nightlife | maybe in a million miles, on the highway through the skies

(Somewhere, Woodstock is marching back and forth across kitchen countertops, peering at himself in anything shiny, tik-tiking it with his beak.)

And Clark squeezes Bruce's hand, offering no answers. They can speculate forever, but that sounds a little like it'd only add to the tight spirals of frustration that seem to emerge when this topic is broached. But he does say, "That's not going to happen," about the fits of, dot dot dot. Whether it's Superman murder, something else.

"But I think that's a good question," a shift, along with a physical one, just a readjustment of his sit on the couch. "And you deserve answers about it. Is it possible—"

Hmm. He laces his fingers between Bruce's.

"Say it's not nonsense. Say there's a key to understanding these dreams on their own terms. A way to control them, to make them make sense or control when and where you let them in, or if there's any precedent for dreaming like that. Where would you start?"

He doesn't answer. For a while, he doesn't say anything at all; instead, he finally engages with Clark's hand entwined with his, squeezing back at those linked fingers, and shifting his weight on the sofa. Not looking away or leaning forward, but grounding himself in the moment - or more accurately, using Clark to ground himself, looking down at where his thumb presses against the joint of one finger, a still point in spinning.

A part of him wants to scream. You're such a good person, what the fuck are you doing.

Bruce takes a breath, and releases it in a slow sigh. Internally doing some, stupid battle, about the kinds of things that are safe to say. As if an admission will make him vulnerable, instead of his feeble mortality. As if Clark hasn't seen the worst parts of him already.

"Does it have to be real?" He will get to that question. Maybe. He has started, before, and it was bad. It will still be bad. But—

"If it isn't real, do you worry that a part of me is still afraid of you?"

Demons to exorcize.

It'd be easy to dismiss that, of course not, and Clark takes a breath like he might sigh it out, but he does neither thing. Faces the question instead, allowing the focus to pull to him for a moment.

"No," does feel important to say, regardless. "You wouldn't have bet the world on bringing me back if you were afraid of me. If any part of you was."

Clark keeps that hold on Bruce's hand. It feels odd, to say that out loud, because it feels like a given truth but also weighted and leaden. He knows the responsibility Bruce feels for him dying in the first place. Having his life in Bruce's hands, even a year and a half after the fact, is just the other side of that coin. But that's all to say: that he lives and breathes feels like a testament to trust. They hadn't known each other, not until it was all too late.

He drops his attention to their joined hands, letting his thoughts unwind down this path, letting the conversation divert and feel its way around. "When I came back," he says, "when I could think straight, anyway, I knew you'd done it for a reason. And once I worked that much out, all I wanted to do was learn what it was. And show up."

Even the part of him that wanted to lay down in a cornfield with Lois Lane for ten years was willing to wait a minute.

"That hasn't really gone away," rueful.

Clark is right: Bruce wouldn't have done what he did. He had to push through the doubts of others, not just from his newfound allies but from Alfred, his only confidant, and keep an iron grip on faith that it was the correct path even in the face of Superman's hostile, mindless return. If his trust wasn't perfectly complete, if he had even a spark of fear, he wouldn't have been able to make himself, much less bodily haul the rest of them along.

He thinks about that, and watches Clark, his expression grave and grateful. Taking it deadly seriously, as it is. Bruce squeezes his hand. He might lean in for a kiss, but just leveling him with this look, mood laid bare, feels even more intimate.

Thank you. You're right. I'm sorry. This has been more than anyone should be asked to shoulder.

Bruce feels less out to sea, appreciative of the light (and possibly imaginary) reproach over— of course this matters to Clark beyond it merely upsetting Bruce, or a nebulous 'maybe' of something unimaginable. He treats his own resurrection with such easygoing disregard sometimes that Bruce has, apparently, found himself fooled into going along with that.

So.

That question.

(Woodstock: pingpingping, on the countertop. Cheery.)

"If they're not nonsense," he begins, with careful deliberation, "and I am looking for a sense of control, where I start is with the man who killed Jason."

Clark would not say out loud that shouldering more than what most people typically do is a little bit the point of him. Maybe his eyebrows might do something that communicates this, a half-smile, but it'd be fleeting anyway. He is not quite as superpowered about every aspect of human existence, but he would like to be.

His expression had gentled from that serious-stern-thoughtful configuration, but now shifts back to that as Bruce circles back around to an answer. It's a surprising answer, even if he's not sure what an unsurprising answer would be.

"Okay," Clark says. "Why him?"

There are many more questions he could ask there, but they can wait for a minute, more interested in following Bruce's train of thought.

A conundrum for people like them; willing to sacrifice it, rarely willing to accept that anyone else might do the same. Perhaps shouldering too much is the point, or at least a point, of Clark. (Certainly being in a relationship with Bruce Wayne is shaded under that same umbrella.) It should be easier for you, Bruce thinks, even while he's made certain that nothing about his own life even carries the potential for ease.

Maybe the unsurprising answer would be 'nothing'. Continuing to deny.

Why him.

From a list of reasons ten miles long, he must choose strategically.

"He's starting to show up, more and more. Closer and closer. As though a simple hypothetical fear of Superman is no longer unnerving enough; this malleable future has begun to craft the worst betrayal I could commit, and see me forced to work with him to achieve an end that, it suggests, would topple Darkseid."

You know. Nightmare shit. Bruce shifts, though, and looks at Clark. The word is tangible in the air before he continues, "But, he's stealing something. Why would he be stealing something."

The people you love, dead. The person you share something extremely specific, intimate, addictive, turned into a monster. The person you hate the most, an ally. If Clark was not already convinced that these dreams meant something, it'd be easy to see how they could simply be nightmares and nothing more, strange subconscious expressions from an overactive mind.

But. If they're visions of the future first, then they're only nightmarish for what they portend.

Really, though.

"Is it possible he knows something about all this? Already." There was a window of time in which Darkseid's influence in the form of Steppenwolf and his parademons had touched down on earth. So far, they've been fortunate in that the narrowness of the mission seemed to keep it neat and locked down, but information has a way of spreading. Maybe an infection's already set in.

"If anyone in this world would," he says, his voice grating with exhausted disdain. He's mentioned Joker before, and of course the clown's shadow looms dark and large even over an already-shadowy place like Gotham. And closer to home. Joke's on you, Batman, scrawled on the body armor of his dead child, preserved in a place where Bruce has to look at it, every day.

But, he shrugs. It's not that, specifically. Quiet again, for a moment. That shrug was not casual, despite the effort he's putting into the appearance of being fine with this conversation. (Stupid. Clark knows he isn't, and he's safe with Clark.)

"I almost married the greatest living thief on Earth." His thumb passes over Clark's, an absent touch, as if some part of his brain is thinking about Mr and Mrs Lane-Kent. Bruce Wayne is the ultimate bachelor. Surely he's fine with all the times he nearly nailed down a committed relationship only to have it blow up in his face. "In the dream, I feel ... inescapably cornered. I'm furious, and exhausted, and the most resentful I've ever felt. I don't have any more limbs to gnaw off in the fucking trap. I'm drowning, and yet I still find it important to let Joker know his former lover defected to me. The only reason— the only reason I wouldn't ask Selina Kyle to help me is if she were dead. If this is real, I think he's going to kill her. I think he figures out who Batman is, and finds her. To make sure he's the only option."

"To steal something," Clark says, mostly to demonstrate he's followed along.

A little grim, but thoughtful. It's a winding kind of path but one more intricately rendered than he might have anticipated. His hands idle, returning absent touch with gentle little sweeps and fidgets, playing with the vital anchor they've forged by just holding hands on the couch, on a rainy Metropolan evening. Eventually, he thinks, they're going to have to work out the hows and whys of Lois Lane's death too. One thing at a time.

He says, still in the spirit of following along: "And so what happens if he never does any of that. If he's killed first." Which might be blunter than the general public might expect from wholesome heartland crayon colours, but Clark doesn't equivocate much, in practice.

His tone is quiet, cautious, but not wary. That Joker is still alive sounds like a decision that Bruce must have made, for himself or for Jason or maybe for the simple fact that their line of work can't always become about execution.

Either way, sometimes the easy fix isn't easy at all.

Bruce tips his head. To steal something, technically. But it would have been anything, he thinks; whatever Bruce needed, Joker would make himself necessary, purely to force him into it. Something vile wriggles in his stomach, cold and uncomfortable. An endless hellscape of violations, again and again, with that monster.

"I nearly did, once." The look he gives Clark is frank, and tired. He doesn't expect any saintlike distance about killing. Zod was necessary and never a part of his madness against Superman. Steppenwolf was also necessary. There is a difference between murdering a criminal and denying them due process, and war. The question is what world does Joker inhabit. "It was a near thing, with intervening forces being what stopped it, not any morals of mine. He's kept his distance since, and I haven't pursued it because I..."

His face does something.

"I don't know if I can. Or should. What going there deliberately would do to me. You've already seen me out of control, and with him it'd be justified. Would I just be giving him what's left of my sanity?"

"No," Clark says, instinctive but not easy, but then pauses, thoughtful, despite himself. He does think of Zod, inevitably, of how he doesn't have any doubt now that he'd done the right thing—had even spent too long trying not to, crucial minutes, but he can't agonise over the instinct not to kill a person. More to the point, there had been something breaking about it, in the moment. He hadn't felt grief like that since he was a teenager.

But it's complicated. Zod represented some last connection to something he didn't have, while Joker sounds like something that just severs, cleaves. Zod had been a threat to the human race, while Joker is, in the cosmic scheme of things, not such a globally looming terror. Joker is a choice, where Zod was not.

Still—

"I don't know if you should either," Clark settles on. "If it's what needs to happen, but maybe it is. Maybe you should. Either way, you're not that person who loses control. It's something that happened, but it's not who you are. And whatever happens next, whatever you decide, you're not gonna be alone with it."

You're not that person who loses control, Clark says, and it touches Bruce that he thinks so. Makes him worry a little, too. Because he is that person. He keeps himself under such extreme control because he knows the consequences of losing it; he knows what he's capable of, and he knows he isn't infallible.

Joker is a choice. One that carries the significant risk of making Bruce feel like that's an acceptable choice to make.

Over his son. Over a dream. Revenge? A preventative measure? What's next down the line, for someone else? Does a creature like that deserve this kind of moral questioning? Is he a person anymore? What right does Bruce have to decide?

He's never been able to answer those questions for himself. Not well enough to do anything with.

Bruce raises their linked hands, kisses Clark's knuckles. Fuck, this is all stupid. He looks away, carrying a look of tension around his eyes. Clark shouldn't have this kind of faith in him.

"Agonizing over it, and it's just bullshit dreams."

Clark's fingers fan a little after they're kissed, but settle into a comfortable hold around Bruce's hand. There's the sound of flapping, and Woodstock flutters across the room to land on the outside of his cage, performing some easy acrobatics to get at the cuttlefish bone wedged between bars. These antics earn a glance out of Clark, mostly to make sure nothing terrible is happening to his parrot.

Back to this, though, and Clark finally lets a smile crack across his face, subtle and crooked, as he says, "Or you just don't want to admit you have superpowers."

He leans in, his aim to kiss Bruce on the head, and then go about putting some dishes away. Hosting sensibility being to break up a little of the tension that's begun to form crystals in the air.

Bird Kent, the ultimate mood stabilizer.

Dishes and leftovers in glass containers (far more sustainable), Bruce does not ask about wine, but makes coffee, and later, they're pretending to be people who need sleep, or sleep at normal hours. In the moonlight streaming into the bedroom from tall windows, Bruce's hair looks much more grey than it does normally. Peering down at Clark from his perch sprawled partially on top of him, arms crossed over the younger man's bare chest.

Sleeping is out, it'd never work. But it's nice to pretend, and to have the intimacy of being together in whatever state; talking quietly about nothing, wondering if the rain will let up. The bedsheets smell like the kind of detergent Lois likes. Bruce always feels like an intruder here, even on rare occasions when it's the three of them. He hopes he always will. He never wants to lose the seriousness with which he respects their marriage, and the priority of that bond.

(What would it have been like, if he and Selina worked out?)

Silent observation. He wonders how clearly Clark can see him in the dark.

"Why do you want me to have superpowers?"

The grey is good. Not because Clark has a thing for ~older men~ (probably?) or anything, it's just nice to look at, and nice to do this, which is: carding his fingers through it, lazily and gently, meditative. He thinks this is probably annoying sometimes, for Bruce, but probably not as many times as it's fine, or desired, just for the intimacy of it. It's a nice kind of no thoughts head empty activity, while they fail to sleep.

The question pulls focus, though. Clark can see him fine. His hand stills, trying to bend his brain around the shape of that question.

"If you have superpowers," he says, slowly, like untangling a logic riddle, "then what I want is for you to be okay about having them."

That's not the answer to the question so much as twisting the question around.

"I just don't think it's so crazy."

He might end up with a thing for older men from here on out. Only the future can say.

Clark's hand stills, and Bruce leans his head into it. Watching him and thinking about that answer, turning it - and this entire issue - over in his mind. With less tension than earlier. Sometimes he just needs some distance, and the room to be less ticked off. Difficult, when the thing in contention is so disorienting. But it helps to have Clark; something reliable in the mess of his head. The younger man deserves better than to be his crutch, in this or any scenario, but Bruce is (mostly) evolved enough to grasp that these are the kinds of things committed partners do for each other. Only a little residual internal squirming.

"The possibility of it isn't something I can deny," he murmurs. "Especially not given the way we're all pulled together like magnets. But if it's real, I can't control it. If it's a power, then it's just over me."

And it is no fun coming to terms with that. Something he thinks Clark understands, at least in part.

That hand resumes its little idle movements, littler now that they're speaking.

"Maybe right now," Clark says, voice low in the intimate space they're sharing. "But maybe not forever."

A pause, thinking it over, before speaking again. "Besides the fact I came down in a flying saucer, there wasn't much to me for a while. Then one day, it was like the whole world kind of cracked open. I was sitting in class, and then it all just rushed in. Pencils on paper, heart beats, clothing rustling, a fly on the wall in another room. And I'd look around, and the walls would disappear, and my classmates, the other kids were gone, and the teacher was gone, and they were replaced by monsters made of muscle and bone. Skulls, all with the same grin.

"Mom had to come get me. There wasn't anywhere I could go to get away from it. Walls, doors, closing my eyes." His tone is even and easy as he speaks, one of those things you'd made peace with a long time ago. Still letting a silvery lock of hair slide between thumb and forefinger. "She helped me. And at the time, I thought, of course she knew what to do, how to get me to focus on just one thing, how to breathe, how to make it stop. Looking back, I can't even imagine being her, trying to deal with that."

He'd started looking at the ceiling at some stage, but looks back at Bruce then. "Say it's a superpower. Therefore, it needs practice. And trust. Hard to do when you're asleep, but maybe there are ways you can practice dreaming when it's not happening." Some humour creases in the lines at his eyes and says, "I'm not saying guided meditation's the answer, but—"

It's not not the answer.

He knew, in some dully scientific way, that there had to have been a point when Clark realized what he was capable of, and that the transition could not have been easy. But to hear him explain it in such ordinary terms, small and overwhelming at once, a confused and terrified kid - something Bruce has such distinct empathy for, on top of everything else - humbles him.

"I bet she couldn't imagine being you, dealing with all that."

Martha Kent is an incredible woman. And she raised an incredible son. Bruce hopes he doesn't look as dopey as he feels, emotion uncharacteristically obvious on his face. But he doesn't dare look away. Not everything is about your dumb ass, Wayne.

Lighter, "You just want to be able to teach me something."

Even though Bruce is the only one, between the two of them, who has done enough meditation to control their own heartbeat. He understands what Clark means, though. Working at something in a way that isn't like learning how to punch properly. This is another realm.

Clark does not think Bruce looks dopey, even if he can see the sentiment cross by through his expression. And it warms him. He wouldn't have expected anything else, of course, intellectually and instinctively, but maybe there's still some small part of him that can never be sure until it happens, the ease and acceptance and understanding.

And it's the point of sharing, anyway. He doesn't want Bruce to feel alone in it either.

He laughs, quiet and breathy, and then reaches to go and hook his arms up under Bruce's, and draw him up those few inches until their faces are level. "Yeah," he says. "You caught me."

They are, after all, in Metropolis for once.

Bruce shifts up (not that he could stop himself from being moved, but he's happy to go), and gives Clark a soft kiss. Not one meant to encourage them in any particular direction; companionable, grateful, sweet.

"I'm a detective."

Catching people is what he does.

One palm is flat over Clark's chest, maybe not-so-incidentally feeling his heartbeat. Over that spot where the spear Bruce had forged shot through him, leaving a gaping, black hole. It's a worse memory than the slice over his cheek, and a worse fear experiencing death at his hands.

"You know how much medication I'm on," is not quite a question. Bruce has given up hiding pill bottles, and even taken some in front of Clark. Unavoidable, with daily prescriptions lashing down severe depression. Relevant factors to consider, concerning bad dreams. And a fragile subject he has no confidence in.

An easy smile fades, but doesn't vanish entirely. Just sobers, some. Clark's hands slide down Bruce's ribs, curl around to rest on his back.

Clark nods. Yes, he knows, and has had at least an idea of that even before Bruce gave up trying to conceal it.

He doesn't say anything immediately, just tips his head as he studies Bruce's face, trying to read what he's going to say next ahead of it.

"It could all be manifestations of mental illness."

And he is already mentally ill. Sometimes these things progress; comorbidity, exacerbation, and so on. He doesn't exactly go easy on himself when it comes to maintenance. The long, excruciating episode that culminated in attempting to murder Superman is definitely something that could be clinically identified as a psychotic break. The fact that he was able to shake himself free of its clutches and perform is a testament to his ability to work under extreme conditions, not a magic cure from future episodes.

"I mean, I... could be having them, but the way I'm perceiving them is wrong. Processed through a broken lens."

Clark's mouth presses into a line of protest, at first, but this gentles at the rest, eyes hooded as he thinks that through, absorbs it. It's not you, he'd said, has said before, when it comes to that spiral that Luthor had sent him down, and even in the context of trauma, of fragility, of treatment and its fallibility, the sentiment stands. If either of them were wholly defined by their worst moments, no matter the cause of those moments, and if those moments wholly defined their futures, they wouldn't be here.

"Maybe," he says. Not doubtfully, really. For prophetic dreams, they sound like they get under Bruce's skin more profoundly than they need to. Clark's hand gently sweeps down Bruce's spine. "I guess the question is, if it distorts the delivery, does it corrupt the message?"

Bruce hopes that he's conveying a practical concern, and not a self-hating fear. If they want to figure it out, they can't ignore core components. And one is, simply, that Bruce has a condition that can warp how he views things. He takes his medication, he is very analytical, and severe episodes are not common. He's used to living with it, just like millions of other people. But millions of other people are probably not having maybe-prophetic dreams.

"That's what I have to decide."

:/

Clark nods.

:\

And pushes a wayward strand of hair back from Bruce's forehead, then lets that hand rest on his shoulder. Expressing that he trusts Bruce will do that just find feels like it'll start to get into unhelpful territory. They're here, now, and Bruce is taking the things he's said seriously. The 'what' can give way to the 'how'.

'Why' is a longer shot, but maybe an inevitable one, eventually. "Is it ever lucid? Even in little moments."

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