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Kryptonite, shmyptonite: there’s absolutely no reason two superheroes should end up trapped in a cabin like this.
Clarke’s calling bullshit.
“Yes.” Bruce exhales deeply. On a lesser man, she’d call that a sigh. “You’ve decreed this 'bullshit' three times now.”
Huh. Her head has been fuzzy since the battle, but Bruce looks, well— he looks like he always does when he’s not wearing his smarmy billionaire persona. Stiff and withdrawn. Two years into this partnership and she’s only seen the quiet wariness that always clouds his face fade away for Diana and Alfred. Sometimes for a kid, if they end up rescuing one during a mission. He can always find a gentle expression for kids.
Not for her, though.
For all that Batman and Superwoman work flawlessly together, their partnership out of costume is nearly as fraught as it was at the beginning. Sure, Bruce isn’t actively trying to kill her anymore, but you don’t need better-than-perfect vision to see she’s not his favorite person. Cowl or not, he wears a mask when she’s around. Quiet, curt. Utterly blank. She used to think it was shame, maybe, or some sort of hesitation about working with a woman he didn’t think he could trust, but it’s simpler than that. It’s revulsion. It doesn’t matter that she died for humanity, doesn’t matter that she came back and kept fighting. Doesn’t matter that she’s spent two years trying to forgive and be forgiven— Bruce Wayne hates her.
Two years, she thinks bitterly, the kryptonite jarring the thought loose from where she keeps trying to bury it. It pops up like a daisy, bright and obnoxious. She’s tired and her head hurts. She can’t push it away.
“I have a point, you know,” Clarke says. So what if she’s needling him. She feels awful, and it’s not just the kryptonite. It’s Bruce. He deserves to be needled.
“I’m sure.”
She ignores him. “The point is: we’re superheroes. We have superpowers. We’re not supposed to end up stuck in a cabin because of some snow.”
It is cold though. Bruce has been trying to get a fire going for the last fifteen minutes. The tinder is slightly too damp to catch, but she’s feeling petty, so she doesn’t tell him. He probably already knows, anyway, and is using the task as an excuse to ignore her. Too bad she’s going to keep talking.
He doesn’t not-sigh again, but it’s a near thing. She can tell from all the way across the little room, even with her senses muffled. She can always tell with Bruce. That’s half the problem, isn’t it?
God, she needs to stop thinking like this or she’ll blurt out something she regrets. Make him really hate her. She really wishes Diana hadn’t left to get help.
“I agree,” he says, voice deep and even, but— maybe a tiny bit amused? She must be imagining things. “But here we are.” He doesn’t even bother to turn away from the fireplace.
“You’re remarkably blasé about all this.” Her voice isn’t bitter. It absolutely isn’t.
“All this?” He still hasn’t turned to face her.
“This,” she snaps, gesturing toward the massive drifts of snow piling up outside the cabin even though it’s wasted on him because he won’t turn around. “The battle going south. Surprise kryptonite with a surprise snowstorm and the damn tinder as the cherry on top.”
He stills.
“It’s not ideal,” he admits, and his voice is controlled and even. For reasons she can’t fathom, he sounds like he’s at the dentist. Talking with her cannot possibly be on the same level as interacting with someone whose chosen profession is yanking out teeth and yelling about flossing habits. “But I doubt we’ll be here very long.”
“Sure,” she says. “Right. Because Diana went to get help.”
He finally turns to face her. “Clarke—”
“It’s fine,” she says. “Like you said. It’s fine.”
His expression pulls into a frown. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.” She’s not. Her head hurts and she sounds like a broken record and she can’t control what she’s thinking or saying and it’s so stupid—
“If the kryptonite—”
“It’s not the kryptonite!” she snaps, even though she knows he hates being interrupted. Why does she know that? “It’s—”
You hangs in the air between them, unspoken but obvious nonetheless. It’s you.
There’s something strange about his expression, a quicksilver flash of something she can’t quite parse. It’s there and gone again in an instant, but she catches it all the same. If she didn’t know better, she’d say it was regret.
It’s a perfectly acceptable reaction to finding out someone thinks you’re unsettling, but she's not feeling very reasonable at the moment. It hurts. Of course he hates being trapped here with her.
She swallows. “I’m fine. It’s fine.”
“Alright,” he says slowly and clearly, like he’s talking to a child in the middle of a tantrum. It’s the most emotion he’s directed at her since he tried to kill her. “You’re fine.”
An ugly silence stretches out through the cabin. She’d sell her left kidney for him to go back to fussing with the tinder. He keeps staring at her instead, frown deepening as he takes in whatever expression is currently on her face. She can’t quite tell. Something bitter, probably. Something bruised.
Finally, he relents. “Get some rest, Clarke. With any luck, we can leave tomorrow morning.”
Bruce Wayne doesn’t believe in luck.
He moves away from the fireplace, stalking like he wants to get out. Get far away from the nightmare person curled up on the bed, snapping at him for no good reason. It’s a one-room cabin; he can’t go far. He picks the rickety table, settling in the equally rickety chair and pulling something out of his utility belt to start messing with the comms. Trying to hail Diana, probably. He’s maybe six feet away but it feels like there’s an ocean between them.
I’m sorry, she wants to tell him. I don’t know how to be around you. I just want—
Clarke cuts herself off, burying the thought as deep as she can. He wouldn’t accept an apology anyway, not really, and she doesn’t mean it the way she should. Her heart hurts. Her chest does too, tough and tight like she imagines the scar tissue would be if she were just a little more human. It’s hard to ignore, but she tries anyway. She curls up under the thin blanket, sore and miserable, and tries not to dwell on how badly she keeps screwing this up.
...
She wakes up in the morning achy but clear-headed. Bruce doesn’t look like he’s slept at all; he stayed up on watch and let her sleep the whole night through. The consummate professional even when she blunders around like a bull in a china shop, smashing holes in their tentative peace with her inability to just keep her mouth shut. He's always like this.
There’s a fire going. She closes her eyes and basks in the warmth for a moment. It’s not as good as sunlight, but in the wake of the kryptonite, every little bit helps. When she opens them again, Bruce is studying her, face blank and inscrutable.
“No word from Diana?”
“No,” he says simply. “The storm system intensified overnight. We’ve got three more feet of snow.”
“So the comms are still down.”
“The comms are still down.”
“So we’re stuck here.”
“Unless your powers have regenerated more quickly than normal, yes. We’re stuck here.”
“Great,” she says, aiming for “we’ve had worse” optimism. She knows it rankles Bruce, pessimist that he is, but it feels safer than addressing all the shit she brought up last night. It’ll be familiar at the very least. Instead, she misses by a mile. Ten, maybe. Her voice sounds terrible. She soldiers on anyway. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Protein bars.”
There goes the optimism.
...
One bar of tasteless mush each and then they retreat to opposite sides of the cabin. The six feet that felt like an ocean last night is almost claustrophobic now. Her senses aren’t at full power, but in a building this small, there’s no escape from them.
She can hear him breathing. Smell day old soap and toothpaste and the hint of smoke and cologne that clings to all his gear, the one he’s not aware of otherwise it wouldn’t exist. The smoke is from the Cave, no doubt, all the work he does to engineer and machine the tools of non-lethal vigilante justice, but the cologne is something else entirely. Not something Bruce Wayne, Sleazy Billionaire would wear, gauche and overbearing and designed to make people roll their eyes at the excess of it all. Instead, it’s quiet. Dark, complex. Delicious. It’s easy enough to tune out when she only has to see him in the context of team-ups and debriefs. Trapped in a one-room cabin with him, snowed in together like they’re living out scenes from a bad romance novel? Not so much. It saturates her every breath.
It’s driving her crazy. She can’t not breathe—she knows that for a fact, tried it for a while when she was six, bored one summer afternoon in the hayloft of the old barn—so she just has to suffer. And suffer really is the word for it: the emotions from last night are still fresh. Still painful.
Two years, she thinks again. You’d think I’d know better by now.
But she doesn’t. Bruce is a pessimist, but Clarke? She’s an optimist. Not stupid, not unworldly, just— there’s good out there. Here, on Earth, despite all the shit that people can do to each other. Martha and Jonathan are proof of that, aren’t they? Taking her in and raising her as their own when they were already hand-to-mouth. Compassionate, loving. Dedicated. And Lois, too, fearless in her pursuit of the truth, ready to wield what she learns to help those in need.
And as much as he’d hate it, Bruce is proof of concept right along with them. He could have been exactly what he pretends to be: rich, shallow, unconcerned. Instead, he puts on the suit and cowl and wrestles with Gotham’s demons. Maybe that’s why she can’t stop hoping that things will change. That he’ll just— accept her. Forgive her for the crime of her heritage, for having the temerity to die after he failed to kill her, or whatever it is about her that makes him hate her so much.
He stripped off the cowl when they first took shelter in the cabin. They’re in a remote corner of the Rockies, nowhere near civilization. The Luthor-funded domestic terrorist cell they were trying to capture is long gone. Isolated and alone, even Bruce can’t maintain enough paranoia to keep his face hidden.
There’s stubble creeping across his jaw, lighter than she would have expected. Nearly gray. Still in the rest of his tac gear, he’s a shadow limned in silver, rendered soft in the pale winter light streaming in through the lone window. He looks like one of Hemingway’s exhausted soldiers, or worse, a Brontë sister’s brooding hero. And her college advisor said that Victorian Lit class was a waste of time.
Only instead of a mad wife hidden away in the attic, he has a secret workroom below his mansion and he dresses up like a bat to fight crime. Well, she does the same, except her suit is a onesie with a completely misunderstood graphic on the front.
God, why can’t he just—
Again, she shoves the thought down. Obviously the kryptonite is still in her system. She’s better about this, usually. Doesn’t dwell on the hurt, doesn’t chase herself in circles trying to figure out why Bruce is the way he is. Doesn’t usually call him Bruce, either. He’s Batman. It’s easier to think of him like that. A professional colleague, not someone she thinks could have been a friend.
It doesn’t matter, darlin’.
Her dad’s gruff voice swims out of memory, the same phrase he always said whenever she struggled with people at school, picked on because she never seemed to have the same problems her classmates dealt with. Clear skin, good vision. Great at math, great at reading. Excellent at sports. Trying so hard to be normal and she couldn’t even do that right.
It doesn’t matter. You’re good people and you know it. Don’t cry over anyone who can’t see that.
It was harder to believe him then than it is now, but it’s still hard. She wrenches her gaze away from the window and focuses on the ragged blanket instead, tries to lose herself in counting every uneven stitch in the faded red plaid.
It works, kind of.
Br— Batman is silent and still, staring out at the storm like he can will it away and restore their comms connection with nothing but the power of his glare. Probably not, though. If he could do that they’d already be long gone.
She goes back to the stitches.
Every time she looks up, he’s exactly where she left him.
...
So it’s like this: once upon a time, Bruce tried to kill her. Almost succeeded. He came a lot closer than she likes to admit to herself on most days, but she doesn’t hate him for it. She’s tried, and she just... can’t.
She can hold a grudge with the best of them—ask the dude in Alaska who threw soup on her—but it’s exhausting, trying to be angry at someone she has to work with and needs to trust. Someone who went out of his way to help her mom, who bought a damn bank for her. He’s infuriating and fascinating and the truth of it is, she’s lonely.
Lois took a long-term gig in Mexico City. They’re still friends, but it’s strained around the edges. Lois loved Clarke, but she buried her, too. The ease that always lived between them didn't climb out of the grave with her. Clarke doesn’t push. And Diana is great—wonderful even, no pun intended—but sometimes it's hard to relate to a woman who has multiple centuries on her.
Clarke has other people in her life, friends from the Planet, a few people she went to college with, but none of them really know her. Not in the ways that matter.
She wants someone who understands the dual lives and crushing expectations; who knows what it’s like to struggle and fail when the world is on the line; who knows, bone-deep, what it's like to get up after a failure of that magnitude and try again. Bruce knows that better than anyone, and the longer she works with him the more it becomes clear he knows loneliness just the same.
Maybe, she thought. Maybe we—
But she was wrong. They can’t. Whatever the reason, Bruce slips into that horrible blank mask every time he sees her, keeps every attempt at friendship at bay with that frigid, implacable politeness.
It’s been two years and she’s not used to it. She’s starting to think she’ll never be used to it.
...
One day fades into two. Two turns into three. Bruce—her thoughts keep slipping, tumbling and skidding over a syllable she’s spent two years training herself not to use—has a seemingly endless supply of protein bars. All of them taste terrible.
She wants to rib him about this being all the flavor money can buy, but she bites down the quip. She’s too raw, and he’s, well. Bruce.
The ache in her bones ebbs and dies. Her head stopped hurting sometime around noon on the second day. Her senses are still a little bit muffled and she's wobbly enough on her feet that there’s definitely no way she can fly them out of here, but she’s mostly back to her usual self.
She wants to pace. Wants to talk to somebody. Anybody. She really, really wishes Diana hadn’t left to get help. Though frankly, Diana should be back by now. The storm is bad, but not bad enough to stop Wonder Woman from getting wherever it is she wants to go. Maybe Diana got sick of their bullshit and has decided she's going to leave them here until the storm lets up or they sort themselves out, whichever comes first. Probably the weather.
She feels like she’s back in seventh grade. It’s got all the hallmarks of junior high: awkward in her own body, trying her best and failing, and the crushing certainty that everyone around her hates her. It sucks.
She tries to think of her dad instead, but it doesn’t work. Tries to count the stitches again, but she’s already got the meandering pattern of bad needlework memorized. Clarke is just sitting there, stewing, when Bruce breaks the silence, startling her so badly she nearly tumbles off the bed.
“I believe I owe you an apology,” he says, the bass rumble of his voice immediately drowned out by shock.
This time she does start to fall; thank god her reflexes are working well enough that she manages to catch herself.
“What?”
His face looks like it was carved from granite. Stern, unyielding. More likely to crack than bend. Why the hell is he apologizing? How badly did she—
“The first night here, you wouldn’t admit to it, but you were upset because you were trapped here. With me.” He swallows, almost compulsively, but his voice is still painfully even when he continues. “I know I’ve been…”
An absolute ass?
“Difficult to work with,” he says smoothly, like he never paused at all. “We’re stuck together, and you’re clearly uncomfortable with such a situation. I’ve made you uncomfortable. I would like to apologize for that.”
He stops after that, waiting. For her to say something?
“What?” she says again. Her voice is raw and bitter; she can hear it the second the word is out of her mouth, but she can’t do anything about it. It feels like she’s been slapped. Like someone’s playing a trick on her.
He grimaces, faint but unmistakable. “I would like to apologize.”
“After two years?” It boils out of her before she can stop it. “You’ve spent the last two years freezing me out, refusing every attempt I ever made to apologize for— for not being the monster you thought I was? For surviving, for dying and then not staying dead and— and ‘sorry you’re stuck with me’ is all you can come up with?”
She’s yelling by the time she finishes. She doesn’t yell in general, and never at Bruce. Clarke may not like that icy reserve he clings to, but she’s not a jerk. She’s tried so damn hard to bend, to accept things—
She’s done. She can’t keep going like this.
Just get it out, she thinks. Maybe if she purges all the poison now, it will let her be. Maybe then the hope won’t hurt so badly.
She opens her mouth. There’s more, loneliness and frustration and the unfairness of it all roaring like gale force winds in her chest, but she doesn’t get to it.
“Clarke,” he rasps, and it stops her cold. She’s never heard him sound like that before. Gutshot, pinned under half a building, watching the world end— Bruce is always calm. Never anything less than collected. Granite, she's thought more than once. More likely to break than bend. And right before her eyes, that’s exactly what happens: Bruce’s face cracks open, and she has no more words left.
“Clarke,” he says again, voice rough on the edges of her name. “I know. I know any apology I make will be inadequate, but—” He swallows again, compulsive.
“But what?” she asks, suddenly exhausted. “Never mind. Apology accepted.” It’s not, but he doesn’t need to know that. Her chest aches. She ignores it. She’s gotten good at that.
“It’s not, though,” he says very quietly. “Is it?”
He closes the space between them with two long strides. Up close, his eyes are a warm deep brown. The stubble on his jaw is definitely gray.
“Please,” he says. She can’t identify the emotion in his voice.
She’d give anything not to feel small and awkward and hurt right now. Maybe her right kidney, since she never did find any takers for the left one. She’s not equipped to deal with whatever emotion is happening on his face right now.
“I just— I don’t know what you want from me.”
He grimaces again. No hiding at all. Guilt, shame, and loathing, god, so much loathing that she nearly flinches before she realizes it’s all directed inward. He doesn’t look away, just takes a deep breath, in, out.
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing you can give me. You can’t fix my mistakes.”
It’s her turn to swallow compulsively. “But I can forgive them,” she says. Her voice comes out much stronger than she feels. Confident, almost. Sure.
“You don’t need—”
“But I do,” she interrupts. He hates that, she knows he hates that, but he lets her steamroll over him. “And I want to. I don’t want to carry a grudge. I don’t want you to tiptoe around me because you think I’m incapable of—”
“I don’t think you’re incapable—”
“—forgiving you for—”
“—Clarke—”
“—I just want don’t want you to hate me,” she finally manages, and it sounds miserable.
He’s silent for a long moment.
“I don’t hate you.” His voice is so soft. Cautious, almost, like he’s afraid to admit it.
“But you did. Before.”
“I did,” he agrees. “But that was before.”
“And you don’t now?”
He’s studying her with those warm, warm eyes, gaze moving across her face like there’s some secret hidden in the set of her brows, the curve of her cheek. The line of her mouth. Whatever he finds, it makes him bring his hand up to cup the side of her face. His fingers are warm and callused and breathtakingly gentle.
“No,” Bruce says. “I don’t hate you.”
It hits her like a shockwave, like a sonic boom. The clarity makes her ears ring. Of course he pushed her away, buried his all his guilt and shame and furious self-loathing under curt, frigid distance. Clarke was an exception: the one person he was willing to kill, the one person he would compromise that unbending moral code for, and then he was wrong. He was wrong, and he realized it, just in time to pull back, and then had to watch as she died anyway. He thought he could mourn her, let her be a shrine to his mistakes the same way the glass case in the Cave is, but then she went and ruined that, too. She came back. Came back and kept—
Kept reaching out.
How can you flagellate yourself with memory when the memory is alive and well, drinking in the sunlight and offering forgiveness? How can you let yourself look with that much raw tenderness at a woman you failed, knowing that you were going to kill her? Knowing that you nearly did kill her. You can’t. Or at least: Bruce can’t.
Couldn’t. He’s looking at her like that now.
“So we can be friends?”
“If that’s really what you want.”
She leans into his touch, watching as he shivers like her forgiveness is heady enough to undo every bit of his ironclad control. Maybe it is.
They stay like that for a long moment, Bruce cradling her face in his palm, Clarke just staring at him. Watching as the shiver dies away. Just— watching him. His heart is beating so quickly in his chest. She can hear it, a quick-fast staccato that she’s never heard from him before. He can’t possibly be nervous?
The tendon in his wrist twitches like he’s going to pull away. She grabs his hand before he has a chance. It sends another shiver through him. The casual display of her strength, or just her touch? A distant part of her mind tries to catalogue the thought and fails.
“If you keep looking at me like that,” he finally says, “I’m going to fuck this up again and kiss you.”
Oh.
Heat blooms through her whole body. She doesn’t think. She just moves.
His mouth is warm beneath her own, lips slightly chapped. He smells like the smoke and cologne that’s been driving her crazy the last three days, but deeper. Richer, now that she’s breathing it directly from his skin instead of from across the room. She’s dizzy with it.
She tugs him down onto the bed with her, or she tries to, but after one moment of give it’s like trying to move a particularly stubborn bit of masonry without using her powers. She’s not at full strength, she knows that, but—
What did she call it? Casual display of strength. Yeah. It makes her blood sing even as she reluctantly loosens her grip, letting Bruce pull away enough to meet her gaze.
“Not like this.”
Oh god, she thinks faintly. He sounds absolutely wrecked. One kiss and he’s—
He’s still talking. She should probably be paying attention to that.
“You were dosed with kryptonite and I know it’s not fully out of your system—”
“But—”
“—don’t even try to pretend otherwise.”
There’s a grin hiding beneath the sternness; she’s sure of it. The mask is gone.
He kisses her again, swift and hot, then wrenches himself away like it hurts to leave. “I’ve done enough damage without trying to,” he says. “And even more when I was trying to not to hurt you. Let me do this right.”
“Alright,” she says, a little shocked at how much it feels like a blow to the chest. He’s right, she knows he is, but it’s like someone replaced her blood with a galaxy of want, dazzling and infinite. Where did it all come from?
It was probably there all along, hidden under layers and hurt and confusion. If she’d known wanting Bruce like this was even remotely an option, she’d probably have been pining away for a good chunk of the last two years.
This time it’s her mom’s voice that pops into her head.
You sure that’s not what you were doing all along, honey?
Whatever. She’ll deal with that later. She’ll sit down and think about how there’s every chance they’re making a colossal mistake, how it’s all happening so fast. She’s a goddamn investigative journalist who just absolutely crashed and burned on the emotional awareness front. She’s gotta talk to someone about that. About all of this, really, but. Not right now.
In the meantime…
“Okay,” she says, smiling when Bruce squints a little at her easy agreement. “Does doing this right preclude fooling around a little bit? Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re snowed in. Alone. Just the two of us.”
“In the wilderness?”
Oh, that’s definitely a grin.
“In the wilderness,” she confirms. “Trust me. I have superpowers; I would know.”
“You do,” he says, and then he’s bending to kiss her again.
...
Diana doesn’t show up for another two days.
Clarke really doesn’t mind. Bruce doesn’t seem to either.