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“as the bullet flies home
but the heart that’s pierced with it
still is racing
still is racing, alone”
-“Leviathan, Bound” by Shearwater
The cocoon of the earth around them should have felt like a grave, but instead it felt like a hiding place, safe and secret from the world. The rocks had long ago stopped rumbling as they settled and they had a reasonable amount of oxygen, trackers active on belt and boots. Clark had asked a question, a dangerous and desperate question about Bruce’s recent (troubling) behavior, gambling on the chance that Bruce would even answer. Clark mostly expected to be ignored, or shut out, but he held on. He had nearly given up hope when the other man spoke.
“I was…waiting,” Bruce said, his voice quiet in the dark. If Clark hadn’t had such sharp hearing, he wouldn’t have even noticed Bruce rubbing at his own face right after.
“Waiting,” Clark echoed, when Bruce didn’t continue.
There was a rustle of fabric, a shift. Bruce didn’t usually fidget so it sounded as loud as the crack of thunder.
“When…” a swallow, “…when my parents…I cried.”
It was said defensively, like it warranted attack or criticism. Clark was quiet for almost too long, long enough to think he was giving Bruce space and then to realize this was Bruce and he’d likely interpret silence as condemnation.
“I think that’s normal,” he said, trying to make it sound like a joke. It wasn’t lightening the situation as much as trying to apologize for the pause, letting him know it wasn’t a grudging concession. “It has been in my experience, but I’m not human so what do I know.”
“Self-deprecation doesn’t look good on you, Kal,” Bruce said gruffly, but firmly, a far leap from the tentative nature of the admission before. This was followed by a deeper silence, one in which Bruce’s breathing was so precisely even that Clark feared he’d overcorrected and killed the conversation completely.
Then the breathing stuttered, like someone bracing themselves for a blow, and Bruce’s voice dropped even more in volume.
“I didn’t want to feel that way then. I’d avoid it, distract myself. But it would catch up to me and I’d get to a point where I couldn’t stop it. I…hated it. Still do. Hate being out of…losing…”
“Control,” Clark supplied softly, without thinking. For a moment he’d stopped treating the conversation as dangerous ground and merely saw someone— a friend— struggling, and held out a hand.
For once, Bruce didn’t reject it.
“Yes,” he said, equally soft. “Feeling. It’s…it makes me a bad son, to…hate missing them, to not want it to…hurt.”
If Clark had a hundred years, he didn’t think he could properly explain all the ways this was wrong. As it was, he could barely manage a sentence against it, he was so thrown. He’d known, of course, that their loss haunted Bruce. It was one of the perverse details that gave them common ground, united them while on the outside of so many other things. But this was so…backwards, he couldn’t even muster a response in the moment, or not anything more eloquent than ‘that’s stupid,’ which he caught on the press of tongue against teeth and stopped just in time. That would have ended the conversation, he had no doubt.
This wasn’t even the discussion he’d been prepared to have.
“When Jason…when I lost Jason,” Bruce said, shifting again. “I waited. I didn’t let myself…feel out of control. Not like that. I dreaded it, but I assumed it was inevitable.”
“But it wasn’t,” Clark said, like he’d been stuck across the face— breathless and empty and bewildered.
“I may have failed to account for the differential in a nine year old’s ability to suppress…displays…and an adult who had spent years training to do precisely that.”
Bruce said this like grief was a laboratory experiment, with factors to control for, with results to quantify. Clark wished for another hundred years.
“So, you didn’t,” Clark summarized instead.
“No,” Bruce said. “I didn’t. And then you were gone, and I…couldn’t. I realized if it hadn’t happened by then, it wasn’t going to unless I let it, outside of the complicating influence of toxins or drugs. It…unsettled me.”
Scared me, Clark heard.
“And then I kept telling myself, ‘you’re going to let yourself cry about this. You’re going to let yourself howl and weep,’ because I know it’s necessary. Every human psychology book says so. But it was always some future date, a free weekend or afternoon, that always got put off. Fuck, I’m an idiot.”
“For trying to schedule your breakdowns?” Clark asked, and he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help the wry and fond curve of his mouth. “Yeah, I think so.”
“It’s easier,” Bruce said abruptly.
“To not feel?”
“To pretend to myself that I don’t. Or it was.”
“And now?” Clark asked, twisting a little so he could look in the direction of Bruce’s face. It didn’t matter so much in the dark, where even with vision the image mingled with bone and muscle and heat, but it was an instinctive thing to do.
Bruce sighed, like stumbling. “Now it would be a relief. But I don’t think I can, anymore. I don’t think I remember how…to stop fighting it. To not fight it off.”
“Maybe you need time,” Clark said, because it wasn’t in him to not at least try to be helpful. He could hear Bruce gearing up to retort and he hastened to keep going. “I mean, you’ve had time. But have you given yourself time, when you weren’t filling it with distractions? You just told me that even when you faced it, you kept putting it off.”
“Do I need to?” Bruce asked sharply.
“You seem to think so,” Clark said steadily, quickly. “Maybe you need time to be alone with it.”
“I can’t just up and leave Gotham,” Bruce snapped. “Or the company, or the League. You know what I do. You know how much would fall apart if—”
“We lost you? For good? Yeah, I think I do,” Clark said, steel in his voice. “This…isn’t sustainable. For you. I think you know that. But we used to survive short breaks and I think we could again, if you weren’t making excuses for yourself.”
“I don’t do well alone.” The admission was so small and quiet Clark wasn’t sure he would have heard it if he’d been anyone other than…him. It was barely actual words, a volume that would have been private and self-directed if it hadn’t been Clark, if it hadn’t been Bruce.
“So don’t go alone, if you go anywhere,” Clark said with a frown, wondering if he’d misjudged things if Bruce was shaken enough to admit something like that. “You don’t have to…get away from people. Just, stop doing so many other things for bit. Maybe talk to someone.”
“When was the last time you cried in front of someone, as an adult, Clark?” The words were a harsh challenge, the rocky defensiveness that had lurked at the corners of the conversation finally coming out.
“My Ma, a few months ago,” Clark said casually, easily. It was actually over a year ago, in some nebulous timeframe Clark would have struggled to precisely nail down, but he figured he could blur some lines for this.
The oh was pin-drop quiet. Then, with a tinge of bitterness lacing the words, “Alfred isn’t exactly comfortable around ‘emotional displays.’”
It took Clark a full minute to parse everything in this, in all the layers: It was the closest he’d ever heard Bruce come to outright criticizing the man who raised him, or categorizing him as a parent by association or implication. The phrase at the end, thicker than the rest, sounded like a mocking quotation, a thing lifted from…an explanation? An apology? It was impossible to tell. It was also impossible to tell how much this reluctance was from Alfred’s own telegraphed signals and how much was from Bruce’s reservations about letting anyone bear emotional burdens with him if he suspected they were even slightly uneasy, however willing.
“I don’t really care who it is,” Clark settled on saying. “Or if it’s anyone. Just give yourself an honest chance.”
“Honest,” Bruce barked a laugh, the tension that had been building like a wall breaking suddenly, shattering. “Not so good at that, either, Boy Scout.”
“Since when has a challenge stopped you?” Clark shot back with a lopsided grin. He knew even if Bruce couldn’t see it, he would hear it. Super hearing might have been Clark’s power, but Bruce spent a lot of time navigating the dark. He had his own honed skills.
“Hnn,” was all Bruce said to that.
“Wanna get out of here?”
“I thought we were waiting for backup.”
“I got a second wind,” Clark said. “Found a buried reserve of strength.”
“You were lying,” Bruce said, and Clark could feel the other man’s razor gaze narrowing on him in the air pocket of the cave-in. “Dammit, Clark.”
Clark shrugged. “I’ve picked up some strategies here and there, from friends, for making necessary things happen.”
He could sense, feel, hear Bruce bristling until he got to the word necessary and then it was like the rising fight went out of the other man. There was a limp sag of limb in the pitch black.
“You won’t trap me as easily again,” he said quietly, without ire, full of resignation. “However necessary you think it might be.”
“Which is why I had to make this one count,” Clark said. “Come on, let’s go, and then you can refuse to talk to me for a month or so. But I’ll warn you now, I’ll still think it was worth it.”
“Two weeks,” Bruce said, right before Clark pulled him into the circle of cape, to tear the earth apart above them as they drove up toward the air and sun; to not lose him behind in the dirt. “Two weeks,” he cleared his throat, “for appearances.”
Clark knew Bruce wasn’t—was choosing not to be—angry.
“Up, up, and away,” Clark said, arms tightening.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Bruce muttered back, and then they were flying.