Clarion

by oxymoronic

Summary:

Clark’s halfway around the world when he hears the delicate crunch of Bruce Wayne breaking his back.

Notes:

• For chantefable.

happy fffx, chantefable!! i have wanted to write something for the DCEU involving Hush for AGES, so i jumped at the chance to bring in some bits and pieces of comics canon as per your request. i really, really hope you enjoy!

note on canon: i think you can read this with any particular JL canon as it only references the fact that Clark is alive and Bruce played a part in that, but fwiw i had the Snydercut in mind.

note on medical stuff: if you're familiar with the Hush storyline in the comics i think this version is actually less grotesque than that, but i will put an explanation in the end notes for those who want to know what they're in for. absolutely nothing is graphic - i don't detail any procedures or anything like that. i just wanted to throw up a quick content warning in case someone might be upset by the concept itself.

Clark’s halfway around the world when he hears the delicate crunch of Bruce Wayne breaking his back. Not that he knows it at the time; Clark hadn’t even known he was listening that intently to the biorhythms of a man he’s not spoken to in going on seven weeks. But he’s cruising over the Pacific when a sense of awful wrongness grips him like a fist, and he’s bolted in the direction of Gotham before he’s fully conscious of what he’s doing.

It’s easy enough to home in on Bruce by the time he’s over the city. He’s in what even Clark knows to be the roughest part of town, eerily silent as Clark descends from the sky and touches down in the stinking, wet-dark dirt. They’re alone in the alleyway, curving off left and right; no observers, no windows to peer through. It makes it even more impossible to miss the frantic sound of Alfred’s voice through the cracked-open cowl. Bruce’s eyes are shut, and his mouth is slack, and there’s an odd, bubbling cadence to his breath, arrhythmic.

Clark picks up the debris of Bruce’s comms, carefully easing the splinters away from his bloodied face. “It’s me,” Clark says quietly into the mike. “I’m here.”

Alfred cuts himself off mid-rant. “Is he – ?”

“He’s alive,” Clark says, and pretends not to hear the following wet rush of air from Alfred’s end. The position Bruce is sprawled in is already unnatural, jagged and strangely formed, and Clark hardly needs to give him a once-over to know the prognosis. “But it’s bad. I think – I think it’s his spine.”

There’s an awful silence. “Listen to me carefully,” Alfred says. “I want you to remove as much of the suit as you can, and then walk to the telephone box three blocks north and place a 911 call.”

The request briefly renders Clark thunderstruck. “You can’t – ”

“Clark,” Alfred interrupts, utterly desperate. “Please.”

Clark sucks in a breath. The air tastes fetid, thick with the afterlick of smog. Alfred isn’t the kind to make stupid requests. Nor is he the kind to beg if he can help it. “I can maybe get the plates off,” he acquiesces. “But I’m not touching the undersuit.”

Alfred exhales in a blitz of static. “That’s more than enough,” Alfred replies. Clark puts down the comm and does what he’s told.

 

 

 

It’s not entirely unprecedented. He’d been about six and a half when he’d heard his Ma break her toe all the way from school; later, while trying to survive middle school with some of his sanity intact, he’d actually heard the godawful squelch of his seventh-grade math teacher’s appendix bursting in the staffroom down the hall. The difference this time is twofold: firstly, he hadn't even been in the same hemisphere when it happened; and secondly, Clark had no idea that his subconscious had become so attuned to Bruce Wayne. Off the top of his head, Clark couldn’t even remember the last time the two of them spoke, let alone in private. It’s discomforting to think that his preternatural ability, this vast, incalculable thing he desperately pretends to understand, is being directed towards something and he didn’t even know.

Clark isn’t sorry that he intervened. He doesn’t know exactly what Alfred would have done if Clark hadn’t landed on-scene, but it certainly would have taken far longer to get Bruce help. This is what they’re supposed to be to one another, after all; backup on permanent call. It just took something this inescapable before Clark had a chance to follow through on the pledge he’d made to help months before.

After three days of radio silence from Alfred, Clark throws out his better judgment and zips over to Gotham General. Any other city in the world and he’d arrive at the ER doors suited up, but they don’t much trust the Superman in Gotham. That said, the fact that he’s identifiably press doesn’t do him any favors either; the moment he scopes out the ICU and works out where Bruce is being held, he’s pushed kindly but firmly away into a nearby corridor by a harassed-looking nurse.

“Please,” Clark says, doing his best to look well-meaning and desperate to a woman who’s holding herself with the air of someone who’s had to strongarm several paps out of the building already. “I’m not here as – I know him. We’re friends.”

The nurse gives him a very long, very searching look. “You know him,” she repeats back.

 “I – yeah,” he manages lamely. In his nervousness Clark hesitates just long enough for the unintended innuendo to take hold. “I guess.”

She nods. “Five minutes,” she says, looking at him with a strange expression he can’t quite place. “And don’t wake him.”

It’s not the first time he’s seen Bruce injured, but it still hits like a punch. He looks unbelievably fragile immersed in a jungle of tubes, the ECG shrieking out the patter of his heartbeat. When the nurse leaves the two of them alone, Bruce makes no indication that he knows Clark’s there; Clark crosses to the window, trying to give himself something other than the arrhythmic bleep of Bruce’s heart to focus on. The city sprawls out in front of them towards the bay, somehow incongruous in daylight. He always imagines Gotham as painted black, only broken by faint flashes of silvery gold from the streetlamps. He wonders what will happen in the city when the Bat fails to show up for weeks, or even months. Maybe the memory of it will be enough to keep the civilians safe for a time, at least. From what Clark knows of the place, that seems doubtful.

The thought is interrupted by the sound of Bruce murmuring his name. Clark turns back round instantly; Bruce is lying awake on the bed, looking like a specter of himself. Skin sallow and pale, his eyes dull with the analgesics. He looks like a dead man.

“Should I get someone?” Clark asks, walking back over; Bruce shakes his head, the motion barely there but clearly painful. “It’s good to see you awake,” Clark adds quietly, watching the way Bruce’s eyes move sluggishly over Clark’s face. Clark wonders if he even fully understands what he’s saying. “You scared the shit out of me.”

The nurse reappears in the doorway, looking put-upon and vengeful. “Out,” she says sharply, glaring at Clark. “I told you not to wake him up.”

Clark doesn’t have the strength to protest. He lets her frogmarch him out of the ICU and back into the ER, and then makes his own way back through the hospital. He recognizes a few of the paparazzi loitering further down, sucking on their cigarettes, so he walks three blocks in the other direction and then ducks into an alley so he can throw himself into the air.

He’d meant to fly back to Metropolis, but he doesn’t. Ten seconds after punching the sky Clark finds himself hovering over the Wayne estate, relieved to hear the familiar hum of Alfred’s heartbeat coming from inside. Clark hangs like a brick above the still water of the lake for long enough to constitute a proverbial knock, and then drops down onto the wooden decking as Alfred opens the back door to welcome him.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Alfred says with a look of great relief, gesturing back into the house. “I need your help.”

Clark follows him down to the basement. It’s only the second time he’s ever been here in the absence of Bruce; he still half-expects him to be lurking in some shadow, dangling from the rafters like the villain in a silent movie. Alfred leads him over to the bank of monitors, rippling with their familiar, unintelligible code, and then fishes a bottle of whiskey out of the top drawer. He waves the bottle at Clark in invitation; Clark shakes his head, watching him pour a finger in silence.

“Let me guess,” he says, once Alfred has his drink in hand. “You need Superman.”

Alfred’s smile is small and wry. “Actually,” he says, tone gentle, “We have questions that need answers. For that I suspect we need Clark Kent.”

Clark smiles in turn. “Well,” he says, spreading his hands. “He’s also happy to help.”

Alfred crosses over to the nearest workbench, Bruce’s grappling hook propped up centrally on black metal mounts. “I could speak to you at length about the steadfastness of the engineering and the microtensile strength of the rope,” Alfred says. “But I think you’ll take my word on how impossible these are to tamper with.”

“But?” Clark prompts. Alfred holds up the rope for him to see; or rather he shows two ends of it, shorn clean with cruel neatness. “It wasn’t an accident,” he surmises. A strange, portentous dread starts to creep over his skin at the thought. Plenty of people have tried to kill the Bat, but no one has ever come this close. It smacks of malice aforethought, of a trap.

Alfred nods. “The whole thing felt strange from the start,” he replies. “We were monitoring a regular shipment of narcotics by the docks when some out-of-town heavies showed up with guns. We took off north after the stolen cargo, and you saw the rest yourself.”

Clark frowns, running his fingers over the ragged edges of the shredded rope. “What makes you think they’re not local?”

Alfred gives Clark a steady look. “No one in Gotham is stupid enough to steal from Sal Maroni,” he says flatly.

Clark nods once. “I’ll see what I can find,” he replies.

 

 

 

It’s bizarre seeing the action develop through Twitter. Clark watches like any other pundit as updates ping up on his feed; the story has the whole office hooked, and Clark doesn’t know a damn thing more than anyone else when Wayne Enterprises PR team informs the world Bruce is out of surgery and doing well.

For his part, Perry seems wholly unconvinced. “Kent, I’m drafting you on finance this week,” Perry says. “I have Katy on standby for the Wayne obit.”

“Sure,” Clark hears himself say. He wonders if this is motivated by Perry’s skepticism at the PR line, his usual brand of pragmatic pessimism, or perhaps a mixture of the both. Clark had almost protested that Bruce wasn’t actually at death’s door, before remembering that to Clark Kent the socialite billionaire Bruce Wayne is just some guy he pissed off once at a charity do. He isn’t supposed to have insider intel.

“Was it that bad?” Liam asks, big brown eyes like dinner plates. Perry shrugs disinterestedly, already flicking the page on the week’s agenda.

“The Gazette says he broke his spine in three places,” Katy supplies, inspecting her nails. “If you want crash safety, don’t drive a Lamborghini.” She shoots Clark a friendly smile. “Don’t worry, it’ll be a quiet one. The latest LexCorp spiel will be a good 800 words alone.”

Clark lets the sound of the meeting wash over him, staring idly out of the window and towards the distant smear of Gotham on the horizon. He wishes Lois were here. He could always shoot halfway across the world and speak with her, but he’s trying to rid himself of that habit. It’s not her job to be his conscience anymore; it never should have been her responsibility to begin with. And if she were here, she’d tell him to stop agonizing and do his job. Bruce would probably say the same too, he realizes, and the thought makes him smile.

The meeting runs its course without his input, and Clark’s colleagues gradually get to their feet. “I wonder if he’s a DUI,” Liam says as he gets to his feet, looking thoughtful. “Imagine if he ends up doing time.”

“Please,” Katy says flatly, gathering her things. “Men like Bruce Wayne never end up behind bars.”

“I have a friend who works oncology in Gotham General,” Jenny pipes up. “I’ll see if I can get anything from him.”

Clark settles back into his little cubicle and pulls up the NASDAQ’s live feed, registering a familiar twinge at the sight of Bruce’s name in the middle of all that jargon. His email pings up with the briefs from Katy, and Clark switches tabs to download the pdf. He gets three sentences in to the LexCorp investors’ statement before pulling up the Wikipedia pages on post-modern portfolio theory and the uptick theory. Fuck, he hates working cover.

 

 

 

Gotham hasn’t changed one inch. Clark has flown to cities all across the world and never found another quite so soaked in the tepid melancholy that still sticks to every Gotham sidewalk like chewing gum. Clark doesn’t even feel the cold, and yet he still finds himself hunching up a little more inside his jacket, the collar raised against the constant ill-wind, head ducked to avoid catching anyone’s eye.

Hostility, desperation, and frigidness aside, the thing he finds strangest of all is that tales of the Bat haven’t diminished at all in the time Bruce has been languishing in Gotham General. One or two sightings Clark could chalk up to copycats, which he’d always assumed would be an issue, or at least until Bruce caught up with them; but the Bat shows up in Gotham twice-weekly like he’s keeping to a schedule. Or at least, something matching the Bat’s description is still fluttering around the gossip rags. In another life, Clark might have tracked them down. But between his work for the Planet, helping Alfred, and trying to keep the Superman alive, Clark doesn’t have the time to sink into chasing ghosts. It wouldn’t surprise him if Bruce is deliberately leaking stuff to the press from his sickbed, after all; or perhaps this is all part of some contingency plan Bruce has for if he’s laid up too long to pace the streets himself.

Bat or not, Gotham’s residents still seem completely uninterested in helping Clark. He’s been trying to scope out the streets around where Bruce fell to see if the tenants had noticed anything strange, but his success rate has been pitiful. After the sixth door in two blocks that Clark has had slammed in his face, he has to concede it’s becoming beyond a pattern. Clark huffs out a breath, adjusts his glasses, and fidgets with his clipboard before looking back down the dingy hall. It’s almost the exact mirror of the apartment building he’d been snooping around before, back when he was investigating the Bat, and the irony that he’s now here on Bruce’s business hasn’t entirely escaped him.

Two stern-looking men are waiting for him when he makes his way back out of the building, their arms crossed to emphasize their dumbbell-sized biceps. Clark clocks them, holds back a sigh, and puts on his sunniest smile. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

The man on the left sneers as his companion reaches over and yanks away Clark’s clipboard, breaking it in half like a matchstick. “Get the fuck out of Gotham,” tall-and-stocky says as the other guy starts shredding Clark’s carefully-forged documents one by one.

“Please,” Clark says, genuinely aggrieved. He’d spent all night working on his EPA credentials, now covered in muck and rendered unrecognizable under this asshole’s boot. “Is that entirely – I’m just surveying – ”

“Consider this a kindness,” short-and-sneery says, grinning toothily as his companion throws the rest in his face like confetti. “If we thought you knew whose patch you were on, it’d be you in bits in the gutter.”

 

 

 

Clark Kent shouldn’t be able to tell from street level that there’s a strange man in his apartment. So Clark Kent tracks up the stairs, fumbles his keys, lets himself in and switches on the lights before jumping out of his skin when the masked man emerges from the shadows by his curtains, dressed head to toe in black.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish,” the man says. “But at this rate you’ll be dead by Thursday.”

Clark huffs out a breath. The guy is young, Clark thinks, probably a little younger than him; definitely a little shorter, slim built but clearly strong enough to fight his corner. The skintight leather and air of menace practically scream Gotham. More curious than concerned, Clark decides to continue to play stupid.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Clark says shortly, smoothing his hand through his hair and dropping his keys in the bowl by the door. “And I don’t like being ambushed.”

“What are you doing snooping around in Gotham anyway?” the stranger asks, ignoring Clark’s tone. “It’s not exactly the Planet’s patch.”

Clark lifts his chin. “I’m doing a favor for a friend.”

“Uh huh,” the man says flatly. “They can’t like you very much. Lucky for you, I happen to be interested in Maroni too. I thought you might use some help.”

“Is that what this is,” Clark says coolly. “Well, I’m all ears.”

The man shakes his head. “Meet me back where you were tomorrow evening,” he says, heading not for the door but for the window, a three-storey drop onto concrete. “And switch your brain on,” he adds as he climbs up onto the sill with surprising grace. “You’ll want more paranoia than that in Gotham.”

 

 

 

Clark heads back to Gotham late in the next afternoon, slipping across the bay just as the sun begins to set against the skyline. He keeps his steps purposeful and his head down as he disembarks from the ferry and makes his way through the city in a deliberately rambling fashion. About a half mile in from the docks he notices he’s picked up a tail, though he couldn’t say when. It’s always harder in cities, harder to cut through the bedlam of sounds to notice the pattern of a familiar footstep. It’s why Clark has curated the habit of so carefully concealing the transformation into Superman; he’s never wholly sure whether or not he’s being watched when he jumps up into the sky in a city. Out in Kansas, he can zip around in the comfort of knowing there’s no one around for miles.

Clark hunches over the menu in a restaurant’s doorway, pretending to squint at the spindly gold lettering. He doesn’t much want to be spied on, but the ability to notice and shake off an unwanted follower is not something that simple, kind-hearted Clark Kent should have. He decides he’s overthinking it, moves on from the restaurant, walks a few blocks south and then ducks into an alleyway just as a busful of commuters spills out onto the pavement.

Clear from view, Clark floats silently up to the roofline and hides himself behind a vent as the man catches up. The tail hurries on down the alley, realizes it’s a dead end, and swears loudly to the crumbling brick walls either side. Clark tries to memorize him, tries to burn into his mind the hard angles of his ragged face and the shock of white-blond hair, and then finds himself wishing he had the Bat’s capacity to capture it digitally. The guy doesn’t look like either of the two jerks who’d stopped him yesterday, but he’s clearly cut from the same cloth. Clark quietly hopes he hasn’t blown this before it’s even begun.

His follower melts away into the crowd, and Clark keeps to the relative safety of the rooftops as he heads towards the rendezvous. It gives him a clearer sightline of the buildings nearby, and he spends a moment walking round the perimeter of the roof once he arrives, noting the direction of the docks to the south and running through what Alfred had told him about the moments before Bruce’s fall. The rooftop looks undisturbed; and besides, the angle would be wrong to slice the rope in the way that Alfred showed him.

He hears, rather than sees, his strange new friend appear. Clark suspects he’s used to getting the drop on most folks, but then most folks can’t hear his heartbeat from fifty yards away. Clark performs the usual shock as his companion slinks out of the shadows, crumpling his face up in mock-embarrassment once he’s illuminated by the gentle orange glow of the streetlamps below.

“You made me jump again,” Clark says, running his hand through his hair, sloping his voice towards sheepish.

“Robin,” the man says, holding out his hand for Clark to shake. He does seem apologetic. “Sorry if I came off rude last night. Your city gives me the creeps.”

“The experience is mutual,” Clark says, taking his hand. “Believe me, I’m grateful for any insight.”

Robin briefly echoes his smile. “Why were you poking around here?” he asks.

“There was a tip-off that Maroni might be using rooms nearby as a smuggling cache,” Clark lies. “The friend I mentioned asked me to look into it.”

Robin looks skeptical. “Do you know what they call this place?” Robin asks, and Clark shakes his head. “Crime Alley,” he tells him flatly. “Even the Bat gets his tires slashed round here.” Robin skips lightly to the edge of the rooftop and peers down into the alleyway beyond. “But sure, let’s take a look.”

The door at street level opens at a push; inside a corridor slopes away to either side, rickety and aging but warm and dry. It’s an apartment block, spread over three storeys and a basement. Maroni is by all accounts a fairly attentive landlord, renowned for keeping his buildings habitable and his streets reasonably safe, Crime Alley or not. This kind of gangsterism wouldn’t be tolerated in Metropolis, but here it seems somehow unremarkable; sometimes Clark can’t shake the feeling that Gotham exists in another world entirely, like Arthur in Atlantis.

“I thought I saw something from the outside up there,” Clark lies, gesturing towards the upper floor. He knows there are no windows on the side overlooking the alleyway, but he still wants to poke around.

Robin nods. “I’m gonna go snoop around the basement,” he says, heading for the stairs and hesitating at the top to throw Clark a look over his shoulder. “Please don’t knock on anyone’s door.”

The second storey corridor is much the same as the first, a long line of numbered doors facing the blank brick wall which backs out onto the alley. Clark makes his way along it slowly, resisting the urge to peek into the apartments as he passes them. Maybe he got the angle wrong, Clark thinks, pausing at the end of the corridor to stare back down the way he came before taking the stairs up to the top floor. He’d been so sure of where Bruce had been when he hit the concrete down below, but it’s possible in the panic of it all he’s misremembered.

As soon as Clark walks out from the stairwell on the uppermost floor, he knows that something is off. It takes him a couple passes to figure it out, but eventually he spots it; hidden from view opposite the final apartment door is a removable strip of board, jutting out ever-so-slightly from the paneling either side of it. Clark teases it out with his fingernails to discover a cluster of loosened bricks, hiding behind them a clear view of the alleyway beyond. It’s old-fashioned, and by the looks of it a well-established feature of the building itself. As Clark peers through, ducking a little to scope out the angles visible through the peephole, he spots a faint rasp of brick dust lying loose on the surface.

“I found something,” Clark says as Robin joins him in the hallway, straightening up and gesturing for him to come and see.

Robin crouches down on his haunches and hums under his breath, vague puzzlement clear on his face. “This block dates back a century at least,” he says. “I’m guessing this is a relic of the prohibition.”

Clark runs his fingers over the freshly-disturbed surface. “Someone’s been here recently,” he says, showing Robin the red fuzz on his fingertips.

“Maroni’s got the cops paid off six blocks every which way,” Robin says thoughtfully, frowning a little. “This kind of subterfuge would be pointless for him.”

“You think someone else did this?” Clark asks.

Robin snorts. “No one in Gotham is stupid enough to steal from Sal Maroni,” he answers flatly, rising gracefully to his feet, but he looks unconvinced. “Leave it with me.”

 

 

 

Two weeks or so slide by before Clark gets a tell-tale little ping on his phone to inform him that Bruce Wayne has been discharged from Gotham General. It sends a spark of surprise through Clark’s stomach when he sees it; he had assumed that Alfred would at the least give him a heads-up if something drastic occurred, but it’s as much news to him as anyone else at the Planet. The mood in the office is tangibly one of relief as the alert filters through, mostly motivated by how much Bruce Wayne’s untimely demise would have dwarfed any other media coverage for at least a month.

Clark, buoyed up by his colleagues’ cheeriness, nixes the message he’d been writing to Alfred and decides to stop by the florist on his way back home and zip over to Gotham in person. One of the glass box’s little bedrooms has been co-opted for a recovery room. The décor is incongruous in an almost comical way; clearly they don’t do clunky hospital furniture in matt black. Bruce is propped up in an enormous bed in its centre, wires trailing off him in every direction, machines around him serenading dully as Bruce skims through a dense-looking document with a vaguely disgruntled expression.

Bruce beckons Clark inside on sight, but keeps ploughing through to the end of the page. Clark doesn’t complain; it gives him a chance to look at Bruce unobserved, note with relief the color in his cheeks and the comfort with which he’s sitting in the bed. It’s disconcerting at first, trying to pick up the familiar hum of Bruce’s ambient homeostasis through the clicks and whirs of the machine, but easier once he realizes that he’s being thrown by the new mechanism bolted into the top of Bruce’s spine. It makes Clark think of the pacemaker Mr Lang had had put in after his second coronary, how grotesque that little lump of metal had seemed nestled in the centre of his chest.

In time, Bruce finally flicks through the pile of paper and drops it to one side with a sigh. “Hi,” Bruce says, smiling a little.

“Hi yourself,” Clark says, raising an eyebrow. It feels strangely anticlimactic, but Clark isn’t sure what he was expecting himself to say. “You look a lot better than the last time I saw you.”

Bruce’s smile turns slightly rueful. “I don’t imagine that would be hard,” he replies. “Alfred says you’ve got the investigation in hand.”

“I think so,” Clark admits, setting his bunch of peonies down on a side table next to a dozen more expensive and elaborate displays. “The Gazette said you broke your spine in three places.”

“You should know better than to believe what you read in the Gazette,” Bruce replies. Clark can’t help but notice it’s not a refutation. The farthest bunch of flowers on the left is a cheerful-looking arrangement with a bright yellow note; Clark would spot his mother’s handwriting a mile away. He runs his fingers along the top of the card with a smile.

“I take it that was your idea,” Bruce says.

“Not guilty,” Clark replies, turning back to him. “Though I did give her your address.” His words make Bruce visibly uneasy; for a moment Clark thinks he’s overstepped some unspoken line. It wouldn’t be the first time, but he’d thought he was getting better at figuring them out.

“After what I put her through – ” Bruce begins, but he cuts himself off, looking vaguely embarrassed.

Clark frowns. “Bruce,” he says slowly, “She thinks you hung the moon. You gave her her son back.”

Bruce’s face twists up even more, and Clark is now thoroughly lost. He waits for Bruce to speak, conscious of every bleep-marked heartbeat, every pain-tinged breath. “That was reckless,” Bruce says eventually. “It’s not – it’s shameful.”

Do you bleed? Clark thinks, completely on impulse. He swallows back his fear. Bruce doesn’t look hateful; he looks sad. “Shameful?” he asks.

Bruce stares at him like it’s obvious. “That you had to die to begin with.”

Understanding hits Clark like a freight train. “I didn’t do it for you, or because of you,” Clark says, his hands balling into fists at his sides as anger crests up hotly in his chest. “Frankly, Bruce, the idea that you have that much influence over the choice I made is insulting.”

It might be easier for Clark to feel justified in his resentment if Bruce wasn’t looking at him, if he were fidgeting with obvious discomfort, fiddling with the wires, if it were easy to read embarrassment or guilt in his motions. But Bruce is staring right at him, almost expressionless, letting each word roll off him like a punch he’s got coming, like Clark’s vitriol is something he somehow anticipates and deserves. It strips the wind out of Clark almost instantly, the implications of that.

Alfred clears his throat from the doorway. “Sorry,” he mutters, uncharacteristically meek and almost squirming with his discomfort. “But Doctor Elliot has arrived and he’s tight for time.”

“I’ll go out the back,” Clark says, composing himself enough to shoot Alfred an apologetic smile. “I wanted to check something downstairs anyway.”

Clark sees no sign of the doctor as he makes his way to the basement. The door leading down is an incongruous wooden slab that camouflages perfectly into the corridor wall, only springing open by a hair’s breadth at his approach. Bruce has keyed his biometrics into the system, Clark knows. The first time it happened, Clark had been hopeful it was a sign of trust, but it’s too obvious a gesture for Bruce. There’s hidden meaning in it somewhere; Clark just hasn’t figured it out yet.

Clark settles down in front of the bank of screens, waiting as they jump to life and offer him Bruce’s usual slew of options. He wants, very suddenly, to be through with this little favor and out of Bruce’s hair. He doesn’t like being forced out of temper, and he likes that Bruce can still achieve it so easily even less. He should go visit Ma, spend a weekend out on the farm; that always helps him recenter. Perhaps it’s too much of Gotham’s anger creeping into his bones.

Clark follows the computer menus through to surveillance, Gotham, private, history until he’s at the night of the accident, noting with unsurprised dismay that there’s nothing with any clear view of the alleyway. It would’ve been too easy; Alfred will have been over this footage with a fine toothcomb long before now anyway. Clark watches footage from the two nearest cameras on quadruple speed, but besides the appearance of the ambulance crew there’s no sign that anything even happened that was out of the ordinary for a murky Gotham street.

Clark frowns at the flash of blue lights, thumbing the spacebar to stop the playback. There’s only one way in and out of the block where he’d found the spyhole, and Clark had been on the scene so fast that the gunman couldn’t possibly have had the time to escape. He’d have to hole up in the building somewhere and hope for a chance to run before Maroni’s guys showed up to check the place over. It takes a few keypunches before Clark has photographs of the people resident in the building, and a few more before he finds a different camera feed, one without a view of the alleyway itself but with a clear enough view of anyone heading back towards the city from its direction.

The ambulance crew comes and goes, and not five minutes after there’s a man with a suspiciously-sized backpack hurrying away from the scene, ducking his head and looking incredibly out of place. The image isn’t great, grainy black-and-white and taken a good fifty yards from across the street, but there’s enough of a likeness captured for Clark to write off most of the people who actually live there. Even this poor rendition looks uncannily like the guy who’d been tailing him a few days before; that itches some deep sense down in the pit of Clark’s mind, a kind of journalistic instinct he doesn’t often feel so strongly. It can’t be a coincidence, but he also can’t be sure without a name.

Clark waits for the printer to spit out the image, drumming his fingers absently against the desk. He’s uncertain of the plan half-forming in his mind; he considers briefly whether to go and ask Bruce for advice. The notion rankles him, though he can’t entirely figure why. It feels somehow unprofessional. The page winds out of the printer, and Clark dismisses the idea. There are still three heartbeats on the floor upstairs; he doesn’t want to interfere.

 

 

 

“Hey, look,” tall-and-stocky says. “It’s clipboard guy.”

Clark shoots the pair of them a sunshine smile. “Hello again, fellas,” he says as he approaches, spreading his palms wide and doing his best to look innocent. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“So keep walking,” short-and-sneery says. It’s easy enough to peg them as Maroni’s thugs now that Clark knows what he’s looking for; between the gang tattoo and the bulging muscles he isn’t sure how he missed it last time. Sometimes Clark wonders if Gotham City is a realm populated entirely by stereotypes.

Clark pulls a showy, contemplative face. “I could,” he admits, dragging out the phrase. “But I figured your boss might want to know who stole his shipment right off the docks a few weeks back.”

The two men share a very slow, very uncertain look. “Who the fuck are you?” tall-and-stocky asks, clearly more annoyed than worried.

“Clark Kent,” Clark says, and hands over a crumpled post-it with his number on. “I’m easy enough to find.”

 

 

 

Clark Kent meets Salvatore Maroni in a terrible dive bar on the east end of Gotham, the air thick with the smell of the petrochemicals plant next door. Everyone is armed, from the barmaid smoking idly in the corner to the guy waiting at the bus stop across the street. Maroni himself is as stocky as his thugs, maybe fifty years old, with two beady blue eyes and walnut-like skin, heavily-tanned and wrinkled. His accent when he speaks isn’t local, though definitely east coast; Philly, maybe.

“I know who stole the drugs,” Maroni says the moment Clark settles into the bench opposite him in the greasy leather booth. “What I don’t know is what you’ve got to do with any of it.”

Clark makes a conscious effort to appear innocent. “I’m just doing a favor for a friend.”

“Whatever the fuck that means,” Maroni mutters, looking utterly unconvinced. “I don’t want the Planet poking about in my business, kid.”

“I’m moonlighting,” Clark insists. “Someone I know over in Metropolis got hit by the same group and I promised them I’d look into it.”

Maroni takes a showy sip of his drink, squinting across the booth at Clark. “Well,” he says slowly. “Those two morons ain’t no problem anymore.”

Clark tactfully decides not to ask for clarification. He moves instead to pull out the printed picture from his jacket pocket, but it sets off a biblical reaction of hands flying to waistbands until Clark holds it up between two fingers, palms spread, looking sheepish. “Sorry,” he says to the room in general; for his part, Maroni seems thoroughly amused. “I just wondered if you recognized this guy.”

Maroni picks up the paper. “Huh,” he says, examining the picture closely. “He involved?”

“I think so,” Clark says. “He was near there when it happened. Can you find him?”

Maroni takes his time replying, considering the page as he rolls the finger of whisky round in his glass. Clark is certain the effect is as unnecessary as it is theatrical. “Sure,” he says, in time; and then, darker and with a vicious grin, he adds, “But you’ll owe me one.”

 

 

 

Six days later an anonymous number texts Clark a name. Clark zips over to the lakehouse as soon as he’s done with work, mostly out of a concern that this Samuel Aldrich might end up at the bottom of the Gotham river before Bruce gets the chance to speak to him; but truthfully it isn’t just altruism. Bruce asked for help, and Clark came through. A small, shy part of him is looking forward to gaining Bruce’s gratitude.

The house is empty when he arrives, so Clark settles himself behind the monitors in the basement and boots up Bruce’s mainframe to get a search started on the information he’s found. He’s no expert, but Clark thinks he knows his way around the tech well enough to pull together a coherent dossier instead of just handing Bruce the name. Aldrich matches up well with the profile of an ex-KGB agent last seen in Serbia, though Clark can’t put together how he ended up working freelance in Gotham under a pseudonym.

He’s waiting for the facial recognition software to finish trawling eastern European airport surveillance when Bruce appears, surprisingly mobile and wearing a suit that visibly costs more than Clark’s monthly paycheck. “Hey,” Clark says, flashing him a smile and rushing to climb up out of the deskchair. “I found the guy who cut your rope.”

Bruce just stares at him. He looks – awful. Exhausted doesn’t even do it justice. There’s a difference in his demeanor that Clark can’t pinpoint. It’s something in his eyes, Clark thinks, trying to fight down on a rising sense of dread. They look empty.

“Did you,” Bruce says softly, after a while. It isn’t a question; Clark doesn’t know how to respond. He’s heard more emotion through the vocoder in the suit. “You know,” he continues in that same, abstract tone, “Alfred says he didn’t call you. That you just turned up right out of the blue.”

Anger rises slowly from the pit of Clark’s stomach, twined with a thread of disappointment, bitter and heavy in the back of his mouth. “You asked me to look into this,” Clark answers, forcing his voice to stay diplomatic.

Bruce smiles emptily. “I can take it from here,” he replies.

 

 

 

It was foolish of him, Clark decides, that he ever expected Bruce to change. He’d known Bruce Wayne to be distrustful and mercenary long before they ever even met; it was one of his many preceding reputations. Clark can’t help but feel like a child for having allowed himself to imagine that their connection was different, to read too much into the paltry knowledge that Bruce granted him when he didn’t have a choice in doing so. Bruce didn’t ask for Clark to appear in that alleyway; he didn’t even ask for Clark to help them work out how he got there. There’s a difference, Clark knows, between inviting familiarity and retroactively adjusting an awkward alliance to fit.

It’s a handful of days after his ignominious dismissal when Clark unlocks his front door and finds Robin sat in the middle of his dining table. “Hello, stranger,” Robin cheerfully says, tossing and catching one of his kitchen knives with unnerving ease; somehow it’s more theatrical than threatening. “Remember me?”

“Shit,” Clark sighs, dropping his groceries on the kitchen counter and running his fingers through his hair. “I should’ve been in touch.”

Robin waves a hand dismissively as he leans over to slot the knife back in its place. “I cannot believe you met with Maroni,” he says, his voice almost gleeful. “That’s one hell of a maneuver.”

Clark shrugs, though he can’t help smiling a little at the acknowledgement. “It worked,” he says, beginning to unload his shopping out onto the counter. “He told me what I wanted to know.”

“So?”

“So I passed the information on,” Clark replies. “It’s not my problem anymore.”

Robin squints at him. “Don’t tell me I misjudged you,” he begins, but before he can continue they’re interrupted by the squawk of Clark’s cellphone. Clark makes a face, pulling it out to double-check, but there’s only one number it actually rings for; he mouths an apology to Robin as he raises the phone to his ear, stepping through into the living room to afford them some ersatz privacy.

“Bruce?”

“You know,” Bruce says down the line, “Gotham is definitely rubbing off on you.”

His voice has that same dead, angry cadence as the last time they spoke. Clark pinches the bridge of his nose. “What?”

“I know you’ve been meeting him,” Bruce says, and Clark’s eyes snap straight to Robin.

“Are you spying on me?” Clark asks in an inevitably rising crescendo, incapable of keeping his anger in check. Robin hears him; he goes stiff-straight instantly, hopping off the table in one elegant move and disappearing out of view.

“Don’t try and claim the moral high ground here,” Bruce replies. “That was a dirty move.”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Clark snaps, and hangs up the phone. Robin reappears from nowhere beside him, a little heap of half-broken wires and computer chips clustered in the palm of his hand. “Fuck,” Clark mutters with feeling. He’s no Bruce Wayne, but he knows a bug when he sees one.

“They were in your light fittings,” Robin quietly says, his tone apologetic and his expression bordering on angry. “There could be more.”

“Thanks,” Clark says absently, flicking through the pieces with a distant rush of disbelief. “I’ll do a sweep.”

Robin is watching him carefully, and his eyes are almost sad. “I’m glad you got what you needed from Maroni,” he says. “Let me know if you’re ever working in Gotham again?”

Clark nods once. He waits until Robin is gone before closing his fist and grinding the circuitry to dust between his fingers, a low, aching fury getting the better of him for one sharp moment of pure pleasure. He never imagined Bruce would stoop to something this juvenile. Standing there alone in his apartment with the remnants of Bruce’s clear misgivings still powdery on his fingertips, Clark has never felt more stupid.

 

 

Clark doesn’t mind that he’s mostly assigned to cover sport for the Planet; it’s lowkey, comfortably repetitive, and usually out in the fresh air. But it does mean that on the rare occasion when the elites of the east coast sporting scene see fit to hold themselves a soiree, it’s Clark who’s inevitably signed up to do the coverage. He has never forgiven Perry for the time he ended up stuck in Providence for a weekend while a bunch of supermodels gave out nepotistic awards to the portly CEOs who backed the local football teams. Tonight’s gala is at least vaguely charitable in nature, and it’s only held across the bay; but apparently that means bad luck just has to fall on Clark’s shoulders in other ways.

“What’s he doing here?” Clark hears himself blurt out, looking up from his notebook to see Bruce making his way down the press line.

The guy to his left throws Clark a look of clear dislike. “He owns the Rogues,” he says, voice heavy with disdain.

Clark grits his teeth and ignores the stranger’s tone. A quick glance confirms his suspicion that there’s no way for him to slink away without making a scene. They’ve shoved the assembled journalists to one side of the opera house’s ballroom over by the drafty windows, kept away from the glitterati by a plush velvet rope. They’re both adults; Bruce has definitely endured more embarrassing situations than this. Clark sucks in a breath and makes himself look as wholly unbothered in Bruce’s existence as possible, even as he reaches Clark’s judgmental neighbor and begins to opine about his love for local sports teams and, weirdly, badminton tournaments.

“Does your friend want a quote?” Bruce asks, jolting Clark guiltily away from his silent appraisal of Bruce’s heartbeat. “It’s Kane, right?”

Clark grants him a thin smile. “Kent,” he says, and holds out his hand. “Clark.”

“So we have met,” Bruce replies, smiling back. “I thought so. I probably owe you an apology.”

Clark blinks. In another life, Bruce’s repentance is all Clark’s ever wanted; here, the casual, empty manner of it instantly sets Clark’s teeth on edge. “I’ve heard rumors – ” Clark begins.

“All true,” Bruce interrupts, winking at the woman to Clark’s right.

Clark manages to hold up his smile. “One of them was that you were dead,” Clark says abruptly.

Bruce laughs, a light, airy thing that grates Clark’s nerves with its obvious pretense. “Only from the neck up,” he concedes in an overloud murmur, leaning in conspiratorially as he delivers the line before stepping back to give Clark an obvious once-over. “Speaking of, can I buy you a drink?”

Clark openly stares at him, too angry to be flustered. “It’s an open bar,” he coldly replies. “And besides, I’m on duty.”

Bruce’s mouth curls with a moue of disappointment. “Some other time,” Bruce says remorsefully, and turns his attention to the woman at Clark’s side as if he doesn’t matter at all.

Clark steps back from the line for a breath of clearer air by the open window, trying to master his temper. Watching Bruce at work gives Clark the uneasy impression of a carnival ringmaster, the constant showmanship that comes and goes with an ease that makes Clark vaguely nauseous. They haven’t spoken in over a month, but Bruce still could have given him some kind of warning. Then again, so could Clark. It makes as much sense for him to be there as Bruce. He takes his time finishing his glass of elderflower something-or-other and does his best to push it out of his mind. Bruce being one of the many guests might make Clark’s night more uncomfortable, but he still has a job to do. Perry won’t forgive him if he comes back from yet another one of these parties and only writes five hundred words of unusable copy on Gotham’s endemic classism again.

Clark is just about resolved to rejoin the presspack when there’s the nearby sound of breaking glass and all of the hairs on the back of Clark’s neck stand on end. He whips round to see Bruce, two journalists up the line, his face ghost-white and rigid with agony. Clark’s moved before he can think, sliding effortlessly in to catch hold of Bruce’s arm as he begins to teeter towards the ground.

“I’m here,” Clark murmurs into Bruce’s ear. “I’ve got you.”

Bruce instantly sags against him. “Car,” he spits out through gritted teeth.

“Have Mr Wayne’s car brought round, please,” Clark says to the nearest person with a nametag, just as Bruce’s legs give out completely. Clark’s grateful that the expressions on nearby faces are ones of pity and dismay, not judgment. Once upon a time they’d all assume Bruce was drunk.

Clark dutifully fakes struggling under Bruce’s weight as he supports him to the hallway, which has been rendered blessedly empty in advance. A different nametagged attendant hurries over to take Bruce’s other arm, steering them towards the back entrance and away from the gawking eyes of the few other guests not already swept up in the splendor of the ballroom.

“He can’t drive like this,” the attendant mutters nervously as they get Bruce out of the back door. There’s a sleek, flashy car waiting on the other side, door open wide, but no Alfred.

“I’ll take him home,” Clark instantly decides, and though the attendant looks skeptical, Bruce thankfully has the wherewithal to nod. They unload Bruce into the passenger seat, and Clark slips the attendant a healthy tip before he climbs in behind the wheel.

Bruce looks even worse in the low, white-blue light of the car, gaunt and sunken-eyed. He fumbles with the glovebox, fishing out a silver metal case filled with what look to be epi-pens; he flicks the lid off one and drives it into the meat of his thigh. It’s a sedative, Clark realizes, as Bruce’s face relaxes and his heartbeat begins to slow; maybe mixed with an analgesic for good measure. Clark watches as Bruce’s eyes glaze over and fall shut. He didn’t even make it to the hors d’oeuvres, Clark thinks glumly as he hits the button for the ignition. Perry is definitely going to rip him a new one over this.

Bruce is still dead to the world by the time Clark reaches the empty house, so Clark has no choice but to carry Bruce inside and lay him out on the bed. He takes off Bruce’s shoes and jacket, removes his watch and cufflinks and balances them on the nightstand. As an afterthought, Clark folds the other half of the comforter over on top of him; Bruce curls himself up smaller into the warmth, turning onto his side and giving Clark full view of his back beneath his shirt. Clark forgets himself for a moment, peers through the shirt to the skin and bone beneath, tracing the shape of the metal rods and circuitry brutally bolted to Bruce’s broken spine. It seems so strange, that hideous contraption, even if it is holding together Bruce's spine. So cruel.

Shame creeps back over him and he forces himself to stop, take a breath, step away. It should be enough, Clark thinks. He’s gone far beyond the line of duty; he’s definitely overstepped what Bruce would ask of him. But just leaving Bruce here alone feels utterly untenable. Clark settles for sitting out on the deck, close enough by that he can hear the steady thud of Bruce’s heartbeat and the push-pull of his breath. He squares his guilt away by telling himself he’s waiting for Alfred to get home, that he needs to pass on what Bruce has taken. Clark supposes it’s a good thing that he hasn’t come back in a rush; it means news of Bruce collapsing at a gala isn’t widespread enough to disrupt whatever Alfred is doing.

When he gets back a little after three, Alfred seems surprised to see him; then pleased; then increasingly harrowed as Clark recites the events of the evening. “I can’t thank you enough,” Alfred says, pinching the bridge of his nose once Clark is done, letting loose a world-weary sigh. “Doctor Elliot told him not to go.”

Inside, Bruce turns over in his sleep with a gentle grunt of pain. “Let me know how he is in the morning,” Clark says.

“Come back and see him,” Alfred insists. “He’ll want to thank you himself.” Then, quieter, under his breath, “He won’t want to, but he bloody will.”

 

 

 

Perry is unexpectedly kind when Clark gets him on the phone, and thankfully doesn’t ask any questions about why he felt so obliged to escort Bruce Wayne home when he supposedly doesn’t know him from Adam. “You’re too damn nice by half, Kent,” is the sharpest thing he says, before making him promise to get a pullquote from Bruce to make up for it.

Clark had expected to have to go into the office and punch something out to make his deadline, but Perry’s unusual clemency has made Alfred’s invitation plausible. Clark mulls it over as he stands at the kitchen window, listening to the hum and rattle of the city. He might want to see Bruce, but he isn’t sure that the Bruce he really wants to see will be the one he finds. He definitely doesn’t want to deal with the slick, oily facsimile he saw last night; but they weren’t exactly cordial before then either. It makes him think wistfully of the carefully-crafted détente they’d managed to eke out in the aftermath of Steppenwolf, something not quite like friendship but distinctly more than tolerance.

The thing is, there’s something warped about this spiteful, suspicious iteration of him that doesn’t sit right, regardless of how Bruce was when they first met. Maybe Perry is right and Clark’s too hasty to be forgiving, but there’s something fundamentally strange at work that Clark just can’t ignore. Lois would tell him to go with his gut, if she were here. Bruce would too.

Clark regrets his decision as soon as he sets down on the lake’s shore. Inside is the unmistakable thudding of three heartbeats, one above ground and two below, and Clark instantly decides he doesn’t want to know what he’s interrupting. He’s already bent his knees to jump back up into the sky when Alfred appears at the window, waving at him excitedly, and this alone makes Clark pause; if Alfred is upstairs in the kitchen, he can’t be the other heartbeat currently keeping Bruce company in the basement.

“I don’t want to intrude,” Clark says as Alfred throws open the door.

“Don’t be absurd,” Alfred instantly replies, beckoning him in. “I’m so pleased you’re here. There’s someone you must meet.”

It can’t be Diana, then, Clark decides, dutifully following Alfred into the house and down the basement steps. Surely Bruce’s doctor can’t know about the Bat; or maybe he does keep a surgeon on retainer who’s aware of where all the stupid injuries of Bruce’s playboy lifestyle truly come from. It would be sensible, but incredibly risky. Clark gets the distinct sense that you can count the number of people who know that Bruce Wayne is the Bat on one hand.

Clark catches sight of the visitor as they descend the final few steps. He’s male, tall and slim-built, wiry but graceful, and strangely familiar. “Dick Grayson,” Alfred says, gesturing between them, “Clark Kent.”

Dick grins. “We’ve met,” he says sweetly.

With the sound of his voice, the penny drops. “Robin?!” Clark exclaims, staring at him in obvious disbelief. Like any good mystery, it’s obvious once you know the answer; Clark traces the slope of his shoulders and the wide, mischievous grin, and both of them undeniably belong to the man who he’d last seen balanced on his dining table. Clark feels a little foolish for not having considered before that a black-clad, masked, vigilante detective likely had some connection to Bruce. He supposes he assumed they were native to Gotham’s ecosystem.

“Clark,” Bruce says thinly, “Could you give us a second?”

Clark risks a glance at him. Bruce looks thunderously unhappy, but his displeasure seems to be directed chiefly towards Alfred, who is in turn cheerfully ignoring him with the effortless practice of a lifetime. Clark instantly acquiesces, trekking alone back up the stairs to make the most of the early-morning air. Staring out across the lake and enjoying the sharpness of the breeze, Clark wonders to himself about Dick Grayson. He doesn’t think Dick is Bruce’s latest doomed romance, though his young age wouldn’t be beyond what gets slung about in the tabloids; it just hadn’t been the dynamic Clark had detected. They seemed more like colleagues, or old friends. They probably met on a rooftop somewhere in Gotham, punching mobsters in the face. Given his age, Clark thinks, he could be Bruce’s son.

“Don’t bring Clark into this,” Bruce says suddenly, his voice distant but sharp, and Clark grimaces. Out here in the middle of nowhere, Bruce’s raised voice had cut through like a clarion call. Clark’s stomach twists with guilt. He shouldn’t be listening to this; it’s not meant for him. His ability to hear this is probably exactly why Bruce dislikes and distrusts him. But Clark’s irresponsibly desperate for the insight, for the slim opportunity to learn why Bruce is treating him like an enemy when they’d been so close to becoming friends.

“He doesn’t have a clue who I am,” Dick replies. “Have you seriously never even mentioned me? Or Jason?”

“It’s nothing to do with him,” Bruce says.

“If you don’t tell him what happened,” Dick says, “He’ll just imagine the worst.”

There’s a long pause. Clark stares out at the still, black lake and wonders at Bruce’s expression, whether he’s angry or tired or sad. “How could anything be worse?” Bruce asks, his voice hoarse.

Fear crawls across Clark’s skin in a cold, sickening wave. He’s not stupid; he figured that Bruce had lost someone long before he saw the glass-sided cenotaph in the basement. His name was Jason, Clark now knows, and he thinks he might have died on Black Zero Day.

 

 

 

Clark takes his newfound hypothesis up into the troposphere. He floats loosely in the unfiltered light of the sun and thinks about the Bruce he first met, furious and hateful, angry and profoundly sad.

He knows instinctively that he can’t let Bruce learn that he overheard the conversation, no matter how accidental. Even if he could, he can’t think of a single way of approaching Bruce without coming across as woundingly flippant. The problem is too big, too complex, too devastating for Clark to even know where he should begin. So Clark does what he always does when the world gets too big for him: he makes it small. He goes to work, calls his Ma, writes prompt copy about the legacy of east-coast baseball. He shows up on time and leaves late and contributes in meetings. He thought he’d gotten away with it until Perry pulls him aside and says he was only joking about docking his pay over the Wayne thing.

It’s three long days later before Clark’s phone begins to bray. It instantly makes him wince; sure enough, when he pulls it out of his jacket, it’s Bruce’s name emblazoned across the screen.

“You took off on me,” Bruce says as his opening line, and a wave of guilt makes Clark flush.

“Something came up,” Clark lies, just as he reaches front of the café line. “Hey, what’s your coffee order?”

“Espresso macchiato. Why?”

Sixty seconds later, Clark drops out of the sky in front of Bruce with a coffee in each hand. He’s definitely caught Bruce by surprise; he’s out on the deck wearing a fuzzy blue robe and slippers. Clark hands over Bruce’s drink, helpless to avoid the bolt of warmth sparked by the small, private smile Bruce gives him in return.

“Sorry if I worried you,” Clark says. “I only stopped by to see how you were, after – ” Clark cuts himself off.

“I should apologize for that,” Bruce instantly admits, pulling a face. It should be a welcome statement, but if anything it reminds him of the offhand flippancy of Bruce Wayne at a press junket, flirting and handing out apologies like they mean nothing at all. “I should never have been at that goddamn gala. It’s a miracle I can even walk, apparently.”

Distracted by the severity of the offhand statement, Clark winces. “Is it that bad?”

“I’m booked in for more surgery next month,” Bruce says, taking a sip of the coffee, before throwing Clark a grin. “I’d show you the x-rays, but I guess I don’t need to?”

Clark suspects the flippancy in Bruce’s voice is less successful than he’d like. Still, the half-hearted but good-natured back-and-forth is infinitely preferable to his previous icy receptions; if this is what Bruce wants from him, Clark will gladly give it. “The implant threw me at first,” Clark concedes, aiming at levity in return. “I thought Alfred had gotten you microchipped.”

Bruce goes utterly still. His eyes become glassy and flat, disengaged and furious, and Clark is instantly transported back to staring up at a man with death in his hands and his boot on Clark’s neck. For a long, awful moment Clark thinks that he’s misjudged the joke, that Bruce is angry at him for violating his privacy in that intimate, clinical way.

He’s absolutely wrong. “Clark,” Bruce says, in time. “What implant?”

 

 

 

It’s incontrovertible. Two x-rays sitting side by side, one from Bruce’s doctor and one from the machine Bruce keeps in the basement, entirely identical save for the little box nestled at the top of his spine.

Clark’s rarely seen Bruce so fixated by anger. It’s the only reason he willingly endures two weeks of radio silence afterwards; there was something so private, so absolute about Bruce’s reaction that Clark felt as though he was trespassing just by witnessing it. But in the solitude, in the infinite time Clark spends checking and triple-checking his phone to see if Bruce has called, Jason seems to hang over him like a specter, like a thick, slimy Gotham fog.

Clark had thought he could live with not knowing, to allow Bruce that thin veil of privacy and manage the responsibility alone, but it’s not long before he realizes that he can’t grant even that clemency. The guilt would be one thing; the uncertainty is eating him raw. One week and three days in, and Clark gives in to his unease and shoots Dick a message. They meet in a chintzy little diner across the street from Dick’s work, their rickety booth in the back corner almost lost in the rush of the lunch crowd. Dick orders a baloney sandwich the size of his head; Clark sticks with a single black coffee, red-hot against his cupped palms as he works up the courage to speak.

“I want to ask you something I can’t ask Bruce,” Clark says once the waiter has been and gone, swallowed up again by the bustle. “I understand you might not want to undermine his privacy, so you have every right to tell me to get lost.”

Dick’s eyebrow raises; he’s visibly intrigued. “Shoot,” he says around a mouthful of sandwich.

Clark pauses, steadying his nerves. “How did Jason die?” he asks, and watches with trepidation the rapid sequence of emotions that flits across Dick’s face. It’s far too fast for any human to see. Anger, Clark thinks; then curiosity, though he can’t be sure when Dick masters himself so quickly. It’s so palpably like Bruce that it makes his chest ache.

In time, Dick settles back in the creaky booth, running a hand through his hair. “There’s a man in Gotham who calls himself the Joker,” he answers. “He killed Jason because he could. To punish us.”

Clark finds himself instantly bowled over by the potency of his relief. In retrospect, it’s so obvious. How could any truth be worse to Bruce than believing it was his fault? Clark should thank him, he knows; but he seems momentarily unable to speak, incapable of forming the words.

“You thought it was you,” Dick realizes into the silence.

Clark nods. “I thought it might be why – ” Clark stops, cuts himself off, swallows hard. He can feel Dick’s eyes on him; he struggles to master his panic, to resist the urge to punch out the window and run. Bruce trusts him, Clark thinks. That more than counts for something. “Why he hated me,” he finishes.

Dick smiles. “He didn’t hate you,” he says, his tone kind. “He gave himself your power and hated that.”

Clark stares down at his steaming coffee. He tries to take a distant pride that he hasn’t so much as given the mug a chip. “Have you known the whole time?”

“No,” Dick admits. “But he doesn’t just let any old reporter into the Cave, no matter how handsome.”

Clark looks out of the window, lets his eyes glaze over as he watches the passers-by. It’s an unfamiliar sensation, this wary, soft pleasure found in someone else’s acceptance of who he really is. To be known without judgment or fear. “What was Jason like?” Clark asks.

Dick’s smile turns private, intimate, full of grief. “He was a pain in the ass, most of the time,” he says, and his voice is flat before it gentles again, softening with warmth. “But he was a good kid.”

 

 

 

The call, when it eventually comes, is quieter than Clark expected. Bruce sounds calm, measured. He apologizes for what he calls his prolonged absence and invites Clark to stop by when he has time. It’s businesslike, dispassionate in a way that makes Clark uneasy; it sounds too much like the Bruce Wayne he meets at charity galas, the one who doesn’t remember his name.

In the soft light of the Cave, though, Bruce’s smile is warm and genuine. He’s stood at the workbench, an easy slope to his stance that doesn’t seem manufactured. Clark resists the urge to give him a once-over in search of the box at the top of his spine.

“I thought you’d want to see this,” Bruce says, gesturing to an old-fashioned manila file about as thick as Clark’s thumb.

“Do you want me to leak it?” Clark asks; he finds himself strangely disappointed by the prospect.

Bruce shakes his head. “It’s in hand,” he replies.

Clark flips open the cover. He recognizes the odd thing as his own handiwork, the odd spool of data he’d composed together when Bruce was still too sick to stand. It’s more than a little flattering, seeing it nestled incongruously in with the rest of Bruce’s crafted evidence.

The rest of it is in turn unfamiliar and repulsive. It still disconcerts Clark to see human horror set out in black and white, even though he’s seen enough of it first-hand that he probably shouldn’t be surprised. Bruce has been characteristically thorough, compiling everything from tax returns to school reports, weaving together an obvious narrative as he goes. Childhood recklessness; professional malpractice; financial fraud; and, finally and most sickeningly, human experimentation. All of it coalesces into the little metal box that Elliot had bolted into the top of Bruce’s spine while supposedly saving his life, a wicked device of his own design with the principal intention of torturing a man he must hate beyond reason.

Clark closes the file, nausea crowding deep in the pit of his stomach. He should say something, he knows; but he can’t think of a goddamn thing that would do it all justice.

“I said your name,” Bruce says into the silence.

Clark looks at him. He doesn’t know what he expects to see, and Bruce’s placid, even-shouldered demeanor feels as telling and as vulnerable as any hysteria would be. “What?”

“I said your name when I fell,” Bruce elaborates, his words carefully patient. “Two decades in this city,” he adds, looking a little rueful. “Of course I assumed you were spying on me.”

“Is that why you bugged my apartment?” Clark asks.

Bruce frowns. “I’ve never been to your apartment,” he slowly replies.

Clark’s first, furious instinct is that Bruce is lying to him; he forces himself to dismiss it, to pause, to think. “Those devices weren’t yours,” Clark realizes, ducking his head. “They were pretty scrappy,” he acknowledges. “Like something out of a movie.”

“That son of a bitch,” Bruce mutters, arms crossed tight across his chest. For the first time since Clark arrived, he seems actually angry. “You know, it was him who told me you’d been meeting Maroni.”

“Maroni?” Clark echoes, tamping down on a sense of hysteria. “I thought you were upset about Dick.”

“Unbelievable,” Bruce says through gritted teeth. “When you visited me at the hospital, he must have thought – ”

Bruce cuts himself off; Clark frowns, tries to guess the rest. “I was after a scoop?”

Bruce’s answering smile is fond. “You’re thinking too Smallville,” he says.

Clark bristles, almost as a reflex. “We have our fair share of disreputable folks in Kansas too,” he points out.

“Don’t I know it,” Bruce replies flatly. Bruce’s voice is lilting coy with each sentence, back to the easy flippancy of before; there’s a finality to the diversion that Clark recognizes and dreads.

“So that’s it,” Clark says, staring down at the file.

Bruce shrugs. “That’s it,” he agrees, still smiling. “It’s done.”

 

 

 

It isn’t. Clark goes back to his poky studio flat and thinks about Bruce, lying on his back in the filth waiting to die, calling out Clark’s name. On its own it might not be disconcerting; but Clark knows on instinct what it means that he singled out that lone shout in the hubbub of seven billion. It happened with Lois, with his Ma and Pa. It happened when his sweetheart in junior high came off her horse in the middle of nowhere, stuck out in the Kansas wilds with a broken leg. She thought she was dreaming, later. Imagining he’d come to her rescue out of the blue, dropping out of the sky like a guardian angel, like something heaven-sent.

After Lana, Clark had always been careful. It made his skin crawl, the idea that he could hear something he wasn’t meant to from someone who knew him, trusted him, and that the other person wouldn’t even know. Bruce had said it himself: I assumed you were spying on me. It’s just never snuck up on Clark like this before, cemented its way into his subconscious long before he knew it was there. It’s weirdly fitting, in a way; everything about Bruce seems to be tinted with subterfuge. It makes sense Clark would fall in love with him without ever even noticing.

If nothing else, he owes Bruce a warning. He could always say nothing, and with anyone else he probably would; assume his unwanted affection would die away and the problem would resolve itself. But secrecy is Bruce’s lifeblood, and the trust they’ve built together is so febrile. Clark has a nasty, instinctive suspicion that concealing this from him would be the absolute worst thing to do, even if he’s dreading making the confession.

It’s late in the day by the time Clark works up the courage to return, gliding down silently across the lake to land on the deck. The light is beautiful, pale yellow rays of sun glinting off the black wet slab of the water. He only has a few moments to enjoy it alone before Bruce appears in the doorway, leant up against the frame. Now Clark can sense it, that tell-tale little tug at the base of his gut, he wonders how he ever missed it to begin with.

Bruce looks gorgeous, dressed to the nines, hair slicked back. He looks wonderfully, vividly alive. He tilts his head, smiles a little, clearly curious. “Do I need to change?” he asks, adjusting his cufflinks.

Clark shakes his head. “I’ll be quick,” he replies, folding his arms across his chest. He pulls in a deep, grounding breath. “It wasn’t because you said my name,” he continues, each word slow and carefully picked. “It was because you were the one who said it.”

Bruce says nothing. Clark can’t bring himself to look over, keeps his eyeline fixed out across the lake, trying to ignore the steady thudding of Bruce’s heartbeat, rhythmic as a pendulum.

“I’m working on it,” Clark adds, wholly apologetic, and risks a fleeting glance across at Bruce. “I just thought you should know.”

Something flashes across Bruce’s face in the second Clark looks over, something fast-footed and vulnerable. The thrill of it careens through Clark like a lightning bolt. “You don’t want me to work on it,” Clark realizes aloud, his heart jumping up into his throat. He takes a few steps towards Bruce, unbalanced and chaotic, and unbelievably Bruce doesn’t deny it, doesn’t back away, stays stock-still until Clark comes close enough to rest a hand ever-so-gently against the slope of Bruce’s neck.

Against the pads of Clark’s fingertips, Bruce’s heartbeat noticeably jumps. “Bruce,” Clark murmurs, half to himself, half asking permission, and Bruce inclines his head towards him in the tiniest, most insubstantial motion. The moment feels unbelievably delicate, like one wrong move could send them both spinning out into the troposphere. It reminds Clark viscerally of the moment he’d touched down in that scummy Gotham alleyway and found Bruce’s life in his hands.

Clark kisses him. The pleasure of the contact spikes through every cell, the soft noise of pleased surprise Bruce makes when their mouths touch, like even after all this he can’t quite believe his luck.

It amazes Clark viscerally; he supposes he was half expecting a shove away and a lecture about responsibility and teamwork. But Bruce’s hand rests almost instantly at the top of Clark’s hip, manifestly anything other than rejection. After a few heartbeats some part of Bruce seems to jump awake, and he instantly turns the kiss dirty, fingers tightening in Clark’s t-shirt, groping along to the top of Clark’s ass. Clark can’t keep his hands to himself, obsessed with the rough texture of Bruce’s suit fabric against his hand, the contrast against the softer, more delicate press of Bruce’s skin against his fingers, warm and so recognizably alive, the faster thud of Bruce’s heartbeat already intoxicating. It startles Clark, how fucking hungry Bruce is, one palm pressed on Clark’s ass and the other gripping the nape of his neck, purposeful and greedy.

Clark pulls away. Bruce is breathing heavily, slick hair falling across his forehead, mouth red, eyes wide. They’re pressed up against the side of the house, one of those stupidly big windows flat against Bruce’s back, and in between two of Bruce’s ragged breaths, Clark drops to his knees.

“Fuck,” Bruce murmurs hoarsely, almost sub-vocal. Clark had already felt the brand of Bruce’s dick against his thigh, but from here the tent in Bruce’s slacks is unmistakable. When Clark turns his head towards it the smell hits him like a freight train, cologne and sweat and detergent and arousal all weaving artlessly together. Bruce’s fingers card through Clark’s hair, a brief, steadying motion, and Clark responds by mouthing along the hot slope of his dick. Bruce shudders.

The thwip-fuzz of Clark pinging open the button and pulling down the zipper seems to echo like a thunderclap. There’s a wet patch already forming on Bruce’s briefs, and the visual of it twined with the sharper, clearer smell makes Clark dizzy. Clark flicks a glance up at Bruce, a last, fervent assurance of permission. Bruce looks ransacked, eyes blown and desperate, and Clark would never have imagined he could ever look so obviously out of control.

His head thunks back against the glass as Clark takes him into his mouth, a short, hard burst of air ripped out of him at the contact. Clark bobs his head, gives Bruce the time to adjust to the feeling, sticking to slow, steady motions designed to be both torturous and grounding. It might be a while since Clark sucked someone off, but he’s familiar enough with the basics to be reasonably confident in his technique. Clark wonders if he’ll need to pull back to state the obvious: that Clark doesn’t need to breathe, and that Bruce can’t possibly hurt him.

Clark hollows his cheeks, traps Bruce’s dick between the softness of his tongue and the hard arch of his palate, brings up his hand to cover the final inch or so with two thick fingers wrapped around the root of him. Clark shifts a little as he moves his head, swaps the angle so that the head of Bruce’s cock starts to skim the slope at the back of Clark’s throat with every downstroke.

“Clark,” Bruce manages, desperate and rough, and Clark shivers, the sound of it humming through every cell like a struck drum. The look Bruce gives him when Clark pulls back is almost feral, wide-eyed and hungry, mouth slack and panting. Clark grins up at him, presses a sloppy kiss to the top of Bruce’s thigh before leaning back over to take the head of his cock back into his mouth. The texture of it against Clark’s tongue is gorgeous, all raw heat and delicate skin in a way that’s wholly overwhelming. Clark moans around Bruce’s dick, gives himself the crux of his hand to grind against, and something in that snaps the last thread of Bruce’s self-control. His fingers clamp into Clark’s hair and he fucks Clark’s mouth fast and reckless, and Clark closes his eyes and takes it, takes in every single other sense of it, the soft weight on his tongue and the heavy smell of his sweat and the stampede of Bruce’s heartbeat.

Bruce comes with a near-silent grunt and without warning, his fingers in Clark’s hair tight enough to rip it out at the root. Clark works to prolong each minute beat of it until Bruce’s legs are shaking, bracketed around Clark’s head. His fingers remain clamped in Clark’s hair; Bruce tugs gently to lift him off when it finally becomes too much, continuing the motion to tilt back Clark’s head, staring down at Clark’s face and the slope of his throat as he swallows.

“Clark,” Bruce says again, softer but still hoarse, rolling out of his mouth like he’s practicing how it feels. For a long, awful moment, Clark thinks he might try and apologize, make a joke, some diversionary, diffusing tactic even while Clark is still hard and knelt between his legs. “Come here.”

Clark floats unselfconsciously to his feet. Bruce meets him with a kiss, strangely chaste in contrast to the hand he slides down the front of Clark’s pants to grope at the length of Clark’s dick. Clark’s leaked through his briefs, sticky and uncomfortable, and he grimaces a little as Bruce eases the wet fabric away from his skin to bare him to the open air. The contrast in sensation makes Clark shiver, caught between the red heat of Bruce’s hand and the chill gliding in from the lake.

“Huh,” Bruce says, once Clark’s pants are fully out of the way. It’s a weirdly clinical experience, the way Bruce explores the slope of Clark’s dick with his fingers. It’s obvious the intention is scientific, methodical, surveying for weakness and strength. It’s painfully arousing, even though it probably shouldn’t be; there’s something deeply intimate about the focus, the intensity of it, brutal and ruthless and still consummately delicate.

“I hope that’s not – ” Clark gasps as Bruce thumbs the head, already over-sensitive. “Fuck. Dissatisfaction.”

“Not in the least,” Bruce murmurs. Something playful creeps across his face, dark-eyed and dangerous; he smiles just a little, that tiny twitching slope at the corner of his mouth. “It doesn’t bite?”

“Not in my experience,” Clark replies, aiming for flat but coming out desperate.

Bruce hums under his breath, a low murmur of amusement. “I think you’ve disappointed half the internet,” he says, and Clark snorts into the shelter of Bruce’s neck, his breath coming fast and shallow. Bruce sweeps his palm through the slick and wraps his fingers vicelike along the length of Clark’s cock, testing, watching. Clark chokes out a moan, shivers, sags more against Bruce as he begins to jerk Clark off with absolute precision, tight, slow pulls of his hand, rippling his fingers.

Clark shifts his weight to lean against the framework of the window, pressing his face further into Bruce’s neck. He’s making such a fucking mess, leaking all over Bruce’s knuckles, the sound of each push-pull deafening and obscene; and he can smell it, all over him, all over Bruce. The pad of Bruce’s thumb settles against a spot just shy of the head of Clark’s dick, and sweet fuck, Clark knows that it’s gentle, knows that it’s soft, but the whorl of Bruce’s thumbprint etching out little circles against Clark’s skin is enough to make his legs shake. Clark moans, long and low and shameless, and begins to jerk his hips, jagged, careful motions to fuck into the tight clench of Bruce’s fist. He’s so fucking close, the pressure building in the pit of his gut, electric whips of pleasure shooting down the length of his spine. It’s just so much, glorious and overwhelming, the thrum of Bruce’s heartbeat and the smell of his sweat. It isn’t just the skill of it, the undeniable fact that Bruce knows exactly what he’s doing; it’s the fact that it’s Bruce, incontrovertibly delicate and ruthless in a way that shouldn’t be possible.

Clark comes like a whipcrack, letting loose a tight, high keen that feels the direct opposite of Bruce’s half-silent grunt. He furiously holds himself still as the aftershocks stripe through him, shivery bursts of pleasure that are almost unendurably intense. At length, Clark pulls back gingerly to survey the damage; Bruce’s beautiful black suit jacket has a rip right through the center seam. Eyeing the tear guiltily, Clark opens his mouth.

“If you’re about to apologize,” Bruce interrupts before he can speak, his voice low and warm and fucked-rough, “Don’t.” Clark lets out a little huff of breath instead, shaky and grateful. “Go make yourself comfortable,” Bruce adds, running his thumb along the slope of Clark’s jaw, wiping away some speck of residue. “I need to make a call.”

 

 

 

Stood alone at the end of Bruce’s slate-gray bed, Clark attempts in vain to take stock. He plucks at his t-shirt, grimacing a little at the sticky half-dried mess on his stomach, and wonders if he can get away with borrowing a sweatshirt. He sweeps the shirt off over his head and stands there, uncertain, suddenly self-conscious and out of place. It’s probably weird, Clark decides, that he’d be more comfortable with this if it were motivated by some galaxy-ending scheme, if he and Bruce were thrown together at the verge of life and death where there was no time to pause.

“You don’t look very comfortable,” Bruce says from nowhere. He’s leant up against the wall, ruined jacket and waistcoat discarded somewhere en route, shirtsleeves rolled up around his elbows.

“Did I spoil your evening?” Clark teases, a stumbling attempt to ease them back into the lightheartedness before.

“I was going to gatecrash a shareholders’ meeting with a supermodel,” Bruce replies, his expression mock-rueful. “I haven’t done that since the nineties.”

Clark smiles half-heartedly. “I’m no supermodel.”

Bruce inclines his head. “True,” he admits. “You’re not a supermodel, or a shareholder, or a mob contact, or a gossip columnist. I’m not doing this because I need something.”

Clark blinks. “I know that,” he slowly replies.

“But something’s bothering you,” Bruce says, pushing himself off the wall to cross the room. It’s a mixture of terrifying and gratifying, being the focus of Bruce’s absolute attention, thrilling in a way that could become wholly addictive. “I don’t hate you.”

The confession is disarmingly forthright; for a moment Clark has no idea what to say. “I’m getting that,” he replies, a little faint. “I spoke with Dick.”

“He likes you,” Bruce says, audibly amused. “He keeps telling me not to fuck this up.”

Clark stares back down at the t-shirt still balled up in his hands. “I came here to warn you,” Clark quietly admits. “I thought you’d find it - I don’t know, intrusive. Creepy, even.”

Bruce looks away. The rhythm of his body slowly changes; it’s the breaking of his apprehension, Clark realizes. He wonders if Bruce had anticipated rejection, whether he’d imagined Clark would want to jam the genie back in the bottle and run. “I had a lot of time to think when you were dead,” he says. “When there was a chance to bring you back I did it without thinking. I did it purely on faith.”

Reckless, Clark remembers. That’s how Bruce described his resurrection before; reckless and shameful. At the time, Clark had ascribed it to a very different type of guilt. “If you’re trying to tell me that you trust me,” Clark says slowly, “Then that hasn’t exactly been obvious lately.”

Bruce does at least have the decency to look apologetic. “I do,” he says quietly. “I do trust you. I can’t justify why I - I knew something was wrong, but I never believed Tommy could - ” Bruce breaks off; Clark can practically feel Bruce’s resignation radiating off him, that tired, beleaguered loneliness, that solid vein of grief. “We grew up together,” he manages, in time. “He knew my parents.”

Clark closes his eyes. “This is - a lot, you realize.”

“I know,” Bruce replies, heavy and tired.

Cut through the noise, Clark thinks. Make it small. Clark pulls in a deep breath, opens his eyes, and smiles. “Is it always like this with you?” Clark asks, his tone deliberately gentle, teasing.

“Pretty much,” Bruce admits; but he returns the smile, small and hesitant.

Clark leans forward to kiss him again, hiking Bruce’s legs up around his waist and floating them backwards onto the bed. He enjoys immensely Bruce’s sharp intake of breath as gravity momentarily gives way beneath him. “More comfortable?” Clark asks once they’re settled in a lazy sprawl, voice slanted sweet.

Bruce shoots him a look from where he’s balanced across his hips, leaning forward to pin Clark’s wrists to the bed either side of his head before he kisses Clark properly, dirty and slow. There’s something dizzying about the simple weight of his fingers against Clark’s skin, an off-kilter disorientation in the quiet command to keep his wrists in Bruce’s grip. Clark’s already breathing hard and shivery by the time Bruce sits back to pull off his own shirt, grinding their hips together in slow, steady circles as he fumbles uncharacteristically with the buttons. He’s looking over every inch of Clark he can see; he notices Clark’s hands still resting against the bed, palms up and wholly unmoved, and his eyes go dark.

It’s not long before Clark realises he’s going to come from this alone; the idea makes him shiver, rolling his head into the pillow, seeking out some kind of grounding against the arousal already lodging like a lodestone at the pit of his gut. Bruce abandons his shirt half-buttoned to lean down again, fingers tight enough against Clark’s wrists to feel his pulse, and his hips begin to roll against Clark’s with a precise urgency that has Clark half-wheezing with every breath. He assumes Bruce is chasing his own orgasm until he notices the murmured encouragement he’s biting into Clark’s neck between steady breaths; and then he can’t think past the hot weight of Bruce’s cock against his, the sensation torturous through four layers of rough fabric.

Jesus fuck, it’s too good, it’s too much, to be pinned to the bed by nothing except Bruce’s weight and the unspoken, unshakable belief that Clark won’t resist. It takes every scrap of Clark’s disintegrating self-control to hold himself still as he comes, head thrown back and tears in his eyes as it barrels through him like a freight train. Bruce kisses him gently through the aftershocks, fingers carding through Clark’s hair; he’s still shaking with adrenaline, and Bruce, either from age or experience, doesn’t seem at all inclined to rush.

In time, Bruce pulls back with a smile, eyes crinkled at the edges. “Is it always like this with you?” Bruce parrots flatly, and Clark snorts.

It’s been long enough for the sticky mess around their midriffs to become actively unpleasant, and Bruce pulls back to strip away their clothes with a noticeably practiced ease. His ostensible calmness is entirely betrayed by the rapid scudding of his own heartbeat; that, and the look in his eyes when he realizes Clark’s still hard. He swears softly under his breath, a bitten-off curse tinged with a kind of sanctified disbelief Clark usually associates with the devout.

Bruce straddles him again, kisses Clark slowly as his hand reaches up the bed and retrieves something from the nightstand. Clark recognizes the tube when Bruce leans away enough to take off the cap, and the realization alone of what he wants is enough to make Clark’s pulse spike. “Bruce,” he manages, semi-incoherent. “Bruce, fuck.”

“Give me your hand,” Bruce says, practical to the last; he slicks up Clark’s fingers brusquely, and time slows to treacle as Bruce guides Clark’s wrist unselfconsciously round to the small of his back. It is, as always, a shudderingly good sensation, the way the pads of Clark’s fingers press up against tight heat that slowly, sweetly yields to pressure. Bruce’s chin drops to his chest as Clark inches two fingers in, breathing a little harshly through his slack-jawed mouth as he adjusts. Clark keeps pushing until his knuckles brush Bruce’s skin; then, with diligent gentleness, he curls them slightly and begins to rock them in and out, his thumb pressed against Bruce’s taint.

Bruce lets out a high-pitched, slightly desperate laugh. “Jesus, you’re good at that,” he says, his thighs beginning to tremble against Clark’s chest, and Clark can’t help but grin. He works Bruce open slowly, definitely slower than Bruce wants, until Bruce is chasing the motion back with his hips and looking increasingly vexed at Clark’s iron-willed attempt to keep him still. Bruce’s whole body is arched taut above him, shaking a little with each push and pull of Clark’s hand. “Clark,” he says, all Gotham Knight and menace; then “Clark,” as Clark adds a finger and picks up the pace fast enough to make them seem to vibrate.

“Fuck,” Clark wheezes as Bruce reaches down between them clumsily and starts to palm Clark’s dick, spreading the lube. “Slower, it’s - sensitive - ” 

Bruce angles himself forward, guides Clark’s dick into place, and sits down in one swift, fluid motion. Clark throws his head back against the pillow and groans like a wounded animal, struggling fiercely to hold himself still while Bruce adjusts. To anyone else, the movement would probably pass in a heartbeat; but to Clark each millisecond of it seems to last a century, from the sudden, slick-hot pleasure around his cock to the look of slack-jawed incredulity that flashes across Bruce’s face.

Bruce rises up momentarily to fall back down again, the corded muscle of his thighs under Clark’s hands like steel cables. There’s something feral in it, the huge curve of Bruce’s battle-marked chest dripping with sweat as he fucks himself roughly back onto Clark. Clark sits up, wraps his fingers around Bruce’s neck to pull him into a kiss, and Bruce sighs against his mouth, incongruously gentle. Clark concentrates on matching Bruce’s motions, lifting up his hips to intensify the angle, and Bruce’s mouth drops open, his nails digging fruitlessly into Clark’s chest.

He’s panting, hot, shaky, sharp bursts of breath that are rough on the edges in a way that is devastatingly potent; when Clark reaches between them and wraps his hand round Bruce’s dick, they graduate unmistakeably into a groan, half-wrangled into a bitten-off curse, a dazed blurt of Clark’s name. His dick is twitching in Clark’s grip, pulsing out precum with every pass of the pad of Clark’s thumb over the head. Clark floats them off the bed, fucks up into Bruce hard and deep, and Bruce instantly comes, a look of pleasure-panic stamped across his face like the sensation is indescribably, overwhelming new, shaking hard as he comes in unrelenting bursts between Clark’s fingers and across Clark’s chest.

Clark pulls him down closer, kissing as much of Bruce as he can reach, forgetful for a moment of the mess. Bruce is still shivering, his face half-hidden in the safety of Clark’s neck, and Clark basks in the joy of it, the long sloping warmth of him pressed up against him, running his fingers up and down the length of Bruce’s spine. It seems to last for centuries, but even so when Bruce sits up again, smiling like a sunbeam, it feels too soon.

Clark is shivery with the effort of holding himself steady; when Bruce rocks his hips a little, tentative and experimental, Clark hears himself let out a low, shaky whine. Bruce’s legs are trembling, overexerted or oversensitive or both, but he rises and falls with slow, deliberate motions, his focus wholly on Clark in a way that’s devastatingly effective. Clark feels the edges of his orgasm begin to draw in, held off for so long in service of Bruce’s, harder and more delicate off the back of the ones that came before. The sensation is electric, overwhelmingly intense, Bruce’s steady pace clearly designed to let the pleasure build in huge, crashing waves. Clark fixes his fingers into the soft cotton of the bedsheets as it breaks over him, slowly at first, a gentle burst that builds ruthlessly into a gut-swooping slam of pleasure that feels strangely like shooting into the stratosphere. He hears himself cry out through the fug of it as it ransacks through him, delicious and never-ending and unbelievably, overwhelmingly good.

The after-effects are disorienting, the intensity of the feeling leaving Clark lying there flayed open, shaky and disquieted. Bruce eases them apart to lie next to him, the weight of his arm across Clark’s waist welcome and grounding, and Clark closes his eyes and listens to the gentle thud of Bruce’s heartbeat, the push-pull of his breath. The living world settles down on Clark again like sediment, his awareness expanding gently ever outwards.

In the background he notices the fuzzy hum of the implant, still lodged in Bruce’s spine. Clark opens his eyes to find Bruce looking right at him, his expression unguarded, his eyes warm. “You didn’t get rid of it,” Clark says, half-statement, half-query.

“Not yet,” Bruce confesses. Clark had briefly anticipated anger; but Bruce is quiet, restful, his tone sloped somewhat sad. “It’s how I got him,” he adds. “Following the signal back to source. Without it, I don’t know I would ever have believed it was him.”

There’s a strange vindication in that, Clark concedes, a vicious satisfaction in so ruthlessly weaponizing Elliot’s own cruelty against him. For a long, awful moment Clark stares out across the vast, black lake, imagining what would have happened in his absence. It feels unbelievably fragile in retrospect; an offhand comment he made in jest that blew the whole scheme away. He wonders if Diana would have noticed; if Alfred would have suspected; if Victor would have sensed it. It seems wholly, awfully plausible that they’d chalk it up to Bruce, assume it was his natural asceticism exacerbated by the fall.

“He would have tortured me for decades,” Bruce says, still lilted with disbelief, his gaze distant and sad. “Cut me off from everyone and ground me into nothing.” Bruce looks up; his mouth thins out into a warm, tired smile. “I’m done loving ghosts,” he says. “I want something new.”

 

 

 

The story, when it lands, is slapped across a half dozen pages of the Gazette. It’s important enough to be top of the bill at the Planet’s daily editors’ brief, three copies of the paper circulating round the table like they haven’t already been ransacked by the whole office. Clark’s only skimmed it to give the impression of surprise, but he spent long enough looking to know it’s deserving of the clamor. The author’s left out some of the more libelous claims pending the criminal case, but it’s juicy enough to win the front page and several double spreads.

Katy’s holding out one of the pages at arm’s length. “I don’t even know which body part that is,” she admits as she tilts her head, looking a little queasy.

Jenny shudders. “Don’t,” she mutters. “Even for Gotham, it’s so ghoulish.”

“You got any inside on this?” Perry asks Clark.

Clark throws him a look of deep relief. It’s a refreshingly blunt request for information the majority of his colleagues have been trying to winkle out of him all morning. “Nope,” Clark replies, and it isn’t even a lie. He doesn’t know anything more than what’s already landed in the inbox of the Gazette.

Liam scowls over at him in clear disbelief. “Rumor is Wayne’s bankrolling the whole prosecution,” he says. “And he’s one of Elliot’s ex-patients.”

Clark shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “I haven’t even heard of this Elliot guy.”

Katy rolls her eyes. “Don’t be obtuse,” she says, almost a sneer. “We know Wayne’s sweet on you.”

Clark stares at her in mild-mannered, Kansas disbelief. “I helped him get home after a seizure at a charity do,” Clark says flatly, as politely as he can manage. “I didn’t even stay to tuck him in.”

“Leave that crap for the gossip columns, Katy,” Perry says, snapping his laptop shut. “Next time, if you want the story, go tuck in Wayne yourself.”

 

 

 

Clark’s attention is diverted mid-afternoon by a surprise volcanic eruption in Iceland. It means he’s briefly released from his vigil of Twitter and Gotham News, trying to judge the mood of the brewing shitstorm; but principally it means it’s already on the border between too late and too early by the time he gets to Gotham, hovering down to land by the lakehouse in the gloom. He finds Bruce in front of the monitor bank, cowl off and eyes smudged with black, glaring at an uncooperative line of emerald-green code.

Dick, sat up on the desk beside him and also all in black, immediately throws Clark a jaunty wave. “Well, one of us has to change,” Dick says when Clark draws near, hands on his hips, his frown over-comic as he looks between the three of them.

Bruce rolls his eyes. “I’ll be done in a minute,” he says to Clark, not taking his eyes off the screen.

“I can finish this off,” Dick offers, gesturing at the monitors. “If, you know, you’ve got better things to do.” Bruce studiously ignores him; mortifyingly, Dick actually glances at Clark and winks.

“I’m gonna go clean up,” Clark says, biting back a smile.

Clark takes his time in the shower, stripping off the suit and leaving it puddled on the concrete floor. He washes the gel off his hair and death off his hands, the water sloughing over him too hot for human skin. Standing there under the spray, Clark tunes in unselfconsciously to the scud of Bruce’s heartbeat, rhythmic and grounding, pulsing out its steady reassurance as he segues between Superman and Clark Kent.

By the time Clark emerges again, there’s no sign of Dick. Bruce sits alone in front of a row of luminescent screens, whiskey in hand, watching the rolling news on mute. Two out of the five monitors have pictures of Bruce looking irritated and harassed, the accompanying bright white ticker-tape zeroing in on the blandness of Wayne Enterprise’s press statement. Clark had been surprised to learn that Bruce hadn’t intended to make this personal, either dressed as Bruce Wayne or the Bat; he’d love that, Bruce had said. And he doesn’t get to win.

“Long day?” Clark asks, taking up Dick’s spot on the desk.

“Excruciatingly,” Bruce admits, rubbing his eyes. “Insisting on my non-involvement seems to have caused more problems than it fixed. How was Askja?”

“Two fatalities,” Clark quietly replies. They were tourists hit by flying debris, dead long before Clark arrived; there was nothing he could do except pull their bodies from the subsequent landslide. They were teenagers on vacation, barely more than kids. Despite all the warnings, they’d decided it was worth the risk for a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse.

Bruce makes a face, grim and sympathetic, but he doesn’t speak. In some ways, there’s more comfort in the silence; Clark knows he understands. Besides, he looks exhausted. Even at a distance he smells like a night in Gotham, sweat and leather and phosphorus. The picture of Bruce on-screen changes yet again. Some canny journalist has found a photograph of him at school, aged maybe eight, dressed in what looks like soccer kit. His face is bright with laughter, one arm thrown around Elliot’s shoulders.

“Bruce,” Clark says quietly, his tone kind. It isn’t so much as an admonishment as a plea.

Bruce nods once. “Enough,” he says, and kills the screens.

Notes:

content notes: as in the Hush comics, Thomas Elliot inserts a medical device into Bruce while operating on him during life-saving surgery. at no point in the fic do i describe any medical procedures, linger on descriptions of anatomy, or anything graphic. the device is mentioned in passing and briefly described in a factual way. it's also the impetus for the plot at several points. the device allows him to track Bruce's location and deliver painful stimulation to Bruce at will. Bruce later uses the device to infiltrate Elliot's network and bring him down.

other end notes: thank you so much for reading!! i really hope you enjoyed. kryptonians had two millennia of only having sex for pleasure, you can't tell me they didn't bioengineer out the refractory period. also, please don't ask me how that coffee cup doesn't disintegrate en route, i have no answer for you. (similarly how and/or why Clark's co-workers aren't baffled by the fact he's just casually at work given that they went to his open-casket funeral is also beyond me, but hey, it also seems to be beyond the rest of the DCEU writing team, so please also forgive me that liberty.)