"We can talk about blame if you come back in her uniform," says Bruce, a little of that spiteful shit-eating playboy who Clark first met sneaking in. (That persona is fake, yes, but he doesn't actually mind snarling at people about Gotham. It's a hellhole, but it's home.)

And that's ... that, more or less. They can't stay up here forever; Clark has feats of divine intervention to attend to, Bruce has fledgling heroes to manage from afar and bleak murders to investigate. They had a beer. It doesn't mean anything. Alfred is pointed about his whereabouts, as being whisked away by Superman was not something that slid under the news media radar, but Bruce resolutely ignores him. It's stupid, and he'll get over it.

Winter gets its claws in early, out here in the east. No proper snow yet in Gotham City but it's bitterly cold enough that everything has a layer of perpetual frost. Bruce should be working, or sleeping, or out with a model, anything but courting pneumonia out in the pitch black expanse of his family's land. He's just walking. Thinking. Drifting.