Chapter Text
Superman is compromised.
Well. Maybe. Bruce is not yet one-hundred percent sold on that particular conclusion. But — something's certainly wrong, and of that, he's sure.
See, Superman has stopped hovering. Which is strange, of course, because all Superman ever does is hover. That's only to be said in the metaphorical sense; Clark has not suddenly lost all ability to fly. He's quite alright, physically speaking. "Tip-top shape," to quote Metropolis' Man of Steel himself. It's his behaviour that has undergone this… this seismic shift, evident only in his constant, unwarranted, unrelenting concern. Or, lack thereof.
Bruce doesn't want to imply that Clark had not wholeheartedly trusted him previously, for he knows that isn't the case. But for all his hope, and optimism, and good cheer that Kal-El prides himself on, he's always been somewhat of a "worrywart" (again, Clark's words, not his.)
It is not at all the same as Bruce's own tendency to overthink things. Bruce's paranoia has its practical uses — genuine world-saving applications. Clark's is bothersome at best and obstructive at worse. This is why, contrary to popular (his children's) belief, psychoactive medication has only ever served to hinder his functioning. Which he does just fine. And, no, he will not be refilling his Risperidone prescription, thank you for the concern, Alfred.
That's beside the point; Clark has been calm. Too calm. And not in his "everything-must-be-alright-because-I-say-it's-so-and-if-I-acknowledge-that-it-isn't-I'll-cry" way. He is genuinely, totally at-ease. It's unnerving.
He used to have a way of questioning and undermining Bruce's every little decision; to point out some manner in which Bruce had placed upon himself too great of expectations (untrue and ridiculous), or placed too great a risk on some league-member's shoulders (their teammates are perfectly capable, Clark). These days, instead, he nods along suredly; he clasps Bruce on the shoulder with a friendly squeeze, and says something cute and overly cheery like: "You've got this, B!" or "You're gonna ace it, team!"
He no longer plays moral compass. He just. Trusts things to.. to go to plan? All the time? Like he's no longer bracing for the worst outcome, or some sort of loss. And for Bruce, it's… it's honestly a little… terrifying.
He's not blasé. Bruce would have found reason to reprimand Clark far sooner if that'd been the case. He shows up when it matters; he gives things the weight they ought to have. He's Superman, in the same way he's always been. He holds the whole world in his palm should only he desire to have it, and instead, he chooses to tend it, this little planet so very far beneath him, with limitless bouts of love and care and devotion. Bruce should have no complaint, really. But it's funny and unusual, and he doesn't like it.
Bruce has begun to notice patterns: Clark leaves Watchtower briefings on time now. He delegates, sometimes. Just the little things — minor earthquakes, mudslides, flash floods. The sorts of things that newer league recruits take to well. And when crises overlap, Clark chooses. Lets himself give his all to one, lets the league half its efforts and apply itself to the other.
Bruce tells himself that this is good. Healthy. Sustainable. He doesn't like how much he notices.
During a League debrief, Bruce lays out contingencies with the sort of thoroughness he has always afforded them. His eyes find Clark's out of habit. He's listening, his chin propped up on the shelf of his hand, shoulders sloped and rounded. Relaxed, in a way Bruce can't remember seeing before.
When Bruce finishes, Clark nods.
"Sounds solid," he says. No careful amendments. No gentle reframing. No reminder of the human cost.
Bruce waits for it, and it, oddly, never comes.
Later, as they file out, Clark takes hold of him in that friendly way he always does, his palms smoothing across Bruce's armoured shoulders good-naturedly. "You’re doing great." Clark says.
Bruce freezes.
Clark is already moving on, threading into conversation with Barry and Hal as they file out the room together in one great superpowered mass, a hand at Barry's back as he laughs at something surely inane from his belly. Bruce's eyes follow him as he goes. Narrow, then, at the sight of his stupidly handsome smile and stupidly handsome dimples on his stupidly handsome face.
The warmth of his touch lingers, somehow, against Bruce's skin, though he knows it impossible. There had been innumerable layers of kevlar and plastic and steel between him and Kal-El's friendly hands. And again, the thought lingers: something is wrong. Superman is compromised.
He tells himself it’s fatigue. Burnout, or something. For nearing on two decades now, Clark has been carrying the world in its entirety upon his (broad) cape-clad shoulders. Maybe, just maybe, he has learnt, instead, to set it down sometimes.
That thought should be reassuring. Instead, it tightens something in Bruce's chest; grips his heart and gives it a little squeeze. Because if Clark is setting the world down, then Bruce has to ask himself what else he might be letting go of.
This takes the cake. Superman must be compromised. That's a one-hundred percent, World's Greatest Detective certified fact. He simply must be.
This time, it's Gotham; it is always Gotham.
The man of the hour is one Garfield Lynns — the Firefly — one of Gotham's minor villainous rogues. But, you know, it's Gotham, so that means very little to threat level evaluation.
Nonetheless, its handled now. It was very clever of him, admittedly, planning his attack for mid-day. Bruce had been in the midst of a mind-numbingly boring quarterly meeting, and it had delayed his usual response time by nearly fifteen whole minutes.
Had it not been for Superman's unsolicited involvement, things might have become catastrophic. For Clark's meddling, this once, he was grateful. (Still, he refused to let the blatant violation of League protocol go unacknowledged. It was the principal of the matter.)
Firefly’s latest plan involved rigging Gotham National Bank with explosives, strategically placed to breach its supports and send the entire building toppling. In a stroke of good fortune, only one device had actually detonated — each of the explosives had been rigged to go off one by one and Bruce surmised this had been in order to draw in emergency responders after the first ignition. It would match Lynn's MO; greater destruction, greater loss of life, more time for his figurative lit-match to catch. A postulation, Bruce had not yet actually questioned him.
The Batman had then arrived in time to defuse the remainder of the explosives while Superman put his efforts toward stabilising the building and aiding Gotham Fire in dousing the resulting blaze. Casualties were, in the end, minimal. No fatalities.
Superman, true to form, was flawless. When Bruce arrived on the scene, they fell into routine. Perfect synchronisation, as easy between them as breathing. Superman at his back; Batman at his. World's Finest, operating as one. It felt right, to fight alongside his best friend; it felt natural. For only the briefest of moments, Clark's strange behaviour was lost on him.
And then it was over, crisis averted, and Clark was leaving. Bruce is dumbfounded.
"You’re leaving." He blurts, still dumbfounded.
Superman floats ahead, mythic in stature, toes ghosting across scarred asphalt. Smoke and soot cling to his suit, to his boots, across the arch of his cheek and the bridge of his nose. Curls pull loose from the gelled slick of his hair, and that stubborn little ringlet that lays across his forehead has been stressed frizzy.
It upsets Bruce, he realises, the way Clark has angled his body away from him, poised to take off into the stratosphere. His cape stirs behind him. Bruce's stomach stirs with it.
Clark's smiling, too. It's not the practiced, sunny Superman grin. It's a Clark smile, small and private and unflinchingly honest. Unguarded. He glances Bruce's way, all pretty blue eyes and long swooping lashes, his irises swallowed up by hexagonal pupils, and Bruce knows that he's looking at his eyes, through the cowl's white lenses.
"You've got it," he tells him, a little airy, "and I wouldn't want to overstay my welcome."
The response bothers him. It shouldn't. Clark is respecting his territory.
“You usually stay,” Bruce says, feeling rather lost.
There is a single fleeting instant, one with a half-life of mere seconds, where Superman considers that. But the moment passes as quickly as it had arrived, and he shrugs, easy and unbothered. “You don’t need me here.”
His words land with the force of an anvil. Wrong. They land wrong. And even so, they are not… incorrect. Bruce doesn't need him here; he is more than capable of working on his own — prefers it, even. They are, instead, misplaced.
There is a pause, and Clark must take Bruce's silence for his response — a dismissal, perhaps — because it is then that he decides to leave. He at once pivots with an exaggerated flourish, his cape sweeping through the air behind him with a flutter. Then, lingering for a moment, he throws Bruce a wink, raises two fingers in a familiar playful salute, and says: "See you at the debrief, B! Don't be a stranger!"
He blinks. Clark's gone, and Bruce is instead hit with a wall of percussive air in his absence. Craning his head, he catches Superman's technicolour blue and red streak in Gotham's leaden sky.
There is a quantity of time then elapsed where he stands there, stock still, suspended in the midst of the street. He distantly hears the city begin to settle around him. The shriek of sirens began to peter; the smell of smoke began to quell. And still, he is there, fixed on his heel.
"Lynns is being processed," it's Gordon, and the sound of him sets Bruce's teeth on edge. He flinches, quite nearly, and wonders if this is his comeuppance for all the times he has pulled the disappearing act on the commissioner.
"We can have him ready for you at the station in an hour." Gordon continues, though his voice wavers, just a little, toward the end. When Bruce whips around to face him, he finds Gordon's eyes have narrowed, and he's scrutinizing him. "Is everything…" he gestures vaguely, searchingly, "okay?"
It is the Batman, not Bruce Wayne, who answers not quite a moment later. "Everything is in order, Gordon. I'll be there."
Jim's face scrunches up, like he's considering something, but he — wisely — drops the issue. "I'll see you then." He agrees, and takes it as his cue to leave.
Bruce watches him go, but his mind is elsewhere. He's certain of it now: something is very, deeply wrong. Hands in fists at his sides, he turns over every recent interaction, every minutiae of body language, every little utterance.
Something tremendous has shifted. Somehow, he is the only one to have noticed. The world around him keeps spinning. Time keeps churning. People pass him by on the street, and they know nothing. Life marches on without Superman.
That, more than anything, is what bothers him.
Listen. He doesn't mean to violate HIPAA compliance.
It began with simple maintenance, really; a standard check of League medical security after a minor breach. It was routine, justified, and certainly not driven by any personal feelings.
Changes to Clark's medical records are infrequent. Circumstances were that Clark, an invulnerable alien, was impervious to injury and illness. What he was vulnerable to had been extensively documented throughout the entirety of his tenure as Superman. And so, that poses the question: what more is there for one to know about someone like Clark, like Superman, that someone like Bruce wouldn't have noticed and documented for himself?
A lot, apparently.
The file he discovers is dated to nearly eighteen months ago. Accompanying it is distinct labelling: "access restricted, nonemergency." It is the most recent addition to Superman's medical records. Bruce hadn't any indication that there had been additions in the first place.
The need to know gnaws at him.
Logically, ethically, he knows he shouldn't look. It would be a total breach of both Clark's privacy and rights as a patient. (Even if he doesn't technically have rights, alien and all.)
But then, there are the unknowns. What if this affects official League matters in some way? What if it affects Superman's efficiency, his efficacy? What if it's some serious, horrible health issue that Bruce — Clark's best friend — could have been doing something about, to help?
Bruce takes a sharp breath. His mind wanders. Who even filed this report, if not for Bruce? Was it Clark himself, or perhaps instead was it Jor-El? The Fortress has communicative ability with League servers, after all. But then, does the relationship between Clark and Jor-El even qualify for doctor-patient confidentiality? Bruce's tongue darts over his lips. He decides he doesn't want to know.
He hesitates only a second before he overrides the lock.
The language is clinical. Detached. Exactly what he'd expect from the Fortress — from Jor-El. He finds extensive diagrams, descriptions; every minutiae of Kryptonian neurology. How it differs from that of a human, how they, alternatively, converge. Enlarged parietal, occipital, temporal lobes, noted as result of the yellow sun's unique radiation; what Jor-El calls Chronic Sensory Overload, hypervigilance thresholds well above human capability. There is one note, Bruce skims, that records symptoms described as congruent with human conditions: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Survivor's Guilt to boot.
He does not read that section in full. It feels like an invasion of privacy, greater than the one he is already engaged in. He scrolls and finds himself instead captivated by the details of Jor-El's prescribed treatment: Kryptonite exposure.
Controlled, the file assures. A Fortress-refined isotype, microdosed and patient-directed. Bruce's stomach drops out from under him. Clark's been intentionally dosing himself with Kryptonite, of all things!? Then: that's why he's been acting so strangely, all this time — Kryptonite!
Logically speaking, he knows he should trust the Fortress's assessment. Kryptonian itself in nature, it would best understand the needs of Kryptonian biology. Still, Bruce balks.
He searches desperately for any mention of side effects, any hint of long-term consequence, but finds only sterile assurances of efficacy. The sheer audacity of it, he thinks, masking his worsening condition with something so intrinsically tied to his downfall. He imagines Clark, pale and sweating, meticulously preparing each dose, self-harm performed for the sake of — what? The greater good? For Superman?
And this is a choice. Clark chose this. Worst of all, chose not to tell him.
With a single keystroke, Bruce closes the file, staring into the hazy, unfocused distance as the implications rearrange themselves in his mind. Clark calmer. Clark softer. Clark stepping back.
Clark trusting him, the League, enough to do that — or, perhaps, not trusting him enough to explain why.
Bruce isn’t sure which possibility unsettles him more. What he is certain about, however, is that he needs official confirmation. He calls up a scanner, the one he has based in Metropolis, and processes a survey of radioactive signatures in the area. He'll have his answers soon enough.
The alert pings an hour later.
Batcave sensors registered a trace radiation signature. Low-level, but specific. Kryptonite.
Bruce’s eyes flick to the display before the alert even finishes sounding. The triangulation resolves quickly, cleanly, with a precision Bruce helped design.
The signal originates from a residential building, an address Bruce knows by heart. An address Bruce Wayne has visited more times than he cares to recount. It originates from Clark Kent’s apartment.
Bruce exhales slowly, already moving toward the suit.
“This is procedural,” he tells the empty cave. The cave does not answer.
Somewhere in Metropolis, Superman is doing something he didn’t think Bruce needed to know about. Bruce intends to find out why.