This isn't like the last time, airlifting Bruce Wayne out of a targetted attack. In a different state, it's the tempo of his heart beat that finds Superman pivoting midflight, breaking the sound barrier, and hovering over the action below. Gotham's night time angles and glitter sprawl out below, and its the panicky rhythm of multiple heart beats that has him stopping to look, vision piercing slanted roofing, red cape billowed in the wind like a single scarlet angel wing.
Does not hesitate. He dives down, feet first, with kind of heavy speed of a cartoon anvil. Through the ceiling, debris obliterated, flooring shattered underfoot as he sticks the landing.
Someone turns their rifle on him, which he grips, and flings them off their feet with a flick of his wrist, expression grim and unforgiving. The weapon is thrown, shattering where it strikes the nearest man angling his way towards the black blur of cape attached to the set of sensory signatures that Clark is all too powerfully aware of.
He has no idea what's happening, but that's normally the case when emergencies involve armed assailants. Tidal waves are simpler.
Edited (alternatively i could just die and never make errors again) 2017-12-24 02:33 (UTC)
There aren't a lot of times Batman thinks that out in the field-- not sincerely, anyway. Often he might kick over a particularly mangled corpse, or observe someone doing something spectacularly foolish, and think, exasperated, What the fuck. But moments like this, well and truly flummoxed, are rare.
Red and blue and like a freight train. Oh, he thinks, at the same time as Oh, shit.
Gotham thugs are a vicious sort. The second wave does not all try to shoot Superman; shooting the mortal one just backfired, after all, and they have in fact seen the news once or twice. Instead only one unloads a full-auto clip into the Kryptonian, an attempt at a distraction while two other men scramble into the other room, to the hostages - civilians from a neighboring county, trafficked, here for no other reason than to act as shields in the event of running into the Bat.
Or, now, the Alien.
Bruce moves, but it's not fast enough to nab both of them. He gets the nearest man and pulls, sending the bullet in his handgun astray, clipping a bound woman in the shoulder instead of her chest where he'd been aiming. Because why not kill someone right off the bat to show the costumed freaks they're serious? Batman is negotiable. Batman is a known factor. Superman is escalation. The second man is in with them, holding a gun to the back of someone's head, shouting. The woman who's been hit is sobbing into the layers of grimy duct tape around her mouth.
Bullets flatten on blue armour, on skin, Clark reflexively raising his arms and turning his shoulder to the onslaught. Red glows through closed eyelids, and light is set free in a quick jab, weapon exploding, half-melted, a strangled cry in the chaos. Then, rabbit-panic heart beats knock at his senses, and he's aware enough of Bruce grappling with one to register the second, and he turns the world around himself to face the hostages in the other room.
Thin wall shatters around him as he takes off at a blur of motion.
Huddled civilians feel the breeze overhead as man and alien go zooming. Superman stops; human is thrown, slamming hard enough into the opposite wall that pulverised plaster lifts like smoke in the air. He'll probably be fine.
Clark turns, all worried eyebrows, but the hostage is fine, breathing, no bullet holes save for the one embedded in the concrete in front of him. The wall dividing them from the rest of the action now half-collapsed, he sees where the boiling over of assailants is divided between attack and retreat, but then divides as one cuts a path through. Dragging something, a large canister, and whatever it is, it has his friends skitter backwards, listing towards retreat.
Something shouted. A threat or a profanity or both. The man twists the valve, and hefts the canister, some thin, dirty-grey vapour trailing from it as it's launched towards heroes and innocents both. Thick and faster.
Superman is a blur, a wind that drags at the thick weave of Batman's cape. Got it.
Both he and canister disappear via-- well, a new hole in the roof.
The goons are fleeing away from the new hole in the roof and remnants of that ominous grey substance alike. Half a heartbeat and Batman makes a decision, leaving them to their escape, dropping one unconscious thug to the ground and making his way to the injured hostage.
"I'll get you all out," he tells the rest of them as he assesses the damage on the injured woman's shoulder. "This first." Shredded skin, mangled muscle and a whole lot of blood, but it wasn't the underside of her arm, and no major veins were hit. Bruce isn't the best medic in the world but he's miles beyond most people, shuffling a bandage out of god-knows-where and wrapping the wound with shockingly gentle hands, even through gauntlets. It's a stop-gap measure, but a necessary one.
She thanks him in a trembling voice, the rest of her holding at least mostly still, shuddering through shock and terror here and there. The few other people wait in varying degrees of anxiety for this nightmare of an urban legend to cut the bindings on hands and feet, allowing them to peel away their own gags.
"Out the back, fire escape," he instructs, synthesized voice causing at least two of them to flinch and skitter away. He has to herd them, somewhat unkindly, rushing to ensure no one comes in contact with anything left lingering in the air. One woman is quick to obey, even on unsteady, exhausted feet, and barks at the rest to follow.
"Where's Superman?" a man asks.
The woman with the bullet wound clenches her good arm tighter around the Bat's shoulders. "Who cares," she spits, and Bruce almost laughs. Ah.
The valve is gone, spun completely loose, but it doesn't take much effort to slap his hand down on the opening even as his eyeballs sting from whatever was inside. In his nose, the back of his throat, despite that Clark is almost sure he managed to hold his breath in time. Maybe not. Even where the heel of his hand stoppers the canister, his skin tingles unpleasantly.
Upwards, then, flying half-blind as he tries to blink against the blur of tear ducts working overtime. Get it together, Superman. Up, up, unsure how far up he has to go until he's certain the chemical inside won't come back down when he finally, gripping it like a football, (go long! at the back of his mind), throws the offending item off the planet with all his strength and momentum, which is a considerable amount.
Ugh. What was that stuff.
Shaking his head, Clark floats in place, before remembering himself and making his descent. By the time he's in view, the civilians have made it to the street, and he makes for the distinctive, dark shape that Batman makes among them. A graceful landing is ruined, however, as his foot catches on a powerline he did not see; it snaps with a flare of sparks, and he flips ass over head, wiping out against the side of a building, crumbled brickwork tumbling where he lands.
This was not really the impression he wanted to make on Gothamites, is an idle thought he has as he pushes his own cape out of his face.
For a split-second, Bruce is annoyed. He didn't ask for help, did want or need it, and now Clark is breaking powerlines and knocking over walls and staggering around, and--
The split-second is over, and morphs into a kind of paralyzing horror. One would thing Superman is the last person on Earth who anyone should worry over, but Bruce knows just how badly he can be wounded; he has done it with his own hands, he has watched him die, felt his lifeless form. They don't really know anything about Kryptonian physiology, and they know even less about Mother Boxes-- what if he has different weaknesses, now that he's resurrected? What if he just killed himself? What if, what if, a hundred things, Bruce's heartbeat wild and terrified.
He has to make sure the civilians are fine, even though ever atom in him is screaming to go to Clark. Even though, hell, the civilians are all suddenly extremely concerned with Superman.
The police and EMTs are on their way, and once everyone is sat down and it's sure there are no lingering assailants, the Bat makes his way over to Superman, trepidation evident in every line of him.
"You fucking moron," is what he says instead of anything else.
One hand resting against brick and the other brushing the last of pulverised drywall from his hair, Clark is blinking hard to clear his vision. Instead of a glossy coat of stinging tears, though, it's just his eyeballs seem to be having a hard time focusing, and it's difficult to tell if that's a brain thing or an eyeball thing or if he should worry about it. But he feels fine. He feels--
Oh hi Batman.
He straightens his posture as Bruce comes near, eyebrows immediately drawing together. "Tha's not a very nice thing t'say to," he points at himself, or maybe his S, "th'guy who saved your life.
Brain damage? Something catches between his ribs, sharp and sticking. Those thugs were trafficking neurotoxin, a hot ticket item with the way the world's going and assassin firms are trying to start up all over the place like loan companies in the eighties. Could it be melting Clark from the inside, doing just enough damage to his post-return body, keeping him in some decaying state?
Armored fingers curl against a blue and red shoulder. If his hand were bare he'd be able to feel the warmth of him - he knows it well by now, and the taste of him, too, but what he thinks of most is the sensation of closing dead eyelids over lifeless eyes.
"I didn't need any help."
Please be all right. Please.
He shifts, removing his hand, finding a button. Summoning his car. It rumbles like a monster, tearing through asphalt to get to them, positioning with unnerving intelligence nearby.
"I'm sending you back to the cave," Batman tells him. "Can you promise not to touch anything?" Please be all right, please do not accidentally shred my multi billion dollar vehicle. Again.
The distant sound of sirens, emergency vehicles approaching, and the lack of gunfire and shouting seems to register enough that Clark does not insist on going after the other thirty guys or whatever it was he had left Bruce to deal with when he'd exited stage up. The day is saved.
"I can promise."
Reassurance, of a kind.
Still bracing a hand to wall, Clark pat-pats his other hand on batshoulder, friendly and clumsy and thankfully not without enough force to dislocate or bruise anything, even if that ever present heaviness and strength is just there, waiting. He promises.
Takes a step, stops, doesn't like it much. "Br--" Mm, no, that's a secret. He lowers his voice, discreetly, "Batman," he says, anyway, "I feel..." Searches for the right word, and doesn't do a hell of a lot better than he did when he was, well, sober. "...really weird."
It would be nice of Bruce could pick a gear, but his default response to everything is to be angry, and even though he's terrified and concerned, those things also inspire anger in him. Emotions are hard. Especially after he's spent most of the night out like this already; the mindset is sometimes overwhelming, difficult to break from cleanly.
Carefully, he gets Superman's weight against him, and half-herds, half-supports him forward.
"I can tell." The shell on the car peels back as they approach, hydraulic noises mingling with the sound of encroaching sirens. Batman leans into it and hits buttons, programming, before helping Clark into it. "I don't know how much neurotoxin you breathed in. Next time try not to dunk your face in it."
Because that's totally what he did.
"Don't touch anything."
Beep boop. The shell closes, leaving the drugged (possibly dying his brain supplies) alien in the batcar. Bruce steps back as the engines thunder back to live, and the vehicle peels out, heading away to its destination.
A voice in his ear, concern disguised in tense sarcasm. "Will you be taking a bus, then?"
"I'll be back as soon as I can. Look after him."
"Of course."
No wisecrack about having planned on leaving Superman to his own devices? Something in Bruce's stomach drops further. Alfred's worried, too.
At least Clark has his feet under him, but balance is altered, as if a straight line is something of a challenge. Sort of keeps his hands hovered so he's not touching things, even in getting into the car, showing them at Bruce to indicate that he did promise, quit fussing. Tugs cape out of the way of the door just in time.
Looks around. What is happening?
Especially as the engine hums to life, and the sleek barely-there motion is felt as it pulls away. "Batman?" Clark queries into the empty space. "Okay. Bye."
Magic car. Got it. His face breaks into a silly grin, a laugh welling up unstoppably as he settles backwards, just enough self-awareness to know he sounds slightly insane which only makes him laugh harder. A hand lands on some panel that chirps at him, and he pulls that hand back quickly. "Oh no. Sorry, Broosh Wayne's magic car. No touching."
Perhaps later, Clark will appreciate the fact that this is all being recorded.
Alfred is waiting when the car makes its descent into the cave beneath the lake, anxious but unafraid - if Superman showing up in the dead of night to collect his fancy pajamas after having nearly torn Bruce's head off wasn't enough to make him nervous, then nothing is. He does his best to herd Clark out of the car and into the section of their industrial deathtrap that counts as an infirmary, intent on-- well, he's not sure what he's intent on, when he gets him there. Not like they can stick a needle in him and draw blood.
When Bruce finally arrives - a little gross beneath his civvies, having stopped in a bolthole of his downtown - he's met with the sight of Alfred trying to re-stick electrodes and sensor pads to a wiggly Kryptonian.
"Are you-- is he all right?"
Don't sound worried is thrown right out the window; Bruce has to all but skid to a halt near them, one hand on Clark's shoulder already.
A friendly drunk, at that, and at least somewhat accommodating which is good, given givens, while still being difficult to wrangle even then, given even more givens. At least he hasn't tried to hug Alfred. Asked him if he misses England, it seems nice there. Once he rescued a people from an England building, on fire. That wasn't nice. What are you sticking on me.
Bruce Wayne, though--
Well, first he gets the sunniest of smiles, hazy eyed. Hand on the shoulder apparently translates as a signal to open his arms -- electrodes and wires ignored, ruining Alfred's efforts -- and list inwards where he's perched to pull him into a hug. Heroic chin bumps against a shoulder.
"I can'get drunk Alfred," sounds -- in tone and content -- like something a drunk person might say, admonishing, assuring. "I'm fine. Your car beeped at me but I didn't mean to."
Alfred's gaze on his ward is immediately accusatory at the way Clark reaches out to him. (He'll get used to it-- it's not that Clark is a man, not even that the situation is unorthodox, he just worries. About everyone, but especially Bruce, and it's easier to appear generally disapproving than admit he's afraid Superman will break his alcoholic disaster child's heart.)
Despite that look, one arm slips around Clark's back, holding him up and close. There is something in Bruce's chest that's still trembling, thinking about Clark being dead or permanently damaged. Because of me. Because he dove in there trying to help me. If we weren't-- he wouldn't have.
"It's okay," he says, of car beeping, and realizes just how fast his heart's beating. Relief hasn't quite taken hold yet, but there's at least a ribbon of it cutting through his anxiety at being in the same room with him, at being able to touch him. He reaches out and tilts a readout screen to an angle that permits him to read it.
"Depressed behavioral inhibitory center in the cerebral cortex," he's murmuring, "Lowered glutamate, stimulated hypoth-- uh."
Vaguely accusatory as much as approving, and conventionally untrue, given no one can possibly smell fantastic post vigilante superheroism, and yet, there remains the faint traces of cologne and aftershave molecules, and probably some vaguely fanfiction notion of whatever registers as uniquely Bruce to supersenses. This observation is made from where Clark has comfortably tucked his head against Bruce's shoulder, the world spinning while Bruce remains solidly reliable, unmoving, holding him. Hug has turned into cling.
He will 100% die when he remembers/is told about stating this observation in front of Alfred Pennyworth, so that's something to look forward to.
"In soph'more I drank this whole thing of vodka as a dare and e'ryone kept expecting I get sick or drunk and they said I was cheating and it was water." He lifts his head. "But it wasn't. It was Pete's dad's. I'm drunk?"
Bruce's arm around him is firm, and where his hand curls into side, he occasionally strokes his thumb over unearthly fabric. His shoulder is sturdy, able to hold the weight of Kal of house Drunky easily-- though it's much appreciated he isn't wasted to the point of forgetting his strength, or Bruce would be a pudding of bashed bone and blood on the floor regardless of how nice he smells.
"Chemically, what you're experiencing is like alcohol intoxication," Bruce tells him, and points at the screen. "Obviously we can't take your blood or check how your liver's filtering anything, but as far as the waves in your brain are concerned, 'drunk' is you sorted out, Kansas."
Alfred re-sticks Clark with more electrodes as Bruce continues to explain, his low voice almost comforting as he runs through the whys and whats of the things they can detect happening inside of him with sensors and scanners. During this, Alfred gives them some space, either deciding he's done all he can or that, frankly, he doesn't need to see them canoodling. (The security feed will be plenty.)
"It's because you inhaled a bunch of neurotoxin." Bruce is quieter, now that they're alone. He presses a kiss to the top of Clark's head.
Hard to say how much of this Clark follows, but he is listening, maybe more to the sound of Bruce's voice than the words it's actually saying. Grasping enough, anyway, that he is more helpful than hindrance to electrode placement, and his solid grip on Bruce finally relaxes, even if he keeps his hands on him.
Mouth presses into a line. Neurotoxin. :/
"I threw it," he says, "off the planet."
What else did he do? He saved a guy. He saved Batman. "Did all those people okay? I mean." Now that he is more conscious as to what the fuck, there seems to be a concerted effort to counter it -- at least for whole moments at a time. "We saved them. Bad guys though?"
Bruce had assumed Clark hurled it out of the atmosphere, trusting him enough at this stage to have enough awareness not to just drop an unknown contaminant into the ocean - and is glad he was correct with that assumption; it means the satellite he tasked with finding the container might have results by now. He can plug in an equation and see how long it'll take the toxin to disperse and become inert in a vacuum, and if he has to send nanites up there to clean it up.
A pain, but much less of a pain than being dead from neurotoxin.
"All the hostages survived," Bruce assures him, the hand at his side moving up and down every so often, more to reassure himself than comfort Clark at this stage. He's not normally so plainly affectionate, preferring to keep his touches brief unless they're leading to something else, but the incident's rattled him-- and maybe Clark won't remember very well, when he sobers up.
If he sobers up.
"I took care of the traffickers." A few unconscious, a few bleeding and handcuffed to a pipe, one upside down. Giftwrapped for GCPD; Happy New Year. Bruce lets out a sigh and presses the bridge of his nose against Clark's temple. "You scared the shit out of me. You're still scaring the shit out of me. Please don't do that again. Gotham isn't like Metropolis, Clark, they're just going to get meaner when Superman shows up."
This would suck if it were forever. An eerily valid outcome given the substance involved, but then, his Kryptonian body is a remarkably capable vessel, coming back from (almost) anything given enough time, enough sunlight. Eventually, readings will show a slow rate of improvement, of normalising. For now, the only cure for the fact that the world seems like it might spin off without him at any moment is Bruce.
But drunk's okay. He feels pretty good, in that straight sentences are hard and there is now a glimmer of worry with the science and consequences explained to him, but his blood is warm and Bruce is being sweet to him. He closes his eyes, content, at the feel-sound of Bruce's voice at his ear.
Registers what he's saying, opens his eyes and lifts his head to look at him.
"You," he says, placing his words very deliberately down, pointing, "were in trouble. There were many guns with guys, and I saved you."
Until those readings begin to slip downwards towards normal (and of course Bruce has readings of him at normal) (somehow), he will remain this level of abnormally clingy. Because standing with an arm around his lover, occasionally bumping his nose to his head, counts as clingy (and definitely abnormal), when you're Bruce Wayne.
Moment of silence, considering-- being mad right now is tempting, but he thinks it'd be lost on Clark, or it'd just upset him in a way that would be too unkind, given his mindset.
"You did save me."
Technically. From the thing that came after, not from anything that he swooped into stop. Well, probably. Bruce has dealt with armed men (many guns with guys) en mass before, and come out the victor. Barring something completely insane happening, he's sure he would have tonight, too. He's going to have to talk to Clark about it, and seriously; intervening in shitty gunfights in Gotham between thugs and figment of the city's imagination isn't going to trigger any senate hearings - and it's important that divide remain.
That would absolutely not have flown with a sober Clark Kent, who must by now be getting used to wading through Bruce's fronts, knowing what lies behind them. It flies for this Clark, who leans into him again, content as a labrador who's been well walked and getting petted for his efforts. Frisbees caught, sticks fetched, bats rescued.
"I heard your heart," he says, like that's a normal thing to say. His fingertips touch over where that heart is, the body's busiest little muscle, twitching tirelessly. His hand is warm, flattening there. "Had to see what it was doing."
"Do you normally hear my heart?" is gently (and genuinely) curious. Bruce shifts so that he can half-sit on the bed beside Clark, resigned to camping out until those readouts tell him something good, at least.
Of course he's well aware how much Clark can hear, is aware that he keeps close tabs on Lois Lane, with her lifestyle of constant danger, and since Luthor's meddling, his mother. It's just never occurred to him that Clark might be listening in on him, at least not remotely. While they're with it each other, it always seemed like a given.
Bruce sits down and Clark leans all the more. Distantly, he is aware that maybe he said something that he'd subconsciously been keeping in check -- not out of a desire to be secretive so much as it's never his first instinct to make people uncomfortable with the sheer amount of things he can do. But he isn't fully focused on all that.
Bruce is asking him so gently. "Normally," he says. "Normally and I don't always notice it, 'til I notice it. Heart, and." He gestures, loosely. And other things. But the heart is the first thing, the thing that can't be helped.
"Ss'how I knew you liked me after all," is added, with a broad grin, pushing into the lean. Eyy.
For a moment, no response, as Bruce considers the full implications of this, his hand still moving rhythmically against Clark's side. It should infuriate him - it's an invasion of privacy far beyond just listening when he's in the same room with him, it means Clark has him so memorized that his biometrics are standard background noise. Normalized to the point where drastic changes are immediately noticeable, even when Clark is hundreds of miles away. It means he was listening even before they engaged each other in-- whatever it is they've been doing. At least a little. Enough to recognize his pulse picking up out of flushed interest.
What he feels is not anger at all, and he has to be very careful not to let his heart rate tick up as he thinks about it. Unhelpful.
This is ... a bad thing to be slightly turned on by. And unlike him. But it feels like reaching out and being reached back to, it feels like reciprocation of something just a little bit shameful, that Bruce knows he shouldn't be doing and yet finds himself unable to stop. Does Clark feel the same way?
"I like to look out for you, too," is what he says after a while, his voice a low rumble next to his cheek. Which Clark probably knows already. Satellites aren't sneaky.
See? Bruce gets it. There will be time enough for Clark to actually consider the proper ramifications of this accidental confession, what it means in return, and what it says about them as people. This strange, mutual intensity, this fascination, how quickly Bruce went from someone who was abhorrent to Clark in every way -- the 1%, justice that punched down, that wielded his personal power to create terror instead of hope -- to someone he flies cross-country to try to protect.
Right now, of course, nothing seems very strange. Of course they want to look out for one another. They are team mates, and more than just that.
"I like that you like to look out for me too," Clark says, a little too accurately, though he seems pleased with himself for all those words happening in order, with syllables only bumping together a little bit with a slur. Mainly because he's murmuring it, in the quiet space they've created together. "S'nice." Nailed it.
Following what he considers to be the natural order of things, he turns enough to meet Bruce in a kiss. Something electronic beeps at them as readings adjust. Getting closer to normal.
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Does not hesitate. He dives down, feet first, with kind of heavy speed of a cartoon anvil. Through the ceiling, debris obliterated, flooring shattered underfoot as he sticks the landing.
Someone turns their rifle on him, which he grips, and flings them off their feet with a flick of his wrist, expression grim and unforgiving. The weapon is thrown, shattering where it strikes the nearest man angling his way towards the black blur of cape attached to the set of sensory signatures that Clark is all too powerfully aware of.
He has no idea what's happening, but that's normally the case when emergencies involve armed assailants. Tidal waves are simpler.
no subject
the
fuck.
There aren't a lot of times Batman thinks that out in the field-- not sincerely, anyway. Often he might kick over a particularly mangled corpse, or observe someone doing something spectacularly foolish, and think, exasperated, What the fuck. But moments like this, well and truly flummoxed, are rare.
Red and blue and like a freight train. Oh, he thinks, at the same time as Oh, shit.
Gotham thugs are a vicious sort. The second wave does not all try to shoot Superman; shooting the mortal one just backfired, after all, and they have in fact seen the news once or twice. Instead only one unloads a full-auto clip into the Kryptonian, an attempt at a distraction while two other men scramble into the other room, to the hostages - civilians from a neighboring county, trafficked, here for no other reason than to act as shields in the event of running into the Bat.
Or, now, the Alien.
Bruce moves, but it's not fast enough to nab both of them. He gets the nearest man and pulls, sending the bullet in his handgun astray, clipping a bound woman in the shoulder instead of her chest where he'd been aiming. Because why not kill someone right off the bat to show the costumed freaks they're serious? Batman is negotiable. Batman is a known factor. Superman is escalation. The second man is in with them, holding a gun to the back of someone's head, shouting. The woman who's been hit is sobbing into the layers of grimy duct tape around her mouth.
He is pulling the trigger.
no subject
Thin wall shatters around him as he takes off at a blur of motion.
Huddled civilians feel the breeze overhead as man and alien go zooming. Superman stops; human is thrown, slamming hard enough into the opposite wall that pulverised plaster lifts like smoke in the air. He'll probably be fine.
Clark turns, all worried eyebrows, but the hostage is fine, breathing, no bullet holes save for the one embedded in the concrete in front of him. The wall dividing them from the rest of the action now half-collapsed, he sees where the boiling over of assailants is divided between attack and retreat, but then divides as one cuts a path through. Dragging something, a large canister, and whatever it is, it has his friends skitter backwards, listing towards retreat.
Something shouted. A threat or a profanity or both. The man twists the valve, and hefts the canister, some thin, dirty-grey vapour trailing from it as it's launched towards heroes and innocents both. Thick and faster.
Superman is a blur, a wind that drags at the thick weave of Batman's cape. Got it.
Both he and canister disappear via-- well, a new hole in the roof.
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"I'll get you all out," he tells the rest of them as he assesses the damage on the injured woman's shoulder. "This first." Shredded skin, mangled muscle and a whole lot of blood, but it wasn't the underside of her arm, and no major veins were hit. Bruce isn't the best medic in the world but he's miles beyond most people, shuffling a bandage out of god-knows-where and wrapping the wound with shockingly gentle hands, even through gauntlets. It's a stop-gap measure, but a necessary one.
She thanks him in a trembling voice, the rest of her holding at least mostly still, shuddering through shock and terror here and there. The few other people wait in varying degrees of anxiety for this nightmare of an urban legend to cut the bindings on hands and feet, allowing them to peel away their own gags.
"Out the back, fire escape," he instructs, synthesized voice causing at least two of them to flinch and skitter away. He has to herd them, somewhat unkindly, rushing to ensure no one comes in contact with anything left lingering in the air. One woman is quick to obey, even on unsteady, exhausted feet, and barks at the rest to follow.
"Where's Superman?" a man asks.
The woman with the bullet wound clenches her good arm tighter around the Bat's shoulders. "Who cares," she spits, and Bruce almost laughs. Ah.
"You're from Gotham," is noted.
"Originally."
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Upwards, then, flying half-blind as he tries to blink against the blur of tear ducts working overtime. Get it together, Superman. Up, up, unsure how far up he has to go until he's certain the chemical inside won't come back down when he finally, gripping it like a football, (go long! at the back of his mind), throws the offending item off the planet with all his strength and momentum, which is a considerable amount.
Ugh. What was that stuff.
Shaking his head, Clark floats in place, before remembering himself and making his descent. By the time he's in view, the civilians have made it to the street, and he makes for the distinctive, dark shape that Batman makes among them. A graceful landing is ruined, however, as his foot catches on a powerline he did not see; it snaps with a flare of sparks, and he flips ass over head, wiping out against the side of a building, crumbled brickwork tumbling where he lands.
This was not really the impression he wanted to make on Gothamites, is an idle thought he has as he pushes his own cape out of his face.
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The split-second is over, and morphs into a kind of paralyzing horror. One would thing Superman is the last person on Earth who anyone should worry over, but Bruce knows just how badly he can be wounded; he has done it with his own hands, he has watched him die, felt his lifeless form. They don't really know anything about Kryptonian physiology, and they know even less about Mother Boxes-- what if he has different weaknesses, now that he's resurrected? What if he just killed himself? What if, what if, a hundred things, Bruce's heartbeat wild and terrified.
He has to make sure the civilians are fine, even though ever atom in him is screaming to go to Clark. Even though, hell, the civilians are all suddenly extremely concerned with Superman.
The police and EMTs are on their way, and once everyone is sat down and it's sure there are no lingering assailants, the Bat makes his way over to Superman, trepidation evident in every line of him.
"You fucking moron," is what he says instead of anything else.
no subject
One hand resting against brick and the other brushing the last of pulverised drywall from his hair, Clark is blinking hard to clear his vision. Instead of a glossy coat of stinging tears, though, it's just his eyeballs seem to be having a hard time focusing, and it's difficult to tell if that's a brain thing or an eyeball thing or if he should worry about it. But he feels fine. He feels--
Oh hi Batman.
He straightens his posture as Bruce comes near, eyebrows immediately drawing together. "Tha's not a very nice thing t'say to," he points at himself, or maybe his S, "th'guy who saved your life.
"Ssso you're welcome."
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Armored fingers curl against a blue and red shoulder. If his hand were bare he'd be able to feel the warmth of him - he knows it well by now, and the taste of him, too, but what he thinks of most is the sensation of closing dead eyelids over lifeless eyes.
"I didn't need any help."
Please be all right. Please.
He shifts, removing his hand, finding a button. Summoning his car. It rumbles like a monster, tearing through asphalt to get to them, positioning with unnerving intelligence nearby.
"I'm sending you back to the cave," Batman tells him. "Can you promise not to touch anything?" Please be all right, please do not accidentally shred my multi billion dollar vehicle. Again.
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"I can promise."
Reassurance, of a kind.
Still bracing a hand to wall, Clark pat-pats his other hand on batshoulder, friendly and clumsy and thankfully not without enough force to dislocate or bruise anything, even if that ever present heaviness and strength is just there, waiting. He promises.
Takes a step, stops, doesn't like it much. "Br--" Mm, no, that's a secret. He lowers his voice, discreetly, "Batman," he says, anyway, "I feel..." Searches for the right word, and doesn't do a hell of a lot better than he did when he was, well, sober. "...really weird."
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Carefully, he gets Superman's weight against him, and half-herds, half-supports him forward.
"I can tell." The shell on the car peels back as they approach, hydraulic noises mingling with the sound of encroaching sirens. Batman leans into it and hits buttons, programming, before helping Clark into it. "I don't know how much neurotoxin you breathed in. Next time try not to dunk your face in it."
Because that's totally what he did.
"Don't touch anything."
Beep boop. The shell closes, leaving the drugged (possibly dying his brain supplies) alien in the batcar. Bruce steps back as the engines thunder back to live, and the vehicle peels out, heading away to its destination.
A voice in his ear, concern disguised in tense sarcasm. "Will you be taking a bus, then?"
"I'll be back as soon as I can. Look after him."
"Of course."
No wisecrack about having planned on leaving Superman to his own devices? Something in Bruce's stomach drops further. Alfred's worried, too.
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Looks around. What is happening?
Especially as the engine hums to life, and the sleek barely-there motion is felt as it pulls away. "Batman?" Clark queries into the empty space. "Okay. Bye."
Magic car. Got it. His face breaks into a silly grin, a laugh welling up unstoppably as he settles backwards, just enough self-awareness to know he sounds slightly insane which only makes him laugh harder. A hand lands on some panel that chirps at him, and he pulls that hand back quickly. "Oh no. Sorry, Broosh Wayne's magic car. No touching."
Giggling returns anew, hands to face.
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Alfred is waiting when the car makes its descent into the cave beneath the lake, anxious but unafraid - if Superman showing up in the dead of night to collect his fancy pajamas after having nearly torn Bruce's head off wasn't enough to make him nervous, then nothing is. He does his best to herd Clark out of the car and into the section of their industrial deathtrap that counts as an infirmary, intent on-- well, he's not sure what he's intent on, when he gets him there. Not like they can stick a needle in him and draw blood.
When Bruce finally arrives - a little gross beneath his civvies, having stopped in a bolthole of his downtown - he's met with the sight of Alfred trying to re-stick electrodes and sensor pads to a wiggly Kryptonian.
"Are you-- is he all right?"
Don't sound worried is thrown right out the window; Bruce has to all but skid to a halt near them, one hand on Clark's shoulder already.
Alfred looks at him, expression grave.
"He's drunk."
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Bruce Wayne, though--
Well, first he gets the sunniest of smiles, hazy eyed. Hand on the shoulder apparently translates as a signal to open his arms -- electrodes and wires ignored, ruining Alfred's efforts -- and list inwards where he's perched to pull him into a hug. Heroic chin bumps against a shoulder.
"I can'get drunk Alfred," sounds -- in tone and content -- like something a drunk person might say, admonishing, assuring. "I'm fine. Your car beeped at me but I didn't mean to."
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Despite that look, one arm slips around Clark's back, holding him up and close. There is something in Bruce's chest that's still trembling, thinking about Clark being dead or permanently damaged. Because of me. Because he dove in there trying to help me. If we weren't-- he wouldn't have.
"It's okay," he says, of car beeping, and realizes just how fast his heart's beating. Relief hasn't quite taken hold yet, but there's at least a ribbon of it cutting through his anxiety at being in the same room with him, at being able to touch him. He reaches out and tilts a readout screen to an angle that permits him to read it.
"Depressed behavioral inhibitory center in the cerebral cortex," he's murmuring, "Lowered glutamate, stimulated hypoth-- uh."
Alfred raises his eyebrows, exasperated. See?
Huh.
"He's drunk."
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Vaguely accusatory as much as approving, and conventionally untrue, given no one can possibly smell fantastic post vigilante superheroism, and yet, there remains the faint traces of cologne and aftershave molecules, and probably some vaguely fanfiction notion of whatever registers as uniquely Bruce to supersenses. This observation is made from where Clark has comfortably tucked his head against Bruce's shoulder, the world spinning while Bruce remains solidly reliable, unmoving, holding him. Hug has turned into cling.
He will 100% die when he remembers/is told about stating this observation in front of Alfred Pennyworth, so that's something to look forward to.
"In soph'more I drank this whole thing of vodka as a dare and e'ryone kept expecting I get sick or drunk and they said I was cheating and it was water." He lifts his head. "But it wasn't. It was Pete's dad's. I'm drunk?"
Wait, what?
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"Chemically, what you're experiencing is like alcohol intoxication," Bruce tells him, and points at the screen. "Obviously we can't take your blood or check how your liver's filtering anything, but as far as the waves in your brain are concerned, 'drunk' is you sorted out, Kansas."
Alfred re-sticks Clark with more electrodes as Bruce continues to explain, his low voice almost comforting as he runs through the whys and whats of the things they can detect happening inside of him with sensors and scanners. During this, Alfred gives them some space, either deciding he's done all he can or that, frankly, he doesn't need to see them canoodling. (The security feed will be plenty.)
"It's because you inhaled a bunch of neurotoxin." Bruce is quieter, now that they're alone. He presses a kiss to the top of Clark's head.
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Mouth presses into a line. Neurotoxin. :/
"I threw it," he says, "off the planet."
What else did he do? He saved a guy. He saved Batman. "Did all those people okay? I mean." Now that he is more conscious as to what the fuck, there seems to be a concerted effort to counter it -- at least for whole moments at a time. "We saved them. Bad guys though?"
:\
A pain, but much less of a pain than being dead from neurotoxin.
"All the hostages survived," Bruce assures him, the hand at his side moving up and down every so often, more to reassure himself than comfort Clark at this stage. He's not normally so plainly affectionate, preferring to keep his touches brief unless they're leading to something else, but the incident's rattled him-- and maybe Clark won't remember very well, when he sobers up.
If he sobers up.
"I took care of the traffickers." A few unconscious, a few bleeding and handcuffed to a pipe, one upside down. Giftwrapped for GCPD; Happy New Year. Bruce lets out a sigh and presses the bridge of his nose against Clark's temple. "You scared the shit out of me. You're still scaring the shit out of me. Please don't do that again. Gotham isn't like Metropolis, Clark, they're just going to get meaner when Superman shows up."
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But drunk's okay. He feels pretty good, in that straight sentences are hard and there is now a glimmer of worry with the science and consequences explained to him, but his blood is warm and Bruce is being sweet to him. He closes his eyes, content, at the feel-sound of Bruce's voice at his ear.
Registers what he's saying, opens his eyes and lifts his head to look at him.
"You," he says, placing his words very deliberately down, pointing, "were in trouble. There were many guns with guys, and I saved you."
They're a team, Bruce. :\
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Moment of silence, considering-- being mad right now is tempting, but he thinks it'd be lost on Clark, or it'd just upset him in a way that would be too unkind, given his mindset.
"You did save me."
Technically. From the thing that came after, not from anything that he swooped into stop. Well, probably. Bruce has dealt with armed men (many guns with guys) en mass before, and come out the victor. Barring something completely insane happening, he's sure he would have tonight, too. He's going to have to talk to Clark about it, and seriously; intervening in shitty gunfights in Gotham between thugs and figment of the city's imagination isn't going to trigger any senate hearings - and it's important that divide remain.
"Thank you."
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That would absolutely not have flown with a sober Clark Kent, who must by now be getting used to wading through Bruce's fronts, knowing what lies behind them. It flies for this Clark, who leans into him again, content as a labrador who's been well walked and getting petted for his efforts. Frisbees caught, sticks fetched, bats rescued.
"I heard your heart," he says, like that's a normal thing to say. His fingertips touch over where that heart is, the body's busiest little muscle, twitching tirelessly. His hand is warm, flattening there. "Had to see what it was doing."
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"Do you normally hear my heart?" is gently (and genuinely) curious. Bruce shifts so that he can half-sit on the bed beside Clark, resigned to camping out until those readouts tell him something good, at least.
Of course he's well aware how much Clark can hear, is aware that he keeps close tabs on Lois Lane, with her lifestyle of constant danger, and since Luthor's meddling, his mother. It's just never occurred to him that Clark might be listening in on him, at least not remotely. While they're with it each other, it always seemed like a given.
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Bruce is asking him so gently. "Normally," he says. "Normally and I don't always notice it, 'til I notice it. Heart, and." He gestures, loosely. And other things. But the heart is the first thing, the thing that can't be helped.
"Ss'how I knew you liked me after all," is added, with a broad grin, pushing into the lean. Eyy.
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What he feels is not anger at all, and he has to be very careful not to let his heart rate tick up as he thinks about it. Unhelpful.
This is ... a bad thing to be slightly turned on by. And unlike him. But it feels like reaching out and being reached back to, it feels like reciprocation of something just a little bit shameful, that Bruce knows he shouldn't be doing and yet finds himself unable to stop. Does Clark feel the same way?
"I like to look out for you, too," is what he says after a while, his voice a low rumble next to his cheek. Which Clark probably knows already. Satellites aren't sneaky.
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Right now, of course, nothing seems very strange. Of course they want to look out for one another. They are team mates, and more than just that.
"I like that you like to look out for me too," Clark says, a little too accurately, though he seems pleased with himself for all those words happening in order, with syllables only bumping together a little bit with a slur. Mainly because he's murmuring it, in the quiet space they've created together. "S'nice." Nailed it.
Following what he considers to be the natural order of things, he turns enough to meet Bruce in a kiss. Something electronic beeps at them as readings adjust. Getting closer to normal.
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