Chapter Text
.Ewuhshodh tavehd zw rraotiv w kyn zrhyminia, the Fortress chimes at Clark.
“My second what is ready?,” Clark replies absentmindedly, because he’s still trying to figure out exactly how much plating the new solar trough will need before the League meeting, while simultaneously keeping an ear on a hurricane that’s trying to decide whether or not to visit Florida, so he’s clearly misheard.
The Fortress hums. .tavehd kyn zrhyminia
“My second what.”
.kyn zrhy-min-ia it says, slower and more distinctly, just like it does when he’s mispronouncing something.
Clark drops the solar trough right onto his foot.
“What are you talking- Fortress. Please describe. In English.”
The automated workstation across the lab lights up softly. Lying on its surface, just finished its final cooling cycle - “carbon-crystal-edged triangular blades, angling thirty degrees alternating, mounted on a strip of tungsten carbide measuring-“
“That,” Clark says, “is a hacksaw. It is not an engagement present.”
The Fortress is silent for a moment. Then it chimes polite confusion, or maybe it’s dissent. Clark frowns at the ceiling. “I think you have some crystals crossed somewhere. This is - a present. A perfectly normal present. For his birthday. Nothing to do with an engagement-” He pauses. “What did you mean second?”
The Fortress is silent for a few seconds, nominally to process his irregular English syntax. Clark is pretty sure it doesn’t need the time at all but does it to subtly encourage him to speak Kryptahniuo. He puts his hands on his hips and continues to frown at the ceiling until he gets a response. “,Tynth, may I suggest you review the data entry I have recalled to the central console?”
Clark puts the trough on the main workbench, eyeing the dent his foot’s made in it, then goes.
—
Okay. There is an easy way to fix this. This being that he’s accidentally proposed marriage to Bruce, or more accurately Bruce has accidentally proposed marriage to him, but the salient point is that they’re about halfway through the engagement process. And he’d been about to all but formalize it, by giving a gift that his House had helped create.
That had been the mistake, apparently. Clark could give Bruce as many gifts as he wanted, he could give Bruce the damn moon without it meaning a thing, but all because he’d let the Fortress handle the final welding step, it’s turned into a symbol. What the House of El, its scion and its holdings, have to offer the… for lack of a better term, House of Wayne.
Clark rolls his third favorite pen between his fingers, trying to ground himself with the familiar scratches and bumps under his fingertips as he listens to his blissfully unaware fi- no, he's not going to let himself think about that even ironically. As he listens to Bruce’s briefing. It works for about half a second before he’s thinking about the - the engagement again.
The kicker is, he’d even been planning on finishing the damn saw himself, so he wouldn’t have been in this mess at all. It’s just that - well, he’d been afraid he wouldn’t be able to finish it in time, what with the Belle Reeve breakout, and before that the cleanup from the latest round of Lex-deployed robots four days ago, and more assignments than usual at work what with the stomach bug going around, and to top it all off the baby Sun-Eater he still hasn’t come up with a name for has been getting fussy about eating from his hands so he really had needed to get the solar trough finished as fast as possible-
Okay. So he’s been, perhaps, busier than he’d realized. It’s not a good excuse but it is an excuse. He taps the pen on the table once.
Focus on the bright side, Kent.
The bright side is that there’s no way this little - administrative mixup - can go further. According to the data entry from the Fortress, the final step in a Kryptonian engagement involves submitting a petition to the raozrhynj-zrhyminia. This seems to have been some sort of compatibility assessor computer, and it is currently orbiting Rao in a million greenish pieces of dust. So at least he can’t do that accidentally.
Just all the courting steps leading up to it.
Also, there’s the hurricane evacuation he’s still keeping an ear on.
And he needs to figure out if there’s some way to give Bruce his stupid birthday saw behind his own House’s back without it drawing the wrong conclusions about their engagement-
There’s a tiny krrrk as he accidentally rolls the pen a touch too hard and the acrylic of the barrel gets a microscopic hairline fracture. No one else could possibly notice the sound, but it does make him set the pen down too quickly. Which, of course, he notices. “Superman,” comes Batman’s stern voice.
It sure would have been nice for the Fortress to tell him all this after he has to sit through a meeting with him.
“Sorry,” he says. “I heard something, but it’s not important.” Not technically a lie.
Bruce seems to buy it at any rate, turning back to the briefing. Clark rereads through the report at speed, listening to Bruce cover all the intelligence, and then add tersely that he will be unavailable for most of the next week. Because Bruce Wayne’s birthday is in two days, and Bruce Wayne has been rather, well, Wayne-ish recently, and so is rumored to be planning on drinking his way through half the clubs of upper Gotham and possibly half its residents as well. Clark’s frown can hopefully be taken as a response to the irritating news that Volcana’s laid her hands on some Atlantean artifact.
“That’s all I have for now,” Bruce says. “Superman, if you have an update on the chemical analysis, after that we’re done.”
The analysis. The analysis that had kicked this whole thing off. Because linking the computer system, the primary resource of your House, to someone else’s system apparently meant that you wanted that link to be…
“They’re almost done,” Clark says. “At the pace they’ve been going, it’ll take about two hours to finish. Then the Fortress systems estimate another four to eight hours to synthesize the first test antidotes.” And the formal meeting’s over, so he leans back a little in his chair with a half smile, enjoying the way Bruce’s mouth twitches just the slightest bit downward. “So, since he’s safely locked away, you can restrain yourself from the Scarecrow investigation for that long. Right?”
“Not this again,” the Flash says, and leaves at speed. Mostly for show since he does pause for a nanosecond to wave to Clark on his way out with a grin. Clark waves back.
But just as Bruce opens his mouth, no doubt to jab something back about how they don’t all have the luxury of being reactive, Clark really does hear something. The hurricane- he lets his head snap up and to the side as he triangulates, and the next moment he’s out of his chair. There’s just enough time to say “excuse me,” and then he’s out, streaking through the sky.
He does allow himself a second of warm fondness, amusement at Bruce’s microexpression at him getting the last word, before he’s all focused on the shift and howl of the winds and the heartbeats below.
—
Clark would not give up being Superman, not if he could ever help it. It’s part of who he is now, part of who he’s settled into. Helping people, as best he can, with what he can do. But he does, every once in a while, find it - difficult. He is far busier than most of the League. He can’t help it, when he hears as much as he does.
It’s not like he minds! He has far more help than he ever would have dreamed of when he’d first put on the cape. But some days -
Some days Clark is saving lives for forty hours straight.
Hurricanes are always a challenge. It’s never as simple as flying every heartbeat out of danger; many have reasons for staying in the flood zone, but he can’t skip checking on them. In his more tired, frustrated moments, Clark wonders if some of the people who don’t evacuate do it because they know he’ll be there to pull them out if it gets bad.
After the storm lumbers its way back east over the ocean and he’s chased down every Floridian heartbeat in its wake he can hear, he manages to sneak in a twelve minute catnap on top of the blanket of clouds. Then he wakes up to Perry bellowing his name in Metropolis. He puts in a good four and a half hours working late in the basement - banished to obituaries again, which is fair considering he’d hastily called out between rescues without getting anyone to cover his assignments - before a fire pulls him away. And so it goes. Fires, compared to hurricanes, are simple as long as he catches them early enough. When it’s out, he sits with Aaliyah, who’d just been trying to make her dad dinner because he works so hard, and she’s just moved to Metropolis and she didn’t know, the stove is all weird not like she’s used to, and she’s starting at a new high school in three days and freaking Superman probably thinks she’s a-
Clark interrupts her at this point to tell her it’s all right, it’s what he’s here for, and asks her if she would like a hug. She would.
He waits with her until her dad can make it off his night shift early and come home and also tell her it’s all right. Then when she’s a little calmer, calm enough to smile and wave goodbye to him when he arches up into the night sky, only then does he realize it’s 10:52 and Bruce’s birthday is almost over.
Sh-
(Clark looks around. The clouds are empty.)
Shit.
He arrows to the Fortress. Except the hacksaw isn’t there.
…Double shit.
“Fortress,” he says. “Where’s the saw.”
A suspiciously placid chime. “It has been delivered to the intended.”
And, of course, the little ultrasound emitter in his cape pocket chooses that moment to sound its 60-25kHz glissando. The Bat-signal. For half a second Clark considers not picking up.
“Agent A?” Maybe this is League business.
“Master Kent, sir. May I request your presence at the Manor tonight?”
Definitely not League business. Also definitely not a request. He - Alfred knows, somehow, Clark realizes, with a frisson of horror. His Master Kent intonation logically sounds nothing like how his mom used to say Clark Joseph Kent. Somehow it also sounds exactly the same.
Clark mutes the channel for a second. “I’m not done with you,” he says to the ceiling, and then unmutes. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
—
Alfred has chosen to make tea in the fifteen minutes. This means Clark isn’t about to be killed outright. Tea is one of the few drinks it’s impossible to subtly poison with liquid Kryptonite, since the tannin reacts with even the smallest amount to turn the entire drink the color, consistency, and approximate taste of Mountain Dew.
Not that Alfred would do that. Try to kill him. Probably. Even if he has accidentally proposed to Bruce without getting his blessing.
Or if he did he'd find some other way. It would be a waste of good tea.
“Master Kent,” he says, when Clark touches down in front of the Manor. “May I assist you with that?”
“No thanks,” Clark says, adjusting his grip on the five-ton, six-foot length of sunstone necessary to grow a secondary console.
Alfred nods, and leads Clark to the Cave, which is -
The lights are dark, but the Cave isn’t, because soft glowing veins radiate through the floor, tracing along where the lights should be. The main computer bank is rimed with crystal, soft delicate arches filling in the spaces between monitors, a backlit shimmer that almost makes the Cave seem underwater. Near the computer banks, there’s a - something between a podium and a crystal flower, strong solid base in the shape of the shield transitioning gracefully to the crystalline angles of a miniature Fortress exterior.
Clark squints at it. Yes, unfortunately, the saw is inside.
When he sets the raw console he’d brought down and steps towards it, there’s a warning chime, and the little Fortress opening pulses a violet warning light. Because of course the engagement gift can’t be just taken back. That would be too easy.
Another step forward and the miniature door tessellates itself shut.
Clark takes a step back and it opens.
Briefly, he contemplates the angle it would take to refract his heat vision through the sculpture-podium-thing and melt the stupid saw. Then he could apologize to Alfred, rip the damn crystals out of the cave with his bare hands, throw them into the sun, and…
Do what? Disconnect the Cave and Fortress and pretend that the whole thing is some sort of cosmic joke from Mxyzptlk? It’d never work. The execution isn’t Mxyzptlk’s style even if it would appeal to the imp’s twisted sense of humor. And -Clark lets himself sigh, looks down. There’s a quiet voice in him, exhausted and small, that’s saying: that it’d be a whole new pile of lies onto the only person left in his life he can just - be himself - all of himself - around. That he really had worked hard on the saw; he doesn’t want to destroy it. That even if he didn’t mean it in that way - he’d - he’d just needed, wanted to do something nice for his friend, give him something useful-
...The heartbeat he usually tries harder not to listen in on is getting closer. Besides, there’s only one car with such an obnoxiously loud engine that can turn onto the road leading to Wayne Manor and suddenly run much quieter.
“I promise I’ll explain,” Clark says to Alfred, who’s been very patient while Clark's been staring at the mess he's made with God knows what expression on his face. “The AI has a mind of its own. Let me see if I can convince it to stop this. Bruce is about fifteen minutes out.”
He shakes his head after he adds the last sentence. He must be tired. As if Alfred doesn’t know better than he where Bruce is at any given moment.
Alfred says “Very good, sir,” and goes upstairs.