It's a good thing he doesn't ask. All Clark's got is: we're drinking beer.
Silence is met with a good natured version of the same, eyes sliding to Bruce's hand, and Clark peels the cap back of his own beer with the edge of his thumb like its wax instead of beaten metal. It strikes the concrete beneath him, clear as a coin, and he drinks. (Whatever exclusive brand beer he bought for the occasion would likely go nuts for the sheer star power imbibing their product in sync.)
Bruce just looks at him, and Clark looks back, brow crinkled. Not smiling, except he is, sort of, in that his face kind of just has a kind arrangement of bones when there's no reason to frown.
"Knocked the teeth out of one of them," he says, presently, which is less weird than to talk about how he specifically heard bone shatter, muffled in sliced up mouth. "Think that part'll make it into tomorrow's daily?"
He's not sure he's read a lot about Bruce Wayne's fisticuffs capacity.
"Not with Superman there," is dry. Even without such a convenient excuse, no one's going to admit to getting socked in the face by some rich fuck, but it'll be so easy to just say it was the godlike alien who did it. Brag about it, even. Superman punched me and I survived! And Bruce doesn't mind the cover, honestly. Being known to do extreme sports to explain away injuries means it wouldn't be that shocking, but still, it doesn't hurt.
"Which is a little insulting, considering if you weren't who you are, you'd never make it out of a schoolyard dust-up with that awful haymaker."
Why say he doesn't mind it, though, when he can say this instead. (Slightly teasing?) Bruce finds his way to the edge of the roof, looking out at the city view that seems pastoral, compared to Gotham.
Of the snide remarks levelled at him over the years, implying he's bad at punching does not usually come up. Being unwilling to punch, sure, but not while he's in his current colours. His response, automatic, comes with an incredulous tug to his brow, chin tipping in to level that look that short distance across the rooftop.
Clark heard him the first time, of course. If he didn't have super powers. But-- "It can't be that bad."
"Mm." Sandpaper bat version of Marge Simpson's skeptical noise. With the hand not holding his beer, Bruce slowly mimes throwing a punch - a familiar one, perhaps, it's Clark's default positioning.
"Sometimes you slip into crosses and bolos, but it's clearly accidental." Again, the mime, and Bruce holds the pose in the position where fist would be making contact with face. "You've got all the strength and momentum from your body leaning into it. But you're wide open after," he makes a small gesture, indicating the posture of the rest of himself, "and you risk blowing out your elbow, or if the impact is too much for your forearm to absorb, cracking the bones inside. The radius and ulna," here he points with the end of his bottle, "cross slightly nearing the elbow. The whole back end of your forearm can explode internally.
"Obviously," and this is dry, now, "I'm speaking in a general, human 'you'."
Not you personally. (Maybe, that's one of the parts that Clark might have detected some residual soreness in, after Zod - but probably only for a second or two, as the radiation from Earth's yellow sun soaked into his cells. Maybe it's one of the parts that ached when Bruce shot him full of Kryptonite.)
Potentially, Superman's superfeelings could be hurt at the ongoing use of a you that flies by him, but optimistically, he doesn't feel as though that's the aim in this endeavour. He drinks his beer and watches, interested in spite of himself, and does think back to the feeling of trying to fight while his body rebelled against him, while the cold night sky offered him nothing.
"Obviously," he agrees, gracious, not without his brand of low-key humour.
Clink. He sets the bottle down on the rooftop's edge, stepping away from it. He looks down at his own hands, closing them into fists, then tipping a look back up at Bruce. "So how's it supposed to go?"
The first you is definitely personal. Second and third, probably. But Bruce'll let it go, fade into the rest of the general yous. Perhaps this is communicated in his eyebrows.
Hhmm. Bruce does not set his bottle down, instead opts to take a long pull from it before: "Show me how you throw a punch, first. Slow enough for my aging human eyeballs, please."
Once this is done, he gets Clark to pause at the end point, and reaches out with one hand to poke at his arm, describing bones and tendons. Work-worn fingers move from wrist to elbow over Kryptonian battlesuit fiber, and Bruce tells him to go back to first position, and then picks that apart, too.
"Shoulders like that. Don't fling your arm back when you start off to get momentum, shift like - there." Poking shoulders, poking hips. Bruce is not so much reluctant to touch him as he is simply in the habit of not excessively touching people who don't invite him to. "Momentum comes from the way your whole body turns, and it doesn't have to turn more than just a little, because when you hold everything aligned like that, there's no weak joint to wobble."
Clark takes the lesson in stride, which he would want to, having invited it. Sure, it amuses him to do so, and he can't be certain Bruce is likewise entertained, but he listens. Does as instructed. Pays attention to what his body is doing in the slow motion, freeze frame version of what he does naturally.
Taking a step back, he swings through at a normal human speed-- well, mostly. Perhaps it's a touch faster than it ought to be, but his form is better. His fist moves through the air like a mallet, wind rush and all.
"I never practiced," he says. It's not bragging, about how he never has to, about how little effort it is to be Superman. It's not really self-pitying, either, about his own necessary acts of restraint throughout his average life, but probably closer to this second thing than the first.
A year ago, Bruce would have assumed it to be bragging; today he knows better. It's not lost on him, the sheer amount of effort it must take for Clark to keep from toppling and breaking everything around him. Bruce has paid attention to and moderated his own strength before, shaking hands or holding a woman or trying not to break a criminal too badly, but they're all split-atom sized issues in comparison.
"You could." Deceptively neutral. Bruce drains what's left in the bottle. If Clark knows what he's doing, really knows what he's doing, then fights like ones with Zod can be over fast, and be more contained during. Because not every conflict is going to be held in abandoned and condemned buildings where over-invested old men are trying to make unhinged points.
(Bruce has thought if it a number of times, how if he really wanted to kill Superman, he could have just killed Superman. If he'd brought the spear with him, then the first time the object of his obsession fell to his knees choking on a cloud of sickly green, it'd have been over. But then Batman would have lived, and that wasn't a part of his plan.)
One more time, during the extended pause of Bruce's finishing his drink. Committing the motion to memory. Wouldn't be hard to apply the principles of it. Clark has a fair fathoming of anatomy, able to peel back its layers before his eyes, evaluate internal injury and pressures at a glance. Probably, with a little effort, he could make improvements.
Of course, that's not who he is. It's who Batman is. Had he grown up human, into a general you, he might still never have made it out of a schoolyard dust-up. Maybe he'd be something weaker, gentler, strong only in the ways a blue collar farmboy is, one who never leaves Kansas, let alone the atmosphere. Just like dad. (He would like to imagine that he gets a natural inclination towards writing. Goes to school. Moves to Metropolis all on his own. Improbably dates the Pulitzer prize winner of The Daily Planet. You know.)
In no scenario is Clark Kent a martial artist.
But still--
"I could," he agrees. "If you wanted to show me a thing or two more, sometime."
Clark collects back his own beer, checking what he's got left in it, innocuous. They are, after all, on a team now.
They are, after all, on a team now. (And Bruce had been the one to bring this up, can't shrug it off now and make it obvious that spending time doing something so physical with the Kryptonian is probably going to do his head in.)
Silence settles. That feeling of 'what the fuck are we doing' creeps up Bruce's spine, and--
Wait a minute, he can totally shrug it off now.
"Diana," he says, seemingly out of nowhere. Bruce glances away for a moment, grasping for what he actually wants to say. This is terrible. He hasn't had a problem with blurting out words since - ever. Maybe when he was four.
"Diana would be a more practical option," jeez, there, words are working, good. "All things considered."
From the little uptick in pulse through to Diana's name thrown out between them (and Clark makes as though to turn around and see if she in fact materialised behind him, because we have fun here), it might also take supercognition to process what signals get collected through his supersenses. He's not exactly looking for them, though he can't play dumb to himself and say that his pushing back at Bruce to teach him something was wholly innocent of motive.
Not a specific motive. He, too, would like to know what the fuck they're doing.
His eyebrows raise at that suggestion, doubtful immediately of Diana of Themyscira being a practical option to teach anybody, let alone him -- metahuman status or not. "You think?" he asks, flatly doubtful, but accepting of the possibility that Bruce does know her better. She's just very.
His gaze cuts back to Clark at that flat tone. (You can be in France in ten seconds, Kal-El.)
"I do," Bruce says. "Because it'll be easier to learn if you focus on what you're doing, instead of on trying not kill your instructor by accident."
Awful convincing, coming from the only person to get into a proper knock-down drag-out with Superman and live. It's unthinkable, actually, that Bruce would be so reckless as to put Clark in a position to slip up and hurt him; he's too smart for that, a hundred times over, and if he doesn't care about his own safety he definitely cares about the other man's psychological well-being. But he's banking on Clark's opinion of him being too low to guess that.
His heartbeat has nearly slowed back into its usual, sedate evenness, the fluster of a moment ago evaporated (or rigidly controlled). It's embarrassing enough as it is - he doesn't need Clark to know.
"And you should get to know her a bit, anyway."
From the edge of the building, Bruce tosses his empty beer bottle towards an abused-looking dumpster wedged against brick. Thunk, clink. Three points.
But Clark doesn't say that, because Bruce isn't wrong. His face makes a :/ expression, contemplating. He can't help but feel stubborn about it, because there's appeal in learning how to fight within human parameter, one foot in the cornfields. There's appeal in learning how Bruce does it, in specific, and there's appeal in repairing something that might need it in a way that a slapfight of misunderstanding between demigods does not.
But they are have not had enough beer for Clark to find a way to articulate any of that. He finishes his beer, and -- carefully -- tosses the empty vessel as Bruce did. Thunk, clink, light enough that nothing obliterates into dust. Maybe he's making a point.
But he says, "Okay. But, you know, if I come back with a sword and shield, you only have yourself to blame."
"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.
It seems like the kind of activity that invites solitude. Requires it. Having touched down, gently, on the rooftop of the manor, Clark listens to the steady heartbeat that, among a few, have become familiar to his ear, peering out into the darkness where he can detect Bruce walking. Drifting. Not where he thought he'd be.
Considers leaving him alone, but it's not his natural instinct, personally. Leaving things alone.
A flutter of cold wind. In the bleak Gotham evening, colours of blue and red are rendered into shades of deep grey. He lands at a respectable distance, shock absorbed into bent knees, several feet behind. Probably, if there were an emergency, he would say so, instead of, upon standing up,
Alien feet meet terra firma and Bruce does not turn around, his shoulders do not tense; that he can see well enough in the dark to have noticed Superman lurking along the parapets of his crumbling childhood home should not be surprising. He's in too contemplative a mood to have been flustered by the appearance - pulse ticking up only now, and only a little. His fingers are curling in the ends of high yellow stalks of weeds.
"First day of construction's tomorrow," he says at length, low voice eerie in the cold stillness.
He and Diana and Alfred had spent a long time, planning and designing and sifting through contractors. He had spent even more, mapping everything out. Some imaginary architect's name is on the blueprints. Bruce Wayne can't be good at much of anything, on the record.
"It'll never look like this again."
No longer a skeleton, no longer a mausoleum for a past he won't speak of that must be composed of more than just his absent parents. Something else has been keeping Wayne Manor dead. It should be a good thing, to breathe life into it. But he seems sad.
He doesn't have a natural instinct towards platitude. It's probably frustrated more than one journalist or superfan on the rare occasions that Superman has touched down long enough to be spoken to, but there it is. Now, none come to mind either, looking past Bruce in an effort to see this place through his eyes.
Black trees, white fog, grey buildings. Different to the palettes of yellow and blue that define his own childhood memories.
Bruce looks back at him, and Clark returns attention on a slight delay, and then gives a slightly surprised smile, as if not expecting the callback. He wanders a step or two closer. "No," he agrees. "I don't have what it takes to be an Amazon, apparently. She, uh." Mm. Some kinda memory plays out behind his eyes and crinkled brow. "Well, we sparred."
It's fine. Bruce has few terminal allergies, fit as he is, but platitudes are on the list. He doesn't often expect a response when he says things like that.
"Mm." One eyebrow up. Mm sounds an awful lot like That isn't strictly what you were supposed to be doing, but maybe also like, It must have been fine since I didn't catch any news stories about the Louvre being accidentally kicked in.
"She's sweet."
Is she.
Amendment, as Bruce turns back to look at the derelict mansion again: "Or she was, once."
He wonders if it disturbs Diana to be so easily understood by a mortal man, and one so spiritually acidic at that. He doesn't wonder if she regrets having felt safe enough with him to share the tale of her lost love - he knows that. He should have told her about Selina, probably, or even Talia. But he didn't. He told her he understood her and then saved that knowledge in reserve as something to hurt her with later.
Clark should leave. Get out of this quicksand before he's too deep.
"But now it's bugging you that you might not be throwing a real punch, huh."
Though they've yet to pick a pace, Clark has idled into a position that can be considered sidelong. This, after a tip of his head in return to silent communication about what they were meant to have been doing: you're telling me.
Donning the cape is sort of instant gravitas, his suit a strange armour that nevertheless demands a certain physical decorum. Here, however, he is more Clark Kent than the statue-like alien from the stars, an absent fidget where he works his knuckles a little with his other hand, as if remembering-- something. They are, after all, talking about punching, and not other things.
As for Diana being sweet, his smile twists. Rue. "She told me to come back," he allows, but wait for it, "after you quit being stubborn about my training."
Her words, not mine, is communicated with eyebrows.
A line appears between his brows. Just so. (There is a whole language in the movement of a person's eyebrows, especially his, and strangely, Clark's too. Of course it has to be an alien who he ends up overlapping with.)
He'll get you for that, Diana, and your little dog too.
"That's interesting," is dignified.
No objections to being called stubborn. He'd probably turn to a pillar of salt, struck down by a god who doesn't exist, the lie would be so outlandish. Even from someone as good at lying as Bruce Wayne. Another little while of staring out at the manor.
"Do you want to schedule a date, or are you free right now?" is deadpan.
At least Clark did not leave France having learned nothing. Raw strength is not news to him, and neither is cosmic ability. That Diana had trained herself into her own relative powers since girlhood had become all too painfully evident, a display of the value of practice combined with metahuman ability. At least he has something to bond with Barry about, besides the occasional race for a coastline.
Clark finds himself looking at what Bruce is looking at, curiousity strong enough, abrupt enough, that he nearly just says: now's fine.
Instead, "I didn't mean to interrupt," which is true, even if he made the active decision to once he'd gotten halfway there. The matter isn't tabled, but he wants to know, "Did you come here a lot, before?"
It's an ambiguous timeframe to ask about. Before tonight. After he left it behind for good. What he knows about Bruce is only a matter of public record, except for the things deliberately kept off record.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that Gotham City is in New Jersey, with how infrequently the dialect impresses itself on Bruce's speech. And then sometimes there's that, easy-sounding words with kicky pops of consonants on the end. Anyway. No. Before is many-layered, and 'a lot' fits none of them.
(Lurking in the darkness is an opinion about pizza. Fear it.)
Bruce turns around, away from the dead thing in the distance.
"Well I'm not instructing you on anything while you're wearing that," sounds a little more human. One step, two, heading back towards where the lake house is, frost-crisp plant matter crunching under booted feet. "You want to zip back to your secret crystal palace and change or borrow something of mine?"
It's only on a slight delay before Clark steps alongside, matching pace, accepting momentum. His next breath is semi-laughter, judging from the way it strikes as steam in the cold air. He's considered getting annoyed about smart assery with regard to his status as messianic alien in tights, if not for the fact he has the luxury, now, of working farmland in Kansas secured beneath his mother's name.
The counter words, ivory tower spring to mind, but the dark grey silhouette of the manor looming behind them has Clark laying down that specific kind of sass with an inwards sigh.
"Crystal palace's exclusively for capes," he says, instead, retreating into easy self-deprecation. "I can borrow something, if you don't mind. Unless it's got ears."
Maybe, if Superman had a nice animal mascot headband as part of his outfit, Bruce would not have wanted to murder him so badly. Did you ever think of that, Clark. Did you.
The hike back to the lake house is right at the midway point of 'long' and 'not too long'; Clark caught him before he could make it all the way to the crumbling mansion or wander past it. Bruce doesn't ask anything further about his jaunt with Diana, nor does he explain why he's bothering to do this Right Now. (He's not getting any younger. No time like the present. Batman doesn't believe in rest. Pick.)
Alfred is in the kitchen when they arrive, wearing pajamas and a house robe and looking appropriately shocked. His alarmed expression eases when whatever he reads on his ward's face tells him there's nothing to be concerned about, but shifts to something else-- something that makes Bruce roll his eyes when he believes Clark isn't looking at him.
"Might I get you something to drink, Mr Kent?" while Bruce slinks off like a shadow to his bedroom.
That Clark has superanticipated another warm moving body ahead of him spares him momentary awkwardness. Well. Mostly. He still manages a second of it when he stops short upon realising that following Bruce directly into his bedroom would classify as weird, and an extra half-second recovering from the alien decorum of a man his senior being the deferential one in the social transaction.
Even if he suspects Alfred more playing at butler than being one. Manners kick in.
"No sir," he says, nonetheless. "But thanks, anyway. Sorry about the hour."
But, you know. Bats are nocturnal, says his crooked, pressed smile.
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Silence is met with a good natured version of the same, eyes sliding to Bruce's hand, and Clark peels the cap back of his own beer with the edge of his thumb like its wax instead of beaten metal. It strikes the concrete beneath him, clear as a coin, and he drinks. (Whatever exclusive brand beer he bought for the occasion would likely go nuts for the sheer star power imbibing their product in sync.)
Bruce just looks at him, and Clark looks back, brow crinkled. Not smiling, except he is, sort of, in that his face kind of just has a kind arrangement of bones when there's no reason to frown.
"Knocked the teeth out of one of them," he says, presently, which is less weird than to talk about how he specifically heard bone shatter, muffled in sliced up mouth. "Think that part'll make it into tomorrow's daily?"
He's not sure he's read a lot about Bruce Wayne's fisticuffs capacity.
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"Which is a little insulting, considering if you weren't who you are, you'd never make it out of a schoolyard dust-up with that awful haymaker."
Why say he doesn't mind it, though, when he can say this instead. (Slightly teasing?) Bruce finds his way to the edge of the roof, looking out at the city view that seems pastoral, compared to Gotham.
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Of the snide remarks levelled at him over the years, implying he's bad at punching does not usually come up. Being unwilling to punch, sure, but not while he's in his current colours. His response, automatic, comes with an incredulous tug to his brow, chin tipping in to level that look that short distance across the rooftop.
Clark heard him the first time, of course. If he didn't have super powers. But-- "It can't be that bad."
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"Sometimes you slip into crosses and bolos, but it's clearly accidental." Again, the mime, and Bruce holds the pose in the position where fist would be making contact with face. "You've got all the strength and momentum from your body leaning into it. But you're wide open after," he makes a small gesture, indicating the posture of the rest of himself, "and you risk blowing out your elbow, or if the impact is too much for your forearm to absorb, cracking the bones inside. The radius and ulna," here he points with the end of his bottle, "cross slightly nearing the elbow. The whole back end of your forearm can explode internally.
"Obviously," and this is dry, now, "I'm speaking in a general, human 'you'."
Not you personally. (Maybe, that's one of the parts that Clark might have detected some residual soreness in, after Zod - but probably only for a second or two, as the radiation from Earth's yellow sun soaked into his cells. Maybe it's one of the parts that ached when Bruce shot him full of Kryptonite.)
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"Obviously," he agrees, gracious, not without his brand of low-key humour.
Clink. He sets the bottle down on the rooftop's edge, stepping away from it. He looks down at his own hands, closing them into fists, then tipping a look back up at Bruce. "So how's it supposed to go?"
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Hhmm. Bruce does not set his bottle down, instead opts to take a long pull from it before: "Show me how you throw a punch, first. Slow enough for my aging human eyeballs, please."
Once this is done, he gets Clark to pause at the end point, and reaches out with one hand to poke at his arm, describing bones and tendons. Work-worn fingers move from wrist to elbow over Kryptonian battlesuit fiber, and Bruce tells him to go back to first position, and then picks that apart, too.
"Shoulders like that. Don't fling your arm back when you start off to get momentum, shift like - there." Poking shoulders, poking hips. Bruce is not so much reluctant to touch him as he is simply in the habit of not excessively touching people who don't invite him to. "Momentum comes from the way your whole body turns, and it doesn't have to turn more than just a little, because when you hold everything aligned like that, there's no weak joint to wobble."
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Taking a step back, he swings through at a normal human speed-- well, mostly. Perhaps it's a touch faster than it ought to be, but his form is better. His fist moves through the air like a mallet, wind rush and all.
"I never practiced," he says. It's not bragging, about how he never has to, about how little effort it is to be Superman. It's not really self-pitying, either, about his own necessary acts of restraint throughout his average life, but probably closer to this second thing than the first.
Mostly, it just is.
"Guess I could get into the habit."
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"You could." Deceptively neutral. Bruce drains what's left in the bottle. If Clark knows what he's doing, really knows what he's doing, then fights like ones with Zod can be over fast, and be more contained during. Because not every conflict is going to be held in abandoned and condemned buildings where over-invested old men are trying to make unhinged points.
(Bruce has thought if it a number of times, how if he really wanted to kill Superman, he could have just killed Superman. If he'd brought the spear with him, then the first time the object of his obsession fell to his knees choking on a cloud of sickly green, it'd have been over. But then Batman would have lived, and that wasn't a part of his plan.)
"If you wanted."
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Of course, that's not who he is. It's who Batman is. Had he grown up human, into a general you, he might still never have made it out of a schoolyard dust-up. Maybe he'd be something weaker, gentler, strong only in the ways a blue collar farmboy is, one who never leaves Kansas, let alone the atmosphere. Just like dad. (He would like to imagine that he gets a natural inclination towards writing. Goes to school. Moves to Metropolis all on his own. Improbably dates the Pulitzer prize winner of The Daily Planet. You know.)
In no scenario is Clark Kent a martial artist.
But still--
"I could," he agrees. "If you wanted to show me a thing or two more, sometime."
Clark collects back his own beer, checking what he's got left in it, innocuous. They are, after all, on a team now.
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They are, after all, on a team now. (And Bruce had been the one to bring this up, can't shrug it off now and make it obvious that spending time doing something so physical with the Kryptonian is probably going to do his head in.)
Silence settles. That feeling of 'what the fuck are we doing' creeps up Bruce's spine, and--
Wait a minute, he can totally shrug it off now.
"Diana," he says, seemingly out of nowhere. Bruce glances away for a moment, grasping for what he actually wants to say. This is terrible. He hasn't had a problem with blurting out words since - ever. Maybe when he was four.
"Diana would be a more practical option," jeez, there, words are working, good. "All things considered."
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From the little uptick in pulse through to Diana's name thrown out between them (and Clark makes as though to turn around and see if she in fact materialised behind him, because we have fun here), it might also take supercognition to process what signals get collected through his supersenses. He's not exactly looking for them, though he can't play dumb to himself and say that his pushing back at Bruce to teach him something was wholly innocent of motive.
Not a specific motive. He, too, would like to know what the fuck they're doing.
His eyebrows raise at that suggestion, doubtful immediately of Diana of Themyscira being a practical option to teach anybody, let alone him -- metahuman status or not. "You think?" he asks, flatly doubtful, but accepting of the possibility that Bruce does know her better. She's just very.
In France.
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"I do," Bruce says. "Because it'll be easier to learn if you focus on what you're doing, instead of on trying not kill your instructor by accident."
Awful convincing, coming from the only person to get into a proper knock-down drag-out with Superman and live. It's unthinkable, actually, that Bruce would be so reckless as to put Clark in a position to slip up and hurt him; he's too smart for that, a hundred times over, and if he doesn't care about his own safety he definitely cares about the other man's psychological well-being. But he's banking on Clark's opinion of him being too low to guess that.
His heartbeat has nearly slowed back into its usual, sedate evenness, the fluster of a moment ago evaporated (or rigidly controlled). It's embarrassing enough as it is - he doesn't need Clark to know.
"And you should get to know her a bit, anyway."
From the edge of the building, Bruce tosses his empty beer bottle towards an abused-looking dumpster wedged against brick. Thunk, clink. Three points.
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But Clark doesn't say that, because Bruce isn't wrong. His face makes a :/ expression, contemplating. He can't help but feel stubborn about it, because there's appeal in learning how to fight within human parameter, one foot in the cornfields. There's appeal in learning how Bruce does it, in specific, and there's appeal in repairing something that might need it in a way that a slapfight of misunderstanding between demigods does not.
But they are have not had enough beer for Clark to find a way to articulate any of that. He finishes his beer, and -- carefully -- tosses the empty vessel as Bruce did. Thunk, clink, light enough that nothing obliterates into dust. Maybe he's making a point.
But he says, "Okay. But, you know, if I come back with a sword and shield, you only have yourself to blame."
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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.
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Considers leaving him alone, but it's not his natural instinct, personally. Leaving things alone.
A flutter of cold wind. In the bleak Gotham evening, colours of blue and red are rendered into shades of deep grey. He lands at a respectable distance, shock absorbed into bent knees, several feet behind. Probably, if there were an emergency, he would say so, instead of, upon standing up,
"Hey."
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"First day of construction's tomorrow," he says at length, low voice eerie in the cold stillness.
He and Diana and Alfred had spent a long time, planning and designing and sifting through contractors. He had spent even more, mapping everything out. Some imaginary architect's name is on the blueprints. Bruce Wayne can't be good at much of anything, on the record.
"It'll never look like this again."
No longer a skeleton, no longer a mausoleum for a past he won't speak of that must be composed of more than just his absent parents. Something else has been keeping Wayne Manor dead. It should be a good thing, to breathe life into it. But he seems sad.
Bruce turns his head.
"No sword or miniskirt, I see."
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Black trees, white fog, grey buildings. Different to the palettes of yellow and blue that define his own childhood memories.
Bruce looks back at him, and Clark returns attention on a slight delay, and then gives a slightly surprised smile, as if not expecting the callback. He wanders a step or two closer. "No," he agrees. "I don't have what it takes to be an Amazon, apparently. She, uh." Mm. Some kinda memory plays out behind his eyes and crinkled brow. "Well, we sparred."
That's probably not the whole story.
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"Mm." One eyebrow up. Mm sounds an awful lot like That isn't strictly what you were supposed to be doing, but maybe also like, It must have been fine since I didn't catch any news stories about the Louvre being accidentally kicked in.
"She's sweet."
Is she.
Amendment, as Bruce turns back to look at the derelict mansion again: "Or she was, once."
He wonders if it disturbs Diana to be so easily understood by a mortal man, and one so spiritually acidic at that. He doesn't wonder if she regrets having felt safe enough with him to share the tale of her lost love - he knows that. He should have told her about Selina, probably, or even Talia. But he didn't. He told her he understood her and then saved that knowledge in reserve as something to hurt her with later.
Clark should leave. Get out of this quicksand before he's too deep.
"But now it's bugging you that you might not be throwing a real punch, huh."
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It is.
Though they've yet to pick a pace, Clark has idled into a position that can be considered sidelong. This, after a tip of his head in return to silent communication about what they were meant to have been doing: you're telling me.
Donning the cape is sort of instant gravitas, his suit a strange armour that nevertheless demands a certain physical decorum. Here, however, he is more Clark Kent than the statue-like alien from the stars, an absent fidget where he works his knuckles a little with his other hand, as if remembering-- something. They are, after all, talking about punching, and not other things.
As for Diana being sweet, his smile twists. Rue. "She told me to come back," he allows, but wait for it, "after you quit being stubborn about my training."
Her words, not mine, is communicated with eyebrows.
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He'll get you for that, Diana, and your little dog too.
"That's interesting," is dignified.
No objections to being called stubborn. He'd probably turn to a pillar of salt, struck down by a god who doesn't exist, the lie would be so outlandish. Even from someone as good at lying as Bruce Wayne. Another little while of staring out at the manor.
"Do you want to schedule a date, or are you free right now?" is deadpan.
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Clark finds himself looking at what Bruce is looking at, curiousity strong enough, abrupt enough, that he nearly just says: now's fine.
Instead, "I didn't mean to interrupt," which is true, even if he made the active decision to once he'd gotten halfway there. The matter isn't tabled, but he wants to know, "Did you come here a lot, before?"
It's an ambiguous timeframe to ask about. Before tonight. After he left it behind for good. What he knows about Bruce is only a matter of public record, except for the things deliberately kept off record.
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Sometimes it's easy to forget that Gotham City is in New Jersey, with how infrequently the dialect impresses itself on Bruce's speech. And then sometimes there's that, easy-sounding words with kicky pops of consonants on the end. Anyway. No. Before is many-layered, and 'a lot' fits none of them.
(Lurking in the darkness is an opinion about pizza. Fear it.)
Bruce turns around, away from the dead thing in the distance.
"Well I'm not instructing you on anything while you're wearing that," sounds a little more human. One step, two, heading back towards where the lake house is, frost-crisp plant matter crunching under booted feet. "You want to zip back to your secret crystal palace and change or borrow something of mine?"
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It's only on a slight delay before Clark steps alongside, matching pace, accepting momentum. His next breath is semi-laughter, judging from the way it strikes as steam in the cold air. He's considered getting annoyed about smart assery with regard to his status as messianic alien in tights, if not for the fact he has the luxury, now, of working farmland in Kansas secured beneath his mother's name.
The counter words, ivory tower spring to mind, but the dark grey silhouette of the manor looming behind them has Clark laying down that specific kind of sass with an inwards sigh.
"Crystal palace's exclusively for capes," he says, instead, retreating into easy self-deprecation. "I can borrow something, if you don't mind. Unless it's got ears."
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Maybe, if Superman had a nice animal mascot headband as part of his outfit, Bruce would not have wanted to murder him so badly. Did you ever think of that, Clark. Did you.
The hike back to the lake house is right at the midway point of 'long' and 'not too long'; Clark caught him before he could make it all the way to the crumbling mansion or wander past it. Bruce doesn't ask anything further about his jaunt with Diana, nor does he explain why he's bothering to do this Right Now. (He's not getting any younger. No time like the present. Batman doesn't believe in rest. Pick.)
Alfred is in the kitchen when they arrive, wearing pajamas and a house robe and looking appropriately shocked. His alarmed expression eases when whatever he reads on his ward's face tells him there's nothing to be concerned about, but shifts to something else-- something that makes Bruce roll his eyes when he believes Clark isn't looking at him.
"Might I get you something to drink, Mr Kent?" while Bruce slinks off like a shadow to his bedroom.
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Even if he suspects Alfred more playing at butler than being one. Manners kick in.
"No sir," he says, nonetheless. "But thanks, anyway. Sorry about the hour."
But, you know. Bats are nocturnal, says his crooked, pressed smile.
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