It takes him a moment. Shame is obvious in the set of his shoulders. If it wouldn't be beyond the pale of dramatic he'd leave, somehow, but even caught in panic's grasp he knows that would be both useless, and compounding embarrassment. So he forces himself to stand there and breathe. Had he been alone, he'd have managed to submerge his response under ice, but it's like stumbling on a step he didn't see. Disoriented.
Only once his pulse is back to something halfway normal does he notice his hand. Bruce very nearly flinches, looking down at it, twisting his wrist in the near-dark to look at. Pain shooting up from his pinkie finger. Well done, Wayne.
Something sick twists in him. "I'm sorry," he rasps, grave.
Clark stays seated, at first, on the edge of the bed as Bruce takes his time, breathes. No doubt his presence is a form of pressure, invisible and weighty, but he does what he can to give Bruce a moment to calibrate, because the alternative is leaving, and he's not about to do that. Then there's that nearly twitch, the glance down, and Clark tracks that, eyes unfocusing and refocusing so that the the world shimmers into ghost-forms. His heart sinks.
"No," he says, at that apology. The urge to scramble over it with his own guilt is there, ready, but he instead brings his hands up, gently blows into his cupped palms, a wisp of icy air fluttering past his fingers, frost patterning delicately over super-cooled skin.
Standing, nearing. "My hand is cold," is a warning, as is, "Let me look," while reaching over to go and take Bruce's injured hand.
His self-worth is hurt more than his hand, which will do alright in a few weeks if he keeps an eye on it; Bruce allows Clark to take it, careful, as if he might somehow do further damage on his own, despite the fact that the other man is literally invulnerable.
"I shouldn't even have the instinct." Quiet, but final. He understands Clark won't want to hear an apology - Bruce wouldn't either, maybe, if they were reversed - but it doesn't matter that he didn't actually hurt Clark. He shares nights with Lois sometimes, for fuck's sake. What does this look like, in bed with somebody else? He feels sick over it. Getting too comfortable with all of this, forgetting who and what he is. Idiot.
Trying to shake it off, but there's some deep icy chain connecting him to that unconscious feeling of horror.
"One hasn't gotten me like that in a long time."
Bruce thought they would get better, once he brought them together. But they've only grown worse.
Nothing broken, at least, Clark's head bowed as he studies Bruce's hand. If it was dislocated, it seems to have righted itself in the flurry. A sprain, then. He gently wraps his hand around the site where he knows it'll be sore, uncomfortably cold which nevertheless throws a blanket over the ache.
Not that Bruce isn't good with pain, but it'll help recovery. Clark looks up when he's done this. It's hard not to think in terms of colleteral damage. There was none, save for Bruce's hand. So it's fine. But it's not.
"I tried waking you," he says, quietly. "And I think that made it worse."
He's not sure he can parcel up Bruce's guilt and take it from him, much as he'd like to, and so he leaves that where it is, and asks, instead, "Tell me about it?"
The feeling of the dream (if that's what it is) paints misery over him, and it's compounded by nauseating helplessness. There was no intent, no thought at all, behind lashing out, but he's not sure if that makes it better. Awfulness beginning to seep into the waking world without his say-so.
Bruce looks at him for a while. Considering, but something about it feels heavier than his usual assessing stare.
He flexes his fingers in Clark's hands, as if returning the grip. Gaze slides over the lake, watching the dark water subtly churn, glinting oncoming daylight.
Bruce had resolved not to tell him about any of this. It's so horrific, and part of him still thinks it has a good chance of being nothing more than a product of some kind of ingrained fear of Superman. (Those early dreams had been so charged in a certain way. Hypersexual even in their violence. Bruce isn't stupid.) But he has discussed it in abstract with Diana, enough that she's conceded she wishes she had listened to him about his feeling, back when he'd first told her had one.
If he lies now, what happens later?
"A long time ago I had a dream about Barry Allen," he says, still looking at the water. "Before I knew who he was. Before I had seen him on surveillance footage. He had come from the future to give me a warning. But I knew what he was talking about, because I'd been seeing that future in other dreams, ever since I first saw you."
Clark holds his hand and keeps it still, letting Bruce flex his fingers without much in the way of returning gesture save to keep his hand in his. Being careful. He watches Bruce watch the water.
That icy cold is starting to warm up. It was never going to last very long anyway.
"What kind of future?" asks Clark, after hesitating over this last part. There are a few first sightings. Clark tends to think of Bruce Wayne at a fancy event, the Batman lurking like a shadow at the edges, his own churn of distrust and confusion that had not yet resolved into something more—something more.
But he's peripherally aware that a lot of people saw him all at the same time, and he also remembers a car chase at night, and a show of strength.
(The implications inherent of a Barry Allen sending a message from the future, of Bruce being able to see it in his dreams, are quietly absorbed for the moment in the project of getting more information.)
He'd been in his office when it started. He hadn't wanted to be, he was going out of his mind wanting to be back in the cave dissecting the alien ransom message, but panic had set in and Bruce Wayne was more useful than Batman. And he watched from across the bay, bolting up to the helipad—
Bruce looks at him, but doesn't answer right away.
He seems like he's going to say something, but stops. Has to try again. How can I tell you. It sounds like every awful thing I ever accused you of, before I knew the truth.
"Before," he says, and there is a weight to that. Before. A time they both know of, without having to put more descriptive words into. "I dreamt about my mother. Over and over. It wasn't unusual at first, nightmares aren't new to me. But the more wrapped up I became the more I dreamed, hearing my father calling her name as she died, seeing her in the mausoleum, my grandfather trying to get her attention. A maid we had, sorting through her jewelry for the mortician, explaining it to me. It took me—"
Christ. He's talking a little fast. He's never said any of this out loud before, and his expression is anxious, cornered. Which he knows Clark can see in the dark.
"Everybody called mom 'Marty'. But not in the dreams. They weren't about me, or her."
Clark Kent has zero journalism education despite his desk at an internationally accaimed news organisation. It's a thing, and he'd had to learn as he went. If he did not have some kind of natural inclination to the craft along with a propensity to pick things up fast, he's sure Perry White would have left his ass on the side of the street a long time ago, Superman or no Superman. He had to get good at writing, for one thing, very fast. Late night discussions with Lois as she scribbled red pen all over his copy.
When it came to managing sources, though, that all had made a logical sense to him. Comes naturally. Create rapport, look and sound like you're interested, find the follow up, the right moment to challenge something, the right moment to question, or agree.
The right moment to be quiet, too. Silence is there to be filled. It doesn't often work on Bruce Wayne, who can live in that silence longer than most.
There's a small and affectionate smile, fleeting, for parental nicknames. His other hand, cool but not cold now, finds a place to be above Bruce's wrist, holding him in some small way. He knows about nightmares, and dead parents, and all the little details that lodge splinters of glass in tender spots. That reflection of empathy gives way to silent prompt, a prickle of curiousity for dreams that are about a son and a mother, but aren't. Go on.
Tonight, Superman didn't make an appearance. A rarity. Often his dreams involve dying at the Kryptonian's hands, but different each time; every possible outcome, every plan he tries, ending the same way. Trying to Solve For X when he already knows what the answer is. The variation creates doubts in his head, but lately, he's beginning to wonder if it's not just trial and error of a timeline desperately trying to assert itself onto reality. They were trying to free the Amazons - enslaved, in chains, being used, being transformed - a woman called Granny using unimaginable horrors to twist them into her Furies.
He had been trying to convince Hippolyta to come with them. She blamed him for Diana's death. Like Clark blamed him for Lois' death. Like so many, and the only person who didn't, it felt like—
It's always me, it's me every time, if I just shoot myself in the head it'll push everything off the spiral we're on, and Harleen grabbing his face and whispering so harshly That's not it, that's not it, stop it.
Sometimes he wakes up and he was living another life for a minute. Sometimes he wakes up and it's all there, every atom changed down to his bones. Warped like Earth under the unity of the motherboxes. Things shift, and he retains some and more vanishes into the waking world, like smoke. Occasionally he manages to take notes, sketch faces. He's shown a drawing of Diana's mother to Victor, but not to Diana. Bruce looks at their hands.
Clark is easy to read. Surprise first, and early dismay.
"Oh."
And he goes quiet, thinking, letting that simple statement alone sink in. Remembering the looming shadow of a galactic titan, eyes burning, the oddly primal sense of feeling a little like a guard dog standing fixed at the gate and bristling its hackles at some unknown threat in the darkness. That maybe a warning show of fangs would be enough, for right now.
The idea of being anything else twists something in his heart. Of Bruce carrying that—
"Why?"
Very open ended. Too open ended. Bad technique. He keeps a hold of Bruce, prepared to firm up if the older man pulls away.
He almost does. The micromovement is there, under his skin. But he stays put. Utters, stupidly,
"We haven't sat down to talk about it."
Bruce snaps his mouth shut and closes his eyes; it's a near thing the way he grinds his teeth together isn't audible. Fuuuuck. He takes a steadying breath and then, another crack at it, "He," because that isn't Clark, it isn't. He opens his eyes, bleak apology there, "kills me whenever he finds me."
(Time after time. Chained, in strangely intimate ways. In battle, carelessly. After torture. Snapping his head off in front of his companions, heat visioning him into a charred skeleton. In one spectacular terror he struggled to wake from, an entire day of watching parademons mangle two dozen people before he-isn't-Clark reached into his chest and nearly gently crushed his heart.)
Quieter: "The implication is that an error I made resulted in Lois' death. And that your grief, and anger at me, made you vulnerable. I can't see. What happened."
It hurts, of course, and there's no point packing that away somewhere unseen. Clark's hands on Bruce are gentle and steady the whole time, perfect control in the way he also can't seem to help the crumple at his brow, the drop of his gaze to somewhere around Bruce's breastbone.
"We're not gonna let it," he says, quietly. Whatever it is.
It's not that simple. They would not be standing here, like this, after that, if all that was necessary was a hopeful attitude, but it's not nothing. He (gently) squeezes Bruce's arm, as if that alone could articulate and communicate something better than words might.
On account of he doesn't know how to say that he's not murderously angry at Bruce over the prospect of his wife dying from some tactical mistake. That, altogether, feels too large and unwieldy a thing to have a complex feeling about just yet. Still listening, in spite of that slip.
"'Whenever'?" he prompts, once he draws focus back up to Bruce's eyes.
With his free hand, Bruce reaches up and holds the side of Clark's face. Affectionate and a little desperate. I don't understand either, I'm sorry. He doesn't do anything more than that; even if any part of him could tolerate crawling back in bed and trying to forget in his arms, he wouldn't let them.
He drops his hand, scrubs it over his own face.
"It keeps changing," he explains. If one can explain something like this, which he knows sounds completely crazy. "Like every time I block one avenue it finds another. And I don't know— if I'm not just—"
He stalls. If I'm not just losing it. An unpleasant spin on that phone call once everyone had been settled back at home after defeating Steppenwolf. Bruce holding a mug of coffee and offering Clark an exhausted, lopsided smile, showing him grainy security footage of a being calling himself a 'Martian Manhunter'. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to be doing this and grateful you came, but I'm still not sure I'm not having a breakdown. Ha, ha. Funny joke.
A rough exhale. "I can show you something downstairs." And also like, bandage his dumb hand. Come on. Bruce snags his robe off a chair where he'd chucked it earlier as they go.
Clark's hands are by now back to a more human temperature as they allow Bruce out of arm's range. A touch in return is enough, momentously enough, to quiet the rising anxiety of some kind of split between them. A small thing, given the staggering nature of prophetic dreams and their implications, but inevitable. He knows, intellectually, it would take more. They've been through more.
(Lois, unrecognisable and destroyed, collapsed to black bones and papery ash. And Clark, who knows grief, as susceptible to its influence as if he didn't.)
He follows. He insists on collecting the kit and on helping, I got it, what with Bruce being down a hand. Everything he knows about administering medical care is X-ray related intuition and being around Bruce long enough by now to become familiar, and so if he is trying to make himself feel better about the situation at all, it at least isn't to Bruce's physical detriment.
Traditionally a bad patient, Bruce shows rare patience in sitting still for Clark, allowing the detailed attention. His free hand sometimes helps selecting the next necessary item, sometimes strays to Clark's side. Reaffirming. These dreams - visions, whatever they may or may not be - won't change how he feels. Haven't changed how he feels. He's wondered, sometimes, if the reason he can't stop and can't kill himself in his dreams is because he still loves Clark so much.
"Mm."
Universal Hold on a second. Reasons for made obvious when they're through, because Bruce has to move to the other side of his primary computer station. A few utilitarian shelves packed with miscellaneous drives, files of hand-written notes, a few books. A ream of printer paper and a cup that doesn't match the ones upstairs. From it, he removes a leather-bound journal; something a normal person would find too expensive to have just to kick around with, but that Bruce probably didn't think twice about chucking into a shopping cart.
Sketches and notes, inside. Bruce is not an artist in any spiritual sense, but he can draw shockingly accurately from memory. There's not enough soul in it to impress a curator, and yet it's lifelike enough to certainly annoy the shit out of any actual artists. Machinelike. A skill honed to help him with investigative work and nothing more. It starts with a sketch of a lanky man in strange armor, and then his face, scruffy, wide-eyed, partitioned by a strange helmet, but still obviously Barry. Notes next to it show Bruce was hypothesizing what the armor could be for, specifically. Early days, innocent reflection. Doodles of creatures that look like parademons. Absent remarks about meditation. A capital Greek omega symbol, a skyline.
Superman. Lines of his face cruel and furious. A note. Is that what he looks like? Satellite. CCTV. Sure I've seen it. Before any news camera had caught him close up. Barry, again. Multiple women in armor. A trident. A detailed layout of an alien ship never seen before on Earth. More recently, a page crammed with writing describing From Vic.
As the pages go on, the more distressed the sketches become. Pages of notes comparing dates of dreams to dates of appearances. No more drawings of Superman; in some bare-bones landscapes, there are obvious absences, where he might be. Bruce censoring his presence, too guilty about his subconscious sticking on that train even though he himself has moved on.
Clark trades medical kit for book. Bruce's hand will need ice, some kind of NSAID, but he's done his bit, careful and particular.
Now, his attention turns to pages, pausing over the first drawing before he begins leafing through. The cast of characters, expanding, diminishing. His presence, and his absence. The blasted landscape, worse than he'd previously imagined the world looking like under Darkseid's influence. Parademons like locusts, stripping down cities. The dates, the notes. Once he stops seeig and starts reading, he can kind of imagine it more like a branching tree, but with pieces missing.
He spends the time, absorbing it all, expression serious. Like he wants to share this, wants to stand where Bruce is standing, where Vic is standing. It has occurred to him he could feel a way about Bruce keeping this from him, but what's the point, when he can understand why?
He starts from the beginning with better context, but doesn't get all the way back to the end again before commenting.
"A fixed point," Clark says. "Darkseid, on earth." Lois, dead. Clark, taken. "And then variations. Even if they look similar, they're not set in stone."
It sounds hollow even to Bruce; his expression as he looks at Clark is very
:/
Self-aware that by now the coincidences have gone from the realm of probable doubt to avalanche. The obvious citations are his own paranoia and the shifting nature of the 'timeline', which have allowed him to halfway ignore it, or at least convince himself that the chances of it meaning anything besides subconscious fear were low enough to be negligible.
Clark looks up, an open kind of puzzlement at the proposition that these dreams mean nothing, that they aren't authentic views of a possible and disastrous future. He suppposes he hadn't come down on either side until viewing Vic's notes solidified them one way or another, along with the a premonition of Barry Allen, and if he has to think about it—
Sure, coincidence, let's try that on for size. Vic could have seen all kinds of things. Bruce could be operating beneath some subconscious aftereffect if his steel trap of a brain had ever seen Barry Allen before and noticed something different about him, if the substance of that dream had only materialised after the fact which leads to the conclusion that Bruce is unstable. An unreliable narrator.
Clark offers an alternative. "Maybe it's sabotage," he says, book open and neglected in his hand. "External psychic influence, a campaign. You brought us altogether, maybe something out there thinks they could drive us all apart with enough—of this."
He closes the book. "I think you'd know," quietly.
"I want to think I'd know," he says, something cracking earnestly in him, looking at Clark in a way that actually demonstrates how uneasy he feels, instead of just implying it in controlled half-glimpses. "I've thought of sabotage. I've thought of too many things. Mostly I just thought it'd stop."
And now it's crept up on him, and he's still panicking in his sleep, and he grazed Clark in a frantic bid to escape himself, and Vic's seeing it, and.
What the fuck.
"You wouldn't do any of that." His voice is a harsh whisper. Utter conviction. "It isn't you, I'm not afraid of you. So why am I still seeing it."
The book is set aside, focus forwards, now. He believes Bruce, that he's not afraid of him, and the summoning of the fact that it has to be said prickles cold over his heart, but it's part of the deal. Whatever their deal is.
"I'm sorry you are," Clark adds. You don't deserve it. Like Bruce Wayne needs encouragement to place the world on his shoulders. "And if I could take it away, I would. But if there is anyone on this whole world who could do something good with it, whatever it might be, whatever it means, it's you."
Faith is a two-way street. One of those simple concepts that a scared and isolated little boy in Kansas had a hard time with, the adult version not much better, not until lately.
He has to say it, because he has to know that Clark knows. Nearly shattering his hand flailing at him and only feeling bad about being violent notwithstanding. When Clark had first returned from the grave, and nearly fried Batman where he stood, Bruce's immediate concern was that when he came back to himself, he'd be devastated that he'd done it.
(In front of half of Metropolis, anyway. Bruce had accepted, the second Clark turned to him, that he had a right to end his life if he felt it was justified. The world needs Superman, not Batman.)
Clark scoots nearer, having claimed a rolly chair to sit and read. Near enough that he can reach out and snag Bruce's unfucked hand, use it to lever himself closer. They've exchanged enough tenderness between wild swings on waking and now that he feels it won't be unwelcome.
"You," he says, "brought me back. After these dreams started."
And maybe they'd been dismissed as nightmares only at the time, but he doesn't think so. Is that what he looks like?, written beside his portrait. Bruce believed, either way, that regardless of the risk, Superman was better to have than have not. That whatever he'd seen in him, in those last moments of hardly knowing each other, and whatever came after, had been enough.
Believing right back feels natural. Necessary. He thinks about saying that, and then says instead, "You know I love you, right?"
"You are so much more than the things my head could ever torture me with," he says in a rough exhale, pained-sounding almost, for the bleeding sincerity of it. Bruce has never committed himself to anyone like he has Clark, and never to any ideal perhaps his own— which had become so broken as to be unrecognizable. You healed me, he struggles to explain. Not by dying. It was before that, when you let me help.
Maybe he could have even gotten some of that out, stilted and strange as it would have been.
For a while, Bruce just looks at him.
Pulse doing another thing. Sounds different than a nightmare.
Vitals point to that it hadn't sunk in, but Clark's not about to make him out to be a liar. He's going to smile at him (dimmer, the occasion puts kind of a pall over the place, but no less warm), and then duck his head and bring Bruce's hand closer to his mouth so he can lay a kiss against his knuckles. And linger there, a short sigh felt against his skin, a flutter of eyelashes.
It should be crippling, this kind of pressure. Maybe later, if signs indicate that Bruce is receiving actionable intel on something inevitable, Clark will be appropriately scared shitless. Maybe. It takes a lot. (This is a lot.) But the way Bruce says that, of what he is, doesn't sound like expectation, but like fact.
But it's not just what Clark does or does not become. It's the thing that Bruce is hurtling to, supposedly, something terrible. Lois' death, unacceptable, and Bruce deserves better than being locked into some awful mistake, whether it's fear of his own making or something real.
There is a world of difference between de-identified awareness and hearing words out loud. A vast divide, one that Bruce has not looked at properly. He has thought it, certainly, never with any particular weight or moment of deliberation— it's an easy fact, one of the easiest things that's ever passed through him, about Clark. He loves him, he is in love with him, and those have been true things for some time. Informing him would just be... infringement.
But why else would Clark put up with him.
His heart aches when his hand is kissed, held so close. After a moment, he steps in, against the rolling chair and the vee of Clark's knees, shifting that hand up to trail fingers in his hair, cradle his head.
Lois dead is unthinkable. So much that Bruce struggles to focus on it, which is itself perhaps worrying; Why can't I see it? But if the answer is that his error is so grave that the way to prevent it is to die before timelines converge, well. Maybe he'll have to find the spine after all. Accept that his refusal to die is ego, as well as skill. Clark wouldn't be so weak in the wake of his death, would he?
(Oh, a new thought. Fuck.)
"I should have told you sooner."
About his dreams. About Vic, about telling Diana. (About being in love with him.) Bruce takes a deep breath and lets it out. Well, he could say. That's what my nightmare was about. Back to bed?
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Only once his pulse is back to something halfway normal does he notice his hand. Bruce very nearly flinches, looking down at it, twisting his wrist in the near-dark to look at. Pain shooting up from his pinkie finger. Well done, Wayne.
Something sick twists in him. "I'm sorry," he rasps, grave.
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"No," he says, at that apology. The urge to scramble over it with his own guilt is there, ready, but he instead brings his hands up, gently blows into his cupped palms, a wisp of icy air fluttering past his fingers, frost patterning delicately over super-cooled skin.
Standing, nearing. "My hand is cold," is a warning, as is, "Let me look," while reaching over to go and take Bruce's injured hand.
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"I shouldn't even have the instinct." Quiet, but final. He understands Clark won't want to hear an apology - Bruce wouldn't either, maybe, if they were reversed - but it doesn't matter that he didn't actually hurt Clark. He shares nights with Lois sometimes, for fuck's sake. What does this look like, in bed with somebody else? He feels sick over it. Getting too comfortable with all of this, forgetting who and what he is. Idiot.
Trying to shake it off, but there's some deep icy chain connecting him to that unconscious feeling of horror.
"One hasn't gotten me like that in a long time."
Bruce thought they would get better, once he brought them together. But they've only grown worse.
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Not that Bruce isn't good with pain, but it'll help recovery. Clark looks up when he's done this. It's hard not to think in terms of colleteral damage. There was none, save for Bruce's hand. So it's fine. But it's not.
"I tried waking you," he says, quietly. "And I think that made it worse."
He's not sure he can parcel up Bruce's guilt and take it from him, much as he'd like to, and so he leaves that where it is, and asks, instead, "Tell me about it?"
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Bruce looks at him for a while. Considering, but something about it feels heavier than his usual assessing stare.
He flexes his fingers in Clark's hands, as if returning the grip. Gaze slides over the lake, watching the dark water subtly churn, glinting oncoming daylight.
Bruce had resolved not to tell him about any of this. It's so horrific, and part of him still thinks it has a good chance of being nothing more than a product of some kind of ingrained fear of Superman. (Those early dreams had been so charged in a certain way. Hypersexual even in their violence. Bruce isn't stupid.) But he has discussed it in abstract with Diana, enough that she's conceded she wishes she had listened to him about his feeling, back when he'd first told her had one.
If he lies now, what happens later?
"A long time ago I had a dream about Barry Allen," he says, still looking at the water. "Before I knew who he was. Before I had seen him on surveillance footage. He had come from the future to give me a warning. But I knew what he was talking about, because I'd been seeing that future in other dreams, ever since I first saw you."
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That icy cold is starting to warm up. It was never going to last very long anyway.
"What kind of future?" asks Clark, after hesitating over this last part. There are a few first sightings. Clark tends to think of Bruce Wayne at a fancy event, the Batman lurking like a shadow at the edges, his own churn of distrust and confusion that had not yet resolved into something more—something more.
But he's peripherally aware that a lot of people saw him all at the same time, and he also remembers a car chase at night, and a show of strength.
(The implications inherent of a Barry Allen sending a message from the future, of Bruce being able to see it in his dreams, are quietly absorbed for the moment in the project of getting more information.)
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Bruce looks at him, but doesn't answer right away.
He seems like he's going to say something, but stops. Has to try again. How can I tell you. It sounds like every awful thing I ever accused you of, before I knew the truth.
"Before," he says, and there is a weight to that. Before. A time they both know of, without having to put more descriptive words into. "I dreamt about my mother. Over and over. It wasn't unusual at first, nightmares aren't new to me. But the more wrapped up I became the more I dreamed, hearing my father calling her name as she died, seeing her in the mausoleum, my grandfather trying to get her attention. A maid we had, sorting through her jewelry for the mortician, explaining it to me. It took me—"
Christ. He's talking a little fast. He's never said any of this out loud before, and his expression is anxious, cornered. Which he knows Clark can see in the dark.
"Everybody called mom 'Marty'. But not in the dreams. They weren't about me, or her."
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Clark Kent has zero journalism education despite his desk at an internationally accaimed news organisation. It's a thing, and he'd had to learn as he went. If he did not have some kind of natural inclination to the craft along with a propensity to pick things up fast, he's sure Perry White would have left his ass on the side of the street a long time ago, Superman or no Superman. He had to get good at writing, for one thing, very fast. Late night discussions with Lois as she scribbled red pen all over his copy.
When it came to managing sources, though, that all had made a logical sense to him. Comes naturally. Create rapport, look and sound like you're interested, find the follow up, the right moment to challenge something, the right moment to question, or agree.
The right moment to be quiet, too. Silence is there to be filled. It doesn't often work on Bruce Wayne, who can live in that silence longer than most.
There's a small and affectionate smile, fleeting, for parental nicknames. His other hand, cool but not cold now, finds a place to be above Bruce's wrist, holding him in some small way. He knows about nightmares, and dead parents, and all the little details that lodge splinters of glass in tender spots. That reflection of empathy gives way to silent prompt, a prickle of curiousity for dreams that are about a son and a mother, but aren't. Go on.
no subject
Tonight, Superman didn't make an appearance. A rarity. Often his dreams involve dying at the Kryptonian's hands, but different each time; every possible outcome, every plan he tries, ending the same way. Trying to Solve For X when he already knows what the answer is. The variation creates doubts in his head, but lately, he's beginning to wonder if it's not just trial and error of a timeline desperately trying to assert itself onto reality. They were trying to free the Amazons - enslaved, in chains, being used, being transformed - a woman called Granny using unimaginable horrors to twist them into her Furies.
He had been trying to convince Hippolyta to come with them. She blamed him for Diana's death. Like Clark blamed him for Lois' death. Like so many, and the only person who didn't, it felt like—
It's always me, it's me every time, if I just shoot myself in the head it'll push everything off the spiral we're on, and Harleen grabbing his face and whispering so harshly That's not it, that's not it, stop it.
Sometimes he wakes up and he was living another life for a minute. Sometimes he wakes up and it's all there, every atom changed down to his bones. Warped like Earth under the unity of the motherboxes. Things shift, and he retains some and more vanishes into the waking world, like smoke. Occasionally he manages to take notes, sketch faces. He's shown a drawing of Diana's mother to Victor, but not to Diana. Bruce looks at their hands.
What have we done? (What will we do?)
"I see you, under Darkseid's control."
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"Oh."
And he goes quiet, thinking, letting that simple statement alone sink in. Remembering the looming shadow of a galactic titan, eyes burning, the oddly primal sense of feeling a little like a guard dog standing fixed at the gate and bristling its hackles at some unknown threat in the darkness. That maybe a warning show of fangs would be enough, for right now.
The idea of being anything else twists something in his heart. Of Bruce carrying that—
"Why?"
Very open ended. Too open ended. Bad technique. He keeps a hold of Bruce, prepared to firm up if the older man pulls away.
no subject
"We haven't sat down to talk about it."
Bruce snaps his mouth shut and closes his eyes; it's a near thing the way he grinds his teeth together isn't audible. Fuuuuck. He takes a steadying breath and then, another crack at it, "He," because that isn't Clark, it isn't. He opens his eyes, bleak apology there, "kills me whenever he finds me."
(Time after time. Chained, in strangely intimate ways. In battle, carelessly. After torture. Snapping his head off in front of his companions, heat visioning him into a charred skeleton. In one spectacular terror he struggled to wake from, an entire day of watching parademons mangle two dozen people before he-isn't-Clark reached into his chest and nearly gently crushed his heart.)
Quieter: "The implication is that an error I made resulted in Lois' death. And that your grief, and anger at me, made you vulnerable. I can't see. What happened."
What I did.
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"We're not gonna let it," he says, quietly. Whatever it is.
It's not that simple. They would not be standing here, like this, after that, if all that was necessary was a hopeful attitude, but it's not nothing. He (gently) squeezes Bruce's arm, as if that alone could articulate and communicate something better than words might.
On account of he doesn't know how to say that he's not murderously angry at Bruce over the prospect of his wife dying from some tactical mistake. That, altogether, feels too large and unwieldy a thing to have a complex feeling about just yet. Still listening, in spite of that slip.
"'Whenever'?" he prompts, once he draws focus back up to Bruce's eyes.
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He drops his hand, scrubs it over his own face.
"It keeps changing," he explains. If one can explain something like this, which he knows sounds completely crazy. "Like every time I block one avenue it finds another. And I don't know— if I'm not just—"
He stalls. If I'm not just losing it. An unpleasant spin on that phone call once everyone had been settled back at home after defeating Steppenwolf. Bruce holding a mug of coffee and offering Clark an exhausted, lopsided smile, showing him grainy security footage of a being calling himself a 'Martian Manhunter'. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to be doing this and grateful you came, but I'm still not sure I'm not having a breakdown. Ha, ha. Funny joke.
A rough exhale. "I can show you something downstairs." And also like, bandage his dumb hand. Come on. Bruce snags his robe off a chair where he'd chucked it earlier as they go.
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(Lois, unrecognisable and destroyed, collapsed to black bones and papery ash. And Clark, who knows grief, as susceptible to its influence as if he didn't.)
He follows. He insists on collecting the kit and on helping, I got it, what with Bruce being down a hand. Everything he knows about administering medical care is X-ray related intuition and being around Bruce long enough by now to become familiar, and so if he is trying to make himself feel better about the situation at all, it at least isn't to Bruce's physical detriment.
"What did you want to show me?", mid-action.
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"Mm."
Universal Hold on a second. Reasons for made obvious when they're through, because Bruce has to move to the other side of his primary computer station. A few utilitarian shelves packed with miscellaneous drives, files of hand-written notes, a few books. A ream of printer paper and a cup that doesn't match the ones upstairs. From it, he removes a leather-bound journal; something a normal person would find too expensive to have just to kick around with, but that Bruce probably didn't think twice about chucking into a shopping cart.
Sketches and notes, inside. Bruce is not an artist in any spiritual sense, but he can draw shockingly accurately from memory. There's not enough soul in it to impress a curator, and yet it's lifelike enough to certainly annoy the shit out of any actual artists. Machinelike. A skill honed to help him with investigative work and nothing more. It starts with a sketch of a lanky man in strange armor, and then his face, scruffy, wide-eyed, partitioned by a strange helmet, but still obviously Barry. Notes next to it show Bruce was hypothesizing what the armor could be for, specifically. Early days, innocent reflection. Doodles of creatures that look like parademons. Absent remarks about meditation. A capital Greek omega symbol, a skyline.
Superman. Lines of his face cruel and furious. A note. Is that what he looks like? Satellite. CCTV. Sure I've seen it. Before any news camera had caught him close up. Barry, again. Multiple women in armor. A trident. A detailed layout of an alien ship never seen before on Earth. More recently, a page crammed with writing describing From Vic.
As the pages go on, the more distressed the sketches become. Pages of notes comparing dates of dreams to dates of appearances. No more drawings of Superman; in some bare-bones landscapes, there are obvious absences, where he might be. Bruce censoring his presence, too guilty about his subconscious sticking on that train even though he himself has moved on.
Bruce hands it to him.
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Now, his attention turns to pages, pausing over the first drawing before he begins leafing through. The cast of characters, expanding, diminishing. His presence, and his absence. The blasted landscape, worse than he'd previously imagined the world looking like under Darkseid's influence. Parademons like locusts, stripping down cities. The dates, the notes. Once he stops seeig and starts reading, he can kind of imagine it more like a branching tree, but with pieces missing.
He spends the time, absorbing it all, expression serious. Like he wants to share this, wants to stand where Bruce is standing, where Vic is standing. It has occurred to him he could feel a way about Bruce keeping this from him, but what's the point, when he can understand why?
He starts from the beginning with better context, but doesn't get all the way back to the end again before commenting.
"A fixed point," Clark says. "Darkseid, on earth." Lois, dead. Clark, taken. "And then variations. Even if they look similar, they're not set in stone."
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It sounds hollow even to Bruce; his expression as he looks at Clark is very
:/
Self-aware that by now the coincidences have gone from the realm of probable doubt to avalanche. The obvious citations are his own paranoia and the shifting nature of the 'timeline', which have allowed him to halfway ignore it, or at least convince himself that the chances of it meaning anything besides subconscious fear were low enough to be negligible.
Also—
"I'm human. I don't have prophetic powers."
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Sure, coincidence, let's try that on for size. Vic could have seen all kinds of things. Bruce could be operating beneath some subconscious aftereffect if his steel trap of a brain had ever seen Barry Allen before and noticed something different about him, if the substance of that dream had only materialised after the fact which leads to the conclusion that Bruce is unstable. An unreliable narrator.
Clark offers an alternative. "Maybe it's sabotage," he says, book open and neglected in his hand. "External psychic influence, a campaign. You brought us altogether, maybe something out there thinks they could drive us all apart with enough—of this."
He closes the book. "I think you'd know," quietly.
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And now it's crept up on him, and he's still panicking in his sleep, and he grazed Clark in a frantic bid to escape himself, and Vic's seeing it, and.
What the fuck.
"You wouldn't do any of that." His voice is a harsh whisper. Utter conviction. "It isn't you, I'm not afraid of you. So why am I still seeing it."
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The book is set aside, focus forwards, now. He believes Bruce, that he's not afraid of him, and the summoning of the fact that it has to be said prickles cold over his heart, but it's part of the deal. Whatever their deal is.
"I'm sorry you are," Clark adds. You don't deserve it. Like Bruce Wayne needs encouragement to place the world on his shoulders. "And if I could take it away, I would. But if there is anyone on this whole world who could do something good with it, whatever it might be, whatever it means, it's you."
Faith is a two-way street. One of those simple concepts that a scared and isolated little boy in Kansas had a hard time with, the adult version not much better, not until lately.
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(In front of half of Metropolis, anyway. Bruce had accepted, the second Clark turned to him, that he had a right to end his life if he felt it was justified. The world needs Superman, not Batman.)
Bruce closes his eyes.
"How do you do that."
Clark is so much better at this faith thing.
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"You," he says, "brought me back. After these dreams started."
And maybe they'd been dismissed as nightmares only at the time, but he doesn't think so. Is that what he looks like?, written beside his portrait. Bruce believed, either way, that regardless of the risk, Superman was better to have than have not. That whatever he'd seen in him, in those last moments of hardly knowing each other, and whatever came after, had been enough.
Believing right back feels natural. Necessary. He thinks about saying that, and then says instead, "You know I love you, right?"
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Maybe he could have even gotten some of that out, stilted and strange as it would have been.
For a while, Bruce just looks at him.
Pulse doing another thing. Sounds different than a nightmare.
"I suppose I do know that."
Holy shit?
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Vitals point to that it hadn't sunk in, but Clark's not about to make him out to be a liar. He's going to smile at him (dimmer, the occasion puts kind of a pall over the place, but no less warm), and then duck his head and bring Bruce's hand closer to his mouth so he can lay a kiss against his knuckles. And linger there, a short sigh felt against his skin, a flutter of eyelashes.
It should be crippling, this kind of pressure. Maybe later, if signs indicate that Bruce is receiving actionable intel on something inevitable, Clark will be appropriately scared shitless. Maybe. It takes a lot. (This is a lot.) But the way Bruce says that, of what he is, doesn't sound like expectation, but like fact.
But it's not just what Clark does or does not become. It's the thing that Bruce is hurtling to, supposedly, something terrible. Lois' death, unacceptable, and Bruce deserves better than being locked into some awful mistake, whether it's fear of his own making or something real.
"We'll figure it out," Clark says.
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But why else would Clark put up with him.
His heart aches when his hand is kissed, held so close. After a moment, he steps in, against the rolling chair and the vee of Clark's knees, shifting that hand up to trail fingers in his hair, cradle his head.
Lois dead is unthinkable. So much that Bruce struggles to focus on it, which is itself perhaps worrying; Why can't I see it? But if the answer is that his error is so grave that the way to prevent it is to die before timelines converge, well. Maybe he'll have to find the spine after all. Accept that his refusal to die is ego, as well as skill. Clark wouldn't be so weak in the wake of his death, would he?
(Oh, a new thought. Fuck.)
"I should have told you sooner."
About his dreams. About Vic, about telling Diana. (About being in love with him.) Bruce takes a deep breath and lets it out. Well, he could say. That's what my nightmare was about. Back to bed?
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and then the thread ended. hereafter are dvd extras.
beep boop
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