foundation. Superman held his father’s pin between his lips, for no other reason than because he had been asked to, looking up at Bruce with a mixture of trepidation and trust.

For a total stranger, he did this.

(Bruce knows what this feeling is. It has a name.)

And Bruce isn’t prepared for—any of it. The kryptonite is in the hands of the White Portuguese. Zod is dead. The media is distracted by a sex tape. Bruce doesn’t know of any other weaknesses that he can exploit...

Jesus, he could do with an actual drink in him.

Bruce fixes himself something from the bar, and pours himself into a chair in front of the evening news. The feeling abates, and Bruce begins to believe that he has some mastery over the vast emotional wilderness that he hasn’t touched in years.

People have always interpreted Bruce’s casual manner as a desire to remain unattached. And so here he is: Bruce, scion of the House of Wayne, blissfully unattached to anything and everything except his burning desire to protect the world from an alien threat who looked at him through his eyelashes like a foal following its mother to pasture.

It’s that thought that makes him unable to touch his drink.

He’s terrified what will slip out if he’s not in control of their next encounter.

This is pornographic, Clark thinks as Bruce teases the zip down the garment bag. He already knows what’s inside, but the long plunge of the zipper teeth passes in hours instead of seconds.

Inside the bag is the suit jacket Bruce had been wearing earlier that evening. It’s hardly the worse for wear from rough handling; the lines of the suit appear immaculate as Bruce slides the trim Italian-fit sleeves over his shoulders, and pulls it snug against his waist. Clark stands stock-still as Bruce pushes small metal cufflinks, the shape of Ws, in through the buttonholes of his French cuffs. And then, the tie. Bruce stops. He’s still enough that the only movement in his body is the rise and fall of his chest. Then his eyes unfocus, as his fingers brush the collar at his throat. What would he—oh.

Clark slips his hand into his pocket. The small barbell collar pin is tucked snugly into his jacket.

(A jolt hits him as he remembers the bite of the surgical steel against his lips.)

Clark could have sworn he saw hunger.

Rousing himself, Bruce winds the tie around his neck, unbuttoning one, two buttons from his throat. Then he fixes himself a drink from the large, multi-tier bar that occupies a good portion of the room. Gin, straight up. Tumbler in hand, Bruce folds himself into a wingback chair, a wave subsiding into the sea, and turns on the television.

The glass goes up to his lips, but Bruce just holds it there, in front of his face, and then sets it back down untouched. His face cracks. Bruce looks tired. The bone-weary kind of tired that Clark used to feel after days of fighting with himself about Pa’s death.

He’s so achingly human.

This is it—his chance. Bruce will never be more approachable than he is now. Clark takes a breath, composes himself to plead for the shield or to accept whatever terms Bruce will set on his cooperation—when something on the news channel catches his attention. Bruce’s voice coming from the television set. Bruce’s voice as he’s coming, on the television set.

Clark’s eyes are dragged to the television screen. And there it is, in its high-def glory: the curve of Bruce Wayne’s spine in black armor, a deep blue chevron contouring his massive shoulders; tights pulled halfway down his thighs, biting into corded muscles; cock thrusting into a man’s unresisting mouth. Bruce grabs his jaw, hard, and—

“Superman, you fucking belong to me.”

—In all of his worst case scenarios, Clark’s never considered what Bruce Wayne might want from Superman.

There’s little that Clark can do to stop the slow-motion trainwreck in his mind. Of course Bruce would be the kind of man to debauch a reporter in Lex’s server room—why would Lex, or Mercy, or Mindi even question it, when Bruce has done so much worse on prime time TV?.

Clark’s appalled by how little he’s understood about tonight. All of the signs were there. The questions on the red carpet. The pariah treatment at the party. Bruce’s jokes in the server room. The cloud of innuendo that smothered every other possible interpretation but this one. Do you know Superman. How could Clark have been so blind?

On the television screen, Bruce threads his hands through Superman’s hair, and yanks his head back, the gesture just this side of cruel, running a hand up his cheek, possessive and assured.

This is the man who has his shield—

—and Clark can’t even summon up the good sense to feel terrified.

He’s been monitoring Bruce carefully since he entered the room, so it doesn’t escape his notice now that Bruce is half-hard. Not completely aroused—flushed, heart rate slightly elevated. The footage ends, and Nairomi should be the next story, was the only story the public cared about yesterday, but Clark is wrong; they’re replaying the sex tape. Clark’s eyes are dragged back to the wingback chair. It’s physically impossible to do anything but watch Bruce.

One of Bruce’s large hands trails down to adjust himself. For the amount of time they must spend wrapped in gloves, grasping, hitting, moving, vaulting over buildings, they’re smoother than Clark expected. The fabric pulls tight over his erection as Bruce’s legs fall open. On screen, Superman drops to his knees. The wool tents; Bruce is—Clark swallows—definitely interested now. The motion is so slight that he may have imagined it. No, by god, he didn’t. Minutely, Bruce bucks up against his own hand, as if to steal the friction of his own skin.

This moment has nothing to do with Clark, and he’s certainly seen worse on stakeout.

It’s fine.

It’s really, really not.

Clark knows the weight, the feel of Bruce pressed hip-to-chest against him, a question in the hitch and grind of him— A small noise rips from Clark’s throat, and he flinches at the sound. A small slip. Nothing that should be detectable in deep shadow.

Bruce outright flinches, spotting him as unerringly in the dark as Diana had in Lex Luthor’s mansion. Like liquid smoke, Bruce pours himself into the space at the sliding glass door, yanking it open fiercely. Flicking his hand across a panel, Bruce switches on the balcony lights. Clark expects something harsh; instead, the balcony is bathed in the glow from fairy lights wound between lacy vines hanging from the pergola. The shadow retreats, and Clark’s glad he grabbed his thigh instead of the handrailing; there’s no telltale handprint-shaped dent on anything.

Bruce stares at him incredulously. He pulls the tumbler against his chest, and cradles it.

“What are you—” doing here, Clark’s sure is the unvoiced part of the question.

Bruce clenches his jaw, and frowns.

Maybe he wants a clarification about the Kryptonian issue too.

The Batman would put shield and Superman together. Even Bruce Wayne has a pretty good handle on flying alien do-gooder—a great handle, in fact, as he sticks his cock down a Superman’s throat in high def behind them.

The atmosphere is thick with emotion, and Clark tries to cut through it by picturing Batman standing in the doorway. A breeze flutters at Bruce’s jacket, flaring out behind him in a rustle of purple silk. Gotham’s bat vigilante and his burning crusade for vengeance: a man too worn down to even bother to drink his scotch, his collar open at his throat, because earlier in the evening, he slipped his collar pin between Clark’s lips, and promised that he would make it up to him.

There’s nothing of Batman or Bruce Wayne in the slump of his shoulders or the tightness around his eyes.

Just that same silent question Clark saw earlier in the evening: help me, or don’t. And something in Clark can’t help but answer it.

Ma always said the best way to deal with difficult situations is to answer the question that you wish that they’d asked. Clark tilts his head, and nods up towards the sky. “Would you believe me if I said it’s a lovely night for stargazing?”

The clouds are rolling in from the harbor, and beyond them, the thousand thousand stars diamond-bright in the blue-and-green smear of Orion’s arm, stars that his Ma told him weren’t half-visible to most folks in this world—give or take the threatening shelf of gray that promises rain, a torrential downpour of it, and soon.

Chapter Text

Bruce was afraid that when he met him face-to-face, whatever violent, obsessive passion he packed into his mental wasteland would unspool itself, to his everlasting shame. It would be a repeat of the Regency’s ballroom and its punishing kiss, or a repeat of the Starlight Suite and its unacceptable surrender.

But it’s not Superman who steps forward into the light.

Same tweed jacket, same thick black frames, same boxy figure, but minus the righteous arrogance. Clark Kent seems poised to flee—Bruce is braced for a sudden gust of wind, an empty balcony—but Clark takes a breath and scuffs a shoe against the balcony tile. Tugging at his suit, Clark pats down the front of it, brushing off the dirt.

Dirt.

As though cleanliness were the only challenge to scaling a skyscraper.

Clark’s clumsy when he’s startled, Bruce notes; as he swerves around a glass-top table set, he knocks into a freestanding arrangement of lilies. It wobbles, then tips over the edge of the balcony; just as the vase works itself up into a good arc to tumble to the ground below, Clark catches and replaces it on the stand without so much as turning his head.

(Bruce, suddenly, remembers the scene outside of the server room. Clark’s comically expansive gestures to Mindi and Mercy were designed to disarm, redirect—anything but encourage someone scrutinize Clark Kent.

That gosh-you-caught-me routine he put on for them was as subtle as a black-and-white Buster Keaton serial.

It can’t be an act—can it?)

“What are you—?” Bruce cuts off the question before it can fully form; he has a plan for how this encounter will play out, and he’s not going to torpedo it with simple goddamn curiosity.

Clark Kent meets Bruce’s gaze. He barely flickers his eyes up to the grey-washed sky, thick with rain clouds. “Would you believe me if I said it’s a lovely night for stargazing?”

“We’re thirty floors up,” Bruce points out, incredulous.

Clark has the nerve to peer over the ledge, flashing a lopsided smile—as endearing as it is contrite. “So we are.”

Jesus. Bruce doesn’t know how to deal with this man at all.

Clark takes a step forward, and Bruce wishes he hadn’t. White clustering flowers tumble down around him like suspended snow. The balcony is washed in color, gently lit by twining fairy lights. In the world below, a piercing siren sings its melody; though it is brief and small and fading into the distant roar of traffic, Bruce feels himself press forward, illuminated by the rush of night. This isn’t Gotham and he hasn’t brought his suit. Even so, he thrills as the call to action runs through him; an infinite series of golden street lights recede from the pergola, and in that brilliant center, Clark is framed by the city that he’s chosen, one among its number; a burning light at the center of Metropolis.

Bruce gives his body the best I’m-in-control-of-my-libido pep talk that he can muster.

“Let me fix you a drink,” Bruce says, the opposite of an offer, and retreats to the suite’s bar.

With a partition between them, Bruce feels a little more at ease.

Clark lingers in the doorway, casing the room. Bruce doesn’t miss the way Clark’s eyes widen, floored by what he sees.

The room is laid out in a circle—windows clear as the night, in floor-to-ceiling glass—Metropolis opening up before them in crisscrossing boulevards and sloping high-rises. When Clark finally steps inside, the city lights fade in the darkness of the room’s interior. Contrasting white furniture is set against opalescent black tile, suggesting from their arrangement a hidden door, behind which hides a smaller en suite bedroom, office and master bath that are properly sheltered for no-muss, no-fuss living. But that’s barely an attraction; the center of the room is the main event. The floor recesses three steps down into a sunken sleeping area with one of the largest beds Bruce Wayne has never slept on; above the bed, a dome sweeps up into the ceiling, curtained by thin fiber-optic strands. As Clark approaches the bar, the suite could hardly give a better impression than the twinkling wash of LED lights reflecting up from the black tile, a glittering pathway of blue and black stars.

“Wow,” Clark breathes out. “Looked different from the balcony,” he adds after a minute, chagrined.

“It’s not called the Starlight Suite for nothing,” Bruce says casually, pushing a tumbler of 15-year-old single-malt scotch across the black granite bar top.

Clark tips the tumbler back, draining it in a single swallow.

“Scotch is supposed to breathe,” Bruce chides, stroking his own glass with his knuckles. Clark motions towards it with his eyebrows, and, after a moment of consideration, Bruce slides it across the counter too. Clark knocks it back just as quickly, as Bruce protests that half the taste is in the mouthfeel.

“Ah, ha,” Clark fake-laughs, setting the glass down next to Bruce’s hand. He raps the bar top, the barfly’s signal, hit me again. Bruce pours him another four fingers of scotch. “I get it now. The joke in the server room.”

“Jesus,” he says, as those fingers evaporate too. “I didn’t think you—” drank like a sailor. Drank at all.

“It takes a lot to put me under the table,” Clark says grimly, rapping his fist against the counter again. Drawing his shoulders in, he turns away from the windows and their dazzling vista—but Bruce supposes it must pale in comparison when you’re used to a better view.

The evening proceeds in a strange ritual; Bruce pours for both glasses and both disappear, Clark’s throat working around the scotch as easily as if it were water. Bruce thinks about how long Clark observed him from the balcony, until that thought grows stale and new seeds sown by Clark’s unusual behavior flower in his mind. Why is Clark dead-set on being drunk, and why is his chosen vehicle of drunkenness one Bruce Wayne? Why hasn’t he asked for his shield? If he knows nothing else about Bruce Wayne, Clark must know Bruce has it.

...Why is he pretending?

A lot turns out to be an understatement. Bruce pours enough alcohol to kill a man, and only the tips of Clark’s ears pink. Well into the second bottle, they flush a deep red. After the second bottle’s drained dry, Bruce switches to cheap whiskey. The kid’s not even tasting it.

He’s not saying anything, either.

When Bruce reaches the end of the third bottle, he slides the empties out of the way, and knuckles down at the bar. Clark’s not meeting his gaze; he’s staring down at the glass cradled between his hands. Bruce expects Clark to care about the details of appearing human: plausible excuses; subterfuge; denial. Something.

“It’s so fragile,” Clark says instead, setting the glass down as gently as a motion-activated bomb, and sliding it away from him with one fingertip. “Everything’s so fragile.”

From this angle, Bruce can’t check Clark’s pupil dilation; and it feels too much like a confession to grab Clark’s jaw to force the eye contact. As he swipes the tumbler from Clark’s reach, Bruce brushes fingers across a wrist—swiftly and clumsily enough to play it off as an accidental touch. In the momentary contact, Clark’s pulse shivers as quick as a hummingbird’s, as alive as anything he’s felt. Medically abnormal for anyone else, but Bruce has no idea where it falls for a Kryptonian.

(He suspects it’s outside normal parameters. Even if isn’t, strictly speaking, a standard symptom of alcohol poisoning, Clark’s probably fine.

Shit.)

“I’m cutting you off, son,” he says half-jokingly, falling into the gratingly chummy persona that he’s used on Clark more than once tonight.

Clark gives him a challenging look.

(So, Clark probably hadn’t bought the act back at the party, either.)

Bruce needs to do something with his hands, or he’s going to check Clark’s pulse again. He tosses the empty bottles into the cubby holes under the counter. When he finishes shuffling around the bartending supplies, the napkins, the toothpicks, the jarred olives (that, strictly speaking, were already in order), he considers investigating the rest of the black-label-wrapped bottles underneath the counter, but Clark’s attention falls heavier on his back than a tire on grade seventy chain. When he quits with the stalling bullshit, and faces Clark across the bar counter, he can tell that Clark has been tracking him.

“You know,” Clark says hoarsely.

Bruce returns with a shrug, equally devoid of pretense. He does know.

“Drinking enough to kill a man wasn’t subtle.”

“Subtle.” As Clark sighs, a draft sweeps past the bar. The sliding glass door to the balcony is still open, communicating freely with the chilly night air. Bruce suppresses the instinct to seal up the room, establish a perimeter, control the stage of their confrontation. Their game is a delicate one; he shouldn’t make any move that might be seen as trying to trap Clark.

(Not that it would be possible to trap Clark anywhere he didn’t, on some level, want to be.)

Bruce’s heart flutters traitorously.

“You have my shield,” Clark says hoarsely. “You’re going to ask me—” Clark’s mouth curls, veering sharply into bitterness—“to do something terrible to get it back. Why don’t you just ask? I’m not going to say no.”

Bruce is more than a little at a loss. The scotch was supposed to help ease rapport between them. “Clark—”

Clark bristles. “Don’t you mean Superman.”

“Clark,” Bruce repeats.

“I caught you breaking into Lex’s personal servers. You and your—your—Alfred trapped a mansion full of people in unsafe conditions. People were hurt, Bruce. You didn’t even care enough to help them. If that’s what you do to get at your enemy—” Disgust. Ah, yes, there’s the moral righteousness that had been missing earlier.

“What?” Bruce prompts.

“Just—ask me. I can’t say no.”

Bruce isn’t prepared for how forthright Clark has been. The exchange Bruce has imagined all evening (“I’m Superman” / “And I’m here to stop you”) is derailing before him, dangling over a precipice, the dark wasteland of his unexamined emotions snarling hungrily beneath.

He freezes his body language, allows himself to look as bewildered as he feels; if his words don’t reach Clark, this game could go very badly very quickly. He tries for a tone that’s neither provoking nor knowing, as simple and clear an assertion as he can possibly make it.

“I don’t want anything from you.”

Another fake laugh. Clark motions at the television, still on in the background. A tasteful graphic in Danger Chrome lettering is splashed behind two talking heads. Bruce Wayne: Sex Pervert or Superman Fetishist?

This is the burden that Bruce has to bear, he knows this objectively; but for a moment, he indulges in the petty resentment of an indifferent cosmos. When will that video stop righteously fucking up his life?

The edges of his thoughts are blurry, but Clark has definitely scored his conversational point. Bruce Wayne is both a sex pervert and a Superman fetishist, and thank god someone on television is tackling the real issues.

He scowls at Bruce to convey his disapproval, but Bruce only seems to gain an extra crease on his brow as he contemplates the depths of his wrongness. Which, Clark grants, is the same as all of Bruce’s other expressions: a flat grimace set in a shatteringly handsome face. Maybe it’s the extra waviness at his graying temples—sticking out at an angle not befitting a celebutant—

(Has Bruce been wearing a mask?

He’s never seen more than blurry silhouettes of the Bat, but the Bat must wear a full face mask. … how could anyone fail to recognize Bruce’s rakishly downturned mouth above the dimple of his chin?)

—but the effect of Bruce Wayne, hair matted and disarranged from the wind, is kind of cute.

Clark beams at Bruce for a split-second. So fast he shouldn’t have been able to see it.

Bruce’s brow gains another wrinkle.

Suddenly, Clark is fascinated by the bottom of his tumbler. There are no drops left to chase around the glass; he’s sucked it dry; and doesn’t let his thoughts run any further in that direction, thank you very much.

Clark isn’t drunk. Kryptonians can’t even get drunk. He’s pretty sure he tested his tolerance levels on the Naiad, where off-duty pastimes were drinking and writing; he filled up his journal seven days into a three-week tour, so the next fortnight he did shots and listened to tales of renegade fishers until the ship’s gossip collapsed in a fitful doze; then the crew recited poetry or drank in silence before shuffling back to their bunks. Nothing, not whiskey, not vodka, not the rotgut from the ship’s still pushed Clark into the realm of tipsy.

Though, a point in favor of this non-hypothesis: Clark’s never shotgunned three liters of 100 proof scotch before, not when he’s burning through his solar reserves to push past hunger and exhaustion just to stay on his feet. Under such extraordinary circumstances, Clark might in fact be impaired; drunk, however, is completely out of the question.

Clark surreptitiously ghosts his finger over his phone to check the time. It’s later than he expected. This little conversational pause has gone on for some time—no imposed questions, no veiled threats, no coercion of any type.

Honestly, Clark’s taken aback.

He never imagined that the conversation about his shield could be contingent on his willingness to participate in it. Clark entertains the possibility that Bruce might be telling the truth—that he might not actually want anything from Clark—or, because damned if Clark is going to fall for this act again, playing a very convincing long game.

Sprawled against the back of the bar, Bruce is framed by rows of empty glasses that twinkle with the red, blue, and gold of the Metropolis city lights: for all the world, looking like a man relaxing after a nightcap with a friend. And that’s the deception: Bruce isn’t bored or impatient—he’s surveilling Clark, waiting for Clark to make the next move.

It’s what the Bat would do.

Older news clippings on the vigilante (that took the urban legend seriously) intimated that the Bat helped one Lt. Gordon close the Triple Spade Murders by exonerating the lead suspect and fingering the mayor; a Gotham scandal for the history books, if anyone took the time to write it. Ten years on, it was a forgotten chapter in a progression of worsening municipal corruption.

On that note, Clark’s thoughts curdle. How could one city be so blase about scandal?

And just how did Batman get his information for that case anyway? (Alleged) photos of parking lot meetings, stills from security cameras in City Hall. The famous shot of the disgraced ex-mayor at the window, with one of his hired killers in shadow, just the rim of his aviators and a burning cigarette glowing in the dark. Did the Bat command an army of cameras rigged throughout the city, sorting and storing information on the entire city’s movements; a massive ongoing breach of privacy to put NSA wiretapping to shame, from street corner to City Hall?

The more Clark thinks about it, the more plausible it seems.

WayneTech is the single biggest developer, property holder, and security camera manufacturer in Gotham City, far outstripping LexCorp’s stake in Metropolis; and, oh, god, that’s it, Bruce isn’t abusing his position as CEO or his company’s tech to get one over on his frenetic competitor. No—Gotham is a giant mechanism, owned and operated by Wayne Enterprises. Anything that endangers its operation is identified and eliminated; twisting the levers, oiling the gears, snapping the jaws of the rollers, the Bat maintains his city’s uneasy peace from Gotham’s fitful, beating heart.

The room’s gone tepid. Clark cranks up his body’s core temperature to compensate. The extra heat is good, so good, and he leans back on the barstool, balancing against a cushion of air. The corner of Bruce’s eye twitches.

“Why do you do that,” Clark asks, because the opposite of talking seems intolerable. When Bruce tilts his head, Clark finds he can’t quite explain his spark of revelation about the Bat vigilante. Sheepishly, he motions in a vague approximation of a mask. “You know.”

“Isn’t it a little early to be asking about my kinks?” Bruce returns, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Um,” Clark adds helpfully.

Bruce isn’t looking at him, he’s gazing at the Metropolis skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows, a thousand-yard stare for the history books. In the background, he hears the news anchor's conspiratorial, let’s get that action in slow motion, Bob.

“It was a frustrating year,” Bruce begins, voice flat, posture stiffer than Simon Stagg reading a teleprompted apology, which, hey, makes Stagg only the year’s second biggest billionaire fuckup now that Bruce Wayne has sunk his hooks into the news cycle. And Clark’s confused again; what does a frustrating year have to do with the Batman?

Bruce takes a long breath. “I had lost people in Metropolis. It brought to light certain...unresolved issues. There was a costume ball advertising the Man of Steel as their guest, and—” A pained look flashes across his face. “I made a bad decision that had the misfortune to transpire in front of someone’s cameras.”

“Costume ball,” Clark murmurs, snagging on a memory of a Daily Planet fundraiser in a hotel ballroom, Lois tying the thick white mask she’d picked out for him at an upscale costume shop, and dropped a tidy sum to buy it, an indulgence for an indulgence—Come on, Clark, you need an evening out of those glasses. You can be yourself under this mask. Another memory is tantalizingly close, but it wriggles free like a small fish through a sea net. Clark shakes his head. “No, I meant—”

Bruce has no idea what Clark meant.

Just as Clark realizes that, he realizes two other things: one, that Bruce has no idea that Clark knows his secret Bat-identity—the nano-tracing would be undetectable to all but very sophisticated cameras; two, as Clark has to float himself a little further upright to correct for a sudden loss of balance, he’s definitely not sober.

In the background, a still of the sex tape is splashed across the television screen with helpful red circles around key pixelated areas, the broad line of Bruce’s back in that black and blue suit frozen as it twists in pleasure.

“Your costume was terrible,” Clark says, to hustle the conversation along because he’s a poor liar when he’s put on the spot and because who chooses a costume for a ball that no one will recognize? “Who were you even supposed to be? Blue Arrow? Night Fancier?”

“Life of a celebrity, Clark,” Bruce says pointedly, as deliberate and direct a fuck you as Clark has received from Bruce all night. “I was incognito.”

“Your Superman seemed to like it.” Clark sniffs. “Although I’m not sure whether his taste is anything to go by.”

“I’m sorry—”

“—You’re not.”

“I’m not the one who made the tape, so no, I’m not apologizing for what I choose to do in my own private time. I am sorry you were put into a position to see it.” Bruce’s gaze drifts over to the television. There’s a pause as a new talking head prepares a fresh salvo of commentary about Bruce Wayne’s scandal rapsheet. Clark can barely hear it over the grinding of Bruce’s teeth. “Repeatedly sorry.”

“S’pose I would have had a story if you decided to dress up as the Bat.”

Bruce goes very still.

“Imagine how unhappy he would have been,” Clark says in a too-bright tone of voice.

Bruce doesn’t have a clue he’s been compromised; Clark’s knowledge of Bruce’s secret identity is a bargaining chip. Clark should…play this knowledge close to the vest. That’s what he would do under normal circumstances. But he finds that he can’t help himself; the words threaten to spill out of him, whether he wants them to or not. So he thinks, why not...let them?

“Bruce Wayne, first high-profile branding victim of the Bat. Man who thinks he’s above the law. If the mark of the Bat really is a executioner’s mark, Perry might have had to run my Gotham vigilante piece after all.”

Clark hums sadly for effect.

Bruce uncrosses and then recrosses his arms across his chest. He looks, frankly, a little bewildered. Good.

“It would have been a shame, though.”

Bruce blinks at him slowly, lips pursed, a narrow and considering set to his jaw.

“Just think of all of Wayne Foundation’s unsupported books.”

Despite evidence to the contrary (the minute sway as he hovers an inch off the ground, the chillier-than-can-be-explained breath, the heat crawling up his side of his neck), Clark does in fact have a plan. It’s not a good plan; even he’s not drunk enough for that level of self-delusion. What he does have is evidence. As Clark needles Bruce Wayne, Bruce has become more agitated. His ma will forgive him for this, will understand the necessity of it; Clark has been monitoring Bruce’s heart beat since he poured the first drink. It’s been controlled, unfamiliar: fast when Bruce sprawls against the wall counter; slow when Bruce leans forward to talk.

But now, Bruce is… slipping.

“Antagonizing urban legends isn’t my idea of fun,” Bruce says; the truth from Bruce Wayne, an obvious lie from the Bat vigilante.

Clark listens closely this time; Bruce’s heart makes an extra KA-thump on systole. Ha! Now Clark has the baseline for Bruce lying his ass off.

The corner of Bruce’s mouth turns up, in a parody of friendliness. This is how Bruce must think people smile. “Just goes to show you, Gotham and Metropolis don’t mix.”

The line is delivered so smoothly, Clark—damnit—might be charmed by it if he didn’t already know Bruce is only this smooth when it’s insincere. He doesn’t know what Bruce’s long game is, and, frankly, he doesn’t want to know; he has a chip to call to turn the conversation to his advantage, and he deploys it now.

“You’re a gracious host, Bruce, but I know when I’m being lied to.”

The tentative smile disappears under tightly-controlled blankness.

“What am I lying to you about?”

“I don’t know,” Clark hedges, “but you want something from me. Just...get this over with. You want me gone as much as I want to be gone.”

Bruce’s heart makes that odd little KA-thump again, and this time Clark has no idea what that means.

Bruce’s urge is to regain control of the conversation with cleverness, deflection. But he suspects if he doesn’t make Clark explain himself right now, they’ll talk past each other all night. Slipping his hand into the secret pocket inside his dress shirt, Bruce pulls out the metal pentagon emblazoned with Superman’s shield. He lays it down carefully next to the empty tumblers. Clark’s gaze locks onto it, but he doesn’t move to take it.

Bruce searches Clark’s face. “What is it? A weapon? A power source? A key?”

The quiet intake of breath, and an exhale. “My father gave it to me,” Clark says, instead. “It’s all I have left of him.”

“Is it dangerous?” Bruce asks steadily. If he says yes, it doesn’t matter how much it will distress Clark—Bruce will destroy it. A coldness settles in Bruce’s gut. Destroying a man’s last connection to his father; Bruce knows he could do it, just as he he knows that it will cost him dearly to do so.

Clark shakes his head—an emphatic no.

“Will you tell me what it is?” Bruce presses.

Clark hesitates a beat, but then clenches his jaw and shakes his head no again.

“A straight trade, then,” Bruce proposes, clamping down hard on the pang of regret he feels. Whatever secrets the shield might hold, he’s certain he’s not going to find them out tonight. “The shield for the leech. The device you took from Lex’s servers,” he clarifies. “Give it to me, and you’re free and clear.”

The moods of the Kryptonian could perhaps be charted against a control baseline, so that in the future, Bruce could point to a certain expression and say, “this is anger,” “this is doubt,” “this is suspicion”; and “this is surprise,” “this is wonder,” “this is thawing disbelief.” He sees it happen, as though water is wearing away stone: the sharp edges of Clark’s suspicion soften and then crumble, swept away in a rush of enthusiasm.

“It’s in my—I’ll have to—! Found it.” Clark paws at the back collar of his jacket, revealing a pocket with a long seam along the shoulder. The motion is clumsy and the leech tumbles out; before it can hit the floor, Clark’s hand blurs and he catches the prototype.

Bruce clears his throat, partially in surprise. The speed of Clark’s hand is...impressive.

Triumphant, Clark flourishes it and thumps it against the bar with a sickening crack. He sheepishly runs his fingers over the spider-webbed crater, the granite countertop flaking away in chips.

“Are you drunk?” Bruce hisses, swiping the leech before Clark can touch it again.

“Maybe a little tipsy,” Clark replies, after some thought.

The casing on the leech is crushed where it impacted against the counter. A status light on the motherboard flickers, and goes dark. So much for WayneTech’s vaunted shock-proof patents.

“Is it—”

Disgustedly, Bruce tosses the device back onto the countertop. What’s the point of designing extreme-conditions tech if a single tap from a boy scout puts it out of commission?

“—It is.”

“Oh.” Clark visibly deflates.

Something in the air shifts. Bruce narrows his eyes, as Clark sways with the new air currents. He suspects that Clark’s feet have left the ground. It’s those pesky little details again: a drunk Superman who can’t control his power is a public danger; a drunk Clark Kent who can’t bother to blend in is a liability to everyone whose privacy relies on Clark’s discretion.

Including Bruce himself.

“When’s the last time you slept?”

The question is anything but casual, but Clark’s far past the point where he can read subtle shifts of mood or intent.

“Seventy-two hours,” Clark hazards. “No.” He smiles beatifically. “Seventy-eight. It’s fine. I can go for at least another thirty.” Clark pulls out his phone, and then replaces it in his pocket, not even bothering to activate the screen.

His face contorts into the wow, it’s late look. Clark’s either drunker than Bruce thought or—or—he can read electronic devices at a touch. Bruce’s mind whirs at the possibilities. What powers does Superman have that he’s never even considered? Bruce should get Clark into a lab, a discreet WayneTech one, something under Lucius’ direct command, to verify—

Clark’s voice breaks through. “It’s late, I should—”

“I reconsidered.” Bruce allows a smirk to play across his face that he doesn’t particularly feel. “I do want something from you after all.”

Clark looks comically betrayed. He wets his lips, and Bruce drags his eyes back up to Clark’s.

“Lay down on the bed, and I’ll tell you what it is.”

The temperature has been dropping for the past ten minutes, but Clark’s oblivious to the cold. He strips off his tweed jacket, letting it fall on the countertop. The tie gives him difficulty.

Clark appears to be a half-step away from ripping it off, when Bruce hears himself say: “Let me.”

It would be ridiculous to lean across the counter to do this, so Bruce joins him on the other side of the bar. Clark drops his hands, and stills, breathing through his nose. Bruce hooks his fingers into the knot, and works it back and forth. It’s not a bad tie, exactly. Black and gray, classically striped. The silky fabric has the tell-tale smoothness of a bamboo weave—a surprisingly eco-conscious choice. Bruce flips the bottom of it over to find the label. It proudly proclaims, Made With Love in Smallville, Kansas.

Hometown, Bruce hazards, then stops himself.

Clark Kent has a hometown.

Midwestern charm like Clark’s is bred into the bone, like a taste for Country Gentleman corn or a compulsive, disarming modesty. Bruce tries to picture a little red-caped god playing in the wheat fields with a farmer’s dog, and catching fish with the old man down at the lake—and finds himself in dangerous territory.

Best to stick with the tie. Less likely to embarrass himself that way.

Bruce has half a mind to tell Clark his tie clashes with the dark plaid button-down to break the mood, when he catches Clark’s half-lidded gaze, tracking Bruce’s fingers working the knot side to side.

Just then—Clark leans in, and their bodies come into electric contact. Bruce’s breath hitches as Clark slides against his thigh, the drag against him almost good, almost right, as he straddles Bruce’s leg to reach for the discarded jacket on the counter. The touch is brief—there and gone—and Clark’s out of his space, holding the Wayne family collar pin delicately between his fingers.

The color’s up in Clark’s cheeks. And Bruce—he’s not doing much better.

“Meant to give this to you earlier,” Clark mumbles, and drops the pin into Bruce’s hand.

Bruce slides the tie from Clark’s neck, and lays it down on the counter. He pockets the pin.

When he’s turned back, Clark’s four buttons out of his shirt. It puddles on the floor as he forges a path to the bed. Thank god for small mercies: Clark’s wearing an undershirt. It’s a thin white tank that’s cut under his shoulder blades, but at least it’s something. Clark doesn’t even bother with the step down into the sunken sleeping area—he glides on the air, and touches down next to the round bed, extravagantly large even by Bruce Wayne’s standards. Clark’s skin is flushed as he angles himself toward Bruce, the line of his lats curving over a powerfully muscled back and a compact waist. Not hard, efficient lines pared down by years of training. Graceful muscles swell and ripple as Clark stretches to the points of his toes.

Bruce’s mouth goes dry, and he wants to say—turn towards me, a little more—to catch a glimpse of the jut of Clark’s cock in those pleated pants.

Because now Bruce understands why Clark wears suits big enough to swim in. How can anyone mistake that frame for anything but what it is? The power to reshape worlds.

Tension ripples and relaxes through Clark’s body as he sprawls on the bed. He raises his head when Bruce slides into the wingback chair half-a-room away from the bed.

“Get some sleep,” Bruce says softly. “That’s the only thing I want from you. Okay, Clark?”

Human ears shouldn’t have heard Bruce’s voice, but Clark’s face clears.

“Okay.”

Clark’s so painfully grateful that Bruce has to wonder why Clark thinks he’s the kind of asshole who would—well. Bruce has spent the better part of the evening convincing Clark he’s exactly that kind of asshole. He shouldn’t be surprised, now that the chickens have come home to roost.

Minutes later, when Clark’s subsided into a fitful rest (answering another one of Bruce’s bucket list questions: does the alien need to recharge? Answer: yes, and he drools on the pillows, too), Bruce pulls the chair closer so he can keep an eye on Clark while he sleeps.

It’s a good start. Even if it has to begin with a white lie.

If asked, Bruce will tell this story differently from how it happened—everyone will be far more witty, or far less awkward—but he doubts that any Good Morning Gotham anchor will ever ask how Bruce Wayne spent the night with Clark Kent in the Starlight Suite. Clark sleeps on a bed large enough to host an orgy, fitful and dreaming, and Bruce watches him from the wingback chair. The room is chilly, even for late autumn; the thermostat’s probably broken. He feels grateful for his jacket; after years of snow-themed villains crashing benefits and galas and Society dances, all of his tailored suits have a dead-air lining to insulate against sub-arctic conditions.

Still. Warmth would be nice.

Clark sleeps on top of the duvet, senseless to the cold. He didn’t roll down the blankets before he passed out; he curled on top of them in his white tank top and dress slacks. A light sheen covers Clark’s skin. It’s a waste of the bed—even though he’s not shivering, he’s sweating—he’s—

Clark lets out a breathy grunt, and rolls onto his back.

Not that Bruce could speak to the quality of the sheets. On his previous visit to the Suite, he napped in the wingback chair, then stole out of the room before daybreak.

The city lights are less intrusive than he would have imagined; it’s dark enough that he can see artificial stars dance across Clark’s skin. He hasn’t slept in the bed, so he doesn’t know how it would feel as the silky white sheets tangle around his feet—how the morning sunlight would spill over someone’s back——

Bruce swallows. He imagines it must be quite nice.

Chapter Text

In the wingback chair, Bruce presses his fingertips together in meditation, restless. He has, so far, failed to achieve every one of the night’s primary objectives. Lex’s servers are almost certainly undergoing extensive system diagnostics in the wake of the blackout and will be inaccessible for days. The leech is damaged, possibly destroyed. If he wants to attempt data recovery, he’ll have to return to the Cave undetected, and for the greatest chance of success, he’d have to leave right now—

A rustling against the sheets and another quiet groan, as Clark shifts on the bed.

Primary objectives recede as Bruce considers his secondary mission parameters. The suite isn’t secure. His efforts to run down the name Guy Jordan or the shell company that has a virtual lock on the Starlight Suite have hit a wall. With no culprit to punish, all that remains is to locate and deactivate the remaining cameras in the room. The unidentified tech in the moulding under the entryway table is certainly a camera; if one device is still active, the rest are bound to be, too.

Unlike his other objectives, it is in fact imperative that Bruce locate the cameras tonight.

Especially if they recorded what happened in this room an hour ago.

Clark floating on air down to the bed; Bruce watching it happen.

Bruce doesn’t have to imagine the fallout. Unlike the Super Sexcapade—a story destined to be pushed out of the news cycle once Lucius’ deal goes through, or the Congressional hearings push the Superman Question back into the spotlight—Clark’s wouldn’t die. The clip would be on every channel, looped, dissected, commentated.

Clark’s secret would be out. And with that exposure, who knows what new scrutiny would be brought to bear on Bruce Wayne.

Bruce is limited by what he’s willing to do within earshot of Clark. Even though Clark appears to be in a deep sleep, and even if he didn’t possess the ability to hear an earpiece through three storeys of concrete, there’s no guarantee that Clark wouldn’t wake up as Bruce was sweeping the room. And then Bruce would have to lie, or worse. The Bat might make its feelings known.

That unsettles him.

The camera he found under the table unsettles him more.

Bruce contacts the Cave through his phone, and queries his research contacts through an anonymized protocol. Dashing off a quick snapshot with a general description of the tech (white, translucent filament, biological elements, possible short-range wireless transmitting, wide arc video feed), the message chain explodes in interest. They have never seen tech with these properties before. His research contacts in Japan and Korea theorize more quickly than Bruce can read. The conversation switches from Hangul to kanji to hanzi until his lids droop, and the world dims to the desaturated fields of long-recurring nightmares.

Clark isn’t a deep sleeper. He floats above his own body, gently cataloguing the heartbeats of everyone in the hotel. One in particular interests him, and he listens to it intently. It’s slow, strong. Every time it spikes in worry, or agitation, Clark tosses. Once it makes a KA-thump which sinks into the recesses of his mind, woven into the tapestry of colors and sounds; a puzzle that he hasn’t figured out. Mostly, he sleeps fine in a bed large enough to graze a herd of sheep. Some part of him is dimly aware that it would be easier if that heartbeat stopped doing whatever it was doing and crawled into bed with him.

Finally, the sinus rhythm evens out into its own restful pattern, and Clark settles into his body, feeling something a little like peace.

A bloodcurdling scream pierces the night.

Clark is on his feet, into his suit, and in the sky faster than the human eye can blink. He knows this voice, and it’s in danger.

The scream isn’t as distant as he thought it would be—it’s coming from Gotham, not Washington DC, where Lois should be checking into her hotel.

Arcing through the mesosphere, he shoots down to a small house built against the side of a secluded lake. The glass walls rattle as he descends faster than he’d normally risk. Triggered by the vibration, the house lights and several powerful floodlights snap on. Seconds later, a harassed man in a waistcoat and a heavy metal-working apron starts towards the door, brought up short when he spots Superman. He gives the man a tired never fear, citizen, Superman is here salute, and turns mid-air to locate the source of the distress.

When Clark spots the source of the scream, he hauls up short. He’s never had to metabolize this much alcohol, and he has no idea if hallucinations are part and parcel with hangovers.

“Superman!” Mindi cries out delightedly, heels in hand, stockinged feet crunching on the gravel as she jogs towards him. “I wasn’t sure you’d get my message!”

Rubbing along the edges of a tension headache, Clark doesn’t think he has the kind of self-defeating imagination to hallucinate this.

Tired and pissed and with a patchy heat growing under his cheekbones—Clark hovers over an empty carport, sticking to the shadow. Under the circumstances, he’s not sure that his public persona will be appropriately disarming.

“Ma’am, are you in trouble?” he asks evenly, no more than a second after Mindi skids to a stop next to one of the carport pillars.

“Danger? Here? After the night I’ve had?” Mindi looks around incredulously, wrapping an arm around the pillar as she slips her feet back into her pumps, then smoothing down her layered suit jacket. She’s changed sometime since the Luthor debacle into a black-on-black ensemble. “This is the Wayne estate. No safer place.”

The universe has decided to play an extended practical joke on him, Clark decides. He’s barely conscious of his distance to the glass house and its extremely powerful floodlights until he’s lost enough altitude for one to hit him square in the eyes. Recoiling violently, he bumps into the carport ceiling. Nothing breaks, thank god, but he is treated to an explosion of white dust as he peels himself off of the stucco surface. With a groan (and without thinking further), he spins himself quickly enough to fling the white dust off of his suit, and touches ground.

He’s almost glad for the slip, because it treats him to a rare sight; Mindi Mayer, hair blown back from a tremendous force, coated from head to toe with particalized stucco, completely lost for a witty comeback.

Mindi’s mouth flaps open and shut a few times. “Superman, are you d—?”

“Depleted is the term I’d use.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Long day. Sorry, ma’am.”

Clark forces himself to remain grounded and in the light. He owes Mindi that much.

“Between me and my ruined Brandon Maxwell, I think you might want to skip your next rescue.” Mindi holds her breath as she grinds some of the white dust into the fabric of her suit, smearing a white stain across the lapel. “Curl up with a blanket or whatever in front of a nice roaring fire—” She seems to come back to herself with a stricken grimace. “I...I didn’t even think to ask. Do you...have a home?”

“I do,” he says, thinking of a farmhouse he hasn’t lived in for years. “Ma’am, did you want—?”

“Mindi Mayer,” Mindi says, sighing, holding out her hand, and they shake with no acknowledgement that Clark has met her before (and maybe, in a way, he has just met her for the first time). “I mean, I’m glad that you have somewhere to go.”

He supposes that once he escorts Mindi home, his twin bed will be his destination. His business in the Starlight Suite has been concluded; and he desperately needs the sleep. If anything else is needed, he supposes a man like Bruce Wayne knows where to leave word.

And it’ll be fine—more than fine—if he doesn’t.

“Thank you, by the way. For rescuing us at Lex’s tonight,” Mindi says, dropping her gaze to her hands. When she fixes it on Superman again, she’s furious. “That was easily the worst danger—all of those people, and he left us. I don’t know what the hell he was thinking.”

Clark sympathizes, even if he suspects they’re not thinking of the same he.

“Thanks are unnecessary,” he demurs. “It’s what I do.”

“The S.T.A.R. Labs people were cagey. Did you find any sign of an underground—”

Mindi doesn’t get a chance to finish the thought; the door opens and a familiar scowl greets them.
To her credit, Mindi offers a dazzling smile to the waistcoated man opening the door, sans apron, plus a chillier-than-expected air. “Oh! Hello, Alfred.”

Alfred. The scowling face lightens in unexpected amusement as he takes in the sorry state of the “rescue” before him. “Alfred Pennyworth. You, sir, need no introduction. Ms. Mayer—good lord.” Alfred whips off his black frame glasses, and pulls a rounded tortoiseshell pair off of his head, and pushes them onto his nose. With a long-suffering sigh, Alfred hefts the door open, and gestures to come inside; a man whose temper has fought with his well-mannered upbringing, and lost. “Well?” he says with a warm impatience. “We can’t send you into the world looking like that.”

Mindi shrugs at Superman, and laughs to herself. “It’s no bother, really—”

“If you have the situation under control, sir, I should—”

“You’ll do no such thing. Mindi, with me.” Alfred brushes a large piece of stucco from Mindi’s shoulder as she passes, then crosses his arms as he turns his gaze back to Clark. He can’t know where Clark has been; yet, it’s as awkward as if he did. Clark makes a concerted effort not to fidget.

“And you, young man,” Alfred says at last. “In this household, we have a simple rule: someone who make a mess helps clean it up.”

The proverbial Guardian at the Wayne Heir’s Gate, relentless and disapproving. Clark bites down on an almost overwhelming compulsion to apologize: I’m sorry for what I did with your ward; or thought of doing with him; or didn’t do with him. I slept in his bed—the bed that was in his room—while he watched me sleep. It was strictly business, I think.

With a silent tilt of his head towards the house’s small common area—a living room set, and a kitchen table with exactly three chairs—Alfred invites him inside. Clark blinks against the harsh floodlights, almost missing the way that Alfred rolls his eyes. Still: he waves his hand in front of a sensor, and the overwhelming wash dims to a gentle glow.

“Capes,” Alfred subvocalizes as he turns back to Mindi. Clark pinches the bridge of his nose; he clearly hasn’t slept off the three liters of conversational assistance.

He’s only been in his apartment for three hours this week. And it seems his bed will, again, have to wait.

In the end, no amount of prompting will encourage Clark to cross the threshold of the lakehouse, and he hopes that Mindi and Alfred will attribute it to manners, or reticence, or the actual excuse that he provided—that Superman might have to take off in a hurry, and he’d prefer not to blow out Mr. Wayne’s walls. Alfred shrugs, knowing an immovable object when he sees one, and compromises by dragging a kitchen chair over to the door. He sits Mindi down in it, and uses Clark’s arm as a towel rack as he lightly mists the front of her jacket, and brushes down the wet stucco.

“I trust that nothing untoward happened?” Alfred murmurs, as he attacks a particularly heavy patch of wet white dust on her left shoulder.

“I must have missed my cab,” she says lightly.

“Master Wayne would be delighted to extend his car service to you,” Alfred offers.

Clark didn’t see any evidence of a garage, but supposes the entrance could be subterranean. He casually glances through to the subfloors of the house, and double-takes at what he finds.

Like Bruce, the lakehouse’s flashy exterior exists to misdirect. Underneath the glitter of wealth that can afford to flaunt its simplicity, unseen depths stretch down through the layers of rock and sediment. Beneath an elevator, and a plinth, an underground cave system that houses all of the organs of a massive surveillance apparatus: a meticulously maintained workshop; a supercomputer with storage that rivals Lex’s server room; and a bay for a truly staggering array of tactical urban vehicles. The way the area has been built up and rebuilt and repaired, foundations old and deep—

Bruce has been doing this for decades.

Despite his best effort to remember Bruce is dangerous—something warm crawls into Clark’s chest. The fact no one has a camera phone to record it is a small blessing; a viral video of Superman blushing during a civilian assist would probably ruin what little remains of his reputation.

Mindi’s eyes dart between Alfred and Clark, as Alfred fills the silence with an innocuous anecdote of Waynes and their penchant for mischief. He spins out the tale of a hospital misadventure from Thomas Wayne’s day that involved a shakedown from the Gotham mob, two missing hospital mannequins, and the resulting court case. Alfred tactfully steers clear of the word scandal, but its implication hangs over the story. The shadow of the Bat lurks, too, when Alfred announces to an astonished Mindi that that particular branch of the mob has since disbanded—when does a mob family just disband in Gotham?—but deflects with a, that’s what happens to those who prey on Gotham’s citizens.

“You’re pulling my leg,” Mindi says darkly.

“The Sionias family did not go down easily, or quietly, but if you wait long enough, this city will surprise you. And no, my dear, not always for the worse.”

“You’re one to talk,” Mindi snorts. “Gotham dazzled me tonight by cutting out of a party early.”

Alfred purses his lips. “I’m sure Gotham has its reasons.”

Clark’s a terrible actor, but he does have one trick up his sleeve thanks to all of the study he’s put in this evening. Mindi and Alfred’s code isn’t particularly subtle, but he figures that, lacking context, it shouldn’t raise any red flags when Superman looks politely confused. “I have to agree with Mr. Pennyworth. Gotham’s alright. A very charming city, even if it is a bit handsy.”

The matching look of mute terror that passes across Alfred’s and Mindi’s faces is worth it. But he takes pity on them, and grabs a handful of his cape. “It’s the cape,” he says, with a what can you do about it shrug. “They always want to touch the cape. Still,” he says, trying not to sound wistful. “I’d like to see Gotham sometime during the day. Maybe it would have an… entirely different character in the light.”

When Alfred pronounces her fit, Mindi gives her jacket a last brush with the back of her hands, and clears her throat.

“Someone as...news-savvy as you, Superman, must have heard about the latest publicity crisis.”

Reaching out to grab back the cleaning cloth hanging over Clark’s arm to dry, Alfred freezes mid-motion.

“I have,” Clark says neutrally, his first substantial contribution to the conversation since he offered to simply freeze the stucco dust and shatter it (the response to that had been varying levels of horror). Alfred lets out a disgruntled sigh (in relief or frustration, Clark can’t tell), and finishes liberating the towel and water bottle from Clark. Clark touches Alfred’s shoulder to capture his attention. “I’m sorry that it’s been such a burden to Wayne Enterprises, and Mr. Wayne personally.”

Alfred hesitates, radiating disbelief. Sincere apology must not be a common feature of the Wayne household.

“That must have been a shock to discover,” Mindi tries.

The onrushing flush of how exactly he had discovered the news is thankfully covered by the low lights.

“It dislodged the Committee Hearings from the news,” Clark notes—probably the only single positive thing that could be said for the Super Sexcapade now that sobriety is knocking at his door. There’s a sex tape with his crest playing non-stop on television. He could have done without knowing certain things about Bruce. How his breath quickens when he suppresses his noises; how his breath hitches before he—

“Pity,” Alfred retorts, hauling the cleaning supplies to the kitchen table, and dumping them into a jumble. “Just when they were on the cusp of resolving international law’s humanitarian crisis.”

“The Committee has been asking interesting questions.” Clark words the defense far more coolly than anyone but Superman should be able to get away with. Alfred narrows his eyes, recognizing the positive form of bullshit when he smells it.

Mindi extends her hand with a simple business card between her index and middle fingers. Mindi Mayer, Publicist, her telephone number in an elegant sans serif. Gently, she says: “Now, I know you don’t do public appearances—outside of your disaster work—but in case you wanted to add your take to the spin cycle—”

(His thoughts press against other thoughts in a jumble: he knows how gently Bruce would cradle his jaw; he knows one of his tastes underneath his tongue.)

“—Mr. Wayne is scheduled to appear on Late Night Gotham tomorrow afternoon at 2pm. Give me a call, or...drop in at the studio, if you want to have your say.”

(When Clark straddled Bruce’s leg in the Starlight Suite, he thought Bruce might ask him to—and maybe Clark would have said yes, if the circumstances had been—acknowledged.)

Alfred straightens in alarm. “Did Lucius authorize—”

“I don’t think—” Clark starts.

“Don’t settle on an answer now. I’m not asking you to present anything but your own feelings.” Mindi presses the card into his hand. “Think about it?”

His hand closes over the card. He suspects Mindi doesn’t want the news media to get his earnest take on Bruce Wayne. “I’ll consider it, Ms. Mayer,” he says, despite himself.

Clark’s tipsiness has cleared (or the hangover’s receded), so that when Alfred passive-aggressively cranks the lights up to their full brightness, there’s no accompanying bloom of pain in his head. Alfred huffs and returns to the kitchen table. Mindi pointedly inclines her head at Superman, then sidles up to Alfred, who is sorting his cleaning supplies with the grim determination of a man staving off an angry outburst.

She stage-whispers, “You haven’t heard from Bruce, have you?”

“Perhaps Lucius could tell you. Last I heard, he was purchasing a hotel,” Alfred says smoothly. Clark could almost believe he wasn’t sick with worry, except for the way he had bounded for the door with all of the subtlety of Jonathan Kent waiting up for Clark after he’d blown curfew on prom night.

“He’s fine,” Clark puts in, and tries not to regret it under the combined weight of Mindi’s cool appraisal and Alfred’s sharpening mistrust. “That is to say, he was fine when I was last flying over Metropolis.” Clark makes an unconvincing little plane motion with his hand. “Not that I’m in the habit of spying on people when I’m flying. I wanted to make sure he was okay. Specifically him. Bruce Wayne. Because of the pressure of the news cycle. Which he is. Fine, I mean.”

“That’s not the impression I received,” Alfred says at last, vulnerability in that confession. Clark can see the edges of the trust that he’s been tasked to keep. “He’s been under far more pressure than the scandal. I’m...worried about him.”

Mindi hums thoughtfully. “Lucius warned me about Bruce’s dangerous side. It’s not the fight clubs again, is it?”

“We could only hope,” Alfred mutters.

“If you’re worried, I could...check again now?” Clark offers.

Alfred carefully replaces the brush on the table, and fixes Clark with a fierce expression. “Bruce Wayne has dragged your good name through the mud. Why on Earth do you care?”

“It’s what I do, Mr. Pennyworth.”

“I suppose you can afford to be magnanimous; it’s not you in the video, now is it?”

The condemnation hangs in the air for a minute before Alfred seems to come back to himself. He softens, as regret makes itself known; his shoulders slump until he’s practically hunched over his cleaning supplies. He lightly raps the table once, twice, slowly, and then straightens his waistcoat.

“I apologize, that was out of line. Of course, I would be happy with whatever you could tell me.”

Clark is glad that he has the excuse to turn his head back out to the Gotham night; it seems almost too vulnerable to watch a man teeter so close to an unexpected emotional edge. He paces to the edge of carport. Mindi and Alfred follow out as far as the patio, exchanging quiet words between them. They lapse into silence when Clark holds up a hand.

For all of the bravado of Superman, the power and spectacle of him, Clark has discovered that it’s not protection that the hurt and the vulnerable crave; the collective human spirit wants to be reassured that when Superman employs his powers, they know how those powers work. Flexing his muscles to lift a commuter train that has jumped the rails, or taking a deep breath before he dives beneath a mile-deep ice floe to rescue a trapped diver—that touchstone to common humanity provides a necessary veneer of fiction for the people he rescues. Clark has learned that Superman would not be so well-loved if he resettled the train on the track as easily as slipping a book back onto its shelf, or if he swum the Arctic Sea trenches for hours without resurfacing to take a breath.

He provides some of that fiction now for Mindi and Alfred: he closes his eyes and exaggeratedly cocks his ear. Listening to the murmured rhythms of his city that he can hear as easily as anything inside the lakehouse, he inclines his head as he peels back the sounds of the city to zero in on the Starlight Suite.

“Can you...hear him from here?” Alfred asks, more than a little impressed.

“Yes, he’s—awake.”

Bruce’s heart rate has quickened from sleep, rising a little; a strong, steady beat that flushes into audible excitement. Clark tries not to strain to catch the sound of skin on skin, to hear if Bruce has decided to do something about that excitement. But when that voice breathes out a word, a name, and his heart makes that small, sincere KA-thump, understanding crashes into Clark.

That flutter isn’t Bruce’s tell for when he’s lying, that’s…

Bruce grunts, once, breathily, and—

Oh, god, Bruce.

“How is he?” Mindi prompts.

“Great. Fine. I mean, it’s all fine. No danger.” Clark says in a rush. He quirks a grin—not Superman’s manicured one—and the effect is electric. Alfred and Mindi look at him like he’s alien: wondrous and wholly new. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, ma’am…”

“Where’s the fire,” Mindi quips, as Alfred watches the retreating speck in the sky. Hmmph, is all Alfred manages to say before Clark shoots across the bay, back toward Metropolis, chasing the yearning in that single quiet syllable of his name.

Chapter Text

It’s an old nightmare that startles Bruce awake, heart racing. The first thing Bruce notices about the room is that the sliding glass door has been wrenched open. The second, the bed is empty. Clark and his shield are gone. Only an indentation remains on the covers to show that a body had slept there. He expects anger or fear to come, but there’s nothing. Just a hollow ache in his chest.

He’s bitterly disappointed.

(Bruce always thinks it’s going to be him who leaves. His right, as the one who is always abandoned.)

Bruce swipes at his phone. It’s only been an hour since he started his vigil. The comment chain has exploded with new intel from his specialists. Biotech advancements have been noted from companies with with the usual list of names: S.T.A.R. Labs, Cadmus Project, LuthorCorp, Stagg Industries, WayneTech—all US military contractors with direct or non-direct contact with Project Starfish, the Army’s codename for its xenotechology division—but no one has pinpointed a definite source for the camera tech.

Well, Bruce supposes it’s time to do what couldn’t be done while Clark slept twenty feet from him. He loads up the raw footage of the Bruce Wayne sex tape, and presses play.

When the video begins, Bruce mutes it. The Bruce in frame is seated in the same wingback chair, positioned ten feet closer to the bar. Only the contours of his legs are visible from this angle, dark against the floor; the details are so sharp that Bruce can pick out the iridescent bloom on individual tiles. An overhead camera zooms in on ‘Superman’s face as he steps out of the entryway. Not even the camera wants to dwell on the shiny Lycra, which looks faded and cheap compared to the real thing. The camera pulls wide for the next part: ‘Superman’ plants his feet and strikes a heroic pose. With his fists on his hips, cape half-caught around his shoulder, Guy Jordan delivers a cheesy line—a catch-phrase pieced together from reports of Superman’s rescues:

You needn’t be afraid, I won’t harm you.

The attention to detail charmed him at the time, but now Bruce can admit that...the line seems a little out of character.

Bruce pauses the video long enough to re-position the chair. He remains standing because—

On screen, Bruce is now standing in Nightwing’s compression suit—a deep, turquoise V plunging down his lats—apparently in control, bored, waiting for ‘Superman’ to sink to his knees. It couldn’t be further from the truth. The dark material of Dick’s suit hides a damp, spreading stain. In the video, he’s already hard in his tights, heart in his throat, as he tries to control the involuntary shiver of his hips.

It would be difficult for anyone else to detect, but Bruce notices the tremor in his hand when he touches the crown of Guy’s head, threading through his dark hair. That would be the kick of adrenaline, as the thought of touching everything Bruce has vowed to contain or destroy overwhelms him.

Bruce only takes a moment to recover from the sour burn in his throat, and then he releases the catches on the cup and tugs the man’s head forward. He doesn’t want to see the actor’s face. Doesn’t want to hear what passes for dirty talk. It’ll break the illusion. Superman isn’t kind. Superman wouldn’t go down on his knees. He’s—Bruce shifts on his feet as, in the video, he lines up against Superman’s mouth, thrusting his hips forward, so agonizingly slow, pushing his cock past Superman’s lips.

Bruce remembers that part all too well. The disappointment of it. He expected an electric first touch: some signal that what he was doing was momentous; a confirmation that he was the world’s own hypocrite.

He had been wound up since he spied ‘Superman’ chatting with someone in a Greek comedy mask and chlamys under the ballroom lights, easy, like he was just another person. Bruce didn’t even bother to pretend he had another purpose at the party; he cut straight through the masked partygoers, and stalked up to them with as much subtlety as the actual Nightwing. As Bruce had thought, no one recognized the costume. Bludhaven’s camera-friendly vigilante had no play in Metropolis. Bruce snatched ‘Superman’ by the front of his uniform, and greeted him with a bruising kiss, anticipation and fear swelling in his blood more potently than it had in shadow of Wayne Financial. A god had plunged through the sky, grappling with his enemy—and Bruce, too small to fight them, too unprepared to counteract their damage—touched the limit of the Bat’s control. Except under the Regency’s ballroom ceiling, the accompanying hatred was washed of its power, cleansed in the room’s soft green lighting.

In those heartbeats, it felt like the world was singing through him. Bruce knew what he wanted. The reality in the Starlight Suite had been far more prosaic; satisfying in its own way, but… incomplete. Watching the video on mute barely elicits his interest now. At the time, the actor’s lycra suit gave Bruce the veneer of fiction that he needed. But now.

He has better control of himself, now.

Bruce spots another overhead shot in the video as it shifts to emphasize his grip on the back of ‘Superman’s head, and he triangulates the position of his mark. He discards the phone in the chair. He has work to do.

A decorative wine rack is pulled away from the wall and maneuvered into place next to the first step of the recessed sleeping area. Bruce swings up onto the rack, and perches on the highest rung of his unlikely set of bars. Locking his legs around the thick frame, he leans backwards until he’s parallel to the ceiling. The half-dome on the ceiling steadies him; stretching over it, Bruce shimmies forward until he’s surrounded by a curtain of dangling LEDs. The wood groans under his weight. The wine rack is barely more than an over-engineered lattice and won’t bear the weight of Bruce’s gymnastics for long.

It’ll be fine; he doesn’t need to be up here long.

Brushing the curtain of LEDs back, Bruce lets them run through his fingers. A translucent jelly-like camera would easily go unnoticed among the clear plastic strands. Everything feels normal. He stretches further into the starfield and runs his hands along the uneven filaments, as though he were running his hands through the wild grasses, clumping in wheat-colored tufts on the Manor grounds.

Bruce’s heart beats a little faster.

“Clark,” he whispers, heart fluttering despite himself. This job sure would be easier with someone who can hover.

A passing fancy, and an unrealistic one at that. Bruce isn’t going to work in front of Clark, and Clark isn’t here. He chose not to be here; knew that there was a choice to make in the first place, and wedged himself out of the door at his first convenience.

Or, hell, maybe he only needed an hour of sleep to recharge. What does Bruce know about the alien, anyway? Bruce may have a name, and a few hours of direct observation—but observations aren’t facts until they’re systematized. Without rigorous experimental controls, everything he’s observed is conjecture.

Repeated observation would require similar conditions.

Not that Superman will—ever—be spending the night with him again.

Running his hand through the next clump of LED strands, he brushes against one that screams wrong. The feeling spreads, a convulsive itch at the base of his spine. Gotcha. As he stretches out to grab the interloper, the wood beneath him creaks warningly. The barest whisper of air tickles the back of his neck as he swings his body up. He grabs onto the ceiling ledge a second before the lattice gives a throaty crack and collapses on itself like a house of cards.

One hand bracing his body against the dome, Bruce snatches for the strand. The casing pulls free from the ceiling and he has his prize: two feet of slimy jellyfish tech. Without a backward glance, he throws it toward the table like a soggy shuriken, embedding it in the wall an inch away from its intended target, and fights down the instinctive reaction to wipe his palm on his jacket.

“I have to admit…this isn’t how I imagined I’d find you,” a familiar voice says from the balcony, deep, resonant, confident that it can’t be restrained or disobeyed.

It—doesn’t sound anything like Clark.

Bruce twists in a graceful arch, and drops to his feet.

Clark isn’t the one standing in his doorway, an unruly lock of hair falling across his forehead to mar the perfection of his face.

Bruce blows out a sharp breath. He’s never seen Superman up close. Grainy footage, drone telemetry, satellite stills. None of them had been close enough to capture the ringed texture of his uniform, the modularly-fabricated cloth hugging his form, flexing with him as he moves, as snug as an undersuit. The material gleams, catching and reflecting a sky full of man-made stars.

Stunning. It’s—fitted with his shield.

The symbol he wore proudly as he took Metropolis apart with his bare hands. Him, and his people.

In a crashing wave of anger, everything that he’s attached to that suit rushes to the surface: the victims of Black Zero; the list of the dead from Gotham and Metropolis; the White Portuguese; the goddamn containment plan.

Whatever Bruce might have wanted from Superman, that goddamn shield short-circuits his mind.

A feral grin stretches across Bruce’s features, and the Bat steps forward—

—only to be brought up short by Superman’s next words.

“Hello, Batman.”

The flat, weary Bruce in the server room hadn’t been the Bat vigilante. Clark knows that now.
There’s no mistaking that it's the Bat vigilante who drops from the ceiling, and rises up like a shadow: it wears Bruce Wayne’s face, and Bruce Wayne’s suit and jacket, but diamond-hard emptiness greets him. In the darkness of the room, a bar of light falls across its face from the city. An underworld shade re-animated in someone’s body; the dark justice of Gotham’s streets burning in its eyes.

“I was hoping we’d meet when I’d had time to prepare,” the Bat says.

Clark steps into the room, his cape rolling and snapping anxiously behind him. In his current state, he’d rather not face the Bat vigilante at all.

“What do you want from me?” he asks again, hoping that Bruce’s I don’t want anything from you last night wasn’t a lie.

Hoping that it was.

“I want you to bleed,” it snarls, and leaps at Clark with the fury of a beast.

Clark braces to absorb the collision. He calculates the force he will need to redirect into kinetic energy, how far he’ll have to roll to deflect the incoming blow without injuring Bruce—but it’s Clark who ends up on the floor, his feet swept out from underneath him.

Never has Clark seen a human move so fast.

Driven by the motion of Bruce’s body, the Italian-cut jacket flares out like a cape, the Bat’s face falling into shadow, so that only two piercing white slits glare back at him as the Bat coils to strike.

Never has Clark seen darkness so beautiful.

“I think you want something else from me, Batman,” and dares the Bat forward with a tilt of his head.

The white slits narrow; perhaps to gauge whether he’s being clever (he is), and whether the Bat can take him (he can’t). The sweep was a lucky strike; Clark will be prepared for it next time.

“No?” Clark asks, breathless with it, trying for the right combination that will spur the Bat to action. “Then I want something from you.”

The Bat’s voice is raw, scraped out of Bruce’s throat. “What?”

“I want to see you in the light.”

A shuriken flashes past his cheek, embedding itself in the room’s controls. Clark follows the motion back to the Bat’s arm, but the Bat is already in motion, already driving Clark backwards through the glass wall, the thrill of battle pumping through them.

The fight is nothing like Clark has experienced before. Faora unleashed tactical, efficient maneuvers; Zod fought him with brute strength, punches that connected viciously against his bone, punishing him for destroying the promise of New Krypton. Without any strength or speed or superhuman reflex, the Bat dances out of the range of his blows. Mocking him. Clark breaks holds and dodges throws as quickly as he can counter without hurting Bruce—and counts it as a victory that the fight is contained to the Suite itself—but still Clark is thrown again, and again, and again.

Clark discovers an opening when Bruce overextends himself on a leap. Clark lunges to grab Bruce around the midsection, pinning his arms to his side in an unbreakable hold. But Clark’s starting to suspect that for the Bat, there’s no such thing. Bruce rolls Clark over his shoulder, redirecting his momentum into a vicious drop onto the bartop. Clark stops short of smashing through the floor, but the bar itself—granite, wood, and glass—cracks cleanly in two, tile and glass scattering across the floor like confetti.

Blow for blow, Bruce stands against him. Bruce’s pulse is up, he’s breathing a little heavier, his posture’s opening up into more aggressive stances. Once, when Clark’s tucked into his side, attempting to break out of a standing armbar without tearing Bruce’s tendons, Bruce has to hold himself back from throwing an elbow. He’s getting sloppy. On one of these throws, Clark will corner Bruce into throwing a punch, and the shock of it should end the fight.

Clark swallows, and tries his luck.

Clark ends up on his back, sprawled against the bedframe. Bracing his elbow against the footboard, the wooden frame cracks with the lightest pressure. The floor is littered with impact craters where he didn’t stop quick enough. The splintered tile fans out in waves of choppy ruin. Clark grinds his fist into the floor, and presses himself up.

In a blur of black and purple silk, Bruce lands on top of him, grabbing the back of his neck and compressing his throat with a shoulder.

A chokehold. Were he human, he would be unconscious in half a minute.

Clark’s muscles tense involuntarily. He experiences a moment of petty delight as Bruce’s hands skate over Clark’s skin, scrabbling for purchase. Bruce inhales sharply when he understands that no part of Clark is vulnerable; the Bat vigilante might as well be choking a steel girder.

The look on Bruce’s face is so incensed, Clark can’t help it—he laughs.

“This isn’t victory, Kryptonian,” Bruce growls, hands all over his body, pressing, searching for weakness. The sound shoots right to Clark’s hindbrain, where the part that recognizes Bruce as a predator has no say. The fight may have dampened his arousal at first, but his cock swells with renewed interest and the uniform does nothing to hide his erection.

Any moment now, Bruce will notice it too.

Clark sighs, exhaling from a deep chamber in his lungs. Control over his thermoregulation is still tenuous. As beads of moisture crystallize in the air, Bruce’s eyes narrow in suspicion.

As he shifts his hips away—a few millimeters of space to make it a little less noticeable—Clark prays that Bruce is reacting to the sudden drop in temperature.

Ice droplets pelt them, melting against their skin, mingling with sweat in the hollows of their collarbones. Bruce shifts, closing the gap that Clark had opened, and the frisson between their hips is a sharp, bright point of contact. Clark freezes, unwilling to move and unwilling to groan his enthusiastic approval.

The ability to process at superspeed means that if Clark wanted to, he could spend an hour inside this moment, caught in between breaths, need coursing through him brightly. He could stay here tangled up with Bruce for has long as he wanted before Bruce could pull away, jams his shoulder into Clark’s solar plexus for another throw. But Clark won’t take this intimacy from Bruce.

He knows why he rushed back to the hotel. The frantic whisper. The quickening thrum of Bruce’s heartbeat. The wild fantasy that Bruce might groan his name as he came. The blood is humming in his veins with how much he wants this. Clark can chase this feeling or let it go—but he can’t deny that what he wants—what he’s wanted since he was pushed up against a wall in Lex’s server room—is Bruce.

The moment stretches and shatters with voices ringing through currents too subtle for even him to hear.

A hands tangles itself in Clark’s cape.

Bruce’s fist quivers, caught between action and inaction. They’re pressed together from chest to hip. Maybe Bruce even presses back. Maybe it’s a shiver. Clark might not be able to tell the difference, every sense tuned into Bruce’s body. He can trace the spark of action through Bruce’s nerves, plunging ahead of the thought that will generate them, the blood racing through his capillaries, the air rushing through his lungs. It's a glut of sensation and, for once, it’s more than frightening, more than overwhelming. It’s amazing.

Clark buries his groan by biting his lip.

The logical part of his brain screams what a no good, very fucked up idea this is as Clark cants his hips upward to shallowly thrust against Bruce’s thigh and feels the relief of it.

Pressed this intimately against him, Clark soaks in the sense of him. Watches when Bruce decides what to do next: pupils constrict, skin cools .5 degrees, muscles in his arm contract and then—Bruce is scrambling to leverage his hold on the cape into another throw.

Clark isn’t above playing dirty.

Before Bruce can slide off of him, Clark pushes at gravity. The cracked tiles around them vibrate, a rumbling hum below human hearing. And then the upward tug of weightlessness. The opalescent ceramic sparkles wildly as Clark floats them off the ground, dark stars caught in Clark’s gravity. Bruce’s thighs clamp around his torso, as his hands dig into the cape. Trying to squeeze him into submission, or maybe caught unawares by the unexpected gravity shift. His eyes are burning with anger, locked on Clark’s chest.

No. On the shield.

Clark bats Bruce’s hands away, and touches the side of his neck lightly.

“Superman,” Bruce grits out warningly.

When their eyes meet, Bruce’s irises are as dark as space.

“I’m beginning to think,” Clark starts in his Superman register, but then softens it so that it’s his voice that reaches Bruce, “it’s not me you have a problem with.”

Sweat-soaked hair falls across Bruce’s forehead, his mouth a thin white line. It’s not a yes, it’s not a no, it’s barely on this side of control. Unhooking his legs, Bruce must not realize that Clark can parse time in picoseconds. Clark overcorrects for Bruce’s motion, and suddenly he’s grinding up against Bruce at the right angle, Bruce’s erection jutting fiercely against the bulge in his uniform.

“You—” Pupils contracting in surprise. Bruce definitely felt that.

Clark repeats the motion so it can’t be misunderstood, and a small groan escapes his lips as the ridge of Bruce’s cock lines up against the slick material of his suit.

He frames Bruce’s face with his hands. In as gentle a voice as he can manage: “Bruce—” the name lands like a blow—“what part of you wants me to bleed?”

A quick intake of breath, a flutter of Bruce’s lids. “Don’t ask me that, son.”

Heat coils in his gut. Clark had a choice in the server room: help him, or don’t. Half-measures have never been his style. Clark’s fingers snake down to his shield, activating the release catches in a sequence of musical tones. The suit retracts from his skin until it’s an inert metal block against his palm. Wild-eyed, Bruce stares mutely at the silver pentagon. Clark recognizes the moment that Bruce understands what he had taken at Lex’s party. Clark throws the shield onto the bed, then rolls Bruce underneath him, and lets them fall.

The frame lets out a throaty crack and sags to the floor. The glittering black tiles rain down, skittering across the floor.

This started with Don’t I know you, Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, Daily Planet. So—

“Tell me, Mr. Wayne, for my exclusive. On the record,” Clark says in his smuggest reporter voice, combing Bruce’s brown-and-gray hair back with his fingers, until it lies down in Bruce Wayne’s rakish part. “What’s your take on the Superman Question?”

Chapter Text

Bruce Wayne’s reputation as a charming bed partner is, for the most part, a fabrication of the Gotham Press. Bruce makes sure his partner comes before he does, and that everyone leaves his bed physically satisfied (because emotionally requiting them is off the table). Everything else is pure fantasy. Bruce is not The Daily Star’s Most Passionate Lover and he certainly isn’t one of People’s 100 Greatest Lotharios. Keeping in that tradition, the first thing Bruce blurts out when his back hits the sheets is, “Someone’s watching.”

“Aren’t they always, Mr. Wayne?” quips a very naked Clark Kent.

Bruce can’t find any trace of Superman in that broad grin—mischievous and focused entirely on Bruce. The effect is not unlike being hit with the full wattage of the Bat-signal. Bruce shifts on the broken L of the bedframe, his jacket fanning out against the white sheets. Pillows and sheets are scattered around them, casualties of their descent.

Clark arches his back as water from their ice shower cuts a line down his chest, muscles rippling as he squares his shoulders. His hands press into the bed on either side of Bruce. Clark’s on his hands and knees, his body angled to keep them from touching. Bruce has enough space to roll out from underneath him if he wants. He hasn’t lost a single piece of clothing, yet he feels naked—his desire embarrassingly evident. But what does he want?

—God, but he wants to run his hands through the dark curls on Clark’s chest.

It’s a simple thing that holds him back. Over the years, every facet of Bruce’s life has been pared down to the essentials. A tailored waistcoat, a bolshoi ballerina, a 25-year-old scotch: they all slot into place, driving the gears of Bruce’s Mission.

(What’s the utility of desiring Clark, who could bring it all grinding to a halt?)

The wool catches and stretches across his cock as Bruce’s erection presses helplessly against his dress slacks. Bruce could continue the fight. As long as Clark’s naked—the outcome won’t be any different.

Clark’s chest rises and falls, tense and waiting.

Bruce’s hesitation is neither subtle nor unnoticed.

Clark grabs Bruce’s wrist. The hold is light enough that Bruce could escape with a simple downward break, even from this position. Even with—he swallows against the sudden prickle in his throat—Clark’s strength.

Slowly, so as not to spook him, Clark brings Bruce’s hand to his skin, flushed and slick. Not from exertion. Arousal? Bruce runs his thumb across one of Clark’s dark nipples, and feels the jerk of Clark’s muscles and a growing heat radiating from him. Bruce runs his finger through the dip of muscle, into the hollow of his sternum, and Clark burns.

God, Bruce is doing this to him.

He shouldn’t find it erotic, yet the sheer impossibility of it spikes Bruce’s lust. His brain sets off down feverish paths. Is the heat a normal part of sexual display for Clark? Will Clark sweat when he reaches climax? Clark’s thermoregulation has been—

Suddenly there are fingers threading themselves through the short hair at the base of Bruce’s neck, and Clark yanks, baring Bruce’s throat. Clark murmurs appreciatively as he slides his palm over the arch of sinew and muscle to Bruce’s jaw. Clark grips it tightly; a sharp tug brings Bruce face to face with Clark, whose searching gaze seems to pare away all of the nonessential information about Bruce, until all that’s left is everything that’s exposed by his reactions: the bob of his dry throat, the clench of his abdominals, the jump of his cock as he fails to disguise how much he fucking wants this.

Nothing else comes of the motion, and Clark’s hands drop, almost shyly. He had just wanted Bruce’s attention, then.

“Br—Mr. Wayne. Didn’t you promise to ‘make it up to me’?”

“So I did, Mr. Kent,” Bruce murmurs.

Clark looks stunned when Bruce locks his legs around Clark’s hips, to crash him down into Bruce’s body.

He feels Clark relent, unyielding steel becoming pliant flesh, as Bruce tangles them together on what’s left of the demolished bed. In his slacks, Bruce is harder than he can remember—aching for more contact, more everything. Two damp layers of cloth separate their skin. Bruce doesn’t take the minute to unzip; instead, he rolls his hips into Clark’s, and Clark arches into it with a breathy moan. The motion is awkward at first, but so good. Bruce tries to guide their hasty grind into a better rhythm, but Clark has his own ideas about where his legs should go: they wedge between Bruce’s thighs; then Clark reconsiders, and squeezes Bruce’s torso in a direct mirror of how he’d clung to Clark when they hovered over the bed, still wearing the Kryptonian shield—

A tap against his forehead. “You never stop, do you,” Clark huffs into his ear. “Thinking.”

“No one’s ever accused Bruce Wayne of being too smart before.”

“I didn’t say that.” Clark’s grinning with it. Goading him, Bruce realizes. A flush rises in Bruce’s chest, just under the edge of the waistcoat—it’s probably his secret, unless Clark can see through clothing, too.

Bruce licks his lips. Clark doesn’t need to know that it’s been ten years since Bruce slept with someone, rather than Bruce Wayne. What he needs right now is a partner that can goddamn focus. Bruce needs that calm connection to the flow that comes most easily when he’s in combat. Bruce bares his teeth in a snarl suited for the Bat and then attempts to suck a bruising line across Clark’s collarbone. Clark’s skin pinks for a moment as blood rushes up to the surface, but it smoothes out to its usual color just as quickly.

Invulnerable, Bruce thinks. How invulnerable?

He redoubles his efforts.

“What am I going to have to do to get you out of that suit, Mr. Wayne?” Clark teases, punctuating his question with a wetter-than-expected thrust against Bruce’s hip, a pointed reminder that other parts require Bruce’s attention.

“Sorry,” and Bruce is really not. “One favor only, Mr. Kent.”

Bruce snakes a hand between them to touch the point where their bodies meet. Clark’s leaking pre-come (Bruce assumes) much more voluminously than any of his other partners—it’s soaking through Bruce’s trousers, waistcoat, jacket.

Bruce rolls them over. He takes Clark by surprise with it, and pushes him against the silk sheets as easily as any of Bruce Wayne’s other lovers. A coaxing hand on the crest of Clark’s hip slows his enthusiastic motion, and Bruce manages to pin that power right where he needs it: underneath him, Bruce’s calves hooked under Clark’s spread thighs. He reaches back to encourage Clark to raise his knees, just to ease the pressure on his calves, and his fingers dig into Clark’s thigh. The feeling of pressing into muscle that could break his hands if he hit it full-on—oh, God. Bruce’s cock strains against the confines of the suit, and he’s panting.

He lines himself up against Clark’s cock, grinding, a slick slow slide of their bodies. As though Clark can’t help himself, one hand drifts over Bruce’s flank to palm his ass, pinning him in place, and the other settles on the small of his back, each finger burning through the suit like a brand.

The rhythm’s finally right. His wool-blend slacks drag damply against his briefs, chafing enough to feel real. He’s wound too tight. The heat at the base of his spine ramps up. It hits him so quickly, he almost misses the moment when he tips over. With a spasm, he comes, and as his cock pulses he grimaces against Clark’s throat, damning his over-excitement. It’s only embarrassing if Clark notices; so Bruce wedges his hand between their bodies to jerk Clark, hoping if he keeps up the pressure, Clark won’t notice the new, spreading stain on Bruce’s slacks. Or if he’s truly lucky, Clark will know nothing about the Wayne reputation. Bruce isn’t sure that he could live down the shame of Bruce Wayne being the more considerate and thoughtful bed partner.

Bruce’s hand is too callused and too dry to be pleasurable, but Clark moans anyway, a small needy noise, and exhales again. Frozen condensation settles on them both. The shock of the cold brings Bruce back to himself enough to remember exactly which room they’re in.

Jesus, he cannot be accountable for Clark’s ruin.

“Active cameras in the room. Not mine,” Bruce manages, hoping it doesn’t sound glowingly post-coital. “Probably,” he amends.

That finally focuses Clark’s attention.

“The tech on the table?”

Bruce confirms with a sharp nod.

Clark’s lids flutter and a filmy blue energy covers his sclera. He blinks it away. “Is it okay if—”

“—By all means.”

One of Clark’s large hands settles against the side of Bruce’s face to shield him. “Hold steady.”

Bruce pauses mid-stroke to yank down the obstruction. Clark’s attention returns to him and he purses his lips—maybe at the loss of Bruce’s touch, maybe at the presumption that Bruce knows better—but allows the hand to be moved. There’s a kind of agreement in that already. Clark gives a slight but good-natured shrug, then concentrates on a point in the distance. Bruce knows it can be done, because he’s watched the beams cut through buildings like paper; but he’s never seen it up close, nor has he seen it in any of his Superman footage of the past eighteen months.

Heat builds under Clark’s skin, a crawling mass of veins that incandesce behind his cheekbones. The light hollows out his face until it’s too bright for Bruce to look at Clark directly. Two beams of crimson light lance out and a bowshock kicks back, parching Bruce’s eyes and searing his vision. He tucks his face against his own shoulder to shield himself. When the heat drops sharply off, Bruce turns back to assess the damage Clark has done to the room. Clark targeted three points; curls of smoke mark what remains of the cameras, the casings blasted into crystal where they weren’t vaporized outright. Two Bruce had suspected (under the bar countertop, another LED strand), and one he hadn’t (a box near the en suite bedroom door; Bruce had thought it was a ceiling feature).

“Destroyed?” Bruce grunts, and Clark turns to him, all raw naked power, eyes blazing with the fire of retribution, of vengeance, of every goddamn nightmare Bruce has ever ever had. A muscle jumps in Clark’s jaw as he squeezes the hellfire back into something human—a glassy lens in which Bruce can see a red reflection of himself—and grimaces.

“Heat vision,” Clark says slowly. “I don’t use it often. Not since—Metropolis.” Clark can’t bring himself to say Zod and Bruce can’t bring himself to say it either. “I didn’t, in Nairomi. But you knew that already.”

Superman meting out punishment to the warlords and murderers of the world has never been Bruce’s fear. If Superman broke in Nairomi—with unlimited power and the will to enact it—Bruce would already be living in the jackbooted New World Order. No—his fear has always been for that future time, when the pall of grief makes justice and vengeance indistinguishable from each other, and the whole world burns in the shadow of Superman’s hope.

“I did,” Bruce says, after a heavy silence.

“Why did you leave Lex’s benefit? Why didn’t you come back?”

Bruce rocks him forward until they’re both sitting, Bruce straddling Clark’s lap. Clark presses his hands flat against Bruce’s chest, holding him at a distance, angry and bewildered. Jesus. He thought acknowledging basic facts would get easier with age, or practice.

(Probably would help if he had, actually, practiced.)

“I knew my presence was unnecessary for a safe resolution.” Bruce smooths his hands up and down Clark’s sides, over the invulnerable muscles that he had punched, jabbed, kicked, and twisted. His voice hitches as he murmurs: “Even now, you try to be human. Without that shield on your chest, you’re still him.”

Clark leans forward hesitantly, searching Bruce’s eyes as he does. “Does that bother you?”

That unnamable thing churns in his gut and Bruce is caught under glass, pinned and mounted. The question hangs between them, sweat and semen cooling on Bruce’s thighs. Maybe Bruce will be ready for this conversation when he discovers the identity of the White Portuguese or the hearse door closes over the last Wayne coffin—whichever promises the more generous span of time.

“Yes,” he says simply.

Chapter Text

It’s a moment of rare candor for Bruce, and he wonders when the hell he decided that mixing sex and honesty was a good idea. And that would be it, the disastrous end to their encounter—the mood gone from heated to chilly in a handspan of seconds as the arousal dims in Clark eyes like blinds being drawn over a window. However, some things about Bruce Wayne are more than skin deep, and he can’t leave a bed partner unsatisfied.

He lifts Bruce off of him and places him gently on the bed. Reaching across the broken frame for the silver shield, Clark’s about to swing his legs over the side of the sagging mattress—about to stand up and give Bruce the brush-off.

Bruce is faster. Anticipating Clark’s exit strategy, he arrives there first.

He catches Clark’s leg with his index finger and presses against the solid muscle. It’s barely more pressure than a feather settling on snow, to restrain a man who plunged to earth like a meteor and walked away from it unscatched; but it’s more than enough to stop Clark.

“You haven’t kissed me,” Bruce observes as casually as he dares to make it without tipping into caricature. Bruce braces himself for Clark’s response.

He isn’t afraid—

(Clark cottoned on to Bruce Wayne’s game at Lex’s mansion pretty quick, but maybe if there’s just enough truth in it—maybe with enough emotional control—he won’t see through the act now.)

—he’s terrified.

Clark’s perplexed, then disbelieving.

(But not suspicious.)

Clark leans forward, stops himself, then completes the motion. He’s watching Bruce, gauging his reaction. Then: a soft touch, barely more than a brush of their mouths, and some pressure, before he pulls back with a question in his eyes. More or too much? As though kissing crossed an intimacy boundary that Bruce’s fist hadn’t already breached.

“Bruce?” Clark whispers.

Bruce is running on adrenaline now; Clark looks like he needs to be kissed, so Bruce kisses him. It’s as simple as that. Bruce grips the back of Clark’s head; when Clark gasps, Bruce connects them in a deep, dirty kiss. Clark opens for him, and Bruce darts his tongue in, taking him, swift and deep, then pulls back to the pressure of lips and teeth.

He groans as the desire to be inside of Clark pools heat in his groin, and he’s hard again already in his slacks, fuck, he’s hard, and Clark answers by greedily taking his mouth.

Bruce reaches out blindly and smacks against Clark who’s already eagerly climbing onto him. Pulling himself into a loose butterfly position, Clark straddles Bruce’s lap and Bruce reclines them together until he’s sprawled against the pillows in a parody of relaxation—a replay of how this mess started: Clark, naked, braced overhead, and Bruce in his suit, hard with fierce conviction that he shouldn’t want this, but wanting it anyway. Except that this time, Bruce refuses to relinquish Clark’s mouth. He surges up to meet Clark again and again and again.

“It’s two,” Clark says when they break apart, sucking at his own lip, chasing the taste of Bruce. “Two favors. One for the server room—”—pushing against Bruce’s cock, rubbing the wet fabric between them— “—and one with Lex.”

“You heard that?” Bruce pants.

He means it only to be a conversational dodge, a little playful banter, but his eyes widen when he realizes what he’s asked.

(And to think, Bruce is supposed to be good at playing himself.)

Bruce doesn’t know what Clark’s going to do this time; he pre-emptively grasps Clark’s forearms to keep him grounded, here, in whatever little Bruce has to offer in a splintered bed frame and a set of messy sheets—bets that even Superman wouldn’t use his strength to toss a bed partner on their ass—and grinds up between Clark’s legs. Hot and tight where Clark’s thighs clamp around him, Bruce’s hips stutter, and then he strokes up against a point behind the balls. There’s that small noise in the back of Clark’s throat, an exhaled oh and a rapid blinking. Clark’s figured something out, and it seems to be good.

Through the wet fabric, Bruce can feel Clark’s skin against the outline of him. Clark’s lids flutter, and one of his hands comes up to Bruce, seeking an extra point of contact against his skin. It lands on the side of Bruce’s neck, and Bruce can feel his pulse hammering underneath that banked power.

“If I was attuned to it, I could hear your heartbeat from the Andes,” Clark says, breathing hard, glancing up at him from under his brow. Clark bites his lip and pauses. Given Bruce’s track record tonight for putting his foot in it tonight, it’s perhaps against Clark’s better judgment to continue, but Clark’s expression clears and he adds: “Or if I was listening for it, I could—hear you whisper my name from Gotham.”

Jesus. Clark heard him.

“What’s this favor going to cost me,” Bruce says roughly.

Clark slips a finger into Bruce’s waistcoat and tugs on the lowest button. “Your jacket and your waistcoat. I’m in a generous mood, so I’ll let you keep the shirt.”

Bruce has no defense against Clark’s lopsided grin; nothing to do, or to be done, but helplessly agree.

Bruce Wayne would have strip-teased for his partner—a seduction of movement, calculated gesture, and power. A hint of the jacket off his shoulder, tangling as it’s yanked off, accidentally trapping his arms behind his back—the purple silk sliding against skin, sensual and demure. A slow unbuttoning of the jewel-like ebony buttons of his waistcoat. And then a frantic ripping; a single button bouncing onto the mattress because he’s too eager to wait for it.

Bruce Wayne would have sucked his partner’s cock as he did it, too.

Hmmph. Far too late to course-correct now. He doesn’t bother to do more that hitch himself up against the headboard of the bed as he undresses.

Bruce loses his layers ungratefully. He’s terrified, and he’s aroused, and he’s at a crossroads in the emotional wilderness underpinning everything that gives meaning to what he does. It’s overwhelming, what he wants and what he’s being allowed to take.

(That’s why his fingers slip on the jacket. He’s the only one who has to know that. If Clark asks, he’ll pass it off as excitement.)

Clark watches as Bruce pulls off the jacket from the distance of Bruce’s lap, allowing just enough space for Bruce to wedge his hands between them to get at the waistcoat’s small buttons. Clark stills, fingers twitching on Bruce’s thighs—breathing quickly, lightly. Bruce can tell he’s enjoying the show more than he thought he would from how his throat works when the last button pops free. Clark bites down on a small gasp when the waistcoat comes off his shoulders—but Bruce is close enough to hear the noise catch in his throat anyway.

The jacket and the waistcoat are dumped onto the ruined bed. Down to his dress shirt, pins still in his cuffs, and slacks—this is far more intimate than expected.

Bruce tips his jaw up to Clark challengingly. “Is this sufficient?” he asks.

It’s such a patient, Bruce Wayne, are you actually crazy expression that greets him, that he wonders if that’s why eighteen months of social media crawler searches have turned up only blurry photographs of Superman’s face; if Clark, in fact, blurs it purposefully, because his thoughts run across it like a crowntail betta fish turning lazy circles in the water of the rice paddy: a clear surface whose depth and easy permeance beckons, and dipping a hand into that gentleness, someone’s fingers could coax him close enough not to bite, to stroke the red and blue radiance of him; catch even a handful of his refracted light.

Clark turns that limpid smile on Bruce. “No.”

Clark catches one of Bruce’s wrists, circling it with his fingers. He holds it gently, as he pushes the cufflink through the buttonholes and palms the small W. Clark finishes with the other cuff, and rolls the sleeves up to Bruce’s elbows. It’s this side of too much.

“Better,” Clark says as he strokes down Bruce’s arms, his cock jumping when Bruce clenches his fist in surprise. The second part sounds like it’s punched out of him. “Much...better.”

Bruce is painfully aware that Clark hasn’t come yet. That Clark’s still hard, that Clark still wants him—it’s something of its own miracle.

“I understand that you don’t want to be—” Clark starts, but is cut off by another moan, as Bruce holds him down and grinds up against his perineum.

“The only reason I’m not naked is because if I were, I would be fucking you.”

Clark’s brow creases: surprise; disappointment. “That’s not the plan?”

Bruce hesitates. He doesn’t have any plans beyond his next breath, and the next.

“Not tonight,” he says instead.

Fortunately, Clark doesn’t remark on Bruce’s hesitation: he doesn’t notice it or he mistakes it for desire. And that’s more than fine for Bruce who takes the time to improvise a plan: he turns them both around to face the headboard and maneuvers Clark to brace his feet against it, one foot on either side of the cleft that neatly bisects the entire bed. Bruce lines them up so Clark’s leaning back against Bruce’s shoulder, hips angled up just enough to give him access. Clark’s thighs are tellingly higher than the bed, and Bruce swats him, with a quick, “Quit that.”

Skin as hard as steel meets his blow. His hand stings like it does after he botches a grapnel landing, and has to grab onto a ledge to steady himself. The feeling is familiar, but in a different context, it sparks a new path down to his groin. Fuck.

(He’ll deal with that later.)

"How safe is it for me to—" Bruce makes a quick, lewd gesture, but Clark only gazes back at him over his shoulder, steady, patient. Jesus, he's going to have to say this aloud. With a sigh, he adds—"penetrate you?"

It’s cosmically unfair that Bruce now knows that Superman pouts when he frowns, and his mind skips eagerly to integrate this new knowledge. Gone is the flat wrath of his nightmares. Bruce pinches his brow. "When we fought. You tense, and I'm hitting steel.” Bruce is only planning to risk a finger—a digit that he’d certainly prefer to keep, but accepts that four of them could still work a grapnel line with acceptable efficiency. “What will happen if I penetrate you, and there’s a muscle spasm? Have any of your past partners ever—"

And there's a look that Bruce doesn't need to see to know exactly what it means. He can practically hear No Data Currently Available. Oh, god. To his credit, Clark doesn’t say anything about that face; and Bruce clings to that like a life-raft. Because—if it were true, it would mean that Clark deserved the Bruce Wayne treatment after all.

Clark gives the question serious thought. Finally he says, “It shouldn’t be a problem if I’m...focused.”

“Focused,” Bruce repeats.

“If I direct my senses to a specific action, it almost feels like...” A flush creeps up the back of Clark’s neck, and Bruce tries not to find it endearing. As Clark appears to grope for the words that would describe the experience of living in a body that had to be completely mastered before it could function in the world the way he wanted it to, Bruce suppresses a small unfurling in his chest—a tendril seeking toward sunlight. Because maybe Bruce could relate, if they could just find the words for it.

The idea occurs to Bruce right before Clark arrives at, “if I concentrate, I can relax my control, sort of.” The answer is absurdly simple. A weight in his pocket that’s been rubbing against his thigh all night. Bruce thrills—now he has an exit strategy.

"You were focused in the server room," Bruce breathes. “Before I—”

Clark lights up in understanding.

“Do you have—”

“I still have it—” and Bruce fumbles for his pocket. He withdraws his prize: the one piece of Bruce Wayne that is undeniably Bruce’s too.

“You know what to do,” Bruce says against Clark’s hair. “So do it.”

He presses the collar pin against Clark’s lips. Clark opens, and Bruce slips it in between his teeth.

He lets a little bit of that tightly controlled terror make his voice heavy with lust. He nuzzles Clark’s earlobe, dips his tongue against the sensitive shell of his ear. Clark pushes the back of his head against Bruce. His adam’s apple bobs as Clark swallows down his pleasure, holding the pin in place. Bruce smooths a hand over the curve of his throat, down that long neck. A small breathy moan escapes around the collar pin, and Clark thrusts up against the air, thick and swollen, as though Bruce were already inside him, fucking him.

Oh hell.

The pink head of Clark’s cock jumps as Bruce’s hand closes around his length, jerking his body up to meet him, canting his hips to thrust through Bruce’s hand.

Clark is wet—and not panting because his lips are locked around something more precious to Bruce than anything in this world that wasn’t sealed up in glass—

That’s when Clark looks up at Bruce through his eyelashes, achingly vulnerable. Clark won’t destroy the pin. A part of Bruce wants to answer with equal trust; repay it with the least of Bruce’s gifts. Tonight isn’t going to be complicated, but it won’t be a disappointing first encounter.

As he strokes Clark, a warm, seeping heat gushes over his hand. Bruce gathers the moisture, and slips it down over the silky head. Once, twice, and the liquid coats Bruce’s fingers, warm, and tingling with the heat of him. Abstractly, Bruce admires the utility in Kryptonian lubrication as he pulls his hand away. It’s a purely scientific curiosity; certainly not because he’s wondering if Clark could fuck him dry.

Clark pushes his hips up, chasing Bruce’s hand. But a quick jerk isn’t the plan. He slips his fingers down over Clark’s balls, stroking along the soft skin until he reaches the tight ring of muscle. Bruce strokes the rim with his knuckles, skimming around the puckered skin, slightly wet from all of Clark’s leaking. As Bruce pushes a finger against the muscle, Bruce can feel how hot Clark is. Clark’s head jerks to the side, the motion almost involuntary.

“Focus,” Bruce murmurs, steadying a hand across Clark’s chest. “Or this is going to be very painful for one of us.”

Clark touches his cheek to Bruce’s chin, a kind of acknowledgement.

He’s as pliant as Bruce could hope around the finger Bruce works into him. Bruce presses inside; the tight whine deep in Clark’s throat reverberates through Bruce as the muscle gives and allows Bruce in up to his second knuckle. Clark breathes out sharply, and Bruce stills the finger inside of him. Clark’s panting around the collar pin, and Bruce pulls him flush against him, the hand a gentling pressure against Clark’s chest.

“Stay calm, Clark,” Bruce whispers against his cheek. He really doesn’t want to have to call the concierge to explain a traumatic sex-related injury. Bruce Wayne might get a kick out of that embarrassment, but Bruce just wants Clark to focus. “Breathe with me.”

Clark’s ragged breaths even out to match the steady rise and fall of Bruce’s chest. A warm echo spreads through Bruce as he feels their combined breath, in and out. Slow, so as not to startle him, Bruce circles the tip of his finger inside Clark in time to their breathing. Around and around in a slow, small spirals, immense heat searing Bruce’s fingertip.

As he twists inside of Clark, Bruce doesn’t feel that slight bump of the prostate on humans. Objectively, Bruce knew that this might be an issue, but Clark seems so—everything else has been—

“What does this feel like for you, when I’m inside you?” Bruce whispers against his ear. “Is this—good?” Bruce thrusts his finger up to punctuate the question, and Clark’s hips buck against the sensation.

“Do you like this?” Bruce asks as he begins to thrust shallowly. “Harder?”

Clark grinds down against his hand, his enthusiastic yes, and keeps up the pressure until Bruce pushes in to the last knuckle. Clark rides Bruce’s fingers, small thrusts as Bruce keeps his movements small; then faster and fiercer as Bruce fingerfucks Clark harder, deeper, drunk with the feeling of him.

Rocking against that pressure hard enough to make his cock audibly slap against his stomach, Clark throws his head back against Bruce’s throat. Now Bruce can see the eyelashes fan across the arch of Clark’s cheekbones, fluttering with the pleasure, the silver barbel ends of the collar pin against the wet pink of Clark’s lips; the vulnerability of it. He can feel Clark’s muscles clenching in pleasure underneath the hand that’s bracing Clark against him. He’s burning with Clark’s heat, breathing Clark’s breath, fucking him. Clark’s body is naked in the glow of the room, twinkling light dancing across his skin; coiled shadows in the dip and span of his muscles; a purity of motion, a restrained violence unfolding between his fingers and Clark’s body, and Bruce is painfully aware that touching Clark’s body like this—containing it with pleasure in this black and white artifact of Bruce Wayne’s world—is a perfect encapsulation of what he’ll never deserve. But if it’s offered freely—he will reach for it greedily, with all of the strength he has to give it.

“Clark,” Bruce whispers, overcome. “God, Clark.”

The second orgasm sneaks up on him. He jackknifes and comes in a long, cresting wave. Bruce is dazed—the starlight of his orgasm punched out of him as he pulses in the wet spot he’s made on Clark’s back—but he’s brought crashing back to reality when he feels two other fingers shove themselves in next to his. He starts to ask Clark why or you could have asked for more when he feels the steel constriction of Clark’s muscle clenching tightly against a barrier of fingers as he comes in a long, dry jerk.

A tremor runs the length of Bruce’s body. With less foresight from Clark, Bruce would be discovering just how well he could work the grapnel line in a field-splint. Fuzzy and expansive (and in no state to repeat the experience), Bruce’s throat constricts; that was the most dangerous sex he’s ever had.

The sweat stands out on Clark’s skin—maybe his, maybe Bruce’s. Shifting underneath Clark, Bruce’s slacks drag against Clark’s leg, sticking and pulling uncomfortably against his own. Christ. From the soak-through, they’re probably a total loss.

When he feels a gentle nudge against his index finger, the moment of peace attenuates until it dissolves into the mute clarity of the night air.

Chapter Text

Bruce strokes Clark’s flank from a disquieting mental distance, aware of the gentle repetition of it. Post-coital lassitude shades the motion with layers of meaning—as Clark rumbles his approval every few minutes or so, near to the edge of sleep himself—but Bruce refuses to examine any of it more closely than he already has. Collapsed against Bruce’s chest, Clark’s still lighter than a body should be, but Bruce doesn’t slap Clark’s thigh or tell him to knock it off, because, honestly, he might not be able to bear the weight. He tries to hold onto his conviction—feel anything other than a return to the center of himself where the Bat whispers its logic into his liquid-limbed haze:

This can never happen again.

“Relax,” Clark mumbles around the collar pin.

Right. He presents a hand to Clark, who leans forward and drops the pin into it. Tipping his head up enough for Bruce to catch the satiation written into his face (and something else, not meant for him), Clark aims a sleepy grin at Bruce. As it slides in between his ribs, Bruce has a premonition to let go; his arms drop to his sides and he forces his body not to react. A second later, he admires the choppy tile floor of the Starlight Suite from a generous five feet above the bed, pillowed on top of Clark’s chest as a wakening interest presses against him.

“No?” Clark says, nudging his cock against Bruce’s thigh, hard already, wanting him again.

Bruce should say no—that he expects to take steps to never find himself in this position again—but instead he hears the implied flirtation of Bruce Wayne’s line.

“The possibility haunts me.”

A warm hand settles against the small of his back, anchoring him, as they drift on currents as gently as a boat on calm seas.

The most unfailing of Bruce’s inner senses is the one calibrated to the millisecond to know how long a touch can endure before it becomes unbearable; when it pings, Bruce knows the steps of that dance: distance, deflect, redirect; don’t call me, I’ll call you. The intentionally clumsy brush-off shouldn’t work as often as it does—but Bruce Wayne’s partners generally catch onto the routine quickly; those that are eager for a repeat performance end up doing half the work for him.

The hand stroking the small of his back should have tripped his sense ten minutes ago; aside from a contented hum, it fails to make an appreciable contribution to Bruce’s growing urgency.

The hand stops, and Bruce regrets it.

“So—plans?”

Bruce isn’t playing dim this time; he’s truly taken aback by the question. Clark is smiling openly—but what does contentment tell Bruce beyond the obvious—that he enjoyed the physical release, as any one of Bruce Wayne’s partners might do after orgasm? That amazing flash of transparency, the thoughts that darted across Clark’s face as clearly as fish through their flooded fields has become inundated, muddy, frustratingly opaque. He hums a non-committal response, which Clark interprets as a request for more information.

“I’m subtly attempting to discover your plans for the week. Assuming that you—assuming nothing, really.”

“Taping for Late Night Gotham tomorrow afternoon. Which is, funnily enough, hosted in Metropolis.” The details are harmless enough, so he adds, “Mindi keeps the rest of my calendar close to her vest. The mea culpa tour is less arduous if I only know a slice of it at a time.”

“Oh.”

Bruce has miscalculated somehow. The exchange of information wasn’t intended to be a brush-off. He pauses long enough to damn himself—and that thought (that Clark has, in fact, seen every one of his hesitations and simply not remarked on them) sends his blood running cold. He affects a yawn. “You? Plans?”

“Nothing,” Clark puts in quickly, then hedges against it. “That is, aside from a night of surveilling the Gotham Port for the Bat vigilante. Which is moot now, I suppose.”

“The Gotham port.” Bruce snorts. “That must have been enlightening.”

The ribbing tone is another miscalculation; instead of diverting the conversation onto smoother tracks, Clark brightens in a show of temper. “The Port isn’t without its points of interest,” Clark says hotly. “A counterfeit smuggling ring is run out of Dock Seven under the auspice of a ship running Sri Lankan colors. The entire situation is …strange. Ships are stacking up on Metropolis side. Tight shipping schedules would dictate that they’d make a quicker turn-around if they offloaded in Gotham. Now, the White Portuguese has the right idea. She docks tomorrow night. Her captain’s a bit of a rogue, with a hand in gray-market trading during the Greek troubles, but he’s good people. I actually met him once in—Bruce?”

The shock can’t be showing on his face, because Bruce has barely had time to process Clark’s words.

The White Portuguese is a ship.

Lex’s plan is simple. Neat, even. To import kryptonite without a hazardous materials license, Lex needs the cover of a semi-legitimate operation that can bribe cargo inspectors who won’t bat an eye at passing a crate to Lex’s retrieval team outside of union hours. Even his government contacts will overlook one gray-market cargo ship stealing into the Port of Gotham; the cover of Lex’s public disdain towards 20th century solutions is better than any protection a high-cost air smuggling operation or well-paid team of mercenaries could give him.

But Lex can’t be allowed to acquire the kryptonite. Whatever he plans to do with it, it can’t be any better than what—

“Bruce?”

—than what Bruce planned to do.

“Lost you for a minute,” Clark says warmly.

In his mind’s eye, Bruce can clearly picture the red beams scything through Jack’s building, the magma crawling in Clark’s infraorbital mass. Past and present catch in a whirlwind around the primary mission parameters of the past eighteen months: discover the Kryptonian’s weaknesses; weaponize those weaknesses; neutralize the alien. From the preliminary reports of kryptonite’s structure, he had thought that a piercing weapon or an inhalant might work.

An arm bears down on his back; a hand brushes against his jaw as it trails up to push the hair back from Bruce’s face, so carefully done. A Kryptonian pulse fluttering faster than any human’s: a question in it, with only two possible answers. Bruce’s heart is suddenly in a state of freefall, suspended in the moment before impact:

Is the kryptonite what Bruce planned to do, or plans to do?

“I should—” and gestures towards the en suite bathroom as calmly as he can, making himself complete the ritual of the fastidious bed partner who doesn’t want to wake up stuck to his ruined suit.

Clark floats them back down into the jumble of pillows and sheets that have pooled in the middle of the broken bed, and Bruce springs over the uneven lip of the headboard, splintered where someone kicked it in pleasure.

“I’m going to clean up,” Bruce says. “Uh—is there anything you could do to give me some privacy?”

“I won’t ambush you in the shower,” Clark promises, earnest and smiling with it. Jesus.

He thumbs his earlobe. “Anything you can do not to listen in?”

“I do understand privacy, Bruce. I can, ah.” Clark looks taken aback. Bruce suspects that he’s making Clark explain verbally what he might always have quietly done for lovers, if he’s had them. “Build a wall around my senses. I’ll only hear what’s happening in this room. I’m responsible for—that is to say, I can’t keep them closed for long.”

Bruce does understand. “Fifteen minutes,” he bargains.

Clark shrugs his agreement, and closes his eyes. Bruce imagines that he’s engaging in something much like light meditation to build a wall around his senses.

Moments later, a startlingly loud snore rips through the room.

“Clark,” Bruce says, skirting the wild suspicion that he might be faking it.

But Clark doesn’t even rouse; he’s as good as dead to the world. Bruce grabs Clark’s discarded pants—thrown with enough force under a table that he had not noticed them before now—and yanks the en suite bathroom door closed behind him.

If Bruce expects the bathroom to feel like any less of a prison of his own making, he’s dead wrong. The bathroom twinkles its black and white ultra-modern luxury back at him: two cistern sinks, two mirrors, two sets of soap and hotel-branded hand lotions. The mockery of it is unbearable. Everything about Bruce Wayne is a goddamn weight around his neck.

He slams the lights off.

Tuned up to an impossibly high note, Bruce strips out of his ruined shirt, pants, boxers, and throws them into the bathtub. Feeling through the dark, he pulls on Clark’s tweed trousers, does up the zipper. They’re loose on him, ready to slip over his hips with one good tug, but he doesn’t need to wear them for long; he just needs to—

Bruce pops open the tinted black floor-to-ceiling glass, the chill in the night air nipping at his chest, arms, face. The balcony railing is within easy reach. Rolling his shoulders, he leaps for the handhold, and pulls himself up onto the metal bar. Without the grip from his gauntlets, the lacquered metal is as slippery as ice, and as cold as it too. The next jump will be harder with numb fingers, but easy enough that he barely gives it a second thought. He coils and springs for the railing of the balcony on the penthouse floor, and one more swing puts him onto the roof, in view of the Batwing, his extra Batsuit, and maybe some semblance of order.

Bruce activates the scrambler once he opens the hatch of the Batwing. It might be too late to destroy any security footage that captured him approaching the vehicle or de-activating its biolock, both damning pieces of evidence in and of themselves; but at least there won’t be Bruce Wayne, half-naked and struggling to slide his sweat-slick skin into a clinging nano-carbon fiber suit, playing nonstop on primetime TV, too.

Bruce supposes the night has another possible ending: he could open the canopy of the Batwing and swing back down to the balcony in his Batsuit. Sweeping through their battlefield like a dark shadow, he could tangle himself around Clark in the broken bed; stroke Clark; revel in the heat of that Kryptonian body (so richly alive) as he awakens. Clark would see Bruce’s suit—maybe understand the moment of doubt, maybe not—but wouldn’t press. Instead, Bruce would tell him (haltingly) one true thing about himself, a minor detail of Bruce’s past: an olive branch to repay trust for trust. Stunned by the intimacy, they would fuck against the white sheets: black pieces of the Batsuit discarded on the mattress; his cape around Clark’s shield on the floor next to them—their dark and shining truths hopelessly tangled up. Clark would spill across Bruce’s bare thighs, not muffled by the collar pin; this time, Bruce would hear what Clark shouts as he tips over.

And Bruce would still sneak away—much later, under a morning sky still flush with promise—but in a week’s time, Bruce would find Superman hovering over one of his perches in Gotham, or the lakehouse, or outside of Wayne Enterprises’ boardroom: any number of impossible places—

Because whatever this is, it’s too much.

Bruce inputs the launch sequence into the Batwing’s computer. He sucks in a breath, counts through it, as her engine wash rumbles through the building below them. If Clark’s going to dart in front of him, it will be now. Or now. Or now.

The sky, thick with rain clouds, remains clear. Bruce glances over the targeting screen to confirm.

No hostile contact.

Grabbing the throttle, Bruce pushes the Batwing above the clouds and lets her drop towards Gotham with a numb, thundering momentum.

The Batwing hovers over an abandoned section of the waterfront: a red brick warehouse with faded gold lettering for Trask’s Treasures—none of its grandeur left from the Gotham Port’s boom days. An old access code triggers the hidden entrance and the roof folds in, scattering an irate roost of crows who are sheltering between her smokestacks.

Fifteen years ago, during the height of the Bat’s mob-breaking days, this safehouse had been compromised by the Black Mask; Alfred had retired all of Bruce Wayne’s official and unofficial waterfront properties, and the area had never recovered. The location had been picked long before the plans for the Bat’s current arsenal was finalized; so it’s no surprise when Bruce eases the Batwing down into the narrow space, her wingtips scrape lines into the paint. The Batwing wasn’t designed to fit into a space this small.

When the landing gear taps the concrete floor, Bruce shuts down the engines and folds her wings into their upright position. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to hover her without the assistance of the wings, and his exit will be more graceful.

In the dim interior, the running lights pick out looping motorcycle tracks on the bare concrete floor, a small (gutted) console, and cobwebbed lockers. At the opposite end of the warehouse, next to a locked-downed , a single desk the beer cans and empty take-out containers of its last watch are buried under thick drifts of dust; the hatches on the weapons cache and the emergency rations locker are ripped open, interiors visibly bare.

Roman Sionis’ people haven’t kept a guard on this warehouse for years.

Even though it’s likely been stripped of all of its essential parts, Bruce will scout the entire location to see if any useful gear survived—but for now, Bruce has another duty to discharge.

Bruce double-checks that all remote systems activation protocols are deactivated before he punches in the activation code on the communications array, flipping on the locational scrambler to slow down a backtrace. On a non-mission night, Alfred would be long asleep by now.

“Alfred,” he says.

“I take it that your situation at the Regency has resolved itself to your satisfaction,” comes the eventual reply.

Bruce ignores the chill creeping into his heart. “Perceptive as always.”

“I’ve let you play your game in Metropolis, because you obviously have something to work out with that city. But don’t think for a second that I haven’t noticed you lying to me all night, whether by omission or commission.”

“I’ve located it,” Bruce says without any preamble.

Alfred registers his surprise, wondering how Bruce managed to recover the leech so quickly.

“Not the leech. Kryptonite,” Bruce corrects. The name is unfamiliar, but Bruce knows that the name is enough to betray its origins.

Alfred’s voice is thunderous, dangerous, steady. “There was never any dirty bomb, was there, sir?”

All it takes to expose months of lying and broken faith is two words. He says them now. “There wasn’t.”

An angry silence fills the line.

Alfred knows the worst, so he might as well know the rest. Bruce lays out the plan, to Alfred cutting asides. Alfred’s suspicion is incisive, stinging commentary landing where it can do damage. Bruce lets it; it’s the least of what he deserves. Bruce sketches out his improvised plan—if it could even be called that, with an unknown strength of men surrounding the kryptonite, with barely more detail that what the rudimentary plan had been months ago, before he had a location, or a name.

Finally, Alfred breaks in with a curt, “Did Mr. Luthor simply volunteer this information? Since, I assume, you met someone at the Regency, and knowing your form of persuasion have likely been tied up with this person in amorous repose.” Alfred draws a horrified breath. “Tell me you didn’t, sir. Not Lex.”

“I discovered it from an uninvolved third party,” Bruce says, his tone as even as he can keep it, in the face of the lapse in judgment on top and the personal self-destructiveness it would take for Alfred to imagine him fucking Lex Luthor. “Don’t ask for a name; I’m not going to give it over a comm channel.”

“Is this one going to end up on the six o’clock news?”

“If it does, we’re sunk.”

The joke goes over about as well as Bruce expects it to--Alfred pauses and then says icily, “You rarely ask for my advice directly.”

“It hardly seems sporting to just ask.”

“I am giving it to you now. Show up to the Late Night Gotham taping tomorrow. Plead your case to the people. Let the world laugh at Bruce Wayne, if you insist on making a mockery of yourself. We can deal with the Superman Question, together, after you’ve dealt with the Bruce Wayne one.”

“This isn’t the Holiday Regent’s Affair, Alfred. A soundbite about municipal corruption and some well-placed donations won’t make this disappear.”

“I would hardly call,” Alfred begins, rising to the bait, then cuts himself off. “You would be surprised how far charm and well-imitated earnestness will get you, sir.”

“Making a few jokes at my expense won’t sate their hunger. Once the story hits the international feeds, the world won’t give Gotham a pat on the back and let us get on with our business. Superman is the only story right now. If it isn’t Superman grinding the bootheel of justice in Nairomi, it’s Bruce Wayne and his power fantasies about the most powerful man on Earth. They’re not going to stop digging at this story, and—neither will he.”

“The Bat can’t solve Bruce Wayne’s problems. Bruce Wayne got himself into this mess and Bruce Wayne will have to dig himself out. The White Portuguese can wait.”

“It really can’t.”

By now, Alfred has discovered that the scrambled channel that will slow his trace until the after the completion of Bruce’s mission. He suspects that a certain reserve of anger has been dammed up behind their aborted arguments about the women, about the drinking, about the lying; and now that the time has finally arrived, impending dressing-down will roll down like waters.

Bruce has witnessed this level of frustration only twice before; once when it was Dick and once when it was Jason. To complete their training, each Robin had been assigned a solo field mission; Bruce and Alfred oversaw the operation from the Cave. At Bruce’s insistence, the mission parameters had been no radio contact except for the all-clear or an abort at the end of the run. Alfred white-knuckled the edge of the command console, his teeth on edge, each word honed like a batarang: that it was foolish to send them into the field alone; that no one in their family should ever be alone, even as Bruce knew that they had to prepare for the eventuality of it.

This is the tone Alfred uses to rebuke him now.

“You’re going to recover the kryptonite—and destroy it.”

Bruce grimaces, his head falling back against the cockpit seat. “Not exactly.”

“He is not our enemy.”

Bruce snorts, unconvincing to his own ears. “Do you take that on faith? Jesus, Alfred, count the dead. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Who holds him accountable for Metropolis? He blazed a trail of destruction because he couldn’t be bothered to contain the fight. Who says to Superman: this can’t happen again? That Congressional Committee who hands down to us the scintillating wisdom of the ages: ‘Superman is, therefore we censure him?’ He’s the most powerful being on this planet and they think words will restrain him?”

(Bruce swallows back the knowledge that, in the right context, the pressure of one finger is enough to restrain Superman.)

The litany is familiar. These words have trailed their rage across the past eighteen months, fueling every upgrade to the Batsuit, every addition to the Bat’s arsenal. But the hot flush of certainty that accompanied his late nights of falters now that he’s only hours away from the mission objective.

“All it takes is one wrong action.” Bruce continues against the growing doubt of his own mind. “One mistake,” he says softly, building volume as he continues, searching for conviction. “A missile aimed at the city, or a dirty bomb slipped over our borders, or another goddamn space alien that doesn’t look like a Kansas farmboy. Hell, Superman wakes up cranky one morning and decides it’s an easier day in his life to live in the New World Order. If there’s a chance that flying menace decides his power imbues him with the right to decide for us—if it’s not our place to stop him, world will burn in the shadow of his image.”

“I don’t take it on faith, Master Wayne,” Alfred says, clearly alarmed—perhaps unprepared for the depth of Bruce’s feeling. “I take it on experience. For a man that’s done nothing but defame his image, he seemed personally invested in Bruce Wayne’s well being. That isn’t the attitude of a tyrant. It’s hardly believable from a saint. The fact remains that the world has enough ambiguity for us to embrace Superman as a person, to see his actions as consequences of a thinking being responding to global problems on a global scale. These are questions that should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.”

“Experience.” A piece falls into place about Clark’s sudden disappearance from the Starlight Suite. “Superman was at the house.”

“He was, sir.”

“He saw the Cave,” Bruce says flatly.

“I most certainly did not invite him for tea and for a quick whirl around our den of conspiracy, if that’s what you’re implying—”

“—He can see through solid objects, Alfred.”

“More information from your uninvolved third party?” All at once, Alfred’s voice has taken on a contemplative, rather than angry, profile. Bruce knows his ass is showing; that anyone who’s seen him through puberty likely doesn’t find him half as opaque as he hopes to be.

“Direct observation,” he offers, uneasily. “Eighteen hours. Then I seize the kryptonite.”

“Bruce! We need—”

“—a world without Bruce Wayne’s bullshit.” Bruce grinds his teeth, as he imagines the fullness of justice and the clarity of purpose that would come the day that he jettisons Bruce Wayne’s cover forever. “I can’t tell you what I would give to experience that.”

Bruce cuts the transmission before Alfred can rally the next salvo; the decision has been made. What Wayne Enterprises needs is immaterial; the world requires the Bat, not Bruce Wayne.

Kicking off the emergency override controls, Bruce shuts down all systems except for the proximity alarms. In the glow of the computer console, he begins to sketch out retrieval plans for a security force of unknown strength, until the numbers—compounding together with the possibility of a future where his sex tape and its consequences no longer haunt him—lull him to sleep in the warm safety of Batwing’s cockpit.

Chapter Text

The first thing Bruce becomes aware of is a metallic weight biting into his wrists. The second thing—as a tug sends him swinging through the air like a pendulum— he’s no longer connected to the ground. His vision judders, green phosphenes sparkling in the corner of his eyes, as he fights down a splintering headache. He’s been captured; that much is obvious. Was he drugged? Incapacitated? He remembers activating the proximity sensors in the cockpit of the Batwing and then...nothing. The question how did his captors disable the Batwing’s defenses is second only to the nagging refrain: who would have the strength to take the Bat completely unaware?

Bruce suppresses the wild paranoia that rises in him. Assessing tonight’s lapse in judgment is academic; right now, his priority must be escape.

The air is stale and bitterly cold: the kind of cold that pierces the nano-fiber mesh of the Batsuit, teasing a false warmth on the edge of hypothermia. The Batsuit he’s wearing is a field model that was designed before Gotham exploded in themed rogues—the commuting bombers, the puzzle extortionists, the never-ending parade of icegun-toting villains. As the heat leeches away from his body, Bruce regrets that his subzero-rated Gucci suit is decorating a hotel floor in Metropolis.

Odds are, he was overwhelmed by a superior force, heavily concussed, and with the emergency beacon and remote drone mode disabled, Alfred was unable to spirit the Batwing away from Bruce’s aggressors when they wrenched open the cockpit.

Alfred will have a field day with that later.

Wrapped clumsily around his wrists, Bruce makes short work of the slack he’s been given. When he’s freed up enough of the extra length around his wrists to stand, Bruce touches down and rolls his shoulders to ease the burn. His muscles are sore but not fatigued; he probably hadn’t been strung up more than half an hour ago and apparently wasn’t deemed enough of a risk to leave a guard. That’s a point in Bruce’s favor. He’s not dealing with anyone who has encountered him before; repeat offenders know not to leave the Bat unsupervised.

As Bruce shifts his weight, the earth rolls precariously underneath his boots. Far less stable than the cement or brick of the safehouse ought to be.

Bruce scuffs at the ground. A cloud of fine grained sand kicks up, free of the sea salt tang of the Gotham shore. Wherever Sionis’s men—or whoever else might wish to capture him—moved him, it’s further than he expected.

But at least he’s had one piece of luck: he hasn’t been unmasked.

Consciousness settles in fitfully, but the green edge to his vision takes longer to fade. Once Bruce can move his head without sensory distortion, he resumes testing the chains for weakness. On a particularly strong tug, the chain snags, rock crumbles and rains down onto his shoulders, then gives a little more.

He takes a deep breath—one more pull should dislodge the chain from the first ring driven into the cave ceiling—and coughs violently. A foul taste sears the back of his throat—worse than the charnel houses in the meatpacking district, or the acrid fumes from Gotham’s last coal refinery. It’s a taste that he recognizes from the day Wayne Financial fell in Metropolis. The smell of vaporized concrete from a burning building. But not just one, a city of them, and with it comes the promise that he won’t breathe easy for another day of his life.

When the coughing finally dies down, it echoes back at Bruce as through a long corridor. If he had to hazard a guess about the cave’s layout, a series of tunnels and rooms probably branched off from this vestibule. It’s interesting, but not immediately important. He needs to get to the surface. He needs to see his city. Now.

Whoever tied him up was kidding themselves. They didn’t remove the Batsuit’s gauntlets or his belt; and they gave him more than enough slack to maneuver his wrists up to his mouth, to pull the concealed butane torch free from his left gauntlet.

Enough time, too, for Bruce to understand something is terribly wrong. As he locks the ignition trigger, the blue torch flame springs to life—

—the world tilts beneath him like the floor of a pinball machine, sending him and the torch flying against the cave wall. As Bruce scrambles for the torch, his arms are yanked roughly out of the chains. By the time that he registers that he’s free, the world snaps and resets.

Bruce flinches as another figure hangs limply from another set of chains. His face is slack, carefree in his unconsciousness, and he’s dressed for rough living: goggles; bandana; thick canvas pants and a leather duster with a thick fur hood that’s shoved back from a bat-eared cowl. The rest of his equipment is split between supplies for hard desert living and subarctic survival.

Bruce grabs the man’s face roughly. The other Bruce doesn’t respond, not even to a stinging slap.

Second compartment on the belt. A self-injecting epinephrine ampule is in his hands as soon as he thinks of it, pressed against the meat of the other Bruce’s thigh, but before he has a chance to inject it, the room tilts again and cracks down an invisible seam. The epinephrine slips from his fingers. Bruce propels himself at the nearest cave wall and claws at the slick river rock for a handhold. By some miracle, he finds one and clings to it as the other Bruce disappears into the slit like a soap bubble disintegrating on the surface of a stream—borne away from him by an invisible current, smashed up against the dark rocks of spacetime bullshit.

The world rights itself with a thunk, as a chunk of the cave wall breaks off under Bruce’s grip.

Bruce stares at it blankly. The slick river rock has turned to powder in his hands, as insubstantial as sand. Slowly, he raises his eyes to the wall. Underneath the rock, there’s a WayneTech Special Projects coolant pipe. The pipe might not unique in this world—aside from the Batcave, a particle accelerator in Central City uses one—but it’s a close enough thing to make finding the yellow WayneTech logo here impossible.

All at once, Bruce understands. The tilt-a-whirl world. The doppelganger geared up to fight a never-ending war.

He’s dreaming.

A kind of peace descends.

A dream.

That revelation allows him to turn his back on the empty space where his doppelganger hung-- but he can’t shake the urgency that bubbles out of him, can’t do anything but tear through the long corridor, spurred onward by a bone-deep need to see his city.

He climbs up the ladder he finds at the end of the tunnel and pops open a pressure hatch.

Bruce emerges on a bluff-face in a red-and-purple twilight. Through a choking smog, he sees a ruined city—his city—skyscrapers scattered across the landscape like chaff below a pale smear of stars and a dark moon. The idea springs into his mind fully formed; somehow, Bruce knows that it’s midday rather than midnight; that the icy drifts that have frozen over the sea of sand are a consequence of the absent sun. This snow-capped desert laps against the edge of the city, swirls around it, and carries Bruce’s gaze beyond it, to two giant holes that have been punched into the Earth’s crust. Their sides are shored up by a walls of tech whose tremendous circuitry is visible even from this distance. The scale of those works are unimaginable, as their eerie light blazes into the mesosphere. Bruce thinks that they resemble nothing so much as firepits, bleeding energy from the core to—heat the surface of the planet?—provide light to this darkness-choked world?

In the frozen desert between Bruce and the ruin, he spots a great Omega scorched into the earth. Only a faint outline of it is visible now, time or concerted effort burying it with the same equanimity as it buries the great fallen cities of Gotham and Metropolis.

A snowdrift breaks off from the cliff face and covers the hatch behind him; Bruce barely acknowledges it.

It’s not really his city. The ruins intermingle the landmarks of both Gotham and Metropolis from this vantage point, making it impossible to tell which city he stands vigil for, and while the other Bruce may have ended his watch, he still has a Gotham to return to.

A scream rends the peace and Bruce whirls towards the noise.

The sound originated three hundred meters to his left, past the cliffs. He presses himself close to the cliff face and works his way silently over the snow-pocked terrain until it gives way to a switchback and a plateau beyond it. Unlike the dunes below, the ground here is hard-packed dirt held down by the roots of dead trees--a good place for an encampment.

A quick sweep of the area confirms Bruce’s supposition; nestled between the cliffs, a ragtag collection of buildings shelters in a dead grove, the twisted shapes of trees offering some protection from the bitter wind that rises off of the desert tundra. The camp (a generous term for it) is several canvas tents and a rickety aluminum shelter cluster around the leeside of a concrete and corrugated half-dome plane hanger. The camp’s outer wall appears to be little more than a chain link fence reinforced with green aluminum siding, and an occasional attempt at a guard tower.

Bruce’s gaze sharpens.

The guard towers are empty, as is the guard booth next to the gate. Inside the perimeter, he hears the muffled fall of boots and quick cries as strikes land against skin, canvas, armor.

It’s not real. It’s not his problem.

But the knowledge that nothing he does here matters slips away from him.

Someone cried out for help.

He breaks into a run. His cape billows around him as he leaps the fence. With a feral grin, he falls on a man brandishing a bastanada at a young boy dressed for hard desert living, and makes short work of him, as his cape closes in tightly around him.

“Run,” Bruce commands. The boy pulls back his bandana and frowns at him. His chin tilts up defiantly. Perhaps he even whispers the words unbelievable and sloppy that are echoing through Bruce’s own mind as a telltale whoosh of metal flies past his ear and the world goes dark again.

This is starting to become a motif, Bruce thinks groggily as he struggles back to consciousness. He tugs at his arms (wrenched behind his back) to confirm his suspicions. He’s been tied to one of the twisted oaks outside of the camp, two boot lengths from the cliff’s edge. His gauntlets and belt have been removed, the bonds secure around his bare wrists. The individual jute fibers cut into his skin as he maneuvers the tie to free up any possible slack.

This time, he can’t find any.

So. One constant in the universe: the Bat’s captors have an accelerating learning curve.

As he gazes at the city in the distance, Bruce realizes this bluff must have been one of the barrier islands in Gotham Harbor before the oceans of this godforsaken place boiled away. This island—cliff—was one of the locations Bruce had scouted for a secondary base if Bruce Wayne’s cover were to ever be compromised beyond rehabilitation.

Beyond rehabilitation. Bruce gunts his disbelief at his subconscious and something shifts in his ear. His comm! Bruce jostles his ear against his shoulder once, twice. The comm’s activation pips chime softly.

“Alfred,” he subvocalizes, and waits.

“Anyone,” he tries.

On the horizon, a burst of green energy upwells from the pits and arches into the atmosphere in a shower of fluttering sparks.

Some time later, he’s aware of movement. His captors interpose themselves between him and the endless night. The boy in the bandana and desert gear (skin the kind of pale that hasn’t seen the sun in years) kicks him in the side then motions at his companion to do the same. A soldier clothed in desert assault gear, a Kalashnikov slung over their shoulder, with a facemask modified to filter out sand. The weapon is not pointed at Bruce, not yet. That could give him valuable seconds to—

Bruce realizes that they’re speaking in low tones to each other. The language isn’t Greek or Pashtu though it seems similar to both. Odd lilting phrases breaking up longer utterances, the cadence of its sentences more like singing than speaking. The sense-memory of it scrapes at a memory of language from before there were mouths to speak it, and he responds with a kind of reptilian terror.

Bruce’s earpiece blitzes him with a sharp piercing static and then coughs up a broken translation.

“Star-god killer has engaged Son-of-All at Sol,” the boy reports.

“So kill Blood-Traitor and have done with it.” The barrel of the soldier’s automatic weapon motions towards Bruce on blood-traitor but returns to a rest position. His captors were smart enough to take his equipment and bind him correctly, but they’re really not concerned about Bruce.

Bruce, who can’t free himself from the rope. Dream rope. The thought irks hims more than he cares to admit.

The boy crosses his arm. “We should leave hunter-of-darkness with the others. Let the Caller-of-Beasts have him.”

Bruce cranes his neck over his shoulder. Around the camp, men and women have been tied to the trees like sacrifices on stakes driven into the ground. Some are only rousing back to consciousness now; the others struggle feebly against their bonds.

A winged thing detaches itself from the twilit sky and lands soundlessly in front of the camp’s gate. Faceless and immense, the creature’s articulated limbs are too numerous to count; twisted, they hang uselessly at its sides. Two sets of dragonfly wings beat a staccato rhythm above its eyeless head, catching and reflecting the light of the stars. The chitinous bulk draws up to its full height and towers over the desert outpost, and with a great heave the wyrm opens its jaws and roars. The unearthly clamor that erupts from its gullet is followed a quiet so profound, it reverberates in Bruce’s chest.

In a flash of movement, more of them fall from the sky. They are silent as they form a ring around the doomed camp, their bodies are the color of absence, writhing, a mass of terrible purpose.

Only when the camp is eclipsed by the creatures does Bruce spot a flash of color amid the host. A second soldier in a red helm and armor traced with the same circuitry as the firepits. The ringleader, the caller of beasts, motions toward the camp, and the giant wyrm detaches from the silent circle. With a massive crash of its tale, it flattens the hangar.

None of the other creatures move to attack. Waiting for their master, or—? The beast-caller whistles to the other two captors, the hurry up of the command plain even to Bruce.

The soldier lifts the strap of the automatic rifle over their head and shoves it at the boy’s midsection. “This is a test, demon-strider. Fulfill the mission or we leave you for carrion.”

The boy takes the rifle, and slides his fingers across the trigger guard. As he raises it, the muzzle slams into the soldier’s hand and is pushed back to the ground.

“Wait.” The soldier grabs Bruce roughly by the neck. “Blood-traitor is not granted an honored death.”

The cowl is ripped free with their other hand, tasers and security locks useless against the soldier’s overwhelming strength.

The chill air nips at his forehead as he’s laid bare to their scrutiny, the mask hangs limply between their fingers. Bruce braces himself against the shock of recognition; even here, he can’t stamp out the last ember of his deepest fear: the two halves of his world crashing irreconcilably together. But no remarks come; they’re as bored by Bruce’s face as he is. How different this world must be, Bruce wonders desperately, that he doesn’t even rate a bewildered Bruce Wayne?

“Now. Let him meet his gods without his real face.” The soldier drops the cowl in the dust and grinds it under a bootheel, the glee of the gesture as visceral as a punch to the gut. The boy reacts with a very different emotion. A fleeting curl of his lips. Anger. But not at Bruce. Shit, maybe Bruce can leverage the boy against his commander.

“Hey,” he croaks, then licks his lips and tries again. “Hey! Don’t I get a last request?”

The boy swears vehemently. “Stop talking,” he orders in accented English, instead of aiming the gun and ending him.

Is the boy...stalling?

“Alfred, I’m sorry.” It’s one of Bruce’s oldest emergency codes, an all hands, report your status after a mission has been compromised. Desperation spurs the hope that the words might kindle a flicker of recognition, so he tries again. “Alfred, forgive me.”

The color drains from the boy’s face. He swears again, picks up the gun’s aim, and before Bruce can blink, the report of the rifle cracks the stillness. The soldier slumps to the ground, a smoking hole in their facemask.

The boy holds up a hand to quell Bruce but does not move to free him from his bonds. Instead, he shoves the gun into the cradle of the trunk, eyes blazing with anger. “Do not think to lecture me; her life was forfeit. Why did you say that name?”

“Alfred?” Bruce repeats, and the boy bares his teeth in frustration.

“Did you not drill me to never speak it aloud for his protection as he moves through Old Gotham?”

Silence is Bruce’s best and only answer.

“You have been unforgivably sloppy,” the boy chides, as he slots himself against the tree, and adjusts his aim through the scope for the beast-caller in their silent ring of constructs. “Your people are in danger,” the boy says softly. “They sold to you to the enemy. Do you care if they die?”

“Yes,” Bruce says emphatically, tone brooking no compromise.

“TT. The next time you need rescue, ask one of your Robins for help, Father.”

Father. The word kicks back with each muzzle burst. The rifle is not precise at this range, but the boy (Bruce’s son?) drills bullets into the constructs. Bruce can’t shut his ears to it, but the sounds of the living—the crying, the ragged breaths, the snatches of frantic goodbyes—diminish until terrible silence remains, only broken by the report of the boy’s rifle and its inexorable chant. Father, father, father.

The bullets unerringly find their targets, but the oozing holes in their sides don’t even slow the constructs.

“Useless!” The Kalashnikov falls against the tree trunk disgustedly.

“Untie me,” Bruce commands.

“Why haven’t you escaped?” Frowning. Appraising. But the boy slips a butterfly knife out of his belt and drops it into Bruce’s upturned palm.

Bruce doesn’t answer it, or the question that spreads across his mind like oil on water, waiting for the match to strike. Would it have made a difference if you had escaped? Has the Bat ever made a difference?

“We need a plan,” the boy announces, flickering a glance back to confirm that Bruce is unharmed and extracting himself from the ropes in all due haste. Bruce catches a soft muttering about Pennyworth escape techniques as he massages the feeling back into his own wrists.

Bruce kicks the boots of the dead soldier out of the way and snags his cowl from under her. He wipes down the faceplate. Grit has invaded the biolocks; the grains of sand caught in the lining will do nothing but irritate him if he tries to wear the cowl now, so he tucks it into the waistband of his suit and ghosts up behind his unlikely rescuer (his son). Together, they watch the line of constructs mass around their position and then pull away in a terrifying dance, dark waves of insectoid segments and labyrinthine limbs. In that roiling center, Bruce glimpses the blood-red armor of their master, the bodies of the camp members.

As the mass of constructs undulates closer to their position, Bruce seizes the boy and pulls him bodily behind the meager cover of the tree. “They should have advanced by now. We’re needed alive. I think you know why.”

The boy pushes up his right sleeve. A red and silver gauntlet with a pulsing red core covers his forearm, nearly swallowing up his hand in circuitry. A thrumming noise pings in rapid succession at the edge of his hearing, pulsing as steadily as a heartbeat, and Bruce immediately knows (without understanding how he knows) that it is alive. It’s almost second-nature for Bruce to recognize the distinct pattern of circles and lines: the same as the circuits of the beast-caller’s power armor. The boy’s hand strokes the red core. A mechanical voice breathes the name Damian, followed by a string of whirring pops.

“She can’t get back to Apokolips without it.” Damian pets the gauntlet as though he’s gentling a spooked calf. “She’ll not risk damaging the last motherbox on Earth,” Damian says, pride in his voice that’s offset by some deeper sadness.

Bruce pointedly doesn’t ask any more questions; he supposes there will either be time for that story later, or they’ll be dead.

As Bruce ticks through the possibilities of assaulting a position with an unknown strength of opponents—and an unknown number waiting to join as the assault progresses—a memory from a time before presents itself to his mind. He had been planning an extraction: unknown security forces, single target, retrieval mission in an area of action circumscribed by two immovable points, the ocean, and abandoned Gotham warehouses. The White Portuguese, Bruce thinks dimly. Kryptonite. Lex Luthor and Good Morning Gotham and press tours—his thoughts mix together in a riot of color, like greasepaint swirling down a drain.

The fact remains: the beast-caller will kill them and any others that stand in her way. Bruce imagines that the little of humanity that survived this cataclysm must be living in outposts barely larger than camp the constructs just destroyed, barely defended, incapable of repelling something as ruthless as a sky full of horrors.

Bruce knows that they can’t risk the beastcaller’s retrieval. The conclusion is inescapable: it has to be a kill.

“If I draw her out, can you get a clean shot?”

Damian looks at him quizzically and nods once.

“Good. Consider that our plan.”

Damian seizes Bruce’s wrist. “You are acting erratically, Father. You’ve never asked me to kill before. In all of my years with you, you have demanded that I respect life, theirs and ours. And I have...tried,” Damian’s voice wavers as he reins himself back in. It’s surreal to watch Bruce’s compartmentalization technique play out on the face of a boy no older than fourteen.

It wouldn’t be hard to echo the sentiment that Alfred delivered to him when he hauled himself from the Jeep into the carport of the lake house, still watching the tower fall with Jack inside it, and said, I tried to be a good man, Alfred, but this world demands a different response. Bruce stands on the other side of that emotion, watching someone else struggle up that same hill of conviction and doubt.

“I know you have,” Bruce says instead.

“I would prefer a plan that does not require me to kill her over your corpse,” Damian says softly. “Backup—” his voice barely hitches, but Bruce hears it anyway—“will not arrive.”

Bruce pats the side of Damian’s face roughly. “Leverage, plan gamma-beta-eight. Do you understand?”

Damian nods sharply, scrutinizing Bruce. Maybe I’ll meet him one day, Bruce thinks hazily and then lets it go--the thought is absurd. Damian’s here; they’ve already met.

Leverage Gamma-Beta-Eight is an old mission code for fake a suicide run against an enemy too stupid to know that you’re baiting them. Bruce rushes into fray; punching, kicking, striking any joint or soft spot on the monstrous bodies, he dodges the construct’s snapping maws. Against the dim sky, the constructs’ bodies appear solid, but as he blocks their multitudinous limbs, his hands sink into their jellyfish-soft skin, burning as they touch the slick inner core.

He snaps his fists back instinctively, and surveys the damage. An oily residue build up along the edge of the suit. Nothing he can’t handle.

After one vicious strike to a scaly construct puts his fist into a construct up to his elbow, Bruce feels the oily sludge penetrate his skin. Wrongness crawls up his spine; seconds later, agony blazes up his arms, into the base of his skull. The pain is almost paralyzing, but he doesn’t stop. Bruce launches himself into blur of motion, limber in spite of the searing pain. He dodges the slavering jaws of the great wyrm, and doesn’t stop until the beast-caller herself has him against the ground, jackboot to his throat. Bruce spits a mouthful of the black sludge into the sand, and grins up at her. Her blood will be up from the fight. Now she’ll frogmarch him out to use as a bargaining chip for Damian’s surrender, and when she’s in the open, Damian will have his shot.

The plan never fails—

Except, apparently, when it does. The monsters pull in a tight ring, blocking them from Damian’s sniper nest.

Bruce can’t see a face through the beast-caller’s breathing mask; he has to imagine the self-satisfaction as she raises her boot from his windpipe. Bruce sucks in a choking breath, lungs burning. He rolls with the next kick so it doesn’t cave in his jaw. The boot slams into his shoulder.

“Alien’s pet.” Sneered in English. She aims the pistol at his forehead—

A small oh god slips out of Bruce’s mouth. He’s going to die in this godforsaken place. In the background, he hears the report of the rifle, again, again, and again, then a roar, barely human. Damian’s voice tearing through the pain, you promised him—!

Thunder cracks the sky.

Rain? In this place?

The beast-caller and Bruce look up together as a bolide streaks through the twilight sky. The streak changes directions, angling towards them, white-hot and gaining speed. Falling faster and faster, a star brighter than all of the heavens washes the sky with light, until the sun itself seems to be rising. The ground roars underfoot. The beast-caller drops her pistol and cowers; Bruce stares on dumbly, too racked with pain to break for the shelter. Breying in terror, the constructs break free of their master’s control. Some evaporate into the air, their bodies of void and translucent gray flesh withering in the brightness; others break towards the cliff, thirsty for their promised kill. The last of them, the great wyrm, turns, and roars its defiance at Bruce.

He braces his arms in front of him and feels a backwash of heat overtake him, as the breath of the disgusting chitinous mass bears down on him. Damian could still make it, if he throws himself over the cliff and grabs for a handhold. Damian could still survive. Bruce releases his terror, breathes through it, and wishes only that he’d had more time—

He feels the voice vibrate through his bones, more than hears it. “Hold steady.”

Instinctively, he obeys. All around him, a crimson wave of heat blasts a circle, annihilating everything in its path. The edge of it is meters away, precise and controlled, never once breaching the invisible sphere of protection around Bruce’s body. Caught in the wave of destruction, the great wyrm burbles, and then crumbles into dust as the heat scours the earth clean.

The cascade of red energy abruptly cuts off.

Bruce drops his arms. As the red light dims, the cracked crust of sand pops and hisses as it cools in the freezing air. The ground in a giant circle around him has fused into obsidian glass.

Despite the throbbing agony clawing its way through his body, Bruce drags himself to his feet. When he sees him floating overhead, the world narrows to that point: the red cape streams on quantum currents too gentle to be felt as wind, glowing with the heat of his re-entry. The midnight blue suit is outlined against the night. The crest of the House of El shining with the light of a thousand stars.

He’s the most beautiful thing Bruce has ever seen, and Bruce can’t let it drive him to his knees, but neither can he remain upright.

He stumbles. Before he can catch himself against the sand, he’s held in arms that have held him before. Superman. Eyes burning with magma-hot fury, red and black veins crawling across his face. Bruce’s worst nightmare, in the flesh. The arms are more careful than he could have ever imagined. Bruce grips the shoulder under the Superman suit as hard as he can, pressing in; he finds no resistance there, just warm, pliant muscle. Clark turns his head to the monster-caller, the ringleader, cowering beneath her pistol, half of her body already twisting away from them in horror.

“You… removed his mask,” Clark says with deadly calm, enunciating each word. “You killed my people. Do you accept the punishment?”

“You are nothing, Star-god killer!” the beastcaller chokes out. Clark’s just come from battle, Bruce realizes. Star-god killer was fighting at Sol. In space. Unimaginable—

Clark lifts her chin with a finger. “I am Kal-El of Krypton, and you will address yourself to me.”

“The brat’s betrayed us, alien. There is nowhere that he will be—”

The gun is snatched out of her hand, and aimed at her temple. From the distance, he hears the report of a rifle. The beastkiller slumps to the ground. Bruce registers her death with the kind of emotion that one saves for someone who had made a concerted effort to kill his son, with a new appreciation for the thin-lipped expression he’s caught on Alfred’s face over reports of yet another Arkham early release. Clark’s expression is, somehow, the same. The monster-caller’s body disintegrates in a crimson wash. And then Clark’s blinking away the fire in his eyes and carefully pushing Bruce’s hand down; Clark confiscates the pistol, and throws it (unfired) into the sand.

“I thought—” Bruce doesn’t supply any number of the things he thought. “Clark.” It comes out like a gasp, as he suppresses as sharp spasm, his body protesting.

Bruce can count the exact number of minutes he has before it shuts down from shock. He has time. He has the time for Clark to smile at him wistfully over Superman’s crest, to stroke the side of Bruce’s face with his thumb, unbearably tender.

“I’ll always come back for you, Bruce.” And then Clark’s nose wrinkles, and he aims a lopsided grin—quick, and trailing off into wistfulness—calibrated for maximum damage. Across the solar system, to this blasted Earth.

“You were in the middle of—” Bruce trails off again, gritting his teeth against the pain, at the end of his knowledge and unwilling to reveal the lack of it.

“Hey,” Clark says softly. “All that means is it may take me a little while to get here.”

Bruce turns himself to glance over Clark’s shoulder. Damian stalks towards them like a jungle cat picking its way carefully over the glassy surface of the scorched earth. That lasts for seconds. Then the Kalashnikov slips from his hand, and he launches himself towards them, sliding across the obsidian like glittering black ice. Bruce braces himself for impact; knowing that with the strength he has left, he’ll collapse under an enthusiastic crash—but it’s not him that Damian embraces fiercely. Clark shrugs over the dark crown of hair as Bruce’s son clasps Clark tightly, pushing his face into the kryptonian suit, a suspicious wetness shining on his cheeks. Damian hunches over almost reflexively, turning his head away from Bruce, as Clark rubs soothing circles into the boy’s back. It hitches once, twice, silently.

What Bruce was prepared to do strikes him now. He was prepared to kill. Regret breaks through. The beastcaller’s life was taken by his son, on his order. Bruce can’t call that decision back. He’s so young, even for this life of violence. No one should have the right to ask him to kill again. Especially not his father, whose motivations may be suspect, Bruce notes from an emotional distance.

Damian pulls away just as quickly as he embraced Clark, hands clasped behind his back as if they weren’t to be trusted. He clears his throat. “The motherbox reported that Son-of-All won at Sol,” as though it’s an explanation for his behavior.

“You were...worried about me?” Clark’s nearly beaming with it. Damian demurs, but his denials are half-hearted, as best. Clark touches his shoulder and Bruce’s, as though to bridge father to son, some necessary component in this strange little family. “I promised, didn’t I? I’d always be here for your father. Not even the gods above could make me go back on my word.”

“Good,” Damian says intensely, staring right at Bruce, directing his words to him. “See that it stays that way.”

Before Bruce can pull away, Clark helps Bruce to his feet. A searching gaze passes over him from head-to-toe, and the way he frowns and his brow puckers up over the knot of bruises that he knows is blossoming over his hip from that hard landing against, Bruce realizes that Clark can, in fact, see through clothing, and maybe even skin too. Bruce hazily wonders why he’s never taken Clark to a lab, amassed a systemic dossier on the Superman’s powers—but why he’d need that, when he can just just ask Clark—he’ll do that, the next time they meet.

The camp is a total loss. The obsidian-smooth surface of the heat-blasted ground stops meters outside of the camp’s outer fence, but the constructs did a thorough job. The tents, and everything they contained, have been smashed into the hard-packed sand. Damian picks through the debris searching for something specific, as Clark breaks off chunks of the black stone and drives slabs upright into the ground, cutting them with his heat-vision into precise, flowing shapes. The sloping iconography is unfamiliar to Bruce, but he recognizes the intent: grave markers for the fallen. Clark shapes the rock, touching each one, saying the names of the dead over the scorched earth.

(Bruce’s people.

It didn’t matter what they had done—the people who followed Bruce, believed in him, fell to darkness in his war; the list of his fallen are larger than the black basalt tablets erected in a dim memory of Metropolis.)

His head swims with everything that he’s seen: the other Bruce disappearing in the underground hatch; the beast-caller’s constructs descending from the sky; his son smiling at him; his son pressing watery eyes into Superman’s torso; Clark, who Bruce knows and who knows him back, touching him like he deserves gentleness. Bruce feels feverish, alight with pain.

“Damian,” is all he gets out before the world tilts beneath him again.

He’s no longer vertical.

“You’re a hard man to find, Bruce Wayne.” A face in a red metal mask peers at him from the mouth of an electrical storm. “It’s not your world, Bruce. Speed shadow. Nothing you do here can change their future.”

Bruce retches black liquid into the sand. There’s shouting from nearby, but it vibrates, compressed in time, as the lightning storm around his body churns wild energy. He’s feverish and hallucinating; he just needs to tell Clark and Damian what happened when he was fighting, that he touched the constructs’ blood, and they’ll take him back to the healing tents for treatment.

“Clark,” Bruce croaks.

The figure in the red metal suit bends down next to him, clasping his shoulder. “You need come back with me, Bruce.You’ve been pulled into a...branch in place, rather than time—” the metal mask deactivates with a smooth metallic hiss, peeling back from more smoothly than any exoskeleton tech WayneTech has developed; underneath the metal, the face of a kid peers back at him, barely older than Damian. Far more worried. “Look, Bruce, you’ve never liked my explanations for anything. Vic would make this sound smart—” he hauls Bruce’s arm over his shoulder—“but I’m here, not him. So trust me, okay?”

Snatches of a conversation that is happening lightyears from him pass through his mind like water over the crashing rocks—feverish—medical attention—how did the constructs—neurogenes invading his system—wasn’t he inoculated—flying would be risky—constructs still in the vicinity——

And then the world dissolves and reforms into another swirling vortex. A boom rips through the air, shoving Bruce into a sprawl of limbs against his would-be rescuer. Overwhelming rings of light rend the fabric of reality itself, as he’s gripped firmly by two sets of arms, and hauled over Clark’s and Damian’s shoulders; Damian’s is sleeve pushed back from his red gauntlet, as he exchanges a series of tonal commands with the sentient machine.

Bruce strains against their restraining hands, whips his head around, trying to see over the bulk of Clark’s shoulder. The red-armored boy and his lightning vortex have disappeared without a trace. As if Clark knows what he’s looking for, he says grimly: “Neurogenes are invading your system. Hold tight. We’ll have you back at camp in minutes.”

“I thought this was the camp?” Bruce coughs violently against a spasm of pain, and Clark almost drops Bruce’s arm. He doesn’t miss the nonverbal communication that passes between his self-appointed guardians. Shit. He’s made a mistake. “Dumb question,” Bruce grits out. “Forget I said anything.”

Clark is visibly disturbed as he pushes the damp bangs back from Bruce’s forehead. Not the Bruce he’s looking for: not the carefree rake that can fuck him slowly against Lex’s wall; not the armed-to-the-teeth warrior that belongs to the sand and ice; not even the master planner that could trap him, bring him to his knees, kill him. He’s never been the wrong Bruce more than he is now. Clark seems to come to a decision. He says something to Damian in a language the comm can’t translate, and brushes a hand against Bruce’s jaw, grief and joy running together.

He squeezes his eyes closed as he murmurs into Bruce’s ear: “Just stay with me. Please.”

And Bruce does.

The world around them distorts and washes into an eerie gray flatness as the energy tunnel passes between the stitches of reality. Every step across the glowing rings of the tunnel unleashes a cloud of golden butterflies that race upwards, carrying their freight into the dying sky. Bruce is sleeping in the cockpit of the Batwing on the eve of securing a weapon that he will use to kill Superman; or he’s burning up with fever, carried through the heart of the earth by his greatest enemy and his son, in a world where Batman is a hero to the last of humanity.

What seems like years later, they emerge on the other side of the portal, and Bruce can’t remember which one is the more impossible dream.

Chapter Text

They touch ground among squat concrete bunkers buried calf-deep in frozen sands dunes.

A line of people whose faces are obscured by sand masks shovel the sand and ice slush into makeshift wheelbarrows, and cart it back into the narrow passageways of a thronged bazaar. Canvas tents thread through the alleys, colorful with woven and knitted clothing, salvaged military supplies, and a press of sellers calling out their wares. A stream of people move through the marketplace, stopping to trade at tents, or slipping food into sturdy leather satchels.

Laughter hits him like ballistic bean bag as a young girl darts through the legs of the shoppers, a string of angry shouts following in her wake. She takes a hard corner and collides into a tent pole, which groans but remains standing. The seller grabs at his grapefruit—too late. They spill over his arms and roll into the sand. Beyond the bright tents, loose lines that anchor the camp’s last line of defense, a tarped moat, flap in an non-existent breeze; guards dressed in riot gear dart up and down the structure to tie down in lines, while others recline against guard towers, smoking and swapping stories with the other sentries, walking the concrete wall that stretches out further than Bruce can see; soldier and citizen mingling together under the colorful tents, the mundane business of surviving the end of the world.

Bruce struggles to his feet. He’ll not be dragged maskless through the bazaar like a sack of potatoes. Clark and Damian clamp his wrists in iron grips, slowing their march so Bruce can at least stumble under his own power through the narrow maze of tents. The path clears in front of them, anxious faces peering out of the stalls. Murmurs of The Dark Knight and Batman and he’s come back to us trail in their wake. Pressed this close to Clark’s side, Bruce can feel the overwhelming heat of him seeping through the layers of their suits, freezing sweat standing out on his feverish forehead. Superman’s cape rolls and snaps behind them, eddying on currents too light to pull at his own which drags uselessly in the sand behind them.

He’s brought to a medical tent, and sat down roughly on a cot. The cape weighs down around his neck, an albatross he can’t remove, choking him. Gently, Clark releases the clasps and slides it down over his shoulders.

“I never thought you would...undress me,” Bruce says. Teeth chattering, delirious, he rises off of the cot to impose himself onto Clark’s space—Clark doesn’t recoil; but he looks like he might want to. “Are we enemies or lovers, Clark?”

His shoulders are held in a firm grip. “We’re—” Whatever they are, he takes the coward’s way out. “Friends, Bruce.”

He reaches out to touch the heart he thinks beats beneath the Kryptonian shield. Left side, or right side? He can’t remember. His fingers sink in again the warm material; can’t feel anything through it. “I’m going to try to kill you. I’m going to kill you. Please, for the love of god, please don’t—”

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Damian scoffs, pressing him back down against the cot, and covering him with a translucent, gossamer-thin sheet. “Do you, Father?”

Clark takes a quick step back from the cot, and searches him head-to-toe again again.

“I didn’t see it at first, but he’s missing the pins in his spinal column. And there are no signs that he has ever had a subdermal regulator.” Clark presses his lips together.

Damian scoffs. “What do you mean you didn’t see it?”

Clark frown isn’t sinister; under a heavy brow, it appears more worried than anything else. He says softly: “I can’t hear the butterfly beating its wings if I’m not listening for it.”

“It would explain why the fever’s been so quick to overtake him,” a lilting voice interjects, as a dark-haired woman, a thick gold collar necklace spread across her shoulders, and red, blue and bronze breastplate with a stiff leather skirt trimmed with fur, the one concession to the elements, that leaves much of her skin open to biting cold. Her quick, smooth motions around the tent show that she barely seems to notice it. The style of armor is familiar, he thinks. An Ancient Etruscan set that he has seen on display in a Gotham Antiquities market, and a face that he recognizes from—from—

She dismisses Damian and Clark from the tent. Grudgingly, they both go.

“I am Diana,” she says, a finger to her lips. “Calm yourself. The longer you stay in this place, the more familiar it will seem.”

Diana picks up two long cords of translucent jelly and lays them against Bruce’s palm.

“Hold still. These will extract the constructs’ neurogenes.”

She rubs her finger across their surface, murmuring to them in that same untranslatable language as before, with Clark and Damian. Bruce has his suspicions. Kryptonian, if he had to guess. The jellyfish tech wriggles to life, moving wetly across Bruce’s skin, as viscerally repulsive as the constructs had been.

“This will sting,” she says, not unkindly.

And Bruce knows at least this much: whomever Diana is, friend, or ally, or figment of his imagination, she doesn’t lie—if anything, she appreciates a good, ironic understatement.

The pain rolls back in waves. Each crest washes over him until all that remains is the the dull grinding of his joints. Even that fades as Bruce drifts in the twilight between sleep and consciousness. It’s rare that his dreams have this kind of narrative consistency to them, lasting longer than a moment of all-consuming terror in the shadow of the Wayne mausoleum. He wonders why he hasn’t jolted awake, tangled in silk sheets, pressed against a warm body, under a sea of artificial stars.

A different kind of warmth breaks across his mind and everything ebbs away.

Unfamiliar tech that still have the basic form of medical diagnostic tools pass over him at regular intervals. The results are optimistic, or he assumes they are, from the way each new tool’s whirrs and clicks don’t arouse the crashing disapproval of his caretakers. After a full-body scan with the bronze widget shaped like a crane, Bruce registers his dissatisfaction at being confined to the cot with a mash of sounds, the cross between a yowl and an unhappy grunt.

At least no one rushes in to denounce him as a fake.

He hears Damian’s voice outside of the tent at regular intervals, peevishly interrogating the guards. They repeat a well-worn ritual; Damian demands information, it is given to him, he scoffs, and then his footsteps fade into the sand. The regularity of Damian’s visits makes him feel cared for, in their way.

Clark doesn’t return to the tent at all.

He dreams. Or he remembers. Three warriors fighting winged insectoid soldiers in the desert, killing them by the hundreds, by the thousands, as they stream through sun-lit tunnels into their world—fighting and dying for the glory of the Star-God. The stench of magma-hot beams cut into the earth, and Gaea roars her fury through Diana as she whirls through the battlefield, a golden, thundering rage. Clark’s fists fall against a cragged, stone face, whose eyes promise the end to all life, everywhere. They barely diminish their enemy’s strength. Slowly, they are pushed back.

Diana smites an insectoid soldier across the face with her shield, and turns to Bruce.

Her voice seems to stretch across an ages-old boundary of time, thrumming through him as deeply as a contrabass:

You have more than you realize. You will need all of us. Look for us, Bruce.

The soldiers pour through the tunnels, swarming over the sand, the horror of them unceasing—the killing and dying wash clean every wound he has ever felt, and it is still not enough. Earth will fall, has fallen, has always fallen to this monster.

“Bruce!” Clark cries out from above, as he’s whisked through one of the sun-lit portals.

The three of them are not enough, he remembers, or he dreams, under the gossamer sheet.

In the fifth hour, the fever breaks. Bruce peels himself off of the cot, and fixes Diana with a challenging stare.

“Satisfied?” he asks, peevish, as she confirms what Bruce already knows with the Origami Crane scanner.

“Rarely.” She moves briskly on to her next task, shuffling bronzed tech pads across a metal fold-out desk, slashing at them with her finger in annoyance. It looks suspiciously like the post-apocalyptic version of paperwork.

She returns with another two long strands of translucent piping.

“What’s a warrior doing staffing the medical tents?” he asks bluntly, pulling himself into a crossed-legged position on the cot. “Surely there must be someone else in this godforsaken camp that can operate those skin-chapping scanners.”

“I train warrior,” she corrects. “This is atonement,” and says no more on that subject. She circles the piping around Bruce’s wrist, and his jaw clenches on the sudden spike of pain as the tech dissolves through the barrier of his skin, and heals it in its wake.

“Christ,” he swears.

“Wrong pantheon,” she says mildly.

“Didn’t realize this was be multiple choice,” Bruce fires back.

He is left alone for another stretch of time, cold, anxious, with only the gossamer sheet to cover him. When she returns, Diana brings hell a few steps behind her. The room temperature plunges, then soars; freezing and boiling, a miasma of sulphur trails yellow sparks like garlands to the dead, rising in small clouds; so similar to the golden butterflies he saw in the sun-road, sparks taking wing. When Diana catches him staring, he tries not to let himself show anything more than a hitch in his breathing.

“Where did you serve?” covering the hammering in his chest, as the presence around her fades.

“Olympus. I—was—a manifestation of War.”

“A friend?”

He expects a witty rejoinder or cutting sarcasm. He feels the sting of their absence when Diana returns with a simple, yes.

“Is…” Bruce trails off. “I guess it doesn’t matter what Clark is.”

“Doesn’t it matter?” Diana asks lightly. “Don’t our thoughts form unshakeable loyalty, or unspeakable betrayal? If we are speaking of such things. I know you don’t like to.”

“I didn’t realize manifestations of War were philosophical,” he says flatly, baiting the sting of her disapproval.

“To the contrary,” Diana returns evenly. “War needs philosophy if she is to take a life she values. Otherwise, it’s slaughter—and she, a hypocrite.”

Bruce doesn’t give Diana a canned Bruce Wayne reply. Instead, he braces himself against the cot to stop himself from rubbing at the patchy red skin over his wrist, tender where he presses it. He directs his next words to a nearby cart of medical supplies.

“I haven’t always had them. Friends,” he clarifies. “They’re the one luxury the Bat can’t afford.”

Diana bares her teeth; Bruce recognizes the smile through the violence oozing around the edges of it.

“I am no friend of the Bat.” Her face doesn’t soften, but she manages to pull back the red shadow that falls over her face, and places a hand over his heart. “My friend is Bruce Wayne. Do not forget that difference. It may save your life one day.”

Diana catches his wrist, with about as much patience for his self-pity as anyone in his life, and explains the subdermal regulator. The technology is Kryptonian; it responds by haptic and mental interface. Touch will activate it; but its mechanism of action works by intent. She demonstrates the dancing motion that activates it, and the sequence that ends with a small punch to shut it down; explains that it regulates a body against extreme temperature fluctuation, but that he shouldn’t expect miracles.

“It’ll keep me warm on the tundra, but I can still get cold feet?”

The corners of Diana’s mouth twitch, but she doesn’t laugh. Instead, she lays one of Bruce’s fingers across a patch of skin that looks like much the rest. He expects lights, circuitry, something to respond. Instead, he feels a small wiggle of acknowledgement in his mind, like an itch behind his ear. “Tap it with your finger twice to activate the control panel.”

“You wouldn’t go through all of this trouble for a little hypothermia. What else does it do?”

Diana flutters her eyelids. He has trouble reading her; she’s either deeply amused, or sick of his bullshit. He wonders if in her, it can be both. “The subdermal regulator alters biorhythms. It cannot hide that you are a living thing, but it can disguise you. It will scramble your body systems’ unique pattern for most beings with super senses.”

Bruce looks up at her sharply.

“No.” The question answered before it is even asked. “It won’t hide you from him. He knows you too well.”

Diana is called away to another tent without tying him down, which clearly must must mean that Bruce is discharged. Someone has brought a fresh Batsuit (minus the cape, plus a tan leather duster), arranged neatly near a bronze chamber at the back of the tent. Sculptural and curving, with a hatch that seals with a complicated haptic command, it turns out to be a shower. He runs a hand across the metal. Solid, warm, faintly pulsing beneath his hands. He lingers in the shower, allowing the sonics to scour him clean of the ash and sand and sweat, and dresses inefficiently, slowed by the unfamiliar arrangement of catches. The suit is configured to accommodate a thin layer of unfamiliar fabric that immediately warms against his skin. He swallows when he sees the duster. Similar in all respects to the one the other Bruce wore in the cave, with a patch sewn on the shoulder he hadn’t noticed. The swooping S of Superman’s crest.

He’s—Bruce swallows thickly—wearing Superman’s crest.

This is a nightmare. It has to be.

It’s a hard insight to hold onto in this place, but he presses his fingers against the subdermal regulator, and he tries. In his bones, he feels the wrongness of the world slip from him like the gentle roll of waves crashing against the shore. Each wave erodes the confidence he has that this place is anything but the magical admixture of adrenaline, memory, and fear.

Miraculously, he can hold onto this thought. He touches the regulator through his skin, and feels the Kryptonian tech hum to life, sending out tendrils of calming blue light, solidifying his mental state. When he pulls his hand away from the wrist interface, he can still feel the conviction burning brightly within him.

His duty is clear. All dreamers must awaken.

Although, as long as Bruce is still asleep (and he’s still safely tucked into the Batwing’s cockpit), he has one last thing he’d like to do before he leaves this dream before he leaves this world behind. He fits the duster over his shoulders, secures his cowl, and heads out of the medical tent into the chilly, unchanging twilight of the camp.

The guards don’t follow him when he leaves the medical tent, nor do they break from their post when he scales the adjacent bunker. From the roof, he can see the green canvas fleet of easy-to-break-down medical tents, stacked on top of each other like fish, and Bruce can tell that things aren’t going well for this merry band of survivors. The place appears to be a cross between a makeshift encampment and an abandoned military outpost—but he’s been fooled by simple exteriors before.

He runs along the thin metal rooftops as lightly as possible, knowing the footfalls of a grown adult will sound like a hailstorm on the thin airplane-grade aluminum, and crouches behind a pediment. For all of the post-apocalyptic chic of the camp, an entrenched Greco-Roman obsession still seems to run through it. He wonders what that says about his imagination. Too many antiquities benefits, probably.

A pair of soldiers pass underneath Bruce’s perch (off-duty sentries from the wall, he thinks, by the easy way they laugh). They wear an S-patch on the same shoulder as his duster; their helmets are obscured in the low light, but he sees the faint etching of it on their helmets. He springs forward onto the next roof, and the next, until he’s at the heart of the camp. The bazaar threads through the spokes of the bunkers as narrow stalls. At the center, the tents explode outward into a colorful canopy of tin-workers, leathercrafters, and a cushioned rotunda that appears to be some kind of communal meeting hall.

In the center of bazaar, he finds what he was looking for.

A black marble pentagon rises from the swell of tents like a dragon’s tooth, lumbering over the square. From its uncanny height, it rises a hundred meters taller than the squat bunkers that surround it. Bruce knows the imagery of tyrants; if this is the future created by Superman’s rule, here is the jackboot writ large. Peace in the shadow of the Kryptonian’s shield.

Bruce looks down on the thready tents, metal bunkers, rotating soldiers patrolling the streets and sees the camp for what it is: a ready-made dystopia.

The numbness underneath his breastbone thaws into anger. Bruce has had enough of the false promises of this place; the friends he’ll never find, the enemy who will never fight at his side, a son that will never be his. Bruce has failed this world. Why else would the soldiers spit his name like a curse? Blood Traitor. This world is a punishment for Bruce not preparing to defend humanity against an uncaring universe.

Message received, Bruce thinks bitterly.

He’s quite ready to wake up. He crosses his arms and waits for the itch of consciousness.

And waits.

Bruce lingers the shadow of the shield until hunger spurs him to find a less exposed perch. He drops down into one of the narrow alleys whose stalls have been packed up for the day, and pulls himself into the shadows of an empty fruit stand. Next to the packed-up signs, he crouches down to watch the residents of the camp bustle through the main thoroughfare. Another busy shopping day. Well. Day or night, today or tomorrow—the anxiety of time must be less pressing in a place where the sun never rises.

Bruce lets his head hit the back of the stall in frustration. Somewhere there must be a key to him waking up. His nights have always been filled with nightmares he can’t stop. But they always did. stop. Does he need to force the dream to the moment of crisis? Can he just...will himself awake?

A grapefruit rolls into his side, and he catches it up in his hands.

“Hi,” a young girl’s voice says, and Bruce looking up into a face he never thought he’d see again.

The girl he’d snatched from the crushing jaws of the Wayne Financial wreckage. Another survivor of the Battle of Metropolis who hasn’t aged a day.

“You’re Jae, right?” Bruce asks. He remembers the half-filled out the paperwork for her adoption that sat on the bench of the Terminal for three months that were buried under drone, satellite photos of the Superman. He never finalized the arrangements. She’d never known. She’d gone on to a home in Central City. It was for the best.

The girl nods surreptitiously, and holds out her hands. Bruce presses the grapefruit them, and suspects that she’ll light out to terrorize the rest of the bazaar’s merchants, but instead the fruit drops into the sand as she buries her face into the side of his neck, her cheek rasping against the black cowl. It’s a fierce hug for such a tiny frame. She says his name into the cowl, touching it like it’s skin.

“Bruce.” She’s not crying, but it’s a near thing.

(It surprises him. Can everyone can see through to the kernel of himself that he buries under Gucci or Nomex? Is he so transparent to everyone but himself?)

“I’m glad you’re back,” she whispers. “Tanna, that’s my new mom, she said you weren’t coming back. When the men took you away, I was afraid for you. Some people said mean, ugly things.”

“I’m still here,” he says roughly.

“Thanks for saving me,” Jae says, wiping her hand against a wet patch under her eyes, which she scowls at in the perfect imitation of Wayne manners. “Not how everyone else means it. I mean, from Before. In…” she looks around, and mouths the word Metropolis, a perfect parody of how Alfred would speak forbidden words before he thought Bruce should hear them. “Before Clark.”

“What do you know about Superman.” It’s barely a question, but Bruce keeps it as cool as he can, clenching his jaw against the anger that rises in him suddenly.

“His name is Clark! Everyone is supposed to call him that.” Frowning, Jae jabs her finger emphatically at the shield on Bruce’s shoulder to chastise him for contravening the standing order the alien must have issued to humanize himself. “You too.”

Bruce grabs Jae’s finger then lets it go—not to stop her barrage—but to command her attention, which has wandered back to her grapefruit. “Jae,” he says, and grudgingly she stops pushing the grapefruit through the sand with the heel of her foot. “Listen carefully. Did Clark tell you not to say Metropolis?”

Jae punches the shield this time.

“Is this some kind of test?”

Bruce purses his lips, then shakes his head no for her benefit; even with her apparent crash course in Wayne mannerisms, he makes the effort to soften his manner as much as the cowl will allow.

Somehow, Jae knows he’s making an effort, and she scrunches up her face as she tries to meet him halfway. “You tell us that. Every time new survivors find their way to the camp.” She deepens her voice, in obvious imitation of the Bat’s rasp. “Gotham and Metropolis, they’re the past. Here in Nightfall, we build the future.”

The imitation isn’t half-bad, even if the sentiment is wholly unfamiliar to his being. Move on from Gotham, his life’s work? What kind of dream is this?

The words swim through his head—what the beast-caller had spat at him. Alien’s Pet. He pulls the patch on his duster into the dim cast of light, studying it. Is his patch shinier than the ones he’s seen on patrol? Are those subtle silver threads woven into the design? He shifts it around, and like a lenticular design, when he tilts it, from the design pops up the spread wings of a bat, intertwining with the sloping curve of the S. Oh god, is he—

“That’s my favorite part,” Jae announces. “Sometimes it’s the shield, sometimes it’s the bat, and sometimes, when you hold it up to the light, its both.”

The world lurches underfoot, and he sits up, glancing around wildly for the lightning-wreathed portal (a handy visual reference that signals his desire to wake up, he thinks vaguely), but nothing appears.

Jae plasters a hand against his forehead, and then removes it. She squares her hands on her hips, suspiciously. “Do I need to take you to the healing tents?”

“No,” Bruce says, near to laughing with the irony of it. He’s dreaming, but his body feels like it’s been battered against the rocks and dragged across the frozen plain of his discontent. “I’m just—tired.”

“Okay.” She thinks for a moment, processing through the data she’s no doubt accessed of this malfunctioning Bruce. Then, tugging at his arm until Bruce is, against his will, on his feet, she announces: “I know where to take you,” and begins pulling in a new direction, toward some new wonder or some new horror.

“Jae,” he says gently, tugging them back down into the darkness of the empty stall. He waits out another pair of soldiers who pass through the alleyway with the efficiency of a regular patrol. They’ll need to move soon, or risk being spotted; they need to keep moving, or stop moving altogether; this is bullshit, he shouldn’t even be here. “I’m not sick. I’m dreaming.”

“Is that why you’re hiding from your soldiers?”

“My—” Bruce blinks rapidly, attempting to process this new information. How can they be his men, isn’t Superman—

“This is your camp,” Jae adds, thinking it might also be a point of confusion. She doesn’t hit him this time to punctuate her disapproval, she’s too mad to do anything but flail toward the bazaar. “You’ve forgotten!”

He should have expected Jae wouldn’t remain stymied on her feelings for long. She flings the grapefruit at him, then immediately regrets it; Bruce thinks, maybe this is it—repudiation for the one good thing he’s done since Metropolis felt her bones crack under the power of the Kryptonians. He doesn’t bother to block it.

Time unspools too quickly and too slowly; he feels the ghostly impact, the citrus burn of the grapefruit against his skin, as though in one world, it hits him.

In this world, he’s not so lucky.

“I think your grapefruit slipped,” Clark says warmly, cape streaming out behind him, holding the projectile an inch from Bruce’s face. Jae snatches her weapon of mass destruction from Clark’s outstretched palm. She regards it, then flashes Bruce a wounded look.

Clark catches the nonverbal exchange, and winks at her. “It’s tempting, but you really shouldn’t.”

Bruce has never seen Clark so at ease in his uniform, which fits him a snugly as a second skin. If Bruce had met this Superman first, would there have been that bloody-minded vow in the shadow of Metropolis’ violence?

Jae points an accusing finger at Bruce. “He’s forgotten his promise.” She pushes away from Clark’s hands. “He’s…he’s...” She’s on the verge of tears again.

“Are you sad because you tried to hit Bruce, or because I didn’t let you?” Clark tries gently, but Jae just shakes her head, taking off down the alleyway like a shot. By the time Bruce considers it might be dangerous for her to be unsupervised in this post-apocalyptic playground, and then reaffirmed to himself No, she’ll be fine, my mind wouldn’t hurt her, she’s disappeared into the flow of the bazaar. Clark starts after her, his feet springing from the ground... then cuts a sidelong glance back at Bruce as he hovers in the air.

“She’ll be fine,” Clark says, forcing himself to power down. He cocks an ear to the side. “And she’ll be back soon.”

Oh god, then he’s turning and he’s giving Bruce that look. The same one he had on the balcony of the Metropolis Regency; he doesn’t have time for this.

“I need to wake up,” Bruce mutters, slapping the side of his face. “Somehow.”

It’s Clark’s turn to insinuate himself into Bruce’s personal space. The twilight does nothing to obscure the stubborn lock that tumbles across his forehead, curling against his skin. The consternation should seem out of place above the shield of a probable tyrant—but arousal courses through Bruce, burning him to ash. Mastery over his emotions counts for absolutely nothing, here. Everything he’s repressed bubbles to the surface, and his skin alight with the unbridgeable distance between them.

“What are we—?” Bruce breathes.

“You never found the words to tell me,” Clark says slowly.

“I saw the monument, Clark.”

Clark starts, then shakes his head as he laughs. It’s a cold, ironic, bitter sound. “You and your goddamn choices.

“You said that we could burn or build in the shadow of hope. You called it an ideal to strive for,” Clark lowers his eyes to the symbol on Bruce’s Suit, stops short of touching his chest—an almost reverse image of them from the medical tent. “I wish you could have met my father. He would’ve liked you.”

A telltale plume of sand rises from one of the stall’s counters. Someone’s on the roof, watching them. Bruce scans the eves of the bunker that abuts the alley. A shadow darts back into the cover of the metal pediment, melting into darkness, but Bruce catches a hint of a yellow-black cloak and a red tunic underneath. The colors of a Robin.

“Takes after his father.” Even though it’s a dream, even though it can’t be real. Bruce has never—maybe there was a moment, years ago, when Bruce had thought about settling down to start a family with a fierce heiress in the Hindu Kush—but beyond that moment of weakness, no. Casting a chilly eye over the enduring failures of his parenting, it’s for the best, really. All of the Wayne heirs have all deserted him. “He’ll be the hardest piece to leave behind.”

“He’s been following you since you entered the bazaar,” Clark says. “Maybe longer. When he sets his mind to it, even I can’t shake him. What hope do you, a mere mortal, have?”

Bruce snorts. There’s not enough space between them to cross his arms without accidentally touching.

“What does he want?”

The question is rhetorical, but Clark has a stubborn literal streak. Telegraphing the move as badly as his throws in the Starlight Suite, he reaches for Bruce’s hand. Bruce prepares to counter a wrist-lock, or a pressure-point hold, or an arm-bar and finds himself completely unprepared for Clark wrapping two of his fingers around Bruce’s pinkie and ring fingers—just holding them. Bruce is too shocked to pull free as Clark’s palm slides into his, warm and yielding.

“Same thing any kid wants—?”

Bruce’s heart constricts.

He digs his fingers into skin, knowing that Clark will let go in an instant; knows equally that the grip is unbreakable, if he can’t bring himself to break it.

“When I wake up, I’m going for the kryptonite,” he says hoarsely.

“I don’t know where you’re from, Bruce, but for the love of Gaea, make better decisions.”

“Every decision I’ve made has been for the good of—”

“Don’t give me that, Bruce. Half of your decisions are bullshit—”

“Name one bad decision, Clark—”

“You’re a hypocrite if you think that—”

“I am not a hypocrite. Everything I’ve done has been because you’ve been a destructive asshole—”

“You are, Bruce. For starters, you’ve been staring at my mouth since the bluffs and you haven’t even kissed—”

Bruce pulls Clark to him, and Clark lets himself be pulled. In that thin understanding where terror crashes into desire, Bruce tilts Clark’s head up, and kisses him feverishly and can’t stop himself from opening again, and again, and again, as his heart shivers and expands in his chest. They break apart to breathe, but Bruce is implacable, yanking Clark back into it; it’s not a fight; it’s not passion; just the firm pressure of lips and teeth and nothing more, until he’s satisfied, if Bruce even knows the feeling from the sliver of affection that he has allowed himself to take.

Bruce winds a hand into the hair on the back of Clark’s neck, and pulls him in harder against his body as green foaming energy energy surges up around them. The laughing hum of a thousand summer nights rises from the frozen sand. A paper-thin voice no louder than the wind whistling through the reeds, responds:

A DREAM IS A WISH YOUR HEART MAKES. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE, BRUCE WAYNE?

Bruce opens his eyes to the sight of the other camp, the obsidian monuments to their dead cutting shadows in the dim glow of the firepits on the horizon. He feels the fever rise in him as his mind clears. He grips Clark and Damian, who support either side of him, as fiercely as he can, drawing them in closer to him. Clark seems to come to a decision. He says something to Damian in a language Bruce’s comm can’t translate, and brushes a hand against Bruce’s jaw, grief and joy mingling on his face. Bruce catches his hand, and squeezes it weakly.

“When I know, I’ll tell you,” he says urgently.

Clark looks as though he were suddenly stricken. Brokenly, he murmurs into Bruce’s ear: “Just stay with me. Please.”

He knows he can’t this time. So Bruce doesn’t.

Bruce lurches sideways into the lightning vortex, draped over the shoulder of one very young speedster. They’re passing through a tunnel, slowed by Bruce’s stumbling gait. His feet are unsteady under their own power. On each side of the static barrier, moving images are caught and pinned like butterflies under glass. A flash of a red cape, and a gold-and-black symbol on Superman’s chest, as he catches a young man in pinstripes; Bruce in power-armor, waiting in the rain; a league of seven, flashing in the sun at they battle a magma-eyed God. He tears his eyes away from the multiplying slivers of captured lives; he doubts that he can decipher this oracle. More tired than he’s ever felt, Bruce can only hope that he’s limping toward the end of his ordeal.

The kid at his side has been talking for some time by the time he comes back to himself. “—Bruce! That’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in awhile.”

“Glad someone enjoyed themselves,” Bruce mutters without heat.

“What?” the kid yells. “How did you even do that? You were vibing like crazy. We still don’t know how you got caught in the speed shadow, but we’re extracting you back to your own ‘verse via a tunnel in the speedforce.”

The technobabble is oddly soothing. He’s going to have some pointed questions for his astrophysicists when he wakes up. The tunnel washes them in a brilliant play of light as they approach an event horizon. The kid stops in front of the gravity well, and Bruce straightens up as he steps towards it alone.

On a thought, he turns back.

“Hey Ghost of Christmas Future,” Bruce shouts, as the roar of the lightning discharge grows to a deafening pitch. “Got any sage advice?”

The kid laughs and gives a half-salute. “Don’t piss off Superman before you find me!”

Bruce jolts awake in the cockpit of the Batwing, clutching his heart through the thin fabric of the backup Batsuit. On the console, the proximity alert chirps silently. The safehouse has been penetrated and the canopy hatch records an external activation. A pit opens in his stomach, and Bruce can’t seem to catch his breath.

Shoving one of his gloved fingers into his mouth, he rips his right gauntlet off with his teeth, and stares at the unmarked skin of the hand and wrist underneath. There wouldn’t be any rope burn; if it had been... a logically consistent experience, his wrists had been healed by a Goddess of War, who resentfully filled out paperwork on alien tech in a post-apocalyptic medical tent.

He rubs a circle against his wrist. The skin feels raw.

Staring at his hand numbly, Bruce brushes the patch of skin that Diana showed him. It’s a shade darker than the rest of his skin: the beginning of a bruise from tearing off the gauntlet without disengaging the safely locks, or the activation control panel for a Kryptonian subdermal regulator. He signs the activation code, mimicking Diana’s finger placement, and feels a telltale itch at the base of his skull.

Bruce’s heart kicks up. Maddeningly vague, Kryptonian technology. An itch is barely proof; it’s barely a signal. He could have imagined the feeling. He needs concrete data. The regulator is meant to regulate body temperature and sensation. He needs a sensation that can’t be mistaken for a twitching muscle. Bruce focuses on raising his body temperature--the feeling of a scorching burn in his palm, the one he didn’t feel in his dream. Speed shadow. Whatever.

Nothing happens. Nothing could happen. It was a dream. Nothing more than that.

Bruce lets the hand drop and sags back into the Batwing’s chair. What the hell was he even thinking? He shuts off the proximity alarm and pulls up the external camera feed log. The details of the frozen earth are already dimming, less intense than the scratchy carbon fiber under his fingers. The logs confirm what logic dictates: despite the proximity and canopy alarms, the log doesn’t show him leaving the Batwing. He watches himself fall asleep on playback, scans through the tape, to the point where he wakes up, hours later.

Bruce blows out the breath he’s been holding. So he doesn’t have to report to Alfred that he’s finally given into the hypnotic lure of his own mental bullshit. That’s the best piece of news he’s had in the past twenty-four hours.

“If you’ve called to tell me anything other than you’ve had an epiphany, sir, I’ll hire staff to wake you at 6am for the rest of your——sir?”

God. He remembers the empty communication line. Bruce stamps down on that memory, hard.

“I’m closing down my business at the Gotham Port. Send a remote drone to monitor the docks. An unusual activity—follow but do not engage. Shipment isn’t expected until 1800.”

Alfred groans on the other end of the line, faint and tinny, from a comm that’s been pulled away from his ear. “I must still be dreaming. Goodnight, Mr. Wayne.”

“I was wrong, Alfred,” Bruce says softly. “I’m sorry.”

A rustling of blankets thrown back on the line; there’s no dull, thick tone of sleep this time. “—Where are you, Master Wayne? Report your status and relay your coordinates now.”

“Next contact will be from the Metropolis Regency or not at all.”

Silence. Alfred’s urgency breaks through weariness when he finally speaks. “If you hang up on me again, I will not be held accountable for my actions.”

And it’s not an idle threat, but Bruce pauses for a moment. Then adds, as gently as he can: “No one dies tonight.”

Alfred’s angry stream of invective cuts off mid-sentence as Bruce disconnects the call. Calmness like the calmness of the lake after rain descends. Lightyears ago in the server room, when they were different men, Bruce had watched the trust in Clark’s eyes as Bruce backed him against a wall, leaned into him, and made a good argument for never trusting a Wayne again.

And somehow, Clark still had; Clark’s head thrown back against his shoulder, as Bruce moved inside of him.

Would Clark be willing to trust him, if he knew everything?

Bruce kicks on the thrusters, activates the Batwing, and pulls her out into the rosy pre-dawn light. The question is moot. He’ll let daybreak in Metropolis decide whether or not Clark is a tyrant; he made a promise—maybe on accident, maybe to a dream—but no part of Bruce Wayne backs down from the commitments he makes.

Chapter Text

The sun pinks the morning sky, reflecting from one building to the next until sky and skyscrapers glitter—a mirror-tile mosaic of gold-limned clouds gathering on the edge of Metropolis and Gotham’s harbor. It’s a spectacular view even for a city of a hundred gorgeous seaside mornings.

It’s entirely too cheerful for Clark.

Clark slumps down on a black recamier that he’s dragged out of the suite and stationed on the balcony, in his boxers and socks, because that’s all that’s left of Clark Kent in the suit. At his last sweep of the destroyed room, his pants were missing, his shirt was gashed down the back, and his cellphone had been cracked. His shield and his glasses rest next to his hand on the only other piece of undamaged furniture in the suite, the small glass-top table on the balcony. The table survived because Clark contained the fight to the suite itself; but the windows weren’t so lucky. Jagged slabs of sheet glass wobble in front of him, prepared to slough off like icicles melting in the spring thaw.

Last night was a blur to him after he fell asleep in the Suite on lockdown—but at some point in the early morning, his hearing expanded; Bruce’s heartbeat had broken into a wild gallop, then nothing. Clark has assisted enough emergency response teams to identify the sound of a fibrillating sinus rhythm before system shock. That wasn’t what he had heard.

Bruce’s pulse had elongated like it had been pulled sideways, then vanished.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Clark panicked. He had shot out of the Regency at full speed, (remembering midway across the bay to return for his shield) to conduct a thirty minute reconnaissance of Metropolis and Gotham. But it had been necessary, because there had been no sign of Bruce in any of Bruce Wayne’s or the Bat’s known locations.

Afterward, he returned to the Regency, because—it had made sense at the time.

In a suite several floors below him, the Good Morning Gotham theme jingles from a television. The show’s more reputable anchor, a down-on-her-luck correspondent who decamped to morning talk when she was passed over for promotion at LexCom, is interviewing Bruce Wayne. She peppers him with softball questions and Bruce ingratiates himself with responses that aren’t keen, but aren’t offensive either; the sober cousin to Bruce Wayne’s library benefit act. The first leg of the mea culpa tour, Clark guesses. The anchor tries to edge in a question about Superman (not the sex tape, Bruce Wayne’s take on ‘Metropolis’ Protector’), even pokes at Nairomi, but the hint of scandal bounces off of Bruce Wayne as easily as bullets do Clark.

“You’ve been out of the news for a while, Bruce, but I think we’ll be seeing more of you in the days to come.”

“Oh, count on it.”

The warm certainty in that voice. Clark would bet his shield that Bruce mugs for the camera, a facade to cover the tight grimace of Bruce’s actual idea of friendliness. Remembering that fake smile as Bruce had shrugged out of his arms last night, clearly distancing himself from Clark, prickles the back of his neck.

Clark holds steady as the interview ends, and waits five more minutes as the morning news dissects the fallout of yesterday’s Super Sexcapade coverage. WAYN stock has taken another steep plunge in morning trading. Negotiations for a government contract has already fallen through. When the network announces it has 12 more hours of coverage lined up today, Clark decides it’s time to check again.

(Aside from the sounds of helicopter traffic, and an unusual engine signature—probably a jet from a local military base—nothing.)

He’s going to have to contact someone about Bruce Wayne’s disappearing act.

Bruce, who could be halfway around the world in any cardinal direction, had plans for a late night talk show taping this afternoon. A pivotal stop in the apology tour, by the sound of it.

Walking out on him in the server room; pulling security gates down around him at Lex’s estate; running out of the goddamn Starlight Suite to avoid an awkward conversation: each were understandable, in their way. Disappearing on what remained of his good name when his company’s future was at stake? Unless Clark had read him wrong, Bruce Wayne wasn’t the kind of man who could watch other people suffer for his mistakes.

The day is well on its way to sunrise when Clark admits that his vigil on the balcony of the Starlight Suite is maudlin. Prudence would demand that he return to his apartment, dig up a fresh suit from his closet, start in early for the Planet to verify that he still has a job after his run-in with Lex last night, write up the library benefit piece, and then distance himself from the sequence of events that lead to whatever the hell happened here last night.

Instead, framed by the clustering flowers of the pergola, he watches the morning light come up through the far wall of the Starlight Suite. Lulled by a steady warm hum—green and peaceful like the voice of Gaea in the sycamore grove—he thinks it might have been nice to kiss Bruce one more time.

The squeal of an ultrasonic alarm breaks Clark from his reverie. He has been listening for Bruce’s heartbeat along the beaches in Guam, the furthest Bruce could have possibly flown in an military grade aircraft by this hour. His hearing extended to its limit, the alarm screams across his nerves, hitting him in with a wall of noise that lands like a physical blow. He flinches, covering his ears reflexively as yellow and black light flashes in the corner of his eyes. Then another alarm trips. And another. The cacophony overwhelms him and Clark clamps down on senses, hard; the alarms die down to a whisper, and his vision clears as the sensory overload rolls back in waves.

He’s barely cleared his head when he hears an unfamiliar ringtone from the suite.

// “I’ve traveled each and every highway / And more, and much more than this.”

Bruce left his phone.

Clark scrambles into the Suite, hopping lightly over the broken glass as he tracks the dulcet voice back to its source. He unearths Bruce’s titanium-and-gold paean to conspicuous consumption from the cushion of a splintered wingback chair.

// “I've had my share of losing.”

The phone’s lockscreen vanishes to black once Clark touches it, and the ringer cuts out when Clark thumbs the external mute button.

Angry green text scrawls across a screen.

>I KNOW YOU’RE THERE, BRUCE.
>PICK UP

Guessing could be dangerous; both Bruce Wayne and the Bat had to have galaxies of influence beyond what Clark knew—but who else would have the technical know-how to install wafer-thin pressure sensors in an aftermarket phone that Bruce hadn’t immediately removed?

Clark feels the electric spark of connection as he extends his senses into the obnoxious billionaire phone. He can’t break encryption, but he can pull a few native processes from behind the password encoding. He finds the clock function, then nudges over to the keyboard. It takes only a little coaxing for a small green keyboard to pop up over the black screen.

> Bruce isn’t here, Alfred. Disappeared suddenly last night. Is he okay?

The angry green text

> WHO IS THIS
> WHY DO YOU HAVE THIS PHONE
> HOW DID YOU
> HELL WITH IT, LOCK CODE OVERRIDDEN
> PICK UP THE PHONE

The phone lights up. No ringtone this time. Like magic, the lockscreen disappears, remotely disabled. Clark answers.

“Are sinister phone overrides in your job description, Mr. Pennyworth?” Clark asks warmly.

A pause and an unexpected indrawing of breath.

“...I’m sorry, but who are you and how did you get this phone?” Alfred thunders.

“I’m not sure if I can answer that,” Clark says, rubbing his thumb across his brow. Saying less than he needs to is a long-ingrained habit, but if he wants Alfred to trust him, he needs to extend himself. Clark tips the phone away from his mouth to allow his voice to shift into the resonant Superman register. “...Was Ms. Mayer able to get home safely last night?”

A muttered good lord comes from the other end of the line. “‘Direct observation,’ he said.” Alfred sounds faint. “Tell me you disabled the cameras—”

Awkward silence as Clark imagines how that scene must have played out between Bruce and Alfred: I’ve secured the Regency, discovered the cameras, and had sex with the real Superman. Just another mission parameter from his checklist. Clark has wondered if there’s something worse than the non-stop media coverage of the Super Sexcapade, and just by luck, he’s discovered it.

“I didn’t hear them broadcasting. I would have, if they were. Probably,” Clark says finally.

A throat-clearing covers a spasmodic cough.

...Then again, maybe Bruce hasn’t told Alfred.

“You can hear wireless signals?” Alfred asks weakly.

“In a manner of speaking. I can see them.”

“I don’t suppose Bruce knows that...particular fact.”

“He knows some facts. About me, I mean. And I know—some facts about him. I wasn’t exactly—”

“You weren’t exactly.” Clark didn’t realize he would so quickly miss the awkward silence; that small squeak might be the sound of Alfred cleaning his glasses in sheer agitation.

“Young man, if you value your privacy, or Bruce Wayne’s privacy, you will get yourself and Bruce’s things out of suite right now. No one has to know you or he were there.”

“Have you seen the room, Mr. Pennyworth? They’re going to know somebody was here.”

“You still have time before—” a feedback loop activates as two more ultrasonic alarms trip, and the phone vibrates its own alarm directly into Clark’s ear. He winces, and yanks the phone away from his ear. Alfred’s voice rings out over the clamour: “—You have no time, you have to move now.”

An insistent knock cuts through the conversation.

“Don’t open the door,” Alfred orders. Clark’s out on the balcony in a single bound, swiping his shield and his glasses from the table. A quick glance through the wall confirms that it’s not Bruce. Mindi, her arms crossed, her face thunderous, is tapping her foot impatiently in the hallway; a man with a concierge nametag over his smartly pressed suit attempts to placate her about the Regency’s privacy policy. She’s having none of it, so he removes a key from his pocket and slips it into the lock.

“It’s just Mindi. Alfred, I lost Bruce. I think he might be in trouble.”

Clark hears the keycard activate the lock. The handle dips down, but the door doesn’t budge an inch. On the other side of the door, the concierge sags in relief and apologizes to Mindi. “The lock’s not responding, ma’am.” She is undeterred. “Remove the door if you have to. I’m speaking to my client right now.”

“I don’t think you appreciate the situation, sir. Bruce is on his way to you over the Gotham/Metropolis Harbor, according to a series of irate tweets about ‘aggressive experimental planes’.”

“That...can’t be right.” Clark breathes out, centers, focuses on the bay. He hears the quiet roar of an unfamiliar aircraft, and focuses on the heartbeat of the pilot inside: the sound is dissimilar to the rhythm that’s filled his mind like a metronome since Bruce entered the Starlight Suite. It can’t be him—even as Clark feels the subtle, indefinable pull toward the unfamiliar beat.

“I don’t think you understand. He’s on his way to you in daylight. Something is terribly wrong and I am out of options. If he followed procedure, Bruce has scrambled the suite locks. That gives us five minutes or less before they attempt more provocative measures. You need to leave immediately. If there’s any hope for—” Alfred trails off.

“—For what, Mr. Pennyworth?”

The voice sounds more tired than Clark feels. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to ask. I need you to make a decision. Will you help?”

“If it’s within my power, always.”

“I need you to decide if you’re willing to help Bruce.”

“That’s an odd way to phrase the question.”

“You’ll understand soon enough,” Alfred says. “Find the comm. It’s still in the suite. If it’s active, he’ll pick it up automatically. Seven minutes until contact.”

The call disconnects, and Clark glances back out into the hallway. Mindi taps out an angry tattoo against her elbow as the concierge phones maintenance.

The tools he has at his disposal are the ones he has in his hands: Bruce’s phone, his shield, and his glasses. He could call Mindi and fake Bruce’s people-pleasing well enough that it might fool her, coming from Bruce’s phone over a bad connection. He could slip into the suit and fly away from this confrontation.

He could imagine any number of ways out of Bruce Wayne’s psychodrama.

Clark fetches his jacket and his shirt out of the wreckage of the bar and pulls his undershirt from under the sagging bed frame. As he slides the shield and the phone into the secret compartment in his jacket, he prays his decision is the right one.

Mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, hair mussed from an evening of debauchery, visibly missing his pants under the cut of his American suit jacket, dress-shirt open at the collar to show off his sweat-stained undershirt, opens the door of the Starlight Suite before the maintenance worker can pop the first hinge off of the door. He squints sleepily at Mindi. His posture is loose, even as he manages to block any view of the room’s interior, and adjusts his glasses.

“Mindi! This is…awkward. Didn’t Bruce call you?”

“Clark Kent,” Mindi seethes. She starts forward, pushing at his chest. To her surprise, he only moves an inch and then leans forward, pulling her into a conspiratorial huddle. Mindi jabs her finger into Clark’s solar plexus. “Move aside. I need to speak with my client’s client.”

Clark frowns. “Aren’t you Bruce’s client?”

“I’m Lucius Fox’s client. Bruce Wayne is my job. Stand aside so I can do it.”

Clark pulls the door tight against his side.

Mindi snaps her fingers at the concierge. “He will call security, Mr. Kent.”

Clark makes a show of thinking through Mindi’s request, then throws the door open and steps aside. Mindi brushes into the room with the concierge and maintenance on her heels. They stop short when the clear the entryway, and Clark can see the exact moment when they take in the state of Starlight Suite: the concierge pales; Mindi grabbed the arm of the maintenance worker, as though to balance herself against a severe blow; maintenance thins her lips.

Mindi picks her way through the sea of broken tile, glass, as the concierge straightens a painting on the wall. The black and white decor has been joined by jagged shards of splintered wood and gray furniture foam spilling from the couch and chair set. In the center of the room, the bed is broken down the middle and ground into the floor at its posts, snapped under Clark and Bruce’s joint weight.

The sound of the shower from the inner suite’s bathroom echoes through their joint silence.

“Bruce is fond of his privacy. Do you mind waiting?” Clark rubs the back of his neck. “I’m sure there’s a chair—” Aside from the entryway table, not a single piece of interior furniture has survived. “The balcony’s still in pretty good condition.”

Mindi rounds on all three of them. “If one word of this written, or one picture of this taken, I will gut your family’s assets.”

Her piece said, she retreats to the balcony, as maintenance swears quietly under her breath and the concierge holds back his trembling lip. Clark subtly shifts the comm in his ear, and continues the silent countdown to Bruce’s arrival.

Mindi doesn’t remain on the balcony, despite Clark’s best efforts to contain her there. She paces around spars of collapsed wall furniture as she works through her contact list, talking quickly with the concierge and maintenance in-between calls to emergency contractors. The repair bill is racking up, and it’s only been five minutes. Everyone resolutely ignores Clark’s state of undress, or the fact that Bruce Wayne doesn’t seem to be any closer to finishing his shower than they did before Mindi started yelling into her phone in Farsi.

Clark wishes he’d found a tie so he could loosen it, as the countdown ticks over to zero.

He activates the comm. Bruce should be within range; by now, he should be too close to the city to back down from whatever he plans to do, and he should see that the suite isn’t empty and that Clark isn’t alone.

“Well,” Clark says with forced brightness. “I think Bruce is just about done in the shower. Mindi, Sorensen, Allison... can I offer anybody room service?” He tips his glasses down and watches the transmission travel through the air like a rippling blue vibration towards the Bat Plane approaching the far side of the building. Figure it out, Bruce. I’m not alone.

Any response is drown out by the backwash of the Bat Plane's engine as it rounds the hotel, rattling the window panes on the floors below them. The roar pitches from loud to deafening as the glass on the floor below them shatters, cascading to the floor in slabs.

“Subtle, Bruce,” Clark subvocalizes, as he motions towards the concierge who is with him on the balcony. “Are you planning to park here?”

The Plane continues banking, whipping itself around in a violent arc. Clark’s eyes widen. Bruce isn’t decelerating, and he’s aimed directly at the balcony. The plane accelerates and plows into the concrete masonry, snapping the empty metal frames of the glass wall like matchsticks. Clark reacts in tandem, pivoting his body to shelter the concierge from the barrage of concrete and tile. Mindi and the maintenance are deep enough into the room to be able to protect themselves; they dive into the en suite bedroom and shelter behind its door.

Undercarriage grinding against the tile, the plane jerks to a halt less than a meter from Clark.

“There are citizens, Bruce,” Clark hisses into the comm. He calls into the suite, “Is everyone okay—” but the roar of the Bat Plane’s thrusters drown out the rest of his question.

The plane hovers above the twice-ruined suite, its wings folding up like a carrion bird. Panels below the cockpit slide open, revealing two cannons fitted with projectile heads and tension lines.

Clark grabs the concierge by the shoulder, pressing him bodily towards the suite’s door—a deep sea fisher knows a goddamn harpoon when he sees one.

“Tell me that you fucked Bruce Wayne,” the concierge cries hysterically, as he fumbles out his phone. “I just...I just need a statement, and we can honorarily induct you into the—oh god, why did I—”

Clark shoves the distraught concierge at the door, and blocks him with his back.

“Go!” he shouts over his shoulder.

The grapple fires.

Time slows as Clark’s anger boils over. Bruce knows Superman can’t be hurt by whatever Bruce is prepared to throw at him; he’s leveraging the safety of Mindi and the hotel staff against Clark’s compliance. Heat builds under his cheekbones. He could smash the grapple bolts into the floor, reel the lines in, and throw the Bat Plane through the ceiling before Bruce has time to disengage the tow cables; he could shear off the canopy of the plane with his heat vision, shove Bruce against the console, demand an explanation for every goddamn inexplicable action he’s taken in the past twenty-four hours.

Alfred’s words ring in his ears: I need you to decide if you’re willing to help Bruce.

Clark hasn’t fucking decided yet.

The click-whirr of a cell-phone camera in slow-motion rings in his ears. Clark can’t end this standoff with witnesses. Clark forcibly powers down.

Okay, he thinks grimly. If they’re watching; let’s give them something to watch.

Mindi has never in her fifteen years working for Wayne Enterprises, three hostage situations at Wayne Tower, and her one personal run-in with the Bat Vigilante when she turned down the wrong alley after a Wayne Foundation Gala, seen this: the vigilante’s plane squatting over the carcass of the suite. Behind the door to the inner suite, Allison, the Regency’s Head of Maintenance nudges into her. Mindi hugs her close. If shooting starts, they’ll need to make a break for the granite-lined shower. Bruce Wayne will just have to make do with some company.

In the past two years, something ugly crawled into the reports of the Bat. Men branded. Drugrunners beaten and chained in their labs. Still—she can’t believe the Bat would kill in cold blood. This must be a terrible mistake—

Clark Kent steps forward, the color up in his face as he spoils for a fight. Fuck. What can Amateur Hour possibly do here. He was helpful in the Luthor manor (until he fucked off as fully as Bruce had), but this was the Bat.

Damn fool’s gotten a taste for—oh shit, what is he doing—

Clark juts his chin out, crossing his arms over his chest. He’s taunting the Bat.

The plane starts forward, sunlight dripping off its canopy in rainbow bursts, then fires its payload. Clark grunts and rolls with the impact. Oh god—he’s down. Mindi shoves her shoulder against the debris that’s wedging the door half-closed. She fixes Allison with a steady gaze.

“Help me,” she implores.

Allison braces her, and the door groans under their combined effort. The door opens a few inches wider, and Mindi slips through. She presses her phone into Allison’s hand. “Call security.”

“Isn’t the, uh, Batman a—”

Mindi sets her jaw. She’s always considered the Bat as Gotham’s Dark Protector, but in the main suite, Clark wriggles like a fish caught in a rope addict’s sloppy nightmare, tangling himself further in the Bat’s line with each pull.

“We can’t take that chance.”

As Allison dials, Mindi grabs for a shard of glass and cloth to wrap it in.

Clark’s eyebrows mount his forehead in mild annoyance as he struggles against the rope. He doesn’t seem to grasp that this situation is more dangerous than the designated Office Asshole stealing his stapler. “Clark!” she calls out, but he’s too preoccupied to respond. Whatever. She’ll cut him free if she has to.

She creeps along the edge of the room, using the ruined living room set as cover.

Clark spies her near the couch. He wastes his breath shouting at Mindi to shelter behind the door, and fuck, they need to hire ‘em smarter at the Planet—Amateur Hour can’t even get his full warning out before the Bat Plane lurches, sweeping him off his feet. With a final lurch, the Bat Plane dives out of the room, dragging Clark across the broken tile, and out through the gaping hole in the balcony. For one sickening moment, Clark is suspended in the air like he wasn’t about to be pulled to his death, and he looks—

Fuck. He looks calm.

Mindi runs to the edge of the demolished glass wall, as far out as she’ll chance it, the floor of the balcony crumbling and raining down onto the street below. She strains to catch the Bat Plane as it swoops across the Regency, probably back towards the bay, where a large shelf of storm clouds has amassed, Clark’s form dragging behind the Bat Plane shrinking to a terrifying speck and disappearing.

God. The day has barely started, and she is so fucking tired.

Mindi turns back to find Allison has inched out of the inner suite. She flinches in surprise when she discovers Sorenson at her elbow with his camera stretched out to film the Bat Plane swooping around the hotel. She lays her hand on Sorenson’s forearm, and Allison’s when she’s crept close enough to touch.

“Wayne Enterprises would be happy to remunerate the Regency for any damage listed on your initial inventory, but,” she says solemnly, and lets out a shaky breath. “But we don’t pay for Acts of Bat.”

Mindi eats her words two hours later when Lucius Fox stands with her in the broken shambles of the Starlight Suite, a wounded pinch to his movements like all seventy-five of his years were unceremoniously dumped on his doorstep today.

“Of course, Wayne Enterprises is happy to pay for all damages to the Suite. Please tally your charges and deliver the estimate to Ms. Mayer by the end of the month. But, of course, yes, we’ll be happy to cover project overruns if the Regency feels it needs to shut down while it rehabilitates its...image.”

A less-composed man might take the liberty of slumping after the hotel staff cleared out of the room at Lucius’ request, but he simply turns to Mindi and leans heavily against her elbow as they survey the damage to Metropolis’ oldest and most venerable hotel.

“He really has made a mess of it, hasn’t he?” Lucius murmurs.

“Bruce wasn’t responsible for this,” Mindi fumes. “He wasn’t even in the room. That Kent fellow was covering for him. He gave me the slip, sir.”

“Were we talking about Bruce?” Lucius turns a twinkling eye to her.

“You spoke with a certain fondness, Lucius. This will double our company’s liability for the fiscal quarter. How the hell am I supposed to spin that to the financial press?”

“I don’t believe we’ll be paying for the tape after all, Ms. Mayer.”

Mindi grabs Lucius’s arm, and maneuvers herself around him to bring them face-to-face. She’s had a stressful twenty-four hours and she’s powering through on her sheer distaste for everything that Visual Entertainment, and its goddamn owner, LexCom stands for. “We need to pull it from the big video aggregators, Lucius. What’s the point of the full court press if you don’t yank the tape?”

“Ms. Mayer, have you seen CNN? NBC?” Lucius nudges at the bezel of a smashed LCD television sticking out from a pile of plaster, and laughs at himself. “No, I suppose you haven’t. How does breakfast sound? I can fill you in on the world’s latest headline.”

Mindi meets Lucius in the lobby of the Deco-Roman disaster after she finishes answering Sorensen’s increasingly bewildered questions about the location of one Bruce Wayne, billionaire, currently missing. The minute Sorenson’s turned, she disengages the publicist smile and watches him as he’s escorted to a back room, presumably to take smelling salts.

The Regency’s atrium swarms with microphones and telephoto lens as journalists cram from the tri-city area cram themselves into every inch of available space. A raft of microphones are shoved in her face.

“Excuse me, Ms.—?” “What happened in the Starlight Suite—?” “—After the Bat took off from—” “One of our own was taken, who was reportedly—” “—Bruce Wayne's secret lover?”

Mindi does what she does best; and gives them the impression she’s just a hack publicist here to give Wayne Enterprise’s corporate line. Disappointed, the swarm turns to the cleaning staff who were in the suite four floors below for a quote.

When she finally makes it across the floor, Lucius greets Mindi in front of a line of security officers, holding back a tide of Metropolis citizens spilling into the hotel from the streets. He holds up an issue of The Daily Planet and spreads the paper open to show the full front page.

“A Breaking Edition, just for the occasion,” he says, with that same goddamn twinkle in his eye.

Above the fold, Sorenson’s grainy cellphone snap of the Batwing hauling Clark out the window at speeds that could probably kill a man. The headline is stamped out with a 72-point fury. Batman: Hoax or Murderer? The byline announces the return to print journalism for Perry White, editor, with special research pulled from Clark Kent’s ongoing investigation. It’s a fucking joke; didn’t Clark say that the Planet had torpedoed his Bat vigilante series last night?

Mindi rips the paper out of Lucius’ hands, pages to Lifestyle and Leisure. A single note about the Luthor Estate Evacuation has made it into the society section. Two columns about the Super Sexcapade, and nothing else. She looks up at Lucius, more than a little lost.

“Bruce Wayne is officially yesterday’s news.”

“Where could Bruce be, anyway?” Mindi asks as they endure a short pat-down at a hastily established security checkpoint next to a column and some ghastly Roman sculpture.

Lucius waits until they’ve entered the door to the town car has closed behind them. He gives the driver instructions to a bistro in Midtown, back across the Metro State bridge which is not currently not backed up as the other two bridges are by police cordons.

“Ms. Mayer, I’ve worked for Wayne Enterprises for forty years. I’ve learned not to speculate on what the Waynes prefer to do in their free time.”

“He’ll be at the taping today,” Mindi says flatly. “He’s preempting actual celebrities, Lucius. If he doesn’t show, I don’t have any favors left in Gotham.”

Lucius presses his lips into a thin line. “That remains to be seen.” He pauses and glances out toward the bay. “I suspect it’ll largely depend on how much of a damn fool he’s prepared to be.”

Chapter Text

Whipping through the air of towards the Gotham-Metropolis harbor, the rope drags Clark behind the Bat Plane like pantsless, recalcitrant steerage. Clark’s anger has subsided—Bruce would be just the type to watch him for a reaction on his external cameras, and Clark refuses to give him one. He doesn’t struggle against the ropes; and he doesn’t supply enough additional g-forces to spiral the plane into the nearest skyscraper.

As the Plane swoops between First Bank and the new Wayne Financial tower to avoid a tower crane, the line jerks him in a roll as familiar as the roll of a deep sea haul before the captain has to ditch the nets to make it through choppy seas. If Bruce cuts the line after all of this…

Behind them, a helicopter’s rotors drowns out the distant rumble of morning traffic; a local news crew circling the downtown corridor for aerial coverage of the city.

“—What the fuck is that, Phil?” “—A goddamn government experiment?” “Is it dragging someone?” “Oh Jesus Tapdancing Christ, it’s a person. Turn the fucking camera on—!”

The circuits in the video camera hum to life.

“Get him in frame, Tara! Oh god, I know him—local kid from The Daily Planet!”

Clark decides a little bit of a show is in order. He wiggles in the ropes, panicked maybe; or convinced a long drop might be preferable to whatever the Bat has in store. The camera will pick up one over-engineered urban intimidation vehicle and one Clark Kent scared out of his wits.

Bruce pushes the throttle, accelerating the plane towards the bay.

Despite Clark’s renewed struggles, he makes sure the ropes don’t slip off his waist as the helicopter doggedly pursues them.

They clear the last line of skyscrapers in seconds. For a moment, they’re sailing brilliantly through the air, the bay shimmering with sunlight below them; the shelf of stormclouds blowing in from the east, still distant enough to promise a golden morning. And then the white-capped waves of the bay fill the rim of his vision as Bruce pushes the plane into a steep dive towards the water.

Seconds before they hit, the plane pulls up and skims across the water, skipping Clark across the surface like a pebble. He grits his teeth and clamps the rope as hard as he dares to make sure each bounce doesn’t launch him free of the grapple line.

The plane whips around in a tight turn as it decelerates under the span of Junction Bridge. They come to rest a meter above the water, within spitting distance of morning traffic. Brakes squeal as commuters swerve to avoid where the drivers ahead of them have abandoned their cars to dash to the railing. The situation escalates, as the crowd grows on the bridge; Clark’s already heard two near-misses as pedestrians were nearly clipped by startled drivers.

Bruce is making a spectacle of themselves. And people will get hurt if he keeps this up.

In a flash of temper, Clark doesn’t entirely compensate for the the loss of momentum.

Instead of tumbling onto the wing, he smacks into the rear of the plane with enough force to rattle the cockpit. Clark rebounds off of it and scrabbles at the back fins as he slips down into the water. Between gasps, he grabs wildly for the plane, but Clark Kent, reporter, is fighting a losing battle. He breaches the surface one last time before he disappears beneath the waves.

The shadow of the helicopter circles overhead as the crew goes kicks up a flurry of comms traffic. “He’s disappeared! He isn’t resurfacing! Quick, get Search and Rescue here!”

The Bat Plane’s shadow should disguise what he plans to do next. He kicks his legs in a lazy stroke, and surfaces just underneath the cockpit. Above him, Bruce calmly monitors his instrument panel.

Clark lays a hand against the belly of plane, and squeezes.

The hull crumples as he jerks the plane down into the water. With another small flick of his wrist, he rips into the fuselage, and pulls. The whole fuel cell assembly comes away clean in his hands as rescue foam deploys to stop the plane from hemorrhaging more fuel.

There’s no reason Clark has to pretend any of this is hard. Bruce doesn’t need to be reassured about their common goddamn humanity.

He waits until the helicopter banks towards them, turning the camera into the glare of the sun. With the cockpit of the plane blocking him from view of the crowd on the motorway, Clark crushes the fuel cells into a compact ball. He aims, pulls back his arm, and lets it fly. Easy as throwing a baseball around with his pa, the metal ball that had been the Bat Plane’s fuel tanks streaks out of the atmosphere.

“What the hell are—” Bruce mutters. He smacks a button on the console. The grapple rope retracts, jerking Clark back under the water, across the underbelly of the Plane, over the razor sharp edges of the hole he just ripped, and hauls him up onto the front gliding wing on the vehicle, glasses slipping off his face to sink beneath the choppy waves.

Jesus Christ. A sailor knows what that was, the implication of it.

He spies the helicopter dipping out of the sun’s glare, and collapses onto the wing, panting raggedly.

Clark raises his head minutely, locking eyes with Bruce through the canopy. With his shoulder, he jams the comm on. “Keelhauling, Bruce? You’re not my captain, and you have no authority to punish me. Whatever the hell you want, you’re going to have to come out here to get it.”

The canopy hisses as it retracts and Bruce unfolds from it in a cascade of black silk. His eyes burn fiercely but aren’t locked on Clark. In the cape and cowl, Bruce’s mouth twitches and seems...oddly vulnerable.

The helicopter buzzes overhead, as it dips perilously closer into visual range.

“Holy shit, Phil, I think that’s Gotham’s Bat!”

“I thought he was an urban legend!”

Clark’s heat vision flashes out, aimed precisely at the helicopter’s back rotor. The metal smokes, and groans as the helicopter veers to the side. It’s a dangerous choice, but they should be able to limp home safely if they clear the harbor immediately. The pilot radios in the malfunction and receives clearance for an emergency landing at the nearest helipad. The helicopter still makes one last pass overhead before it turns back into the city.

“They’ll make it,” Clark says as he tracks their flight path back to the nearest helipad.

The morning smoothes out into the cries of gulls, the lap of water against the Bat Plane’s hull, the excited cries of the crowd that’s gathered on the bridge.

Clark runs a hand through his wet hair and stands. Rises off the front wing minutely, until they’re level with one another. Bruce’s head is still bowed.

“What. do. you. want. from. me,” Clark enunciates. It’s clearly not nothing, and he refuses to bleed for him.

The cowl rises, Bruce’s eyes burning in the face of Gotham’s Bat. “Confirmation,” the mechanical voice rasps as he pulls another grapple from his belt.

Clark flinches but catches the bolt an inch from his shoulder. He hears oh my god and what’s Batman doing? and contact the national guard! ripple through the crowd. And then shurikens are tearing into his soggy tweed jacket, crumpling against his skin. As Clark Kent takes a knee, a hundred cell tower pings vibrate inside his skull. The next stagger is less for show than for actual necessity, as he shuts the panicked stampede of emergency calls out of his mind.

When Clark looks back up, Bruce has re-sealed himself in the cockpit. The Bat Plane lurches forward as it rises out of the water. A secondary fuel supply. Of course. The whirring whine of the dual jet intakes almost covers the soft hiss of chambering of rounds; but Clark gets the idea as soon as the grapple guns rotate into the body of the plane, and two mini-guns deploy from the up-sloping wings. Clark Kent, soaked to the bone, skewered by the Batman’s shurikens, teeth chattering, without even a pair of pants to his name, falls to his knees in front of the crowd.

“No,” Clark says calmly, his head bent against the hull as if in supplication. He leans down, and catches the lip of the Bat plane’s gliding edge. “I’m done humoring you.”

He lifts them together out of the water, pulling the plane in his gravity wake. Clark hopes to whatever indifferent universe that the motion is subtle enough to be mistaken for the plane moving under its own power. In the cockpit, Bruce swears violently as he pushes the throttle past its maximum, then stabs down on the firing controls. The rattle of gunfire past his body doesn’t phase him. The confrontation is over.

Picking out one of the barrier islands on the edge of the harbor, Clark aims, and hurls himself and the plane towards it, an avenging angel and a demon clasped in his arms, streaking towards their deserted target.

Caught in the inexorable pull of Clark’s gravity, heat alarms trigger in the cockpit as the plane screams past its friction tolerances. The leading edge of the wings begins to glow as Bruce frantically attempts to stabilize their descent, but he’s not flying under his own power. Nothing can deccelerate the plane fast enough; they’re going to land hard.

Clark watches him brace for impact…

...and in the blink of an eye, Clark releases the wing of the plane and catches the nose of the cockpit, the metal crumpling against him as he matches velocities with the machine and then swings in into a wide spiral, flying with it, until it has bled off enough momentum that Clark can land them both safely.

He sets the plane down on a wide, grassy mountain top that drops off into a dramatic sea cliff, and steps back from the cooling metal, stripping out of his jacket and his gashed dress-shirt and his torn-up undershirt. He grabs at the shield from its hidden pocket, and slams it against his chest.

The Kryptonian fabric unfolds in long thin petals, flowing over him as gently as rain. If the Bat wants to face him, let him stand against Superman.

The canopy blows open with concussive force and Bruce comes out swinging.

One of the corners of Bruce’s mouth turns up, as he slams an elbow into the side of Clark’s head. “You’ve changed.”

Damn him, but even after the grapple and the keelhauling, Clark still doesn’t want to hear the sound of Bruce’s bones breaking against his body. He rolls with the elbow, as Bruce switches into a grappling throw. Bruce’s blood is up, and his heart is hammering quick, quick as anything he’s heard. Except it’s not Bruce’s heartbeat.

What Clark wants is an explanation.

“You’ve changed too,” Clark remarks as he super-speeds out of a hold, only to find Bruce’s feet somersaulting off of his back, using Clark’s momentum to slam him against the ground. Clark’s on his feet before Bruce can gloat over it.

“I haven’t,” Bruce insists as he ducks out of Clark’s reach. “This was always the plan, alien.”

Clark grits his teeth. “Don’t call me that.”

“How are you going to stop me, alien?”

He springs into the air before Bruce can dive at him again. He cuts a line of fire around them, a dark glassy warning belt that burns as hot as magma. Inside of the ring of charred earth, no larger than twenty paces radius from the Bat Plane, Bruce’s guard falters, a stunned expression on his face.

The unfamiliar rhythm of Bruce’s heart makes a strange noise. Bruce is… afraid?

“Your heart—” Clark murmurs, as Bruce grabs his grapnel gun and fires a line at Clark’s leg. Clark doesn’t dodge it; lets the grappling hook wind around him. If Bruce thinks Clark will allow himself be hauled back down to the ground, he’s in for a nasty shock.

Clark crosses his arm in petty triumph; the proverbial immovable object.

Bruce slaps the side of the gun. He flies up towards Clark at inhuman speed as the grapple retracts. Clark’s jaw jumps in frustration, but he refuses to move. It Bruce wants to break himself on Clark’s body... Clark is going to let him.

At the last moment, Bruce rolls. He somersaults heavily off of Clark’s solar plexus. He releases the grapple gun and dives back towards ground at the same breakneck speed as his ascent—heading towards earth without a line to break his fall; without showing any sign of breaking his descent.

An impact at this speed will shatter Bruce’s vertebrae.

Clark’s on the ground in an instant, grabbing Bruce out of the air. His body absorbs the brunt of impact, and diffuses the rest of Bruce’s momentum by rolling them both through the scrub. Bruce lands on top of him, panting. Before Clark can get a word out, Bruce plants a boot in Clark’s face.

The world slows to the horizon of Clark’s power as picoseconds crystallize around his body. When time reasserts itself, his hand is around Bruce’s throat, holding Bruce back against his chest. That’s all Clark needs to hold him, but his other hand closes over Bruce’s wrist almost delicately.

“Do it,” Bruce taunts with the Bat’s synthesized voice, his throat working underneath Clark’s hand.

“What do you want to hear from me, Bruce? That I’ve killed to save this planet? That I have no intention to ever do so again?”

“Actions, not words, Superman.”

Clark tightens his grip, pulling Bruce flush with his body. Bruce’s heart makes that same noise that reads as fear, but…

“Do you actually believe I could kill you? Did you believe that when you asked me to breath with you last night? Did you believe it while you were fucking me?”

That sets Bruce struggling against his grip. Clark listens. Something about his heartbeat rings false; as though the sound of Bruce’s heart were played over a distorted speaker, shifting the fundamental frequency from its normal pitch. Clark feels the rise and fall of his chest constrained by Bruce’s body pulled tight against him.

If this weren’t already unbearable intimate—but Clark needs to know.

Clark releases Bruce’s wrist and ghosts his hand over to Bruce’s heart. Laying his fingers against the rough weave of the Batsuit, he presses in gently. Bruce stills underneath him. Clark feels rather than hears that stretched KA-thump, the telltale flutter of Bruce’s heart, buried under the sound of a false heartbeat.

Clark’s hands falls away from Bruce, who whirls to face him. Peering through skin and muscle, Clark’s vision slams into a network of opaque veins branching through Bruce’s body. A snarl of them knot around Bruce’s heart—as impenetrable to Clark’s sight as a half-kilometer of lead tubing.

“So that’s what you think of me.” Clark says calmly, taking a hitching step back from Bruce, and another.

Bruce had to have shoved this tech into his body overnight. Right after Clark had let Bruce—

What Clark can’t figure out is how Bruce managed to insert that much material into his body without any visible markings on his skin. But Clark supposes there must have been technological advances over the past two years courtesy of LexCorp scavenging the Kryptonian scout ship. There’s every possibility that Clark wouldn’t be able to recognize that kind of hybridized tech on sight.

The repudiation lands a blow more vicious than anything that Bruce has thrown at him at the Luthor estate, in the Starlight Suite, or the harbor.

He feels cored out.

“Was I so repugnant to you—” he hitches up against the melted gliding edge of the Bat Plane and stumbles, falling heavily against the cockpit. “—”that you had to fill yourself with—” he gestures at Bruce’s body, from wrist to heart.

The motion startles Bruce. He springs back into a low crouch. Bruce cradles the wrist that’s been touched with the unknown tech, staring at it wonderingly. Next to the barrier of burning reeds, throwing thick columns of smoke in the morning light, the Bat looks like a cornered animal.

“What do you see?” Bruce demands.

“Shielded vessels are attached to your heart and to your wrist. It’s muffling your heartbeat. When you re-appeared in Metropolis, I couldn’t tell that it was you. Not at first. I can hear your heartbeat now, but only when I’m touching you.”

Clark doesn’t know why Bruce looks stricken.

When Bruce comes at him again, Clark sinks back against the plane’s open cockpit, crushing it into a cushion around him. He can’t seem to catch his breath. The Bat towers over him in morning light. The color is up in Bruce’s face. He’s breathing hard, just out of Clark’s reach. The fitful, beating heart of Gotham has bested him.

“Do you find me that disturbing?” and regrets the question as soon as its asked. “Please don’t answer that—”

“—I do.” As the Bat’s mechanical rasp falls silent, Bruce watches him carefully.

Clark wasn’t sure that his romantic life could so closely resemble his early failures with his expanding powers, but now: a failure more spectacular than smashing half a mountain on his first flight. Bruce has given him every indication that he finds Clark Kent and Superman viscerally disturbing. How many times has Bruce run away, before understanding breaks across him at last?

Clark doesn’t bother to look when he hears locks popping. A heavy object clanks against the plane’s outer wing; he double-takes when he sees the cowl discarded at Bruce’s feet. Underneath the mask, Bruce’s hair has matted to his skull and rivulets of sweat run down the side of his face. He’s breathing heavily, the carbon weave of the Batsuit glinting harshly in the morning sun. Surely he wouldn’t be so affected by such a short fight. An hour of grappling in the Starlight Suite barely winded him last night.

“Kryptonian tech,” Bruce recites. “Works by touch and intent.”

Clark’s shoulders slump. He’s so tired. He doesn’t bother to answer.

The lack of response doesn’t deter Bruce. He rips off one of his gauntlets with his teeth, and touches the point on his wrist where the opaque threads meet skin. The sonic distortion net around Bruce’s heart drops, and the steady beat spreads across Clark’s mind like an antiseptic balm that stings what it heals.

Bruce approaches cautiously, fingers brushing the hull next to Clark’s head. “Can I touch you?” He clears his throat and clarifies, “your suit?”

The laugh that bubbles up out of Clark isn’t pleasant. “Do it, and then just—”

Bruce’s hand falls onto Clark’s upper arm, then jerks back, before it settles onto his suit. Together, they watch as Bruce’s hand dances over the material; where the suit meets Bruce’s touch, the fabric tessellates, rippling away from his palm.

His hand closes, gentle and trembling, over Clark’s bare skin.

“How?” Clark demands.

“Subdermal regulator,” Bruce says, almost punch-drunk with amazement. He pulls his hand back, and traces a finger along Clark’s deltoid. The suit folds away from his finger like paper cranes subsiding into a lake. Clark charts the progress towards his collarbone with subvocalized rumbles, that are not moans.

On his fourth attempt, he gets out: “Do you expect me to understand what that means—”

“If you want better answers, ask smarter questions—”

“Typical. Gotham’s Bat can’t bother to just ask me—”

“If you weren’t such an perfect symbol of Truth, Justice and—”

“You could have come to me, and we could have talked this through—”

“—but you wouldn’t listen, would you?”

“You don’t need to be afraid of me, Bruce. I won’t hurt you.”

Bruce is breathless. His pupils are blown. A telltale thick scent hangs in the air, a rich heaviness that has Clark’s tongue rolling against the bottom of his mouth. It takes him a moment to realize how close those words are to what an actor in a Lycra suit had said to Bruce a year ago under very different circumstances.

“How about this,” Clark offers, swallowing against the memory of Bruce in someone’s mouth. “Answer one question honestly, and—and I’ll listen. To whatever you have to say.”

His finger stops at the hollow of Clark’s throat, drinking their fill of the skin he’s uncovered. Bruce nods tightly.

“Bruce Wayne, or Bruce, or the Bat—whichever one of you makes executive decisions—what do you want from me?”

Bruce tilts his head forward, until they’re breathing the same air. “Right now?” he asks, about as rough as Clark himself feels, their bodies intersecting where Bruce’s fingers skate over the suit and nowhere else.

“Anything that’s true.”

Bruce pulls his eyes along Clark’s body. “I want you to let me suck your cock.” He looks thoughtfully over at the cockpit of the Bat Plane, then cuts his gaze back at Clark. “Fair warning, I might want something different after that.”

“Okay,” Clark says, dazed. “I’m listening.”

Chapter Text

It turns out that Bruce doesn’t want to do that much talking. He traps Clark against the Bat Plane, in an echo of how he’d caged Clark against the server room wall. His fingers cut deep lines in the Kryptonian suit as Clark jerks back into the crumpled fuselage. He grabs the cockpit to steady himself, but the edge crumples beneath his grip as the cascade of feeling resolves into a familiar sensation. Excitement. Moreyesmore. His fingers dig into the honeycombed hull and release, only to curl back as Bruce’s hand reaches his abdomen, and the suit flows away from the path Bruce’s fingers trace like water.

The metal creaks warningly; Clark suspects that the plane might be a total loss if Bruce keeps up this punishing gentleness.

Bruce purses his lips as his hand dips over Clark’s hip, and Clark shreds the metal like tissue paper.

He felt that the touch against the arch of his bone.

Impossible.

Mercifully, Bruce takes the hint and palms the swell of Clark’s cock under the uniform. The Kryptonian weave tessellates away and is replaced by the microabrasions in the terrain of Bruce’s skin. And then—the pressure of the Batsuit’s armor plating grinding against him.

Clark restrains himself to small groans, unwilling to test what his vocalizations at full volume would do to the human eardrum when he’s wound this tightly. He does, however, give voice to the complaint that bubbles out of him when Bruce pulls away.

“Is that all?” he teases.

Bruce grunts (in the negative, Clark assumes), and sinks to his knees and strokes along his shaft from tip to root, just to feel Clark jump under the pressure of his hand.

Bruce’s hand brushes the underside of his cock, cups his balls, dances across the pleasure points in the base of his spine. The alcohol may have thrown a blanket across his senses last night—and he’s been touched like this by other partners—but Clark has never so vividly experienced skin against skin. He can’t control the cry that rips out of him. It resolves with a panting syllable that sounds like Bruce.

Bruce looks up at him, face tight with startled pleasure. “After all of this, how do you still want me?”

“—You.” Clark snorts. Bruce nips at the soft skin at the base of his cock, the slightest graze of his teeth. “That’s your big question?”

“Didn’t think a spiel about deterrence would enhance the mood.” Bruce trails the heat and wetness of open-mouth kisses up to the tip of Clark’s cock. Bruce doesn’t slip his mouth over the head, even though he sways toward it minutely. Instead he tilts to the side, considering. Lets the breath of his words dance across the wetness welling there. “It’s not a rhetorical question. Everything about you is—”

Nothing good has followed from this part of Bruce’s honesty. “Please don’t, Bruce—” Fully prepared for him to explode their detente, or at the very least, the mood.

“—unexpected,” Bruce finishes, voice neutral—but the game is up.

The pulse hammers in Bruce’s throat, as good as a declaration, and Clark feels his his heart answer in kind. Clark hauls Bruce up to capture his mouth, tries not to bite at his lips when Bruce takes control of the kiss, and keeps it light, shallow, a steady beat of skin against skin, kisses that have nothing to do with the hardness that’s wrapped under layers of the Bat’s battle-ready groin protection.

(And maybe a few kisses afterward that do.)

“A compromise,” Clark says when they break apart. “I’ll give you an honest answer if you don’t interrupt what I have to say next.”

Bruce agrees with a curt nod, barely tolerating that Clark is simply holding him.

“I know what you think of me,” Clark says, stroking down Bruce’s side, fingers tracing the zippers that divide the Batsuit into its constituent parts. “I know the Bat wasn’t lying in the Starlight Suite when you said you wanted me to bleed, and I know you’re not lying now. Something changed. Tell me later, or don’t, but that thing you’re feeling that we’re not talking about—whatever it is that sets your heartbeat racing faster than a jackhammer? I know what it is. I feel it too.”

He’s never seen what it looks like, up close, when someone’s about to disagree with him. The extensors and flexors in Bruce’s mouth shift like tectonic plates, and the landscape of Bruce’s face reconfigures itself into that’s bullshit, Clark as clearly as if he said it.

“It’s reciprocal, Bruce,” Clark insists, hugging Bruce against the plane’s crushed honeycombed armor, compromised beyond repair. “Don’t ask me why I want you. You know the answer better than anyone else.”

Clark wets his lips as he watches a muscle jump in Bruce’s jaw.

“Fine.” Bruce’s agreement is neither graceful nor true. Clark can hear the lie of it, and lets it go with a tentative smile. “Now, can you shut up and help me return the favor?”

Bruce loses his layers more easily than he had in the Starlight Suite (or maybe with less obvious resentment). Clark unzips the Batsuit from throat to groin with a short detour around the obliques. The Batsuit’s lower half is trickier. The compression technology that cinches the material shut around any intrusion—knives or questing fingers—bites into Bruce’s corded muscle as he rolls the carbon-fiber pants down over his hips. Clark is disappointed to discover an unanticipated base layer: a thin stretchy material that resembles the suit he wore in the sex tape. This suit unzips from the back, but only comes off in one piece.

He suspects Bruce isn’t ready to be that exposed.

Clark slips his finger under the material at Bruce’s wrist as Bruce rolls the Batsuit bottom over his thighs, to distract himself from reaching for the back zipper.

“The costume on tape—”

“It was an old model.” The response is too immediate and too smooth to be the truth.

“—had a blue chevron.” He snaps the undersuit, which clings snugly to Bruce’s forearm. “Even fashion-forward Bruce Wayne wouldn’t bother with something that fancy for underwear. My guess, it’s someone else’s suit. Someone who works with you closely.”

Bruce takes a sharp breath, and glares up at him from a half-kneeling position, groin protector discarded next to the cowl and the Batsuit top, erection visible through the damp cloth. He remembers how quickly Bruce jackknifed over the edge of pleasure the first time in the Starlight Suite, and he fights against the flush of arousal that pours into him.

“Nevermind,” Clark says weakly, clamping a hand around the base of his own cock. “I have image search, and maybe even a job to do it at.”

Bruce pulls free of the outer suit and stands up, squaring his shoulders in a half-conscious battle stance. As though they were still fighting, and everything they’ve done has merely been an extension of that first punchdrunk match in the Starlight Suite.

Clark mirrors him.

They make quite the pair: Clark half-naked from the waist to the thighs, the ends of his uniform rustling like wind chimes as the cloth ends contact each other only to be pulled apart by their last directive; Bruce in his black skin-tight undersuit, a damp stain at the head of his cock, outlined in stark relief by the clinging uniform, as naked as Clark has ever seen him.

Clark reaches for Bruce without thinking. A hand offered, palm up. Bruce takes it, expecting to step around the discarded sections of the Batsuit. Instead, Clark pulls him into the air and twists them in a lazy roll, delighting in the quick fluttering beat of Bruce’s heart as he lands heavily on the Batwing and crushes the aft stabilizers underneath his shoulder blades.

Bruce startles, bringing their bodies into electric contact; Clark groans and chases the friction, thrusting wetly against the side of the undersuit, while Bruce’s jaw works around a building anger.

“Are you planning to destroy everything I own?” Bruce grits out, touching the crushed armor of his vehicle reverently. The flush is up in Bruce’s face, creeping above his neckband, the thick outline of his cock straining against the damp material—his body doing its utmost to undermine the peevish tone of his voice.

“That depends,” Clark says, rolling out from underneath Bruce, and letting gravity do all of the work, pulling his weight as he flattens the fuselage out into a more bed-shaped surface. “Plan to keelhaul me again for sport?”

“No,” Bruce bites out and Clark reaches for him again. “Wait—”

Clark stops.

Bruce crouches next to him in a familiar grappling pose. A very deliberate set of choices led them to this moment; feelings aside, Bruce could just as easily choose to close the distance to roll him off of the plane as he could choose to bend over him and take Clark’s leaking cock into his mouth. Clark compacts his core to prepare for either eventuality.

What Clark doesn’t expect: Bruce twists in front of him to show him his back. The undersuit’s zipper traces the curve of his spine. “Get this off me first.”

Clark ghosts a finger over the zipper, pulling a shiver of anticipation from Bruce—nothing he’d let an enemy see: the anticipation of touching and of being touched.

Bruce had said he wanted to suck Clark’s cock, but—

“I think you might like it better if I—” and reaches around to palm Bruce’s erection, tugging at the springy material covering his cock just a little too hard. Teasing how carelessly Clark could rip the suit away.

Bruce’s body hitches against him in surprise, and Clark wonders how he ever thought it was hard to read Bruce.

“Fine,” Bruce says.

Clark digs his fingers into the cloth and tears it away in an easy handful. The shredded undersuit bears Bruce from mid-thigh to stomach. Layered scars cut deep valleys into his body. He traces a whorl of knotted skin that resembles a distorted, upside-down smile. Half a lifetime of injuries as the Bat. Jesus.

Bruce’s breathing hitches again, an unvoiced pleasure noise so controlled—so thoroughly undone. He nudges Clark back toward the ridge of his cock. Safe ground, Clark takes it. “Stay here, all right?”

Clark agrees; it’s kinder than dredging up old memories.

Bruce leans back into the circle of Clark’s arms, and Clark coaxes him to lay against him like a pillow, as he stretches out on the shallow indent he’s made in the Bat Plane. Pushing back against Clark’s cock minutely, Clark strokes Bruce through a strong pulse of arousal. He feels Bruce’s building tension, transmitted to him through the pads of his fingertips. As Bruce circles his fingers around Clark’s wrist, a circuit completes: Clark feels the electrified touch as though it were playing against the base of his throat, the long line of skin from chest to groin. He grinds his free hand against his erection as his foot sinks another dent into what had been a maintenance hatch.

If this keeps up… Bruce isn’t the only one on edge, here, and he’d hoped for a little more than a quick handjob on top of a damaged Bat vehicle.

“I had a dream,” Bruce says with little preamble, his throat catching on a small groan and giving voice to his pleasure.

God, what Clark would do to hear that groan an hour from now, a year from now; what Bruce could ask him to do, just for the promise of... Clark licks his lips, and drops his head against Bruce’s cheek, more than a little overwhelmed by the desire to carve and serve up this piece of himself.

“Don’t ask me what I would do to hear that again,” Clark breathes against the shell of Bruce’s ear.

Bruce shakily thrusts up to meet Clark’s next stroke, his entire body a violent arc of need. Bruce’s groan is audible this time, and he presses up through the dry tunnel of Clark’s fingers, pulse jumping wildly: on edge, searching for something to push him over.

“You asked what changed,” Bruce says roughly. “I dreamed.”

“Was it a good dream?” he asks casually.

“I dreamt that an alien dictator destroyed the sun and forced the last of humanity to scrape by in tent camps.”

Clark’s hand falters; he can feel his brows knitting together in confusion. “That doesn’t sound positive.”

Bruce plunges on, relentless. “Gotham had fallen. People had died. Millions of them. They killed and betrayed and compromised everything they believed in to survive in that frozen wasteland. The world was falling to pieces, and I was…” The last word is barely more than a murmur, Bruce’s teeth scraping over his lip. “Happy.” Clark’s hand stills entirely. He feels Bruce push back against his cock as he fucks the immobile circle of Clark’s fingers. The question’s just about formed, probably another variation of how’s that even possible, when Bruce is answering between his quiet, rhythmic exhales. “I was, impossibly, loved.”

Bruce thrusts against Clark’s fingers, taking himself over the first tentative jumps, the building pressure, and the spasming hitch as Bruce pants out his orgasm against Clark’s shoulder; Clark comes back to himself enough to gentle Bruce through the last jerks of his hips.

Clark idly slips his fingers into the wetness on the torn edge of the undersuit, dazed and maybe still not fully present.

Loved.

The word ripples outward through his mind, until it laps up against the inescapable trajectory that he’s aimed at Bruce, a man as violent as he is implacable. The word’s power is for someone else: someone else in some other dream loved Bruce. Clark’s own feelings are too new, too sharp—but given time?

Vaguely, he’s aware that his fingers are teasing Bruce, running through a slick trail up and down his abdomen.

A dry clearing of Bruce’s throat snaps Clark back, as Bruce shifts against the hull. He reaches for the scrap of suit Clark had discarded minutes ago. The fire ring lays low, almost down to its cinders. The smoke has begun to abate; soon, one very battered Bat Plane and its current occupants will be visible from the air. After the show they put on in front of Junction bridge, Clark would bet on that eventuality sooner rather than later. His own suit is in a state of disrepair and his cock is yelling for attention through the thundering of Bruce’s words and the way Bruce won’t meet his gaze.

Suspicion blooms in his heart.

Bruce pats himself dry efficiently and then rumbles: “Participation would be appreciated next time. Unless you expect me to get myself off during all of our—”

Clark’s hands have come on their own accord to grip Bruce’s biceps. It’s urgent that Bruce answers now, before he retreats behind more of his bullshit. “Loved by whom, Bruce?”

The shifting of Bruce’s jaw turns the gears of his complete disapproval.

“How about we don’t mention that again,” he says flatly.

“How about we—” The rest of the sentence is lost in fierce kiss, Bruce twisting around to get at his mouth, more flexible than Clark would be in the same position; and afterward, breathing slowly against Bruce’s cheek, his forehead resting gently against Bruce’s brow, Clark can’t seem to find where he put the rest of that thought as a rush of green sparks melts back into the ground beneath their feet like an explosion played in reverse.

Consenting to being flown home in the Batwing takes all of Bruce’s self-discipline. He pulls the bottom half of the Batsuit back on to cover the activity window the boy scout ripped into his undersuit, then drops into the flattened cockpit. Clark’s worse off, anyway. When he retracts the suit, it obliges, but when it unfurls again, the ends flap in the same place Bruce cut with his fingers. Looking askance at him, Clark removes the suit altogether, and shakes the metal shield warningly at Bruce.

“This is your fault,” Clark says smoothly. “You’ll fix it when we return to the Batcave.”

Bruce tries not to notice that Clark’s naked and aroused and in no great rush to do anything about it; the revelation that he knows about the Batcave—or the implicit demand that he be let into it—would have been more shocking twelve hours ago.

Bruce doesn’t even bother to manage his reaction. Forget post-coital glow; he’s exhausted from his not-a-dream sojourn through time and space.

He side-eyes Clark. “If your ass is going to grace my workstation, you’ll call it the Workshop.”

“Next you’ll tell me this isn’t called the Bat Plane.”

Bruce pats the side of the Batwing—an apology for the injustice of Clark’s sobriquet.

“When we get back to the Workshop, I’ll fix your suit. But I still want something from you, and I’m not willing to do all of the work,” Bruce warns.

“I’m sure that can be arranged, Mr. Wayne.” Clark grins in a slow dawn of affection.

It’s more than what Bruce deserves, but not more than he’s willing to take.

Clark fetches the emergency-ejected canopy back to him, and Bruce tries not to be compromised by the sight of a nude Clark catching the golden rays of morning along the planes of his muscle as he rumbles the Batwing to life in the baffles of his gravity envelope.

However it is that Clark defies the universal constants that have regimented Bruce’s understanding of the physical world, he’s not going to take that power as a given; he mentally pencils Clark in for a meeting with Bruce Wayne on the day he’s touring WayneTech’s newest diagnostic facility. The premises are new enough that no one aside from security personnel will be on duty until the ribbon-cutting ceremony next Tuesday—which should give them more than enough time for Bruce to take some baseline readings of Clark’s powers (strength, heat vision, flight, invulnerability), and maybe dredge up some intel about what powers Superman has hidden from the public. Or what Clark might do with the differential gravity restraints Wayne Tech were going to debut for the military next month. Bruce has been wondering how he would slip those bonds...

The Batwing banks sharply as several Apache helicopters wheel over their vacated position on the island, investigating the charred ring and impact crater. Bruce watches Clark’s fingers dancing near a section of exposed armor.

God, he’s not even touching the plane.

Clark guides them into the line of clouds blowing in across the bay. The squall line is closing fast with the shoreline. In twenty minutes, it will unleash its fury on the downtown corridors of Gotham and Metropolis. In the downpour, miles away from their last recorded position, they should be able to make a break for the cave without being spotted by aerial surveillance.

Water droplets whip across his face. The visibility is reduced to zero; Bruce has no visuals beyond the consoles and the crumpled cockpit armor. No mission parameters to distract him. Bruce has twenty minutes with nothing to distract himself from the exposed vista of his emotions—the sheer tumult he’s exiled into that wasteland; the bubbling hope of it.

Waiting is interminable.

The memory of staring into a Stygian twilight, alone on a bluff in that frozen apocalypse presses itself into his consciousness—his whispered plea for help, turned back on itself.

“It wasn’t a dream.”

The words don’t need to be shouted for Clark to hear it, so it comes out like a conversational aside to his deactivated flight computer. He waits for the other shoe to drop.

When it doesn’t happen, he continues.

“That ruined Earth I told you about, it was the future. Or a speedshadow, whatever that means.” He clears his throat. “The subdermal regulator came from there. It’s Kryptonian.”

Bruce cranes his neck to catch a glimpse of anything outside of himself, but all he can see is the cotton candy grayness of the thunderhead. The quiet hiss of cloud cover streaming through the cockpit, and the muffled breathing that it covers; without the roar of the Batwing engines, he could almost imagine that he’s flying under his own power.

“The thing of it is since, uh, someone named Diana stuck this junk into me without the courtesy of an owner’s manual. I’ve been having visual hallucinations. Green phosphenes. Sparkling light. I’ve seen it more than once. I bet that Kryptonian tech reconfigured my goddamn optic nerve.”

There’s a muffled laugh, closer than he expected it to be. “Green light?”

Bruce snorts in disbelief. “That’s what you find interesting?”

“Sparkles? The sound of a hundred voices singing without language?” Clark prompts when Bruce fails to provide a more substantial answer. “Did you see it on the island?”

“I did.”

“Oh.” Bruce can hear the smile in Clark’s voice. Christ. He’s not prepared for this. “That’s Gaea. The, uh, I guess you’d call, living embodiment of Earth.”

“The Earth is sentient.”

“When you fled from Luthor’s mansion, you gave me the slip. I couldn’t track you by any standard means. But Gaea pointed Diana in the right direction, and she told me how to find you at the Regency.”

He can feel the end rushing up to an extremely bad punchline.

“Spit it out, Clark.”

“I’m pretty sure she just watched us,” Clark clears his throat. Bruce bets that he can’t say the word fucking twice. “Together. I think she’s fond of you.”

“The Earth is sapient?” The connections self-organize in his mind, racing faster than the cascade of horrified denial that floods through him. The kiss in the desert bazaar. The entire goddamn sojourn to that apocalyptic wasteland. An object lesson on feeling his feelings with Superman? And further back, that effervescent shimmering light that wreathed the ballroom floor of the Regency, exactly one year and one day ago, which meant.

No.

The man in the Greek comedy mask?

No.

The thought is almost too ridiculous to contemplate from a bank of clouds, held aloft by nothing more than the good intentions of a naked Kryptonian, but he resolves to ask Clark about it. Later. One thing is clear: whoever is feeding the living Earth films about the power of love needs to stop.

As the Batwing drops out of a mountain-sized cloud, down through the pounding rain, down through the gale winds of a the storm, down into the arms of the Batcave’s lake entrance, he directs his gaze to the lake. The surface shimmers, an undulating green glow that rises like fireflies, and scatters across the land, so quick it might have been a hallucination, but Bruce knows better. This is the burden that he has to bear, he knows this objectively; but for a moment, he indulges in the altogether earned resentment of an apparently very interested cosmos.

“Hey, Bruce?” The smile is back in Clark’s voice, and he’ll bet anything that he knows Bruce can hear it too.

“What.”

“Do you think she’s seen your sex tape?”