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“Smallville.”
“Hey Lois,” he says wearily. “I suppose I shouldn’t even bother to ask how you got all the way up here.”
“Friends in high places. And now friends in cold places.” She smiles ruefully and clutches her frankly gigantic coat a little more tightly around herself. “You’ve been avoiding us.”
“Fortress of Solitude, clue’s in the name.” The you’re a reporter, right? quip hangs between them, an old joke and weak at best, but he finds he can’t even summon the energy to make it.
Lois frowns. “Clark- “
“I’m working on it.”
“I’m sure you are.” She bites her lip. “Need fresh eyes?”
“Sounds horrible. Necromancy is not something I’m particularly fond of and I doubt it’ll help.” He smiles a little at her snort. “I’ve got people running the numbers.”
“People?”
“Friends,” he amends, avoiding her sharp and knowing look. “It’s easier for them to work in peace without me hanging over them.”
“Uh huh.” She pushes her hair behind her ears and sighs. “I can’t stay long, have to get back.”
“I understand.”
“But your Mom- “ she places a gentle hand on his cheek when he flinches. “Your Mom says...you do what you have to. She’s given up on the whole ‘you don’t owe them anything’ schtick she tried the first time around-”
“Lois.”
“No, listen. You do what you have to is what she said. But, Clark, listen to me when I say- Clark, look at me.”
“I am!”
“You’re not, you’re a thousand miles away, I hate it when you do that.”
“Sorry, I was just-”
“I know what you were doing, turn those ears off, there’s no point. I’m saying you don’t have to-”
“I do.”
She sighs, fingers tracing his jaw. “I know that, genius. But you don’t have to be alone.”
Clark smiles then, and waves his hand in a vague gesture meant to encompass the pale, shimmering walls, the quietly singing crystals, smiles wider when Lois rolls her eyes and smacks him in retaliation.
“Yeah, yeah, Solitudey bullshit. Whatever, Smallville. You-”
He pulls her into a hug and then lets her go.
“It's okay, Lois. I’m not alone.”
Clark watches Barry pace the length of the floor and back, with detours to flail, derail himself and then get back to the point again, with exasperated fondness. It’s like a stop motion kids programme he used to love years ago except with more yammering.
“..and...AND!” Barry gasps, his face lighting up as he finger-guns the ceiling in excitement, “if we could get our hands on a Motherbox Vic could do his stretchy metal fingers thing - gross, so gross, by the way, and don’t even get me started on what Ralph could - never mind, never mind.” He pinches his fingers together and with some effort, forces himself to take a deep breath. ”So we find a Motherbox, right, then we-” Clark huffs a laugh at the superspeed series of jazz hands with accompanying facial expressions designed to demonstrate weeks of complex theoretical research and implementation in about four seconds flat. He settles back, watching curls of his condensing breath drift upwards.
“-and bam! Problem solved.” A theatrical bow. “You’re welcome.”
There’s silence for a while as Clark considers, tails of mist flickering away into nothing. He decides against taking another breath.
“You’re...welcome..?”
“There’s no point,” He offers eventually.
“No. No no no no,” Barry zips closer, distressed. “ No. Look, man, it’s a solid plan. We could try. The others will help, well, maybe not Diana, because, you know, but you can’t just- ” he pulls at his hair and looks so very young. “You can’t just-”
“The Motherboxes are gone, Barry,” he says quietly. “You know that. No-one knows where and no-one should know where, least of all me. All of us were in agreement.”
“Superman, I hear you, I do.” Barry’s eyes are bright now, his face tight with misery. “I think you’re wrong though. You don’t...you don’t have to.”
Clark closes his eyes.
“Clark.”
Clark sighs and blinks up at the ceiling. “And now it’s Batman. Oh good. Can’t a guy be left to brood in peace?”
“Hypocrite.”
Clark rolls his head to eye him but doesn’t bother getting up. Even without the voice modulator Bruce’s voice is flat, but Clark knows better than to be deceived by his lack of inflection, knows to be wary of shifting currents.
“Come outside with me.”
“What for? Bruce, you’ll freeze.”
Bruce idly inspects a gauntlet, straightening his cape before meeting his eyes, an eyebrow twitching upwards.
Clark sighs. “At least put your cowl on, I don’t want to have to heat vision your ears back onto your head when they freeze off.”
“Hmph. That’s not a verb and you know it.” Bruce reaches under his cape and produces, of all things, a hunter’s cap, an obnoxious plaid and sheepskin creation which he jams onto his head. He tilts his chin challengingly at Clark’s expression. “Better?”
He can’t help it. Clark throws his head back and laughs, the sounds echoing off the crystalline consoles and smooth, cold walls, sounds overlapping and strangely muffled, thrumming through his chest. When he calms, Bruce is watching him, both Bat and be-hatted billionaire and all the disparate parts of himself together for once, eyes dancing.
“You were always good at that,” Clark gasps, still quivering with amusement.
“Getting your head out of your ass? Agreed. Come on.”
Clark follows slowly, wiping at his eyes.
“Not that,” he manages. “Surprising me.”
*
It’s cold and dark outside, very unsurprisingly. He feels rather than sees Bruce shiver beside him, tapping at a gauntlet display.
“Finally got that thermoregulation working?”
There’s a warm touch on one hip and then another, snowflakes drift onto the Batsuit and melt, forlorn streaks glistening in the starlight.
“Show-off. Also,” Clark looks down, “don’t think I don’t know you’re patting me down, World’s Most Obvious Pickpocket. I should never have shown you where those pockets were in the first place.”
“Just checking you haven’t stowed any of that gold kryptonite in there.”
“Bruce.”
“Clark.”
His gaze is sharp, but there’s warmth in the brown of his eyes - and how did Clark ever think them vacant or accusatory? No wonder they were hidden behind lenses or blurry masks of feigned intoxication and lust. How he’d fooled anyone, fooled him, for so long was a mystery. Mind you, he can hardly talk, he thinks, swallowing a sudden grin. Glasses, Kent? Really?
“Clark.”
Bruce’s voice is softer now and Clark can’t meet his eyes, instead throwing his head back to take in the spray of stars above them.
“There’s no aurora any more,” he murmurs. “Did you know that?” There’s a faint hum. Bruce is looking up too although he’s moved closer, a soft push of heat from his suit bleeding into Clark’s.
“No solar winds. I miss it,” Clark presses a shoulder to Bruce’s. “The colours, they were beautiful. I used to lie here and watch them until they faded.”
“Sounds chilly,” mutters Bruce, but he doesn’t move, his gaze still upwards.
“Sometimes I’d fly into them, try to get closer, surround myself with colour and light,” he sighs and shakes his head. “Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to say it. But up there was never as beautiful as down here.” He moves closer to Bruce, catches the flutter of his eyelashes, the faint curl of his lips.
They stand in contemplative silence, watching the slow wheel of the galaxies, the tinge of red at the edges of the night. The days are shorter now, even this far north, and soon the sun will come roaring over the horizon.
“Other things up there,” Bruce offers. “Other stars, other civilisations.”
“You know I can’t.”
“You could. There are options.”
“The sun is dying,” Clark says firmly. “You know my options. I know my options. I just...need a little time.”
“All right.”
There’s a soft moan from inside the Fortress, wind twisting down empty corridors, through darkening chambers. Bruce turns towards the noise.
“I did take the gold kryptonite out,” Clarks tells the back of his head. “Once. Got as far as this door-” He falters as a hand shoots back, grips his own fiercely.
“No.”
“I didn’t Bruce,” He turns his hand, threads his fingers through leather. “I’m still here.”
“Not like that, Clark.” The grip is punishing, Bruce must be hurting himself but he doesn’t let up. Leather creaks, the seams straining.
“Bruce -”
“Not like that.”
“So, okay, okay, I’ve got it. A sun bomb! Tell him, Victor!” Barry is crackling with energy literally and metaphorically, his hair wild, clothes still steaming from his journey.
“A sun bomb, Superman.” Victor repeats flatly from the monitors, face filling almost the entire screen. The flare from his red optic bathes the room in crimson. Clark frowns, looking around, and Victor moves the camera further away from himself looking faintly embarrassed.
“Uh. Morning?” Manages Clark, sitting up slowly.
“I saw this movie-” Barry begins, trailing circles of water behind him.
“He means he typed ‘the sun is dying’ into a search engine and found a movie,” supplies Victor. “Yeah, I saw,” he continues as Barry raises an admonishing finger. “Don’t even try to deny it.”
“Anyway. This really hot team of astronauts, like, super hot, fly towards the sun with a bomb which can re-ignite it and bam!”
“Didn’t they all die in the end?” Victor asks slowly, watching as Barry abruptly deflates. Clark snorts, despite himself. There’s a metallic rattle, rhythmic, Vic drumming his fingers impatiently on his desk.
“But you wouldn’t die, would you, Supes?” Barry perks up, and, honestly, Clark can’t remember ever seeing him un-perked for longer than twenty seconds.
They’re both eyeing him expectantly and Clark knows what they’re talking about but the thought still fills him with rage and terror.
“You know the answer to this, I’m not even sure why you’re pretending that the answer came to you via Netflix.” Barry jerks in surprise and Vic’s defense systems tick up with a sudden glow. Clark rubs at his nose, his near shout still ringing in his ears. “I’m sorry,” he mutters. “I’m not angry at you.”
“I didn’t-” Barry stammers to a halt, a red swash across his cheekbones.
“I know you didn’t,” Clark rubs at his face again. “Believe me, I know. But do you know how much energy it would take me to get there? With...everything that’s happened I’m pretty depleted. Do you know how long I’d have to stay inside the new star to recharge? Hundreds, maybe thousands of years. If it even works.”
The room is silent aside from a faint dripping. Vic’s mouth opens and then closes again.
“It’d work,” Victor says finally. The monitor goes dark.
“And you’d live,” whispers Barry, through trembling lips. “You’d be alive.”
“Alive,” repeats Clark, staring at his hands.
Clark retreats to the lab. Of course Bruce is there because Bruce is fucking everywhere, neon lit by a 3-D rendering of the sun fading then bloating into a red giant, swallowing the Earth and continuing to expand, relentless.
“Subtle,” mutters Clark, throwing himself into the nearest chair.
“You know what’s going to happen,” says Bruce, starbursts of light playing across his face. “The sun is dying.” His eyes are distant, his face marble pale.
“Yeah,” Clark’s tired, of himself, of the responsibility, of pretty much everything. “The Ship shows me that every opportunity it gets.”
“The Ship shows you everything you ask it to,” returns Bruce. “So why do you think it keeps showing you that specifically?” Bruce rounds the console, stands over him. Clark upgrades from being tired to exhausted, lets his head flop backwards.
“Don’t loom, it’s annoying.”
“It’s a skill.”
“It’s dying too,” Clark gives him a sidelong glare. “I’m aware. No more yellow sun, no more battery. How come I never learned how to loom as effectively as you did? Even in the suit I couldn’t manage it.”
“Years of suffering, better loom. All that clenching pays off.”
Clark laughs and then gasps as a flare of grief seizes him, sudden tears blurring his vision. “My loom should beat yours hands down by now,” he manages. “I’ve had a lot of time to wallow.”
And Clark has always been good at deceiving himself but he never developed the Grandmaster Skills of self deception that Bruce had cultivated over the years. There’s no hiding. He takes a deep breath and forces himself upright.
“The ship is dying,” Bruce says relentlessly. “And so are you. In eight months the red giant will swallow this planet and everything still on it and you are doing nothing to save it. Why, I wonder?”
“Stop.”
“ Why, Clarke?”
Clark puts his face in his hands.
“- because there’s nothing left to save.”
Diana, left, eventually. She would have stayed, she was as long lived as he was, but his careful distance, the studied indifference he had learned from Bruce over the years and deployed with exquisite cruelty eventually forced her away. The last conversation they had was not pleasant, she had dashed the tears from her eyes and left without a word. He’d known at the time, from the scorched place in his chest, that she wouldn’t return. He doesn’t know whether she and her sisters left Earth with the others but he hopes that they found a new home somewhere, found a reason to keep going.
“When a star dies,” begins Bruce and Clark startles, it’s been a while since either of them had spoken, “one of three things happens.”
“Uh huh.”
“If it’s like our sun it expands, becomes a red giant and then shrinks, becomes a white dwarf then a black dwarf.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“You’re not listening. A bigger star will go nova and explode, throwing massive amounts of energy and material into space.” Bruce’s hand against his face is warm and familiar. “New stars will be born, Clark. They’ll shine just as brightly.”
Clarks considers. “There’s a chance the sun bomb will do that?”
“If you’re referring to the possible effects of the highly developed and technologically advanced piece of engineering we’ve created,” says Bruce irritably, “then yes.”
He goes to move away but Clark catches his hand, presses it against his closed eyes. “Exploding stars,” he rasps. “Bruce-”
“No guts, no glory.”
“The new stars wither and die as well, you know. Eventually.”
“I know,” Bruce’s voice is heavy in the silence. His other hand comes up to rest on Clark’s shoulder. “And for what it’s worth I’m sorry.”
“You saved a lot of people when you took that bomb with you. I just wish I could have said goodbye before you went nova. Along with a few other things.” Clark doesn’t look up even as Bruce’s hand tightens on his shoulder. “When I lost you there was only ever the third option for me, you know that, don’t you? What happens to the biggest stars of all?”
Bruce bends, puts his mouth to Clark’s ear, his breath blowing eddies across his neck, and he shivers.
“Stop wallowing, Kansas. Don’t you think It’s time to wake up?”
The thick liquid of the genesis pool ripples as Clark clenches a fist.
“How long have you been asleep?” Bruce asks quietly, warm against his chest.
“Don’t know, a few hundred years.” There’s a sharp poke to his ribs and he flinches, even though it's probably hurt Bruce’s finger more than it’s hurt him. “Yeah, I get it, no lying to yourself any more, Clark. All right, a few hundred years give or take a couple thousand millennia.”
“And you’ve been dreaming.”
“I have. It’s why you look so good after all this time, you should be thanking me really.” He turns into him, tangling their legs. “After you were...gone...I went on for a while, years that felt like millennia, I helped the others as much as I could, tried to reverse what was happening to the world but it didn’t work and after that I couldn’t…”
“Black hole. I get it, Kent. Subtlety was never your forte.”
“Empathy was never yours.”
“I blame you.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s your mental, in all senses of the word, projection, after all.” Bruce pulls back a little to look at him. “I understand why you’re doing this,” he says quietly. “I would have done, anyway, actual me would have done,” he amends with a rueful quirk of his lips. “There’s a lot of me in this Ship, after all.”
“I’m sure you would have done, Mr I Vant To Be Alone.”
“Clark.”
“We are the lords of unhealthy coping mechanisms.”
Bruce scowls and shifts, hair falling across his eyes in a way Clark used to crave, still does, and then relents. “What were you waiting for all this time? True love’s kiss?”
“No,” Clark buries his head in the pillow. “Yes. You.”
“Me,” says Bruce flatly.
“Uh...yes?”
“Dead me.”
“It’s happened before!” Clark flushes. “But then years went by...”
“A lot of years.”
“Many, many years. Then I guess I just gave up hope.”
“Your biological parents would not have been impressed.”
“Yep, a big X straight through that sigil. Not sure my non biological ones would have been either.”
“That’s you were waiting for, was it? A reason to wake up?” Clark hums a muffled assent into his shoulder. “How disappointing for you.”
“You have no idea. It won’t be long now anyway. And I’m glad.”
“You’ve been alone for a long time.”
“In a manner of speaking. Who wants to live forever, huh?” Clark peers up at him, a spark flaring in one dull blue eye.
“Don’t quote Queen at me,” mutters Bruce. We’re having a Moment.”
“A Moment. Right.”
“We had lots of those, I’m surprised you never noticed.”
“Seeing as I’d usually have to overthink, decode and second guess, by the time I realised we’d had one most of them were long gone.”
“Heh.” Bruce tips his head against his. “You never moved on,” he says simply.
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” Clark whispers, fingers sliding through the silver at Bruce’s temples. “Too much to move on from.”
“Good thing you stayed still, then. In a tank. In a frozen tundra.”
“Pool, please. Don’t mock the highly developed and advanced technology.”
“Bet you don’t even wrinkle.”
“Not anywhere that counts.” Clark shifts restlessly, blows out a breath. “And I don’t want to wake up, Bruce. There’s no-one, nothing left. Sometimes I- “ he waggles a hand, “-surface for a while. I listen. Everything and everyone's gone but me. And this is my home.”
“You’re staying, I understand. As I said.”
“Just be happy I didn’t stick you in a glass case.”
“I suspect you would have done if you could’ve found all the-”
“Please don’t,” Clark sputters, “you horrible, horrible man.”
“You love me anyway. And vice versa.”
“Yes I do, God help me. Projection you is nicer. Normal you would never have said that.”
“I would have done, and I believe I did. In a variety of ways.”
“Yes, I remember. A variety of grunts. Sometimes a variety of grimaces if you were in a good mood” Clark sighs, pulls him impossibly closer. “It’s getting dark. Can you stay with me?”
“I can and I will.”
“No meetings in the morning, huh?”
“Not a one.”
“I miss you. I’ve waited for so long.”
A whisper of a kiss against his temple, red at the edges of his vision. “You have. You can sleep now, Clark.”
END
High in the halls of the kings who are gone
Jenny would dance with her ghosts
They ones she had lost and the ones she had found
And the ones who had loved her the most
The ones who’d been gone for so very long
She couldn’t remember their names
They spun her around on the damp old stones
Spun away all her sorrow and pain
And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave
Never wanted to leave.