Maybe if Clark weren't looking for it -- or something, if not that -- he'd miss it.
But he is, so he doesn't. Rolling to sit, first, watching Bruce turn aside, before climbing to his feet when he recognises a return to position. By the time Bruce turns back, there's a smile ready for him, crooked, a glint of canine. "I think General Zod took it personal," he says, pacing into position, "that a Kryptonian without any kind of genetically encrypted destiny he could recognise, without a lick of training, might go toe to toe with him. It's what he was made for, being a warrior."
Which is what Kal-El was intended for too, but not in the same way, not through the same methods. "How long did it take you? To make you what you are."
Twenty years in Gotham City, but he had to start somewhere.
It's a testament to how far Bruce has come that he doesn't have something to say about that first bit. (Someday. That he was there, that he ran into the dust and debris while others ran out, that the building Zod and Superman heat-visioned into oblivion was his, filled with employees and their children, people he'd moved out of Gotham to be safe. That a shadow he'd spent so long running from caught him.)
Maybe there's something in his gaze before it's blinked away.
Yeah, well. Zod was a dick.
"What, this?" Eyebrows up. Dry. "This is a shitshow, Kent, I'm falling apart."
But that's not what he's asking, and Bruce knows it. Once more - he directs him. Again, from the top. Pushes him a little, forces him to make a call about how Bruce is coming at him.
"Ten years or so," is what he says eventually, "between when I started to wander and when I came back to Gotham. Another five to think I had it figured out."
Since Clark is interested in sweeps, he shows him one.
The flat look that Clark deals to Bruce at the words shitshow is not quite on par with the one he gets more often than not, and mitigated when steered back into training. It takes a certain amount of double-think, honing skills without exercising them to their fullest, but then, he's had a lot of practice with restraint.
He'd learned how to cauterise wounds with lasers that can cut buildings in half; he can go through these motions with Bruce without liquefying his insides.
A real answer gets rewarded with German Shepherd headtip in the midst of it, natural inclination to latch to facts of interest. When the sweep comes, he avoids it as Bruce did before, and then snorts. "Careful, Wayne," he says, because we're doing last names, now, "might start feeling sorry for you."
And he pushes back. It's inevitable that his version of human speed and strength will be that much clumsier and predictable, especially given he is going through motions he's shown, but if surprise is what earns praise
not that he is doing this for praise, it's just nice to know you're not wasting someone's time
Something to alight on the field of landmines that is his entire person; implying Bruce, who nearly succeeded in killing Superman, needs this corn-fed moron to feel sorry for him, lists towards insulting. (Even though he was the one to bring it up, even though any implication there might be that Clark is lacking, because he nearly fell to this broken old man, or that he finds him worthy of inquiry. Even though Bruce is pitifully, embarrassingly enamored with him. Yes.)
To counter the inherent clumsiness in control, Bruce slows him down further. Focusing purely on how it feels. The movement, not Bruce's hands on his skin; he wonders distantly if his senses make small things more intense, or if he needs to get hit by a bus to feel anything. There's a method to tai chi's madness and this isn't quite it, but the principle is the same. Pay attention.
Oh well in that case Clark Kent of the Daily Planet will not share what he's
just kidding.
But after a moment, first adapting to the slow down, an uncertain look flashing across his face before he focuses. Paying attention, possibly to Bruce's expectations, possibly not. For the layman, this probably feels silly, and he is something like that himself, and so feels it, but wanting to take this seriously overrides it.
Speaking of overrides, it's probably clear that whatever he was going to say has been taken over by something else, maybe something stupider, given his entire self.
"That you're impressive," is what comes out of his face around when he slow motion fails to deflect the next slow motion strike he didn't slow motion anticipate, maybe with a self-conscious uptick at the corner of his mouth, but eyes dreadfully earnest, down to the bitty patch of brown marked in all the blue.
Bruce isn't sure if he's satisfied or disappointed that his surly response got Clark to (apparently) abort the mission. It doesn't occur to him that maybe he just decided to wait a moment, change tactics. Usually, once Batman gets somebody to stop something, they stay stopped.
Not so with Superman.
The failure to deflect leaves Bruce with his hand almost at Clark's throat, neither grasping nor impacting with, just there, an open-palmed tag that, were it a real hit on a human, would leave someone staggered, possibly even in need of immediate medical care with a dislocated or collapsed esophagus. Sharp brown eyes snap to mostly-blue ones-- ones Bruce has studied in pictures, in videos, up close while reeling from kryptonite-- and it's clear even through his usual stoic expression that he's surprised. A little disbelieving, too, and deeper, something that's - flustered? God forbid.
Walls shift into place. Bruce tags his throat, barely-there. Got you.
And then he's stepping back, removing his hands.
He doesn't know what to say to that so he's just. Not going to say anything. Apparently.
Surprised, and disbelieving in a way that doesn't seem skeptical, which is important, and he can't help but like being capable of surprising Bruce Wayne in ways he chooses. Clark swallows in the wake of the barely-felt tag to his throat, backing up a step himself. His hand chases the touch without really thinking about, banishing the lingering tickle of it with the flat of his palm.
Smiles, a little, says, "And winning."
It's very possible that he has flustered himself in the wake of open silence, because playing it off isn't supereffective. But okay about it, really, no walls within him to shift into place.
"Is that so." More wry than shuttered, this time. Implying he isn't trying to get one up on Clark, perhaps-- no matter that he always seems to be. Though that seems-to-be is with everyone; a compulsion, defense mechanism, way of life he doesn't know how to turn off.
He could change the subject, here. He should. This is dangerous - more dangerous than trying to punch each other's lights out. Bruce knows by now that the only plans to stop Superman must hinge on Clark flinching, and this is - something. They're both unsteady, and he isn't sure why. (Well, he knows why he's unsteady, but can't imagine it's the same for Clark.)
"When you were traveling, where was the weirdest place you came across?" A beat. "Besides Gotham, which I noticed you avoided."
Of course Bruce knows about that. Either from his standard batcreeping or because of Martha.
Seems like a rich description to ask of Superman to assign anything, especially as directed by Batman -- and at the same time, maybe too vast a category for someone whose first seventeen years of their life was spent in a place called Smallville, Kansas. Mountains qualify as weird.
"I skipped most big city centres," Clark says, of Gotham, hands dropping to fidget again with one another. "Weirdest place was probably as far west as I got before going north. Desert town, if-- marble and pink limestone open mall palace and parking lot can qualify as a town. I had a dish washing job, there. Couldn't tell you where the other employees went every night, and every customer was just passing through. Transitional. Should have been perfect for me."
He didn't last a week, say his eyebrows. Rootless wandering, he can handle, but places that seem to exist like oil on water are unsettling. Five generations of Kents, turning over soil, make an impression.
"But normal's my home state's main export." Next to corn.
Those transitional places - Bruce wouldn't do well there, either. For as twisted as he is, as much as the Kent farm makes him want to skitter away, there's nothing absent about Gotham. Too much context, the both of them. And he quirks his eyebrows for: "Turns out it's easier to hide in big cities, huh?"
Metropolis, like Gotham, is large and busy enough to afford cover. Sure, his co-workers at the Daily Planet know, but who else? Places like this, the subways of New York, downtown Los Angeles - 'weird' doesn't even rank a participation prize. They don't stick out so glaringly.
"I did the Appalachian Trail when I..." Clark trails off there, unsure exactly how to put words around that unique compounding of frustration and loneliness and desperate need to figure things out in a way that doesn't sound, you know, melodramatic. He gives up on that quickly enough. "Well, I'd been wanting to do it, made it something to work towards. Took about six months to fund it, and we're talking-- pocket change, by the time I was ready."
Most would have run out, midway through, maybe less. It takes months. He knew then he didn't need things like people needed them. "It's not all solitary. Cabins, camp sites, other hikers, even the noise? Of woodlands like that? But there's the portion around the Tennessee-North Carolina border, where you can see all around, mountains and forests, indifferent and ancient."
He then stops, thinks, says, "It was beautiful, but. Maybe that's not a favourite place. Just a favourite time.
"What about you? Or is Gotham just weirdest and best?"
That's when his father died, not because anyone's told him, even though he's sure someone's mentioned the year or he's read it. But because he knows the exact look of that pause, knows the shape of the unanchored feeling intimately. Bruce remembers, stupidly, that he'd felt like an alien on earth - had thought those words exactly - because of how misshapen everything had left him inside. Clark, meanwhile, has always been exactly how he should be, and has just been mistreated over it.
For a moment he's quiet. It should be an uncomfortable understanding, but it isn't.
"Lower Manhattan for the weirdest," he says. "Before the--" he makes a vague gesture. "I hate the word 'gentrification', it sounds so benign, but before that. It's even weirder now with that, but as somebody from Jersey, it was too unnatural."
What a stereotypical thing to say. And yet it's true; topical, even, though he doesn't say so, Ted Grant having taught him these very punches. Got his face flattened a dozen times a day.
Having talked himself away from the thinking about dead parents, Clark's smile communicates something like how isn't it neat that Bruce likes remote mountainous locations too. They're practically twins.
Maybe more than that. It's not lost on him, the slight oddness and suddenness of the conversation, questions like a stick digging around in the sand, even if he's not entirely sure what Bruce is looking for. Something to understand, maybe, and he's happy to oblige, to fall into the odd rhythm of it just as he is trusting in the over-slow movements of punches and blocks.
"I'd never been overseas until I figured out how to fly," he says, presently. It's a good thing that the ancient Kryptonians touched down in Canada. "When was Tibet?"
Outwardly, he looks vaguely harassed by that smile, like Clark's sunshine personality is tiring. (It is.) Internally, his pulse does That Thing again, briefly.
C'mon, Smallville, let's put you through your paces again.
"Ten years ago," he says, after watching Clark throw a few punches in slow motion. "And twenty-three years ago." There is a gap in the Bat's activity, a decade prior to today, but not a large one. And it might not look like a gap at all but an uneven shift, like whoever was running around in armor for those months didn't quite have the same skillset.
Maybe he was on vacation.
"How did you like France?"
Bruce is bad at this: talking, getting to know someone. He doesn't really know how to do it without it being like an interrogation.
Clark has done his homework too, although isn't currently doing the math. There's an inquiring look at the numbers -- yeah? -- before concentrating on what he's doing. Fighting very slow phantoms. Starting to get it, though, less just miming and more concentrating on the intricacies of the movements, how he's balanced, what he's doing with the rest of himself when he pulls his right arm back to deploy a strike.
And if chest hair shows up during as neckline tugs with movement, these are the sacrifices we have to make.
Another smile, this time more crooked than the last. "France was fine," sounds genuine, despite the fairly tepid descriptor assigned to a whole nation. "First time I actually touched down there that I can recall, but didn't get up to much sight seeing. Diana was pretty set on not destroying any property while we practiced. Startled some cows instead. They got nice country."
"That's nice of her," he says blandly. It's interesting to him, the care these demigods and messiahs have to take. How it can be reduced to something like remembering to stretch before jogging. Hopefully Clark will connect that sentiment with what they're doing here, since Bruce doesn't want to have to rub his nose in it and make it feel like a lesson to be shirked when he's inevitably annoyed at him.
"Some."
Trying to talk to Bruce is mostly like trying to interview a bored brick wall about mid-term election prospects during a no-contest year.
Well, this time, Bruce's foot catches on an immovable object, Clark instinctively setting heel to floor without thinking about it beyond a muscle memory desire to escape the indignity of last time. Topside, he doesn't cheat as much, other arm coming around in a deflection designed to buckle Bruce's strike, leaning backwards.
Belatedly, that foot lifts to step out of the grapple, this side shy of sheepish.
The problem with the bored brick wall effect is that it does not change the ways Bruce is, personally, in action and history and existence, endlessly fascinating, and still impressive. Clark should find it off-putting, the deflection, the blanking. He mostly finds it frustrates his curiousity without doing anything to quell it.
Without prompt, Clark goes to do as Bruce did: foot to ankle, hand to arm, mostly to see what he does as opposed to ardent desire to put him on his ass.
Ah he thinks, with a kind of incredulous longsuffering quality he mostly ascribes to Alfred, and does not dart away - instead he flips through options for what he'd do if anyone got a decent throw hold on him (and Clark's, while far from form-perfect, counts purely because he might break his own arms trying to get out of it). If Clark were human Bruce could twist to one side and get him in a headlock, or simply not move. He opts to let gravity do the work, allowing himself to fall back, but keeping hold of Clark's borrowed shirt at one shoulder and a grip on his other arm.
In theory, this will allow him to roll back and throw an opponent over his head, and away. He's curious as they go down what exactly will transpire. He suspects Superman might not have the ordinary vs-gravity buoyancy to be flipped.
Satisfaction of apparently having Done The Thing effectively enough to catch Bruce out -- because even if he had activated his X-ray vision, it does not give Clark insight into the branching scenarios almost lazily contemplated inside of his opponent's skull -- quickly turns into a flutter of panic about what he's supposed to do next by the time Bruce's hands tighten on shirt and arm. In normal scenarios, remaining perfectly in place is a likely given. Flying backwards another one.
Presence of mind to have kept those tabled, Clark responds to full-bodied tug by startling, pitching forwards.
Bonk.
Any roll-back momentum is too immediately countered by Clark Kent landing heavy on top of him, a half-aborted attempt at breaking grip laying forearm against a shoulder, knee jabbing thigh and the other braced against mat, other hand flung out wildly to absorb some of his own weight onto the floor next to Bruce's shoulder. Face to startled face as Clark jerks his head back by an inch, zero idea of what to do next has him going still in place.
They're both lucky that Bruce speaks physical violence better than he does English, so when Kryptonian knee meets human thigh he's able to position as to not end up with his leg in two pieces - though perhaps concerning is the way he doesn't seem to find those points of contact painful, like the response is simply absent, having spent too many years getting the shit kicked out of him for this to rate.
Bruce's pulse does that thing it's been doing. It evens out - albeit at a quicker than normal pace - at the sight of Clark so startled. Rudely finding his own peace at the expense of the other man's nerves.
Beneath him, he relaxes. Broad hands are smoothed out against perfect skin and borrowed cotton. He looks at Clark, looks in those bright blue eyes and that little speck of warm brown-- he wonders if that tiny blip of heterochromia is what's supposed to have set him apart from other Kryptonians and their genetically encrypted destinies. Look, says some long-dead alien radical, he's completely natural. Ordinary. Fucked his eyes up and everything.
Nevermind the rest of him shames Greek statues.
Bruce moves one hand, slow, like approaching a wild animal. Raises it up towards Clark's temple and the wavy dark hair there -
- shoves his knee into the other man's chest and torques his body, flinging him aside.
Bruce relaxes. Clark does too, a little, making only a subtle adjustment to make the position less physically awkward, if no less-- otherwise awkward. He awaits instruction, complaint, signal to move -- should probably not wait for any of that and just roll off like a normal person -- and thinks that even with the ability to telescope his vision to identify where subtle silver has threaded itself into Batman's five o'clock stubble from two blocks away, it's different up close. Mutual absorption of detail.
Detail coming attached with opinion, like how his age suits him, how brown eyes no longer seem as murky and walled off as they usually do but like wood cut to transparency and brought to a polish, and wondering what else it might take for Bruce not to school his expression so perfectly.
Beside Bruce's shoulder, his fingers curl inwards, as conscious as a wild animal of movement, brow pulling at the centre. Tension returning, kindled differently.
And then a knee to the torso, too densely made for it to drive the breath out of him but his breath still hitches anyway. Clark rolls as heavily as a log and lands with an over loud thump of his shoulders hitting padded ground. The next breath is a semi-laugh, head falling back against the ground. Cool cool cool.
Unlucky, that Bruce speaks physical so well, now wholly cognizant of the not-nothing of that moment. He's more at ease with it than he'd be if the moment had been, heaven forbid, mid-conversation, but there's still a frisson of strange as he sits up halfway on his elbows.
Stranger still, how beautiful Clark's laugh is, how easily it throws him. Briefly, Bruce tries not to smile. Again. He turns his head away to cover it, significantly less subtle than before.
Clark looks at him from where he remains on his back, sort of playing at an exhaustion or defeat he doesn't feel. Feet slack at the ankles, hand idling on his stomach. His smile closes, less toothy, but still there. You ever feel ways about the people who trained you?
Is not an appropriate follow-up, but it scrolls through his brain like a news ticker. Considers the ceiling again, does not make comparisons about how quickly his body sheds sensation, no twinges, no aches, in contrast to where his knee thumped down on Bruce's thigh, because he lacks the proper frame of reference.
Doesn't mean he's going to forget much about it, though.
"Makes sense."
There's no Bat Academy, after all. No one thing that made Bruce what he is. The world wasn't equipped to do it, in the way Themyscira grew her soldiers, or Krypton forged gods. He remembers something, in his Kryptonite memory haze, about how Bruce had to force the world to make sense.
The feeling of Clark's weight above him, his warmth through nothing but thin layers of workout clothes, his closeness, the energy between them - it'll haunt Bruce, like his laughter. Like the feel of his dead body with a gaping hole in his chest being lowered from beside the Kryptonian monster into Diana's arms, into Lois's embrace.
Maybe, some traitorous voice whispers in his mind, you will forget what that felt like, with enough exposure to feeling him while alive.
A thought so revoltingly selfish that it casts a chill on him. A chill that should have been with him all along. Reality. Bruce sits up, rolls to his feet. Something creaks in his left knee.
Smooth.
"Showers are in with the locker room," he says, "if you're so inclined. I have a long day of wrangling construction idiots coming up in a few hours, so I should pretend to sleep for a little while."
Clark gets to his feet as Bruce does, his expression just a touch expectant that the other man will say something less utilitarian. Foolishly. Mention of showers sort of tips his brain in a whole other wrong direction but corrects itself quickly enough, frowning at the shift that's taken place instead.
Not shocking, though.
"Of course," he says, midwestern manners in place, a handwave to assure he can see himself out and everything. There's probably some disaster waiting for him in another timezone, maybe one he missed while wrestling bat. The shadow of responsibility on his time has its ebbs and flows.
Clark steps aside, even if he doesn't all the way want to, and throws out a last hook with, "Bruce," followed by, "thanks for this. Until next time?"
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But he is, so he doesn't. Rolling to sit, first, watching Bruce turn aside, before climbing to his feet when he recognises a return to position. By the time Bruce turns back, there's a smile ready for him, crooked, a glint of canine. "I think General Zod took it personal," he says, pacing into position, "that a Kryptonian without any kind of genetically encrypted destiny he could recognise, without a lick of training, might go toe to toe with him. It's what he was made for, being a warrior."
Which is what Kal-El was intended for too, but not in the same way, not through the same methods. "How long did it take you? To make you what you are."
Twenty years in Gotham City, but he had to start somewhere.
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Maybe there's something in his gaze before it's blinked away.
Yeah, well. Zod was a dick.
"What, this?" Eyebrows up. Dry. "This is a shitshow, Kent, I'm falling apart."
But that's not what he's asking, and Bruce knows it. Once more - he directs him. Again, from the top. Pushes him a little, forces him to make a call about how Bruce is coming at him.
"Ten years or so," is what he says eventually, "between when I started to wander and when I came back to Gotham. Another five to think I had it figured out."
Since Clark is interested in sweeps, he shows him one.
"All downhill from there."
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He'd learned how to cauterise wounds with lasers that can cut buildings in half; he can go through these motions with Bruce without liquefying his insides.
A real answer gets rewarded with German Shepherd headtip in the midst of it, natural inclination to latch to facts of interest. When the sweep comes, he avoids it as Bruce did before, and then snorts. "Careful, Wayne," he says, because we're doing last names, now, "might start feeling sorry for you."
And he pushes back. It's inevitable that his version of human speed and strength will be that much clumsier and predictable, especially given he is going through motions he's shown, but if surprise is what earns praise
not that he is doing this for praise, it's just nice to know you're not wasting someone's time
then an attempt is made.
"You want to know what I think?"
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Something to alight on the field of landmines that is his entire person; implying Bruce, who nearly succeeded in killing Superman, needs this corn-fed moron to feel sorry for him, lists towards insulting. (Even though he was the one to bring it up, even though any implication there might be that Clark is lacking, because he nearly fell to this broken old man, or that he finds him worthy of inquiry. Even though Bruce is pitifully, embarrassingly enamored with him. Yes.)
To counter the inherent clumsiness in control, Bruce slows him down further. Focusing purely on how it feels. The movement, not Bruce's hands on his skin; he wonders distantly if his senses make small things more intense, or if he needs to get hit by a bus to feel anything. There's a method to tai chi's madness and this isn't quite it, but the principle is the same. Pay attention.
"Not particularly," is deadpan.
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just kidding.
But after a moment, first adapting to the slow down, an uncertain look flashing across his face before he focuses. Paying attention, possibly to Bruce's expectations, possibly not. For the layman, this probably feels silly, and he is something like that himself, and so feels it, but wanting to take this seriously overrides it.
Speaking of overrides, it's probably clear that whatever he was going to say has been taken over by something else, maybe something stupider, given his entire self.
"That you're impressive," is what comes out of his face around when he slow motion fails to deflect the next slow motion strike he didn't slow motion anticipate, maybe with a self-conscious uptick at the corner of his mouth, but eyes dreadfully earnest, down to the bitty patch of brown marked in all the blue.
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Not so with Superman.
The failure to deflect leaves Bruce with his hand almost at Clark's throat, neither grasping nor impacting with, just there, an open-palmed tag that, were it a real hit on a human, would leave someone staggered, possibly even in need of immediate medical care with a dislocated or collapsed esophagus. Sharp brown eyes snap to mostly-blue ones-- ones Bruce has studied in pictures, in videos, up close while reeling from kryptonite-- and it's clear even through his usual stoic expression that he's surprised. A little disbelieving, too, and deeper, something that's - flustered? God forbid.
Walls shift into place. Bruce tags his throat, barely-there. Got you.
And then he's stepping back, removing his hands.
He doesn't know what to say to that so he's just. Not going to say anything. Apparently.
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Smiles, a little, says, "And winning."
It's very possible that he has flustered himself in the wake of open silence, because playing it off isn't supereffective. But okay about it, really, no walls within him to shift into place.
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He could change the subject, here. He should. This is dangerous - more dangerous than trying to punch each other's lights out. Bruce knows by now that the only plans to stop Superman must hinge on Clark flinching, and this is - something. They're both unsteady, and he isn't sure why. (Well, he knows why he's unsteady, but can't imagine it's the same for Clark.)
"When you were traveling, where was the weirdest place you came across?" A beat. "Besides Gotham, which I noticed you avoided."
Of course Bruce knows about that. Either from his standard batcreeping or because of Martha.
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Seems like a rich description to ask of Superman to assign anything, especially as directed by Batman -- and at the same time, maybe too vast a category for someone whose first seventeen years of their life was spent in a place called Smallville, Kansas. Mountains qualify as weird.
"I skipped most big city centres," Clark says, of Gotham, hands dropping to fidget again with one another. "Weirdest place was probably as far west as I got before going north. Desert town, if-- marble and pink limestone open mall palace and parking lot can qualify as a town. I had a dish washing job, there. Couldn't tell you where the other employees went every night, and every customer was just passing through. Transitional. Should have been perfect for me."
He didn't last a week, say his eyebrows. Rootless wandering, he can handle, but places that seem to exist like oil on water are unsettling. Five generations of Kents, turning over soil, make an impression.
"But normal's my home state's main export." Next to corn.
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Those transitional places - Bruce wouldn't do well there, either. For as twisted as he is, as much as the Kent farm makes him want to skitter away, there's nothing absent about Gotham. Too much context, the both of them. And he quirks his eyebrows for: "Turns out it's easier to hide in big cities, huh?"
Metropolis, like Gotham, is large and busy enough to afford cover. Sure, his co-workers at the Daily Planet know, but who else? Places like this, the subways of New York, downtown Los Angeles - 'weird' doesn't even rank a participation prize. They don't stick out so glaringly.
"Where was your favorite place?"
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"I did the Appalachian Trail when I..." Clark trails off there, unsure exactly how to put words around that unique compounding of frustration and loneliness and desperate need to figure things out in a way that doesn't sound, you know, melodramatic. He gives up on that quickly enough. "Well, I'd been wanting to do it, made it something to work towards. Took about six months to fund it, and we're talking-- pocket change, by the time I was ready."
Most would have run out, midway through, maybe less. It takes months. He knew then he didn't need things like people needed them. "It's not all solitary. Cabins, camp sites, other hikers, even the noise? Of woodlands like that? But there's the portion around the Tennessee-North Carolina border, where you can see all around, mountains and forests, indifferent and ancient."
He then stops, thinks, says, "It was beautiful, but. Maybe that's not a favourite place. Just a favourite time.
"What about you? Or is Gotham just weirdest and best?"
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That's when his father died, not because anyone's told him, even though he's sure someone's mentioned the year or he's read it. But because he knows the exact look of that pause, knows the shape of the unanchored feeling intimately. Bruce remembers, stupidly, that he'd felt like an alien on earth - had thought those words exactly - because of how misshapen everything had left him inside. Clark, meanwhile, has always been exactly how he should be, and has just been mistreated over it.
For a moment he's quiet. It should be an uncomfortable understanding, but it isn't.
"Lower Manhattan for the weirdest," he says. "Before the--" he makes a vague gesture. "I hate the word 'gentrification', it sounds so benign, but before that. It's even weirder now with that, but as somebody from Jersey, it was too unnatural."
What a stereotypical thing to say. And yet it's true; topical, even, though he doesn't say so, Ted Grant having taught him these very punches. Got his face flattened a dozen times a day.
"I liked Tibet."
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Maybe more than that. It's not lost on him, the slight oddness and suddenness of the conversation, questions like a stick digging around in the sand, even if he's not entirely sure what Bruce is looking for. Something to understand, maybe, and he's happy to oblige, to fall into the odd rhythm of it just as he is trusting in the over-slow movements of punches and blocks.
"I'd never been overseas until I figured out how to fly," he says, presently. It's a good thing that the ancient Kryptonians touched down in Canada. "When was Tibet?"
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C'mon, Smallville, let's put you through your paces again.
"Ten years ago," he says, after watching Clark throw a few punches in slow motion. "And twenty-three years ago." There is a gap in the Bat's activity, a decade prior to today, but not a large one. And it might not look like a gap at all but an uneven shift, like whoever was running around in armor for those months didn't quite have the same skillset.
Maybe he was on vacation.
"How did you like France?"
Bruce is bad at this: talking, getting to know someone. He doesn't really know how to do it without it being like an interrogation.
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And if chest hair shows up during as neckline tugs with movement, these are the sacrifices we have to make.
Another smile, this time more crooked than the last. "France was fine," sounds genuine, despite the fairly tepid descriptor assigned to a whole nation. "First time I actually touched down there that I can recall, but didn't get up to much sight seeing. Diana was pretty set on not destroying any property while we practiced. Startled some cows instead. They got nice country."
Of course they do.
"You trained in Tibet, or?"
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"Some."
Trying to talk to Bruce is mostly like trying to interview a bored brick wall about mid-term election prospects during a no-contest year.
How about they try that throw again. Bonk.
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Well, this time, Bruce's foot catches on an immovable object, Clark instinctively setting heel to floor without thinking about it beyond a muscle memory desire to escape the indignity of last time. Topside, he doesn't cheat as much, other arm coming around in a deflection designed to buckle Bruce's strike, leaning backwards.
Belatedly, that foot lifts to step out of the grapple, this side shy of sheepish.
The problem with the bored brick wall effect is that it does not change the ways Bruce is, personally, in action and history and existence, endlessly fascinating, and still impressive. Clark should find it off-putting, the deflection, the blanking. He mostly finds it frustrates his curiousity without doing anything to quell it.
Without prompt, Clark goes to do as Bruce did: foot to ankle, hand to arm, mostly to see what he does as opposed to ardent desire to put him on his ass.
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In theory, this will allow him to roll back and throw an opponent over his head, and away. He's curious as they go down what exactly will transpire. He suspects Superman might not have the ordinary vs-gravity buoyancy to be flipped.
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Presence of mind to have kept those tabled, Clark responds to full-bodied tug by startling, pitching forwards.
Bonk.
Any roll-back momentum is too immediately countered by Clark Kent landing heavy on top of him, a half-aborted attempt at breaking grip laying forearm against a shoulder, knee jabbing thigh and the other braced against mat, other hand flung out wildly to absorb some of his own weight onto the floor next to Bruce's shoulder. Face to startled face as Clark jerks his head back by an inch, zero idea of what to do next has him going still in place.
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Bruce's pulse does that thing it's been doing. It evens out - albeit at a quicker than normal pace - at the sight of Clark so startled. Rudely finding his own peace at the expense of the other man's nerves.
Beneath him, he relaxes. Broad hands are smoothed out against perfect skin and borrowed cotton. He looks at Clark, looks in those bright blue eyes and that little speck of warm brown-- he wonders if that tiny blip of heterochromia is what's supposed to have set him apart from other Kryptonians and their genetically encrypted destinies. Look, says some long-dead alien radical, he's completely natural. Ordinary. Fucked his eyes up and everything.
Nevermind the rest of him shames Greek statues.
Bruce moves one hand, slow, like approaching a wild animal. Raises it up towards Clark's temple and the wavy dark hair there -
- shoves his knee into the other man's chest and torques his body, flinging him aside.
Bonk.
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Detail coming attached with opinion, like how his age suits him, how brown eyes no longer seem as murky and walled off as they usually do but like wood cut to transparency and brought to a polish, and wondering what else it might take for Bruce not to school his expression so perfectly.
Beside Bruce's shoulder, his fingers curl inwards, as conscious as a wild animal of movement, brow pulling at the centre. Tension returning, kindled differently.
And then a knee to the torso, too densely made for it to drive the breath out of him but his breath still hitches anyway. Clark rolls as heavily as a log and lands with an over loud thump of his shoulders hitting padded ground. The next breath is a semi-laugh, head falling back against the ground. Cool cool cool.
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Stranger still, how beautiful Clark's laugh is, how easily it throws him. Briefly, Bruce tries not to smile. Again. He turns his head away to cover it, significantly less subtle than before.
"I trained in a lot of places."
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Is not an appropriate follow-up, but it scrolls through his brain like a news ticker. Considers the ceiling again, does not make comparisons about how quickly his body sheds sensation, no twinges, no aches, in contrast to where his knee thumped down on Bruce's thigh, because he lacks the proper frame of reference.
Doesn't mean he's going to forget much about it, though.
"Makes sense."
There's no Bat Academy, after all. No one thing that made Bruce what he is. The world wasn't equipped to do it, in the way Themyscira grew her soldiers, or Krypton forged gods. He remembers something, in his Kryptonite memory haze, about how Bruce had to force the world to make sense.
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Maybe, some traitorous voice whispers in his mind, you will forget what that felt like, with enough exposure to feeling him while alive.
A thought so revoltingly selfish that it casts a chill on him. A chill that should have been with him all along. Reality. Bruce sits up, rolls to his feet. Something creaks in his left knee.
Smooth.
"Showers are in with the locker room," he says, "if you're so inclined. I have a long day of wrangling construction idiots coming up in a few hours, so I should pretend to sleep for a little while."
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Not shocking, though.
"Of course," he says, midwestern manners in place, a handwave to assure he can see himself out and everything. There's probably some disaster waiting for him in another timezone, maybe one he missed while wrestling bat. The shadow of responsibility on his time has its ebbs and flows.
Clark steps aside, even if he doesn't all the way want to, and throws out a last hook with, "Bruce," followed by, "thanks for this. Until next time?"
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