Maybe there's an alternate timeline where Bruce falls back on instinct, closes up, retracts, deflects. In this timeline, later, hours or days, Clark flexes his fingers through Bruce's and says I feel like there was something you wanted to say to me, and maybe Bruce does, then. Or doesn't, but it won't matter, because there may have been some unsteady and unstable time when Clark, unsure of himself, could have been shut out for good, allowed that to happen. But not in that future.

Not in this present. He is cleaning his hands when Bruce speaks, setting food court debris aside, and then stillness. No fidgeting.

His eyes do a thing, that fractional widening slightly amplified by needless lenses. His heart does a thing, no one around to hear it. It doesn't feel like new information—you know, right?—but it still feels revelationary. That's how poems work too.

Clark, gentle, reaches across the table to map his hands against the outside of Bruce's, like he could absorb that fidgeting and the feelings that create it. His thumbs resting on the heels of Bruce's palms. "I don't like the idea of you waking up alone with this," he says, quietly. "And I know you might prefer it, that way, but I want to be there. And next time, I won't let this thing hurt me, or you." For whatever 'hurt' means, flailing in the dark, invulnerability.

"You don't have anything to be sorry about," he adds. Deeply earnest, very sure.