Work Text:
Bruce
It’s the kind of day that makes me consider dark things. It’s the slow spiral towards unwell that starts to tip my world out of focus, sliding me further and further away from myself. My world starts to look more grey than blushed with color, and I feel my perspective slipping darker than it should. I tell myself to be positive. To be…better than circumstances.
But some days, I just can’t.
I drop my keys inside the door, slipping my shoes off with a sigh. Charity functions and anniversaries play through my thoughts in strange projector-like pictures, flashes of light recapping the day I just lived. Their colors are leached of vibrancy, leaving them sepia and pale. A flurry of dresses and fake smiles, empty fingers, and a strand of pearls breaking upon cool cement. A banquet in my parents’ honor, hosted by the hospital charity they founded when they were still young and thriving. When I was just a toddler.
Going through that party and greeting faces, seeing people who knew my parents perhaps better than I did…was sobering. Like dipping your feet in glacial water. Acute cold followed by intense pain, and then…numb. I feel numb even as I move deeper into the room, shedding my clothes as I go.
It’s days like this, when I ache all over and my mind is a flood of memories and thoughts, that the old thoughts of leaving start to rise again. I feel them flickering through my head in time with my own heartbeat, little whispers that promise a better reality if I weren’t in it. Maybe I wouldn’t have to try so goddamn hard to just…function…if I just stopped.
It’s a tempting thought pattern that feels comfortable, like a pair of worn in shoes or an old sweater. It’s grey and blue and everything cool, liquid, and gentle. It beckons me to linger, to stay for just a little while longer…
I slip onto my side of the bed, curling my knees into my chest in an attempt to draw heat into my center. I close my eyes, but I can still feel that my world is tipped, knocked out of balance by today’s events. It will be a chore to center it again, to make myself normal again, and for now, I’m just too goddamn tired to try. I don’t want to try anymore.
It’s rare that Clark isn’t awake when I come home late. Usually, I’ll come home and he’ll be seated in our bed with feet crossed, working an article, crossword, or frayed novel. He’ll usually eye me from above those horn-rimmed glasses and pat the bed beside him. And like a man starved of water, I’ll crawl into bed and press myself to his skin. I’ll draw him in so tight to me that I forget where I begin and he ends.
It’s dark in the bedroom tonight, and judging by the soft breathing next to me, he’s long ago abandoned waiting up for me. It burns more than I realized it would that I don’t have his voice in my ear righting me again, and I chalk it up to my poor mood that if effects me so deeply. But I feel the hurt like a knife in my ribs when I try to take deep breaths, try to close my eyes and welcome sleep.
I just want to rest. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to imagine my parents or what they’d think of who I am now. I heard a thousand they’d be so prouds tonight, but I still can’t quite trust it. Their names were thrown about so casually I can still hear they syllables ringing in my ears, blearing together until it’s just a collection of consonants. Perhaps the most painful reminders were the comparisons. You have your mother’s eyes. Your father’s nose…Thomas used to smile just so…Martha was always laughing like that…your parents…your parents…Thomas and Martha…
It makes my own reflection my enemy, like looking into a mirror and seeing all the things I can’t have staring back at me through tired eyes. A future that never happened, a couple that never died. Wishing for things I can’t have. People who I’ll never see again, and God, it rends me to the core. It leaves me feeling naked and fragile as an autumn branch. A breath of wind, and I just might blow over.
Master Bruce, you do not have to go tonight if you do not wish to. Your parents would understand. We all would.
God, I wish I’d taken Alfred up on that. But I had argued that it was the right thing to do. I’d overestimated myself, and now I’m suffering for it.
It’s when I start to feel the persistent burn of self pity at the backs of my eyes that I feel the mattress dipping beside me. I hold my breath a moment, but my eyes are searching the inky darkness of the bedroom unbidden. Clark’s shape moves beside me, and I feel the covers displace for a moment as he sits up on his elbow and looks down at me in the shapeless night.
There’s a breath of a moment where he rubs at his eyes, before his voice is whispering, “Hey. Did you just get home?”
I remain quiet for a moment, feeling a bit like I’ve been caught. My eyes are still burning, my chest aching with renewed fervor. I nod slightly, “Yeah.”
He yawns, one of his hands coming to brush along my hairline familiarly, “How did it go?”
My voice doesn’t sound nearly convincing enough when I murmur a soft, “Fine.”
Clark’s shadow hesitates, and I feel his fingers still at my temple, twisting a bit of my hair around a fingertip. He inhales a soft sigh, and if the moonlight were strong enough, I would bet his eyes would wash to the color of dried hyacinth. Gentle, understanding, quiet. Clark.
“That bad, huh?”
I swallow thickly, not trusting myself to do anything but nod.
Clark seems to understand my silence, and it doesn’t take long for the sound of shifting fabric to bring him closer to me. When he eventually settles beside me with his nose pressing to my forehead and his arms wound round my ribcage like a binding, I feel the first vestiges of my control fracture. He smells like flannel pajamas and clean skin. Toothpaste and herbal tea. His skin feels like a prayer answered, and I feel the baptism soul deep when his lips press to my brow and he whispers an apology.
It’s the gentle kind of apology you give when you don’t know what to say. It’s a mourning apology, the breed of which speaks compassion and solidarity and understanding. Looking into someone else’s abyss, grasping their hand, and jumping in together. It’s the coolness of blue meeting the wild abandon of red. And until now, I didn’t know that it was exactly what I needed to hear.
I break. It’s not loud or beautiful or poetic. It isn’t accompanied by lovely words or memories of beautiful people I’ll never see. But it’s the breaking of control that allows me to cry in silence. It’s the few tears that slide down my cheeks into the smooth planes of Clark’s chest, the tightening of his hands against my back, the sharp inhales of my breath as I mourn. Crying feels like a cleansing ritual, like drowning poison out of my system with grief, and I let it wash us both clean without trying to manipulate it into submission.
When the tears do eventually grow cool on my skin and the world quiets to the steady pulse of hearts between two lovers, I begin to feel the horizon shifting into equilibrium again. The pain lingers, like it always does, but its bite grows less acute. More like a dull roar in the background of my existence. It becomes easier to breathe, easier to think about the present and not those pearls striking pavement.
With each heartbeat, each gentle stroke of the clock against our ears, the world shifts, groans, and then settles again. Broken, and fragile, but…level again. Right.
We stay here so long that Clark falls asleep. I hear his breath deepen into slumber, feel his arms go slack around me. I stay awake to watch his shadow breathing. I let my fingertips brush over his skin, like smooth water...let my eyes trace his silhouette wrapping around me like a second skin.
I press into him, like I do every night when the world is too big for even the Batman, and he starts to feel so apart of me I couldn’t separate us even if I wanted to. My thoughts wander to my parents again, to what they would think of the man whom I have given myself to, and I let my mind drift over hazy, summer images of family gatherings. They would have loved him. His radiance, his energy, his compassion. All the things they were. All the things they wanted for me.
To think, if I left now, I would never experience those things again.
I fall asleep repeating a list of the things that make this life so worthwhile, over and over in my head. A mantra of family and quiet words, books and cool, cool water, lovers and lazy hands. The boys and Alfred and Clark. They’re the things that make me stay, the things that keep me tethered to this earth, and so I memorize them. I press them into my thoughts like tattoos, and I pray I don’t forget them.