Chapter Text
One month later...
Ollie took a sip of his disgusting beer. Dinah shook her head in exasperation. She knew he hated this type of beer and she knew drank it once in a while to remind himself why. Ollie grimaced. It really tasted like cooled-down warm piss.
Hal thankfully stole his drink and drank from it, "You have awful taste buds."
Ollie grinned, "I'll have you know I have awesome taste in everything except when it comes to friends."
Hal comically arched an eyebrow, "Is that so?"
Ollie winked, "I'm friends with you, aren't I?"
Hal slicked his hair back, "No, I'm friends with you."
Dinah chuckled, "That's the same thing."
Hal shook his head, "I was the one who had to lower his high standards."
Ollie rose and took his favourite bottle of wine in one hand to admire its label, "I've seen your other friends. Believe me, I'm by far the coolest."
Dinah also rose, "Well, as much as I would like to see you banter like children, I have an appointment I can't miss. Don't break anything I like." She kissed Ollie's left cheek and went out.
Ollie poured himself some wine, "So, Hal, how did your Batman blackmail plan go?"
Hal's face twisted in distaste, "It backfired."
Ollie threw back his head to laugh, "Of course, it did! Now, tell me just how much of a disaster it was."
Hal sighed, "I called him and before I could even blackmail him properly, he told me," Hal's voice deepened in an approximate attempt at getting Batman's voice right, "Jordan, I have been closely monitoring your actions for twenty years. Is the thing you want to use against me worth all the information and photos I have accumulated during that period?"
Ollie let out a peal of laughter, "Man, Hal, you overplayed your hand a bit much in the past." He wiped out a stray laughter tear, "I needed that laugh."
Hal gave a weak smile, "Me, too. Is that blood on your shirt?"
Ollie glanced down and made seductively exaggerated movements while he sang, "I'm... too sexy for my shirt... I'm too sexy... it hurts..."
Hal threw a pillow at his face, "The gray is showing in your words, geezer."
Ollie smiled, overjoyed, as he snatched the pillow before it hit him, "I have something to announce."
Hal took a sip, " 'bout what?"
Ollie sighed, "Maybe I'm growing too old for this."
Hal put down Ollie's stolen beer, "Stop being a drama queen and out with it."
"I love Dinah."
Hal rolled his eyes, "Yeah, and I've got eyes."
"You don't understand, Hal. I feel extra cheesy saying this out loud, but she makes me want to wake up each morning. She's always there when I need her."
"And?"
"I'm asking her in marriage."
Hal stared at him, "You're serious?"
Ollie's eyes gleamed at him, "Yeah. Never been more serious."
Hal closed his mouth and looked at the table. He took back his beer, "That's great, man."
Ollie quirked up an eyebrow, "It doesn't sound like you think it's great."
Hal's eyes wandered back up to meet his, "It's just... Remember our stupid bet? The one about which League member would marry first? Second?"
Ollie grew pensive as if he was trying to figure out where his friend was going with this, "Yeah. What about it?"
Hal glanced at his beer and put it back on the table as if he was disgusted by the thought of it, "We both betted Superman would be first. I betted Arthur would be second; Wally, third; Diana, fourth and Batman and J'onn would never marry."
"And?" Ollie prompted, still trying to figure where he was going with this.
"And you betted Wally would be third; Arthur, fourth and Diana, Batman and J'onn would never marry. You betted I'd be second."
Ollie's eyes widened in realization. Hal avoided his searching look.
"That's..." Ollie started.
"Pathetic I still attach importance to a stupid bet, uh?" Hal grinned self-deprecating, still averting eye contact.
In the awkward silence that follows, Hal added, "Thing is, Ollie, I'm glad for you. Hell, Dinah too. You both deserve an unf*cked-up happy ending. Wedding bells and pigeons and all the bird sh*t that comes with that. Even the dumb decorative cake that's overpriced and the stupid rings." He paused, "Don't let me poop over your happiness. Just, you know, forget about my lack of enthusiasm. I'm too messed up right now to be a good friend."
Ollie quietly asked, "What happened?"
Hal gulped, "When Superman, J'onn and I went back in time, last month, I... did something stupid."
"What kind of stupid are we talking about? Nuclear stupid? Or just drunk stupid?" Ollie tried to relieve the tension.
Hal actually winced before exhaling, "I copied the content of Bruce's diary with my ring."
Ollie's eyes widened, "Christ..." He drained his wine glass in a few quick swallows, "How the hell did you do that?"
"I'm not as dumb as everyone seems to think I am," Hal retorted.
Ollie quirked an eyebrow up at that, "You just stole Batman's personal diary's content. That's the very definition of dumb and gutsy, but especially dumb."
Hal sat at the edge of his seat, looking contrived, "It seemed a good idea at the time."
"How did you do it?" Ollie asked as he poured himself another glass.
Hal waved his ring hand in the air, "I use it to find clean shirts in my apartment. That night, at your house, twenty years ago, I just asked it to find Bruce Wayne's diary and it did."
Ollie blinked at him. Hal blinked back.
The billionaire took another sip of wine, "Your ring can do that?"
Hal swallowed, "It did. It's the first time it works this well with something I've never seen before."
Ollie leaned forward, interested. Damn, he still hadn't shaken out his fascination with both Lex's and Bruce's mind process, "You read his diary?"
The pilot nodded, uncharacteristically not verbally answering the question.
"And it wasn't what you expected," Ollie surmised.
Hal squirmed in his seat, "Hell no. Took a while for my ring to decode it. I wanted to find something stupid to hold over him, you know, girls he had crushed on, pranks people did on him, complaints about Alfred, stupid things he did..."
Ollie snorted. Hal had been naive. It was obvious, even to Ollie, that Bruce's diary would be a dark tunnel leading into a really twisted mind.
The other man looked uncomfortable as he glanced up at him, "Yeah, it was dumb to think he'd have normal things in his diary. Let me tell you, he's majorly, obsessively, messed up. I shouldn't have read it."
Ollie made eye contact with him, "Yeah." Maybe Bruce slicing Lex's throat wasn't even the worse he had seen of Bruce...
The guilt in Hal's eyes made him curious as to the nature of the diary entries, however, he had long learned that trying to understand Bruce was doom to bring trouble and headache. Sometimes, it was better not to get too close to someone.
Hal gestured at him, "How the hell were you even friends with him?"
Ollie pondered it, his head tilting to the side before returning his eyes on Hal, "People bore me, Hal, especially back then. For all of their flaws, Bruce and Lex never did. I once was foolish enough to think that was the most important thing to seek in other people."
Hal looked at the glass on the table and his face scrunched in confusion and mild awkwardness, "That's fucked up."
Ollie grinned, "Welcome to the fucked-up-kids-with-too-much-money-and-not-enough-sense club admission process. I barely made the cut, 'cause I'm not near as insane as they were."
Hal nodded, still looking upset and regretful. Whatever he had read must have been seriously messed up. He needed a distraction.
Ollie threw the pillow at his face. Hal dodged it.
"Relax, Hal. Bruce is not nearly as insane now as he was back then. He won't kill you for reading his diary. He'll just torture you until you wish you were."
Hal took a pillow in each hand and threw them in rapid-fire at Ollie, "Not before I drown you in pillows."
Ollie laughed. He'd all but forgotten Dinah's words about not breaking anything she liked. Oh well, Hal needed all the cheering up he could get and who was Ollie to deny him that right?
***
J'onn walked into the Justice League conference room and was surprised to see Batman looking at Earth from the gigantic glass window. Batman rarely attended the Watchtower without a particular task to fulfill. It was even rarer to see him with his hands idle.
"J'onn," the human growled out, less an acknowledgement, more of an uncertainty.
"Batman," the Martian answered as he walked closer to the man. The only source of light was the sun's reflection on Earth. The blue planet gleamed gloriously under the sun's tender touch. This was one of J'onn's favourite image of Earth even if it reminded him of another life on a red planet.
They stood there, a man almost leaning on the glass while the Martian stood a few steps back gazing at the black figure on the light blue background. Minutes ticked by. Time for a Martian was not as importantly quantified as most human civilizations did. He had once learned the Martian way of breathing in each moment as they flowed into one another. Humans, the curious culture they were, had taught him to calculate exactly which moment had been lost forever.
"Lex and I were parallels," Batman intoned in the companionship silence that had grown between them, "Lines veering close to one another without touching." A gauntleted hand clenched at his side.
J'onn knew better than to pry into the man's brain. This man's confidence was a gift rarely granted. It would be a shame to squander it.
He stepped forward once, "Parallel destinies are a rare gift of the mind." It was a Martian saying he rarely used; rare were the ones wise or openminded enough to understand them on Earth. Batman was an extremely well-versed scholar, a man who learned from everyone. His thirst for knowledge could not be sated. In many ways, it was a blessing for a stranger like J'onn.
"It's a black mirror of possibilities," Batman answered in what seemed to be an obscure quote.
"Only through visualization of the possibilities can oneself choose the best path," J'onn replied by rote.
Batman half-turned in his direction, "It also heightens the weight of blame that is associated with those choices."
J'onn's gaze found the lenses-covered eyes, "I once heard the saying human learns from their mistakes."
The man's jaw closed down, withdrawing from the conversation. J'onn felt sadden by the loss of the connection. Batman liked discussing abstract concepts as long as it dodged his emotional motivation to raise those points in the first place.
J'onn watched the man whirl back to his planet.
"When I first landed on this blue planet," J'onn deliberately admitted, "I was sad."
The human body tensed.
"The things I lost could never be regained. This new beginning meant nothing compare to my loss."
He closed his eyes, reminiscing the terror of his arrival on Earth. Then, the quietness in his mind had been deafening. Gone was his wife's gentle thoughts and his child's questions. It was a void nobody could ever fill in his mind. There were no more Martians to inhabit him. No more community and acquaintances symbiotically intersected with their minds. He had been alone. Truly, utterly, alone in a way no human could ever understand.
He opened his eyes, seeing the lone black back facing the world from his gargoyle in the sky. A child who once lost his family in a dark alley...
"I knew things could never be as they were before. My connections grew in other ways, in ways I had not thought possible before."
J'onn careful watch the silhouette in front of him shift through his words, weighing them with his usual attentiveness for any nugget of knowledge he may pick up. He had already concluded the man would not respond. It was not often he would let the conversation wander upon Batman's emotional minefields.
But Batman was nothing if not surprises. "Letting go of the impossible is not something everyone can do, especially when they are offered a shot at a miracle."
J'onn carefully reviewed the words in his mind. If someone had offered him a chance to get back what was lost on Mars, it would have been hard to refuse the opportunity.
He stepped forward until he was beside Batman, "Miracles do happen."
Batman bristled, "Miracles are concealed temptations, ready to ruin anyone foolish enough to believe in them."
J'onn could deduce he was thinking of the wish-granting object twenty years in the past. From the content of the conversation, Batman must have wanted to use it to save his parents from their demise even at the cost of Lex's life.
"Wanting something so badly, especially when it is impossible, is an obsession. And obsession leads to bad decision making." One of his hand almost settled palm first on the glass as if he wanted to touch the world on the other side of the window. At the last second before contact, Batman withdrew his hand with a brusqueness he rarely exhibited.
Maybe, J'onn thought, they were similarly yearning to be part of that world below them.
Batman finally turned his head in J'onn's direction, "Do those connections make you as happy as you were before?"
J'onn examined the man who hid his vulnerabilities behind a mask, behind his calculated tone and behind his self-imposed distance. He deserved honesty.
J'onn answered, "Batman, I cannot compare what was gain and what was lost on a scale. It would trivialize both experiences."
Batman observed him from behind his lenses. The soft light from the window illuminated his mask and lower half of his face in a way that made him appear as both a ferocious dark monster and a tired human. The image was, like always, jarring for a Martian who had chosen this man's satellite as his home.
J'onn glanced back at the beautiful round planet under their protection. His contemplation must have gone longer than he had realized when he heard a grunt beside him. It sounded like a soft thanks to J'onn's ears.
***
Lois liked Clark's living room.
Even despite the mould on the ceiling.
It was comfy.
The sofa was just the right amount of broken in; the lights were soft enough to illuminate what needed to be read while avoiding the interrogation room feeling; the coffee table was low enough to lay your feet on while still high enough to rest your drink on.
Unfortunately, today, her usual pleasures felt sapped by Clark's glazed over eyes.
"Clark?"
"Uh?"
Lois tugged his sleeve, "What's wrong?"
Clark blinked and turned toward her, "Nothing."
She frowned, "That's a lie and we both know it. You've been acting weird ever since you came back from your trip in the past. What's wrong?"
Clark's hand gently removed Lois's hand on his sleeve, "It's hard to explain, Lois... There's something I should be telling you, but I want to make sure I know what this is before I do."
Lois felt worry bloom in her chest, "Does it have something to do with the fact you always seem to be looking at something far away?"
Clark's lips dropped as his eyes shined with something that resembled shame, "I... I can't tell you yet. I have to process something first."
Lois nodded and looked at him seemingly look at something far away again. She curled closer beside the warm body beside her, yet he felt as far away from her as his gaze had been aimed away.