"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.
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.
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.
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—"
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."
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.
"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.
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."
One hand moves from his folded position, drawing knuckles along the side of Clark's face, resting with a light touch at his temple. There is a pressure point there that Bruce enjoys the manipulation of; can a Kryptonian feel it at all?
He seems to be somewhere else for a moment, slipping away from the question posed. But he returns.
"Lately, sometimes. With Joker. His provocations.. get personal, and something about it is so useless and out of place in that awful setting, that it begins to feel fake. And I can see the seams. But I can't do anything but watch."
"Lately," Clark echoes. "Maybe it's changing. Or you are."
First lucidity, then control? Food for thought. As much as he can offer up the pieces of experience he has with superpowers he did not ask for, that had controlled him for so much of his life, something like a dream feels far afield of his own experiences. Mental illness, too, to the extent that Bruce grapples with it, for all that Clark hasn't been the paragon of perfectly balanced brain chemistry all his life either.
His head tips against Bruce's hand. "I don't know that it would help, but Kryptonians had a kind of—lucid shared dreaming technology. I experienced it on Zod's ship. Different from something like VR, more organic, and I didn't have control over it. But Zod did."
Maybe they can do more scout ship dumpster diving.
Unease creeps up his spine, makes something at the back of his neck prickle. The idea of interacting with it, being aware, unable to wake up, turn it off. Of Clark being there, manipulating the setting and being reminiscent of Zod. It's an irrational fear, if he were to look at it on paper, but the gut instinct of it is so profound he can't bring himself to dismiss the feeling.
"I don't know," he hedges. "Something the ship said before the box woke you up. Only Victor heard it clearly. 'The future has taken root in the present.'"
Unease doesn't make any particularly nuanced sounds. Not so profound as to alter a heart beat, or any other number of internal chemical responses that Clark could attach emotional meaning to. But he also doesn't need those things, sense of the hesitancy in his voice, see the shadow of it cross subtle behind his even subtler expression.
Maybe another time, then, if Clark can pitch it in a way that doesn't sound like literal torture. Maybe talk to Vic about it, do his own homework.
But Clark's attention shifts, and there's a flicker—not quite guilt. Not quite the same as Bruce's unease. He asks, "What does that mean?"
What if I can't wake up. What if I become lucid, and that's the final step to entering that world. What if you see it, and it's too horrible, and it makes you hate me.
Not rational fears, unlike the issue of his mental health, but then again: these are not rational times. Strange happenings are ordinary. Clark is not human, and Bruce is having visions. Resurrecting a man using a blip in time travel and alien technology from two different worlds is not actually any less outlandish than another timeline trying to supersede its way into Bruce's reality.
Odd that the ship might say something like that in the moments prior to his resurrection when the holographic ghost of Jor-El made a very convincing thesis about Kal-El transcending into some symbol of hope that could lead the people of earth into a brighter tomorrow. Maybe it's not him, maybe it's the overwhelming power of technology they were grappling with.
Maybe it is him, though. Some kind of cosmic trade off. Protecting the people of earth from deep space invasion while representing their potential destruction.
Clark breathes in through his nose, brings a hand up to touch Bruce's face, and lifts his head up to kiss him, just gently.
The scout ship was having A Time, that day, in fairness.
Bruce returns that soft kiss. Let his eyes close. Says, "All organic things can experience trauma. Including the Kryptonian computer."
Maybe it was just afraid. It had tried to talk them out of it, after all. Perhaps not because of Kal-El, but Darkseid. It's Bruce's stupid brain's fault those things are linked. Isn't it? He rests his forehead against Clark's for a moment, thinking, trying not to think.
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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."
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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.
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"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?"
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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?"
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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."
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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."
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"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?"
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"That's what I have to decide."
:/
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:\
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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He seems to be somewhere else for a moment, slipping away from the question posed. But he returns.
"Lately, sometimes. With Joker. His provocations.. get personal, and something about it is so useless and out of place in that awful setting, that it begins to feel fake. And I can see the seams. But I can't do anything but watch."
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First lucidity, then control? Food for thought. As much as he can offer up the pieces of experience he has with superpowers he did not ask for, that had controlled him for so much of his life, something like a dream feels far afield of his own experiences. Mental illness, too, to the extent that Bruce grapples with it, for all that Clark hasn't been the paragon of perfectly balanced brain chemistry all his life either.
His head tips against Bruce's hand. "I don't know that it would help, but Kryptonians had a kind of—lucid shared dreaming technology. I experienced it on Zod's ship. Different from something like VR, more organic, and I didn't have control over it. But Zod did."
Maybe they can do more scout ship dumpster diving.
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Unease creeps up his spine, makes something at the back of his neck prickle. The idea of interacting with it, being aware, unable to wake up, turn it off. Of Clark being there, manipulating the setting and being reminiscent of Zod. It's an irrational fear, if he were to look at it on paper, but the gut instinct of it is so profound he can't bring himself to dismiss the feeling.
"I don't know," he hedges. "Something the ship said before the box woke you up. Only Victor heard it clearly. 'The future has taken root in the present.'"
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Maybe another time, then, if Clark can pitch it in a way that doesn't sound like literal torture. Maybe talk to Vic about it, do his own homework.
But Clark's attention shifts, and there's a flicker—not quite guilt. Not quite the same as Bruce's unease. He asks, "What does that mean?"
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Not rational fears, unlike the issue of his mental health, but then again: these are not rational times. Strange happenings are ordinary. Clark is not human, and Bruce is having visions. Resurrecting a man using a blip in time travel and alien technology from two different worlds is not actually any less outlandish than another timeline trying to supersede its way into Bruce's reality.
Also, softly, "I have no fucking idea."
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Odd that the ship might say something like that in the moments prior to his resurrection when the holographic ghost of Jor-El made a very convincing thesis about Kal-El transcending into some symbol of hope that could lead the people of earth into a brighter tomorrow. Maybe it's not him, maybe it's the overwhelming power of technology they were grappling with.
Maybe it is him, though. Some kind of cosmic trade off. Protecting the people of earth from deep space invasion while representing their potential destruction.
Clark breathes in through his nose, brings a hand up to touch Bruce's face, and lifts his head up to kiss him, just gently.
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Bruce returns that soft kiss. Let his eyes close. Says, "All organic things can experience trauma. Including the Kryptonian computer."
Maybe it was just afraid. It had tried to talk them out of it, after all. Perhaps not because of Kal-El, but Darkseid. It's Bruce's stupid brain's fault those things are linked. Isn't it? He rests his forehead against Clark's for a moment, thinking, trying not to think.
"We could ask."
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