Work Text:
If he makes it out of here alive, Bruce is putting an embargo on all missions to cold places, effective immediately.
He doubts he makes it out of here alive though.
Getting flung into icy cold water is bad enough. Getting flung into icy cold water and trapped under the ice itself, well that’s—
stupid
—probably the last mistake he’s ever going to make.
A sharp, sudden crack makes him flinch, gunshot, but no, no, it’s just the ice breaking. A hand closes on his shoulder, yanks. He knows it should hurt, will probably hurt as soon as he isn’t too numb to think, but his head is breaking the surface and he can’t care right now.
“Bruce—B, my God—“
Bruce gasps, chokes, forces his tongue to form words: “Fuck ’ff.”
“Yeah, no—good to see you too.”
It’s Clark. Of course it’s Clark; if anyone could miraculously just be there in the most remote place at the absolute last second to save a life, it would be Superman.
“Bruce, please talk to me, your vitals are really freaking me out right now.”
Bruce’s vitals are, frankly, freaking him out too, but he’s still too numb to feel it as anything more than a vague existential irritation. “F-fine.”
“You are not fine, you—“ Clark picks him up, holds him like he weighs nothing and he should hate that, knows that he normally does hate that, but right now it’s—okay.
He almost drowned in the Arctic; he’s entitled to a little weakness right now.
Clark won’t hold it against him.
Clark, who is still talking.
“—get you someplace warm.”
Everything is blurry, and that’s bad. He’s—he remembers enough to know that’s bad. He should stay awake.
Clark is flying with him now, and he usually hates that too, but he’s just so tired.
He can’t feel anything past the numbness and the cold and the armor of his suit, but he knows that Clark is warm, so at least something in this forsaken frozen landscape is.
(He’d always thought Clark ran hot, even before they really knew each other, and he’d checked that after they became allies—friends—when Clark allowed him to study his abilities—
“37.1 degrees Celsius.”
“Why do you use Celsius?”
“Is that really what you’re going to take from this?”
—he’d been right).
Clark is saying something, but he can’t tell if it’s memory-Clark or here-Clark.
He can’t…
…
.
*****
If almost freezing to death hurts this badly every time, Bruce is just going to go ahead and actually freeze to death next time.
Maybe Mr. Freeze has finally updated his freeze gun.
“Your shoulder needs iced.”
Bruce’s mouth runs on ahead before his brain checks in. “Damn. Where will I ever find some ice.”
A laugh, short.
Clark.
Bruce cracks open an eye to see Clark standing over him, plaid and glasses and ratty jeans. His smile is a little stiff around the edges, but he doesn’t seem frantic, which means Bruce is probably going to live.
“How do you feel?”
Bruce shuts his eyes, then blinks them both open. “Like I got dunked in the Arctic Ocean." His voice sounds like it's being dragged over a rumble strip. "Where are we?”
“Canada.” Clark holds up a credit card, looking a little sheepish. “I, uh, borrowed your card for the room. And the change of clothes. I didn’t want to explain why Superman and Batman were renting a motel.”
Bruce looks down at himself. It feels like he's wearing sweatpants under the half-dozen blankets he's wrapped in, and a blue sweatshirt that is both the lumpiest and softest thing Bruce has ever worn in his life is poking out around his neck. “That’s fair.”
“I also called Alfred. He wants to talk to you once you’re back on your feet.”
“I think I’ll stay lying down.” Bruce actually isn’t sure he can stand up just yet, but Clark doesn’t need to know that.
The look Clark gives him over his glasses suggests he isn’t fooled.
“Can you move everything? Like—does everything work? Your body temperature’s still a little low, but—“ Clark breaks off, worrying at his lip.
Bruce has a momentary flash of pity for Clark, who cares so much about everyone and whose invulnerability will never help anyone but himself.
“Still stings, but I think—“ Bruce shifts a little, flexing various muscle groups in turn. “More or less in working order. No amputations necessary.”
Clark scowls. “Not funny, Bruce. None of this is funny.”
Bruce has enough experience with this sort of situation to know when a lecture is coming.
Sure enough: “Why didn’t you call me? You knew Luthor was doing something dangerous, but you still followed him all the way up here by yourself and got into a fight with his new pet—which we still have to find—and nearly drowned!”
Bruce keeps his mouth shut. This is probably less than he deserves; if he was in Clark’s place, the silent treatment would likely be involved, after a vicious tongue-lashing.
“You almost died, Bruce.” Clark isn’t looking at him anymore. “You were so cold, you almost weren’t breathing—“
“It’s the job, Clark.” Bruce keeps his voice as gentle as his raw and scratchy throat will allow. “You know that.”
“You don’t have to take such stupid risks!” Clark’s voice breaks on what was probably supposed to be a shout and he scrubs at his eyes under his glasses. He looks halfway to falling apart—between Luthor and that tsunami in Japan, it’s been a hell of a week all around.
A hell of a week, and Bruce is exhausted, half-frozen, and emotionally drained. If Clark starts crying, he will lose it spectacularly. “You’re right.” Clark’s eyes snap to him, startled. “I mean it. I thought I understood the situation when I engaged, but I didn’t. I underestimated the threat Luthor’s monster posed.” Bruce forces himself to look over at Clark. “It was a disaster from start to finish. I should have called you in when I got the tip. You’re right.”
Clark looks a little disbelieving, and disconcertingly fragile, but Bruce can see the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Did you hit your head, too?
“Hn.”
“I forgive you.”
Something loosens in Bruce’s chest, a knot he’d assumed was just from the cold. Ridiculous. “Didn’t apologize.” He’s having serious trouble keeping his eyes open now.
“I know.” And Clark’s back to that unbearably patient tone he gets when he’s ignoring Bruce’s words in favor of some underlying emotion that may or may not actually be there.
Bruce would almost prefer another lecture.
He feels Clark’s hand against his forehead. He knows he should swat Clark away, but can’t muster up the energy. “Get some rest. I’ll be around.”
“Always are,” he mutters.
An exhale that might have been a laugh, under better circumstances. “Always will be.”
Bruce thinks he feels Clark’s hand in his hair, but he’s asleep before he can be sure.
The digital clock on the bedside table reads 2:37AM when he wakes from a dream of dark water and bone-deep cold and can’t breathe. He forces himself to calm down and take stock. His throat feels worse, but his everything else feels the same or better. He’ll take it.
A soft noise from the chair beside the bed. “Bruce?” Clark lifts his head from where he’d clearly been sleeping. He looks almost as tired as Bruce feels. “You okay? Your heart kicked up.”
Clark would never admit that if he wasn’t still half asleep. They both know he keeps an ear (and an eye, and probably one or two other things) out for Bruce, especially when he’s worried, but they don’t really talk about it. Clark because he doesn’t want Bruce to tell him to stop, and Bruce—
I know his heart.
—Bruce because he won’t admit that he—he doesn’t mind.
“I’m fine,” he says, just a whisper—to spare his throat, and to spare this moment, because right now feels like a moment for whispers and acceptance and things they won’t say outside of a dingy motel room at two in the morning. “Go back to sleep.”
“Mm. You too.”
Bruce doesn’t sleep, not right away, but he keeps his breathing slow and even so that Clark will.
Clark doesn’t need sleep the way people do, but sometimes he just needs to shut down, check out, be somewhere quiet and still and removed from a world that demands more of him than it has any right to.
Bruce wonders, now and then, what he dreams of.
Still. Damn him for being able to sleep sitting up all night and wake without feeling like his spine has permanently molded itself to the back of the chair.
Maybe he deserves it.
Maybe Bruce is entirely too burnt out for any real train of thought tonight. This morning. Wonderful.
He falls asleep to the creak of the window, the rattle of the heater, and the near-silent breathing of a man who will cross continents to bring him home.
He doesn’t dream.