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Chapter Text

Bruce

Mornings were consistently Bruce Wayne’s least favorite part of the day. He did his best to skip them altogether, sleep through them and wake up no earlier than noon, but he was a father of five and the CEO of a multibillion dollar corporation and that wasn’t always possible. There were always those mornings when he had to wake up at what most people would consider a “reasonable hour,” and those were by far the worst ones. He would drag himself out of bed to the screech of his alarm clock – he had to set it to play the loudest, most irritating sound imaginable or he’d ignore it and go back to sleep – and walk, bleary-eyed, to the bathroom. He would take a scalding hot shower, brush his teeth, get dressed, style his hair. He wouldn’t entertain a single thought that wasn’t related to how much he’d rather be sleeping until he had at least three cups of coffee in him, black like the night, no milk.

This felt like one of those mornings, judging purely by how utterly fucking exhausted he was. Except… no blaring alarm. He kept his eyes stubbornly closed. He didn’t have to wake up if his alarm hadn’t gone off yet. He was already well on his way back to the blissful, dreamless sleep he’d left behind when realization struck, slow and sluggish, like his thoughts always were when he first woke up, suspended between dreams and reality.

He hurt. That, on its own, was hardly unusual. Bruce Wayne woke up in pain more often than not. It was an occupational hazard. But usually, it was limited in its scope: He crashed the Batmobile and his neck ached from the whiplash; he leapt off a building, landed wrong, and twisted his ankle; he wasn’t fast enough to dodge a punch and came away from it with a black eye and a throbbing headache; a bullet grazed his side and the wound felt like it was on fire.

This was not like that. It wasn’t his neck, or his ankle, or his face, or his side that hurt. It was his whole body. It was everything. He hadn’t woken up feeling like this in a while, and when he did, he always remembered why. Usually it involved one of the Joker’s more elaborate schemes, or a League mission gone awry, but when he woke up the next day, after trying and failing to sleep it off, he always remembered. But now, lying here – and another delayed realization hit him, that he wasn’t lying on his ridiculously comfortable ten thousand dollar mattress back at the manor, because the mattress he was currently lying on felt like it belonged in a cheap motel – he racked his brain for an explanation for this all-encompassing, unrelenting pain and came up empty. His thoughts felt foggy, and not just from sleep. Reaching for his more recent memories was like grasping at straws. That was what worried him. And it was what finally convinced him to get his ass out of this shitty bed and figure out what the hell was going on.

It was never a simple feat, getting Bruce Wayne out of bed, least of all when he’d taken a beating like the one he must’ve received, the one his mind couldn’t remember but his body certainly did. He groaned, indulging himself in a little self-pity before he had to face whatever happened to him, and opened his eyes.

He recognized the space he was in immediately. It was his room in the Watchtower. (That explained the pain, then: League mission gone awry, as he’d suspected.) He didn’t spend a lot of time in there. The furniture was the same in every room, which was why it wasn’t up to his usual standards. Harsh artificial lighting glared down at him from above. The black expanse of space stretched out past a window to his left, dotted with pinpricks of stars. He heard a body shifting to his right and turned his head, grimacing at the effort.

Diana gazed down at him from where she sat perched on a chair she’d pulled up next to his bed, bare arms and muscular legs crossed, dark hair messy like she’d been in a fight and hadn’t bothered to fix it since. “The warrior lives!” she exclaimed, only a little mockingly. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and regarded Bruce with her piercing brown eyes. “How do you feel?”

Bruce never felt the need to hide around Diana. “Like I got run over by a truck,” he said plainly, forcing himself into something resembling an upright position. Every one of his bones and muscles protested the action. He was still wearing the Batman suit, complete with cape and cowl, which explained why his skin felt tight and itchy. The suit was designed for fighting, not sleeping.

“Worse,” Diana said, repressing a smirk. “You got into a fight with me.”

If there was anything in the world that could make Bruce feel as thoroughly thrashed as he did right then, it was a fight with Diana. Which was only one of many reasons he made a point of not fighting her. So her answer, while enlightening, only brought up more questions. The first of them being, “Why the hell would I do that?”

Diana frowned. “You don’t remember?” Bruce shook his head, and Diana let out a small hmm sound of consideration. “J’onn said that might happen. Let’s just say you weren’t exactly yourself.” She stood, stretching her long limbs and offering a hand to help Bruce up. He took it, because it was Diana, and shifted slowly into a seated position, and then a standing one. His body ached like one big bruise, but at least there was no sharp stab of pain to signal something might have been broken.

“I’ll let J’onn explain everything,” Diana continued once he was steady on his feet. “He went to go check on Superman.”

Now it was Bruce’s turn to frown. It was par for the course for Bruce to feel like shit after a mission, but if Clark was also hurt, it must have been some battle he’d forgotten. He didn’t like that. He prodded the cloudy space in his memory, but all he came away with was a feeling of disorientation and a little nausea. The room spun, and he steadied himself against the wall. Diana, familiar enough with Bruce’s fragile ego, pretended not to notice. “What happened to Superman?” he said, injecting more steadiness into his voice than he felt. Diana’s mouth stretched into a smug grin.

“He also got into a fight with me.”

Clark

Clark knew before opening his eyes that he was in the Watchtower. He was familiar with its sounds and smells: his fellow League members chatting or going about their business, the station whirring, the neutral, antiseptic scent of space. He woke when J’onn entered his room. He knew right away it was J’onn. He could identify some people by the sounds they made: heartbeat, breathing, the weight of their footsteps. Anyone he spent a significant amount of time with was permanently mapped in his memory, and if he reached out with his senses, he could probably have identified quite a few of them in the immediate vicinity.

J’onn woke him and brought him to a briefing room where Bruce and Diana were waiting. He waited, too. Waited for someone to tell him what, exactly, was going on, how he’d ended up in his bed in his room in the Watchtower – a room he almost never used – when the last thing he’d been doing was… was… he couldn’t remember exactly. When he reached back into his mind searching for some clue, he found that his more recent memories were clouded in smoke, inaccessible and blurred.

“How are you feeling, Kal?” Diana asked. J’onn had briefly explained Clark’s situation when Clark first awoke; apparently he’d gotten into a fight with Diana, which probably meant he’d been brainwashed or telepathically controlled by a malicious entity, because he wasn’t stupid enough to face off against the legendary Amazon of his own accord. It explained the brain fog, anyway.

“I think I’ve mostly recovered,” Clark said. He was being modest. Whatever Diana had done to him, he’d recovered from it completely. Whenever he did manage to get injured, which was rare, he healed quickly. “J’onn said I have you to thank for this?”

Diana put on a serious face. “It was for the greater good,” she assured him. “You would have wanted me to do it.”

Clark was sure that was true. He was also sure that a part of Diana had enjoyed taking him down. They were fairly equally matched. Clark had a few extra superpowers on her, but Diana had a (very long) lifetime of training on an island of elite warriors. They didn’t fight often, except to practice, but when they did, it was legendary.

“What’s the last thing the two of you remember?” J’onn asked, glancing from Clark to Bruce, and Clark’s gaze snapped over to where Batman was sitting straight-backed across the table from him.

“Something happened to Batman?” Clark asked, ignoring J’onn’s question for the moment. Clark getting hurt was no big deal; again, he healed quickly. Bruce getting hurt was… well, Bruce would say it was also no big deal, and it certainly happened often enough that it shouldn’t have been, but it was a very big deal to Clark.

“I fought both of you,” Diana said impatiently. “One of those fights lasted longer than the other. Sorry, Batman.”

Bruce appeared unfazed. He knew he was no match for either of them in hand-to-hand combat. His strengths lay in other, equally important areas. But if what Diana said was true, if Bruce had also gotten into a fight with Diana… Clark cringed. He could only imagine what Bruce looked like under the Batman suit. Covered in bruises, no doubt. And then he very quickly stopped imagining what Bruce looked like under the Batman suit, because that was never a productive line of thought.

J’onn repeated his question. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Clark tried to think, but he kept running up against that wall of fog. He shook his head. “To be honest, I’m not sure.”

“I definitely don’t remember getting into a situation that would force me to fight Wonder Woman,” Bruce added.

Diana shot J’onn a look loaded with significance. “You should probably start from the beginning.”

So he did.

“There was an alien invasion,” J’onn began.

“Of course there was.” Clark could hear the eyeroll in Bruce’s voice. Bruce was right, though. It was always an alien invasion, wasn’t it?

J’onn continued, “At first, it seemed like the aliens – you wouldn’t be able to pronounce the name of their species, so I won’t bother—”

“It’s true,” Diana interrupted. “Not even I can pronounce it.”

Diana could read, write, and speak every human language, living or dead, but there were several alien languages she simply didn’t have the biological equipment to speak. This must have been one of them.

“At first, they gave us the impression that they were here to introduce themselves,” J’onn explained. “Naturally, I was skeptical—”

“So were you,” Diana said to Bruce. Unsurprising. Bruce was always the team cynic.

J’onn was unperturbed by the frequent interruptions. This was how it always was at League meetings. Unless Batman was in charge. He hated being interrupted. “Superman convinced us to hear them out, and the United Nations sent the three of you as Earth’s representatives onto the alien ship. It quickly became clear that they were not as friendly as they claimed.” Score one for Batman. Bruce remained silent, but looked vindicated. “Apparently these aliens are parasites that inhabit the bodies of other intelligent species. They travel from planet to planet, conquering entire worlds to obtain new bodies in order to reproduce. Once you were on board their ship, two of their leaders took over your bodies, intending to use you to destroy Earth’s defenses. Diana had to subdue you and I had to figure out how to remove the parasites while the rest of the League fought the invading force.”

It sounded like a fairly typical alien invasion scenario, except for one minor detail. “Why didn’t they use Diana the way they used us?”

“Typical patriarchal species.” Diana’s voice dripped with disdain. “Once they learned I was a female, they decided I wasn’t a threat.”

In that case, the aliens couldn’t have made a more fatal miscalculation. Diana was by far the deadliest of the three of them.

“Was anyone else hurt?” Bruce asked.

“The rest of the League is fine,” J’onn reassured them. “A few minor injuries. And there were no casualties on the surface.”

The surface of Earth, he meant. Clark breathed a sigh of relief. Logically, he knew the Justice League was perfectly capable of functioning without him; he wasn’t the type to self-aggrandize. Still, he worried when he wasn’t around to help.

“Good work,” he told Diana and J’onn. Then, just to Diana, “And you’re right. I would have wanted you to take me out.”

Diana smiled. “I confess, I did enjoy it. It’s rare these days for anyone I fight to pose a real challenge.”

Just as Clark had suspected.

Bruce

Normally, Bruce would have stuck around much longer after a League mission to debrief everyone, make sure everyone was on the same page. Today, all he wanted was to get home and lie in his own, expensive bed and wallow in his unending pain. He didn’t want to move or speak to anyone under any circumstances until at least the next day. So when he arrived back home via the Batcave and passed Alfred in the halls of the manor, all he said was, “Alfred, cancel anything I have scheduled today.”

“Are you alright, Master Bruce?” Alfred asked. “We saw the alien invasion on the news.” He was concerned but trying not to show it. He knew Bruce hated when people worried about him. Bruce knew Alfred couldn’t help but worry about him. They didn’t speak about it, but they both implicitly understood. That was their arrangement.

“I got taken out by Wonder Woman,” Bruce replied, simply, gruffly. He’d give everyone the whole story tomorrow. After his wallowing.

“Perhaps you should get checked for internal injuries.” It was a fair suggestion, but the last thing Bruce wanted to do was go to the hospital, because then he’d have to come up with another bullshit story that explained how he’d managed to injure every single part of his body but didn’t give away his secret identity.

So he said, “I’ll be fine. I just need to sleep it off.”

Alfred knew better than to argue. He saved his arguing for when he felt it was really needed. He picked his battles. “If you say so, Master Bruce.”

Bruce didn’t pass anyone else on the way to his room, which he counted as a blessing. He collapsed in bed, lights off, curtains drawn, and sleep reclaimed him.

Chapter Text

Clark

Clark always made a point of walking at least a few blocks to his building and going up the stairs and through the front door to his apartment like a normal person instead of simply flying in and out through the window. He didn’t want to make it easy for any curious bystander to figure out where Superman lived, and thereby learn his identity. So that was what he did after the alien invasion he couldn’t remember, only to realize, when he reached his apartment and patted down his pockets, that he didn’t have his keys. He mentally scolded himself. He wasn’t especially forgetful, but this sort of thing was known to happen occasionally. He could have easily broken in, but then he’d have to come up with some story to tell management and get his door fixed.

He checked his watch. It was seven-thirty in the morning. Lois wouldn’t have left for work yet, and she would have a spare key to his apartment. He’d given it to her when they’d dated and told her to keep it even after they broke up. He walked back down the stairs and out onto the street, kept going a few blocks until he reached an alley he liked to take off from. There were no windows facing it and no one was ever there, other than a few pigeons or some rats.

When he arrived at Lois’ place, he flicked on his x-ray vision for the briefest moment to confirm she was, in fact, home, and that no one else was with her. He could have texted, but it honestly would have taken longer to wait for her response than to simply fly there and find out for himself. He knocked on the door and, after glancing at him through her peephole, she let him in.

“Clark!” she said, enveloping him in a friendly hug. “What are you doing here?” She was dressed and eating breakfast, but still barefoot and barefaced.

“Sorry to bother you, Lo,” he said. “I lost the key to my apartment. Do you still have the spare I gave you?”

Lois stepped back and gave him a very strange look. The timer on her microwave beeped and she spun around quickly to take out a cinnamon roll she’d been warming up. “No,” she said, speaking slowly and regarding him closely. “I don’t have a spare key to your apartment. You don’t live in an apartment.”

Clark didn’t know what to say to that. Of course he lived in an apartment. The Daily Planet certainly wasn’t paying him enough to afford a house in Metropolis’ overpriced suburbs. And why would he even need a house? He was single, childless. It was just him, by himself, and his cozy one bedroom was big enough to suit his needs. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

The expression on Lois’ face morphed into one of open concern. She reached out, placed a gentle hand on his shoulder like he was something delicate and breakable, which couldn’t be further from the truth, but it worried Clark. What was he missing here? “Clark, are you feeling okay?” she asked. “I saw the alien invasion on the news. What happened?”

“An alien parasite took control of my body. Wonder Woman had to take me out,” Clark said, giving her the abridged version. Normally, he’d go into great detail, because Lois loved nothing more than being in the know, but at the moment he was too eager to get to the bottom of Lois’ weird reaction.

“And she gave you a traumatic brain injury?” Lois supplied.

“I’m not sure that’s physically possible,” Clark said. “Even if she injured me, I should have healed by now. Why?”

“Clark, do you really think you still live in an apartment?”

“Yes.” Then Clark paused, suddenly doubting himself. He reached into his memory and felt that same fog from before. It made him dizzy. He wasn’t used to the sensation; usually being too near Kryptonite was the only thing that could give him that reaction. “Why?” he added. “Where do you think I live?”

Lois answered like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “With your boyfriend,” she said.

Clark gaped. “Excuse me?” There was a lot to unpack in those three simple words. He didn’t have a boyfriend. He hadn’t dated anyone seriously since breaking up with Lois, and he hadn’t dated another man in even longer. At least, not as far as he knew. He was starting to doubt his own mind. The mental fog pressed down on him, a weight on his thoughts.

“You live in a mansion in Gotham with Bruce Wayne,” Lois said firmly, like this was true, like it was obvious. “You know, the man you’ve been seeing for three years.” She paused, growing more alarmed. “You do know, don’t you?”

The idea that Clark was dating someone was completely believable. The idea that he was dating a man was slightly less likely, simply because it was easier to meet single, heterosexual women than single, gay or bisexual men. Metropolis didn’t have much in the way of an LGBT scene. Still, it was possible.

But the idea that he was dating Bruce Wayne? Not possible. Because Bruce Wayne was Batman, and there wasn’t a chance in hell Batman would give Clark – would give Superman – the time of day. Not like that. They were friends, and even that had taken years to get Bruce to admit to.

Even in some bizarre fantasy world where Bruce had feelings for him, Clark couldn’t imagine the man would ever actually admit it. And Clark was a nice guy, and he didn’t want to disrupt their fragile friendship, so there was no way he would be the one to bring it up. Even if he thought Bruce was attractive. Even if he thought about him a lot, and thought about what it might be like if they could give the unspoken thing between him a chance. Clark had every intention of taking these thoughts to the fucking grave.

“I don’t have any memory of dating Bruce Wayne,” he said flatly, in shock. “Lois, is this some sort of joke?”

Lois shook her head vigorously, her grip on Clark’s shoulder tightening to the point where it might have hurt, had he been human. “It’s no joke, Clark.” She bit her lip, mind racing behind those intelligent eyes. “I know you can’t exactly see a doctor, but I think you should talk to someone who might know what’s going on with you.”

Clark couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you saying I’ve somehow forgotten the past three years?” He took out his phone, checked the date. He hadn’t paid it any attention until now. He swallowed.

It was three years later than he’d thought it was.

Once the realization had a chance to sink in, Clark snapped into business mode. He’d have time to freak out about this later. Right now, his priorities were: first, figure out the extent of his memory loss, and second, figure out if the same thing had happened to Bruce. They’d both gone through the same thing: getting their bodies taken over by alien parasites, getting knocked out by Wonder Woman. If Clark had lost three years’ worth of his memories, it was likely Bruce had, too. And Clark could only imagine how he would react when he found out what they’d been up to in those three years.

“Lois, if what you’re telling me is true, what else have I forgotten?” he asked quickly. “Do I still work for the Daily Planet?”

Lois nodded. Her hand left his shoulder. Her cinnamon roll lay forgotten on the kitchen counter. She’d need to warm it up again later, but she wasn’t thinking about that now. She was in business mode too. “Our coworkers think you’re crazy for commuting to and from Gotham every day. They don’t know it takes you less than a minute.” She smiled briefly at that.

“What about my parents? Are they…?”

“They’re both fine.”

“And what about you?”

Now she smiled more fully. “You know me, Clark. I haven’t changed a bit.”

Clark was dumbfounded. Three years. “I’ve really been dating Bruce Wayne?”

“Clark…” Lois forced him to meet her eyes. “You’re not just dating him. You live with him. You’re in love with him.”

Clark couldn’t think about that. Not now. He added it to the growing pile of things he was putting off until he figured this shit out. First, he had a more pressing question. He needed to know how much Lois knew. “How much have I told you about him?”

“If you’re referring to his nightly activities,” Lois said euphemistically, “You didn’t tell me anything. I figured it out. I’m an investigative reporter, and I have experience cracking secret identities.”

Of course she did. Once Clark was in a relationship with Bruce, it would only take a little extrapolating for Lois to piece it all together. He wondered if Bruce knew she knew. At the moment, Clark was just glad he didn’t have to hide it from her anymore. He hated hiding things from Lois, and if he was really in a relationship with Bruce Wayne, he knew he’d need a friend to confide in.

A relationship with Bruce Wayne. Half of Clark was struggling to wrap his brain around the idea. The other half could imagine it only too easily. That was the half that was worrying him.

Don’t think about it. But he had to think about it. He couldn’t not think about it.

“I think I should probably go talk to him,” Clark said. If Clark was freaking out right now, Bruce would be fucking losing it. Internally, of course, because that’s how he did things, but still.

Lois nodded. “Good idea. Go talk to him, and then go talk to… I don’t know. Who’s the expert on Kryptonian neurology?”

Clark was pretty sure anyone who knew anything about Kryptonian neurology had died with the planet Krypton. “There isn’t one.” He and Lois looked at each other for a long moment, realizing neither of them knew what to do to fix this, realizing there might not be anyone alive who knew what to do to fix this. “I’ll talk to J’onn.” It was all he had.

“Okay,” Lois said, even though they both knew it might not be enough. “Keep me posted.”

Bruce

Bruce had every intention of staying in bed all day. Really, he did. But it turned out lying unconscious in the Watchtower had given him his fair share of shuteye, and he didn’t get more than another fitful two hours in before he gave up and accepted the fact that, for the first time in a very long time, he wasn’t tired enough (and was in too much pain) to get a good morning’s sleep. Compelled by the gnawing emptiness in his stomach, he trudged downstairs for breakfast.

It was late morning, which was the earliest any of the Waynes would even consider getting out of bed, so he fully expected to have the kitchen to himself, but when he shuffled into the room, he found Cassandra perched on a stool at the counter, leaning over a bowl of sugary cereal and reading one of the Harry Potter books. She was a slow but determined reader, and evidently she’d finally gotten sick of her siblings and friends making references to pop culture phenomena she didn’t understand.

She looked up when she heard Bruce pop two slices of bread in the toaster and start brewing a pot of coffee. Bruce met her silent gaze and did a double take. “You look different,” he observed, and it was true, although he couldn’t put his finger on what exactly about her had changed. When he tried to think too hard about it, all he came up with was confusion and vertigo, just like he’d felt when he’d tried to remember what had happened during the alien invasion.

Cass shrugged. “Haven’t done anything different,” she mumbled, returning her attention to her book. Bruce decided not to dwell on it, at least not until he’d had his coffee.

Bread toasted and coffee brewed, Bruce took a seat next to his adopted daughter and got started on breakfast. The hit of caffeine was working on his brain by the time the heavy thud of footsteps alerted him to the arrival of another one of his children. He glanced over his shoulder and was surprised for the second time that morning when Jason glared back at him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. He and Jason were barely on speaking terms, despite Bruce’s efforts to make up for his past failures. Jason held a grudge even longer than Bruce did.

“Good morning to you too,” Jason snapped back sarcastically, adding a silent bitch to the end of his sentence with the disdainful curve of his mouth and snatching the pot of coffee from the counter. He offered no explanation for his presence, and Bruce didn’t demand one. He wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. “Gonna tell us about that whole alien invasion that happened yesterday?”

Bruce was grateful for the neutral topic. “I don’t remember any of it,” he said. “I was possessed by an alien parasite the whole time.”

“Lame,” Jason said. He didn’t eat breakfast. He only drank coffee. “I’ll have to ask Clark.”

That struck Bruce as an odd thing to say. When would Jason have the opportunity to talk to Clark? It wasn’t like the two crossed paths often. “Why would you ask Clark?” Bruce asked. This prompted another reproachful look.

“Uh, because he was there too?”

“I don’t think he could tell you any more than I could. He was possessed too.”

A quieter set of footsteps approached from behind. Cass passed the box of sugary cereal to Damian, who yawned and took it. “Tell us about the alien invasion, Father,” he said, having just missed Bruce and Jason’s brief discussion of the event.

“He can’t remember it,” Jason said before Bruce could. “He got body snatched.”

Damian huffed, dissatisfied with this turn of events. All of Bruce’s children liked to hear about his more exciting League missions.

Bruce stood to make room for Damian at the counter. He was finished with his toast and coffee. While he was rinsing his dishes in the sink, he watched the three children carefully. There was something different about all of them, but especially Damian. “Have you all gotten taller?”

“Maybe you’re shrinking, old man,” Jason drawled.

Bruce was distracted from his musings by the buzz of his phone in his pocket. He had most notifications turned off, or else he’d be bombarded with emails all goddamn day, but his text notifications were turned on. He opened the app and saw one new message from a contact labeled “Clark Kent.”

Bruce didn’t remember giving Clark his phone number.

Are you awake? the message read. But that wasn’t what caught Bruce’s attention. There were several old texts from this number – Clark’s number – including entire conversations Bruce didn’t remember having. Mostly dull or meaningless exchanges, but the mere fact of their existence was disturbing.

Even more disturbing was the time stamp marking them, specifically the year at the end of that time stamp.

“Shit.”

“Hey,” Jason piped up from the counter. “If I’m not allowed to curse at the breakfast table, neither are you.”

“You never follow that rule,” Damian pointed out.

Bruce wasn’t paying attention to either of them. “I need to talk to Alfred,” was all he said.

Chapter Text

Bruce

“I told you to get checked for internal injuries.” After over a decade of aiding Bruce in his vigilantism – a decade of trying and failing to get Bruce to care about his physical wellbeing – Alfred had perfected the “I told you so.” He never gloated, even in times like this when he had every right to. He didn’t have to. Bruce could see it in his expression: the smug glint in his eyes, that familiar, exasperated frown. Why doesn’t anyone around here listen to me? it said. Aloud, he said, “Do you have any other symptoms of a concussion?”

That had been Bruce’s first thought, too. But even though he was no neurologist, he’d had more than his fair share of concussions, and he was fairly certain a traumatic brain injury couldn’t neatly wipe out three years of memory while leaving the rest of his brain intact.

There was always the possibility the rest of his brain wasn’t intact and he just hadn’t noticed it yet. Bruce didn’t scare easily, but that was a terrifying thought.

“Slight vertigo and nausea when I try to remember anything that’s happened in the past three years,” Bruce admitted. “That’s it.”

Alfred’s frown deepened. “You’ll need to go to the hospital,” he said, just as Bruce had expected him to. “We’ll come up with a convincing story for how it happened. You stay here; I’ll gather the children. They’ll need to get their stories straight.”

Bruce remained in his study while Alfred collected everyone. He sat at his desk, in front of his computer, and scrolled through all the major news outlets, getting a sense of the state of the world. He did a few quick searches on current world leaders, ongoing wars and conflicts, changes to trade agreements, Wayne Enterprises’ performance in the stock market. He tried to keep his head, maintain a rational perspective. Everyone he cared about was still alive and well. (At least, everyone who’d been alive and well three years ago. Given how the dead didn’t always stay dead in Gotham, that wasn’t a foregone conclusion.) No supervillains had succeeded in taking over the world. The Justice League was intact.

He took a deep, cleansing breath. Sure, there were few things in the world Bruce hated more than not knowing things, and now there were three long years’ worth of things he didn’t know. Sure, he’d forgotten the past three years of his children’s lives, years he’d never get back, years he might have one day looked back fondly on. Worse things had happened. Far worse things. He’d catch up on everything he was missing from those three years, and everything would be fine.

And maybe his memories would come back on their own. Again, he was no neurologist. For all he knew, it was possible. But he also wasn’t an optimist, so he wasn’t going to count on it.

The sound of familiar voices murmuring outside the study door interrupted Bruce’s strategizing. He remained still and silent, listening in.

“Three years?” That was Dick. He must have just gotten in from Blüdhaven. When Alfred said he’d gather the children, he’d meant all the children, apparently.

“Explains why he was so surprised to see me this morning,” Jason said.

“It’s convenient timing,” Tim muttered.

“You don’t think it has something to do with—?” Damian began before Dick shushed him.

“We don’t have any evidence of that,” he said.

“Anyone heard from him?” Bruce had to strain to hear Cass’ whispered question. He didn’t catch the others’ answers. “Someone text him,” she said.

“I’ll do it.” Dick again. “Should we wait for him to get here before we tell Bruce?”

Bruce wondered who he was. He made a mental note to find out.

“Bruce is going to find out, if he hasn’t already,” Tim warned them. Smart kid. “It’ll be better if he hears it from us.”

“Still, we shouldn’t just spring it on him,” said Dick.

A few more seconds of whispering and then, having apparently reached a consensus, all five of Bruce’s children stepped through the door.

“Alfred told us what happened,” Dick announced before Bruce could say anything. They all took seats on the various couches and armchairs around the room, looking alert and ready, although ready for what, Bruce couldn’t be sure.

“You don’t remember anything?” Tim asked. “Absolutely nothing, between three years ago and today?” Bruce shook his head, and Tim and Dick shared a significant look.

“It’ll take a while for me to catch up on everything that’s happened,” Bruce said, feigning ignorance of the conversation he’d overheard. “What are the most important things I’ve missed?”

“You and Jason made up,” Dick offered.

“Sort of,” Jason quickly amended. “You’re still on thin ice.”

That explained Jason’s presence in the kitchen this morning. “Anything else?”

“Damian lost the last of his baby teeth,” Tim said, and Damian glared at him.

“He said important things.”

They fell silent. Bruce waited for one of them to let him in on their secret, letting his gaze fall on each of them in turn. None of them cracked. They were all talented liars; after all, they’d learned from the best. But they weren’t leaving until Bruce got an answer from them. “What are you keeping from me?”

Another long pause. Jason snapped the gum he was chewing. Damian stared at the ceiling, bored. Cass leaned her elbows on the armrest of the couch she was sitting on and watched the trail of a raindrop down the window nearest to her. Tim leaned over and nudged Dick with his elbow.

Dick huffed a sigh. Apparently he’d been elected as the bearer of potentially bad news. “You started dating someone. It must’ve been almost three years ago.”

That was just about the last thing Bruce had expected. He wasn’t the dating type. For obvious reasons. “Who?” he demanded.

Dick cast a desperate look around the room for someone to save him from this situation. For another minute or two, no one spoke, and just as Bruce was about to repeat his question, Cass spoke up, voice muffled by the hand she was resting her chin on. “Clark Kent.”

For a moment, Bruce’s mind wandered into an insane fantasy world where what his children had told him was true, but he reeled himself back just as quickly. “Who’s idea was this?” he snapped. He had no patience for practical jokes, especially not now.

“This isn’t a joke, Bruce,” Dick said, and he sounded so sincere Bruce almost believed him. He wouldn’t have pegged Dick as the type to participate in this type of behavior. But they had to be messing with him, because the idea that Bruce was dating Clark Kent was… absurd. It was laughable. It would never happen, because Bruce wouldn’t have allowed it to happen.

But then Bruce remembered the messages on his phone, the lengthy log of texts between him and Clark going back years. Three years, he would guess. He considered them in a new light, remembered what a few of them said, innocuous things: When are you coming home tonight? How long will you be in Shanghai? Are you free for dinner on Sunday? I think I might actually get all the kids out of the house tonight. Together, they added up to something… not so innocuous.

Just as the weight of this realization – the second shock of the day for Bruce, and it wasn’t yet afternoon – began to sink in, the doorbell rang, echoing through the vast halls of the manor.

“I’ll get it,” Tim offered, and the others glared at him for taking the convenient excuse to temporarily escape the situation and leaving the rest of them trapped there. He practically leapt from his chair and bounded out of the room.

“That’s probably Clark,” Jason observed neutrally. He must have seen the flash of doubt on Bruce’s face, because he leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest and said, “We’re not fucking with you. You’re dating Superman. Get over it.”

Clark

The door to Wayne Manor swung open, revealing Tim Drake, who was sporting an impressive case of bedhead and a t-shirt several sizes too large that he might have borrowed from one of his older siblings or larger friends. “Hey,” Tim said, ushering Clark inside. “We’re, uh, having a bit of a situation here.”

“I’m having a bit of a situation of my own,” Clark said candidly. “Tell me.”

Tim looked at him strangely for a moment before spilling the beans. “Bruce has memory loss. We’re still not sure how it happened, but he can’t remember the last three years. Which means he can’t remember dating you.”

Clark had thought this might happen. Honestly, it was more convenient than the alternative. He didn’t think he could handle a Bruce Wayne who’d sunk three years into a relationship with him. That Bruce Wayne was… unfathomable to him. He could, however, handle the Bruce Wayne he knew and remembered. “Good. Because I can’t remember dating him either.”

If they were in an old episode of Looney Tunes, a lightbulb would have gone on above Tim’s head. “Oh,” he said, gears turning behind his intelligent eyes. “Could it have anything to do with that alien invasion yesterday? Bruce said you both got body snatched.”

“That seems likely,” Clark agreed. “Can I see him?”

Tim hesitated, glancing back into the house. “Uh… yeah,” he said eventually. “I guess.”

Tim led Clark to Bruce’s study, where the rest of Bruce’s children were gathered around on a collection of armchairs and couches and Bruce himself was seated behind his desk, looking surprised to see him. Clark had tried texting that morning when he’d found Bruce’s number in his phone to make sure he wouldn’t arrive too early – he knew how the Wayne family valued their sleep – but had gotten no response.

“Hey,” he said, looking around for an available seat. Cass scooched over to accommodate him.

“Did Tim get you up to speed?” Bruce asked.

“He can’t remember anything either,” Tim provided so Clark wouldn’t have to.

Bruce squinted at Clark. “Interesting.”

“Yeah,” Clark agreed. “Very interesting.”

They didn’t have to say anything else. They both knew they were thinking the same thing. Something had happened when they’d gotten, as Tim had put it, “body snatched.” Which was unfortunate, because it wasn’t like any of those alien parasites had hung around for Batman and Superman to interrogate them about any unforeseen body snatching side effects. They were flying blind.

“Wow,” Jason deadpanned, eyes flicking between Bruce and Clark as they stared each other down. “Been a while since there’s been this much unresolved sexual tension between the two of you. I don’t miss it.”

“Maybe we should go,” Dick suggested quickly, doing damage control.

Before any of the kids could make a move for the door, Bruce stood. “There’s no need for that,” he said forcefully. “Clark and I need to go to the Watchtower.”

Clark was glad they were still on the same page. “You’re right. We need to talk to J’onn. Hopefully he can tell us more about what exactly happened to us during that alien invasion.”

Bruce nodded. “Alfred’s in charge while I’m gone,” he told the kids.

“Duh,” Jason said.

They made their way down to the Batcave. Clark was already wearing his Superman suit under his clothes. Bruce suited up. Neither of them said a word. Jason had been right: There was tension between them. The revelation of their three-year relationship had shifted something in their delicate friendship, and Clark was caught between equal measures of hope and fear that the change was irreversible.

“We’re not going to talk about… this,” Bruce said, and Clark knew immediately what he was referring to, “Until we figure out what the hell happened.”

That was probably for the best. Clark certainly wasn’t looking forward to that conversation, the one where they’d have to sit down and talk frankly about their feelings. Talking about feelings with Batman was like pulling teeth. “That works for me.”

Bruce

J’onn didn’t seem all that shocked when Bruce and Clark broke the bad news to him, which Bruce took as a good sign. Hopefully it meant J’onn knew what the fuck was going on.

“My best guess,” J’onn told them, “Would be that it’s a side effect of the alien parasites.”

Bruce has to bite his tongue to keep from replying “No shit.” That habit Jason had of interrupting conversations with snarky comments? Yeah, Bruce was pretty sure he knew where the kid picked that up. He wasn’t always the greatest influence on his children. He tried his best.

J’onn continued, “Their ultimate goal, when possessing a body, is to take it over completely, until no trace of the original person remains. No personality, no memories, no free will. Perhaps, because they only briefly inhabited your bodies, only a few years’ worth of memories were erased. They didn’t get the chance to complete the process.”

“In that case, I’m even more grateful you and Diana were able to bring us back,” Clark said. “I don’t love the idea of my body running around with nothing left of me in it.” Bruce had to agree with him there.

“You say our memories were ‘erased,’” Bruce quoted. “Does that mean you think we won’t get them back?”

“There’s no way to know for certain,” J’onn said regretfully, knowing it wasn’t what either of them wanted to hear. “Only time will tell.”

Later, when J’onn had left and it was just the two of them, Bruce let some of his dismay show on his face. “This is… not ideal,” he sighed. Understatement of the century, but it wouldn’t be very professional of him to say “This sucks balls.”

“You’re telling me.” Clark held out his hands in a helpless gesture. “I’m a journalist. How am I supposed to do my job if I’m not up to date with the world news? If I’m three years behind?”

“I’m the CEO of a multibillion dollar company,” Bruce added gruffly, echoing Clark’s frustration. “And that’s not even touching on our work with the League and keeping Gotham and Metropolis safe.”

“Yeah. Not ideal.”

In the silence that settled between them, Bruce’s mind raced. Clark must have recognized the look on his face – one of intense concentration, the look he got just before he solved a particularly elusive mystery – because he didn’t say or do anything to interrupt Bruce’s train of thought. He was likely doing some thinking of his own. Over the past twelve hours, they’d been given a lot to think about.

First things first, they would both need to catch up on everything they were missing from the past three years. In the meantime, they’d need to take off work, probably for a longer stretch of time than a garden variety stomach bug or common cold would excuse. An idea formed in Bruce’s mind. With the two of them now apparently in a relationship – something he was determinedly not thinking too much about – they’d only need to come up with one bullshit story, kill two birds with one stone.

“Are you and I together publicly?” Bruce asked.

Clark didn’t stop to question why he wanted to know. “Let me check.” The Watchtower had monitors in every room; Clark used the nearest one to run a few searches. “Yeah, looks like it.” Bruce peered over his shoulder to see his own face looking back at him in a series of images. They were all of him dressed for various formal occasions, with Clark hanging off his arm. The men in the pictures looked happy to be together, but Bruce always took care to look happy in pictures, regardless of how he truly felt, so that meant nothing.

“Good,” Bruce said, tearing his gaze away from those images before they started to make him feel things he didn’t want to feel right then. (Or ever.) “We’ll say one of us was in an accident. Something serious, but not too serious. It’ll give both of us an excuse to take some time off work so we can get caught up with everything that’s happened in the past three years.”

Clark accepted this plan immediately. “Which one of us will we say was in an accident?”

“Me,” Bruce volunteered. “I get in ‘accidents’ all the time. Rock climbing, skydiving, white water rafting. I’ve cultivated a reputation as quite the thrill seeker.”

“Which, as we know, is completely inaccurate,” Clark said, voice laden with sarcasm. “An adrenaline junkie? You? No way.” Bruce rolled his eyes at Clark’s teasing. “So what happened to you this time?”

“I think it’s been a while since I was in a cliff diving accident. Alfred will pull together the details. In the meantime, you’ll have to stay at the Manor to keep up the illusion.” The illusion that Clark was caring for his ailing boyfriend. The illusion that they were together at all.

“It’s not like I have anywhere else to live,” Clark said. “I mean, there’s always the Fortress of Solitude, but like the name says, it gets pretty lonely out there.”

With the first part of his plan in place, Bruce could move onto his next concern. “We should get the message out to the rest of the League before we go. We won’t be of much use to them until we get this figured out.”

Again, Clark agreed. He sent out a message to the rest of the Justice League. Bruce relaxed marginally. He’d gotten through an entire conversation with Clark without either of them getting too deep into their relationship.

Now if he could just keep that streak going for the foreseeable future, he’d be golden.

Chapter Text

Clark

The next day, Clark woke well before anyone else in the Wayne household. He was used to getting up early for work, and even on his days off he rarely slept past eight.

Clark was a notoriously light sleeper. He blamed it on his super senses; his ears picked up the faintest sound from miles away, and although he’d learned to filter out the constant background noise in his life, he could never fully turn it off. It was easier, though, to fall asleep and stay asleep in Wayne Manor than it had been in Metropolis. The relentless sounds of city life were more distant, and there were no noisy neighbors staying up late throwing parties or cheering on the local sports team or arguing or having sex or moving furniture or any of the large number of activities the other people who’d lived in Clark’s apartment building had gotten up to at all hours of the night.

So he’d slept well, and when he awoke, he decided to take a look around the mansion, which he hadn’t had a chance to do the day before, in between figuring out the whole memory loss thing and breaking the news to the Justice League. He’d already gotten a good look at the room he was staying in: large window with a view of the Gotham skyline, huge four-poster bed and a mattress that felt like sleeping on a particularly supportive cloud, en suite bathroom with a shower and a bath and more counter space than he knew what to do with. All his things were in Bruce’s room, but he’d taken what he needed the night before and set himself up in a guest room down the hall. He showered, groomed himself, got dressed, and went downstairs.

Wayne Manor had both a kitchen and a formal dining room. The kitchen was well-stocked with a wild assortment of foods, from that organic, overpriced shit rich people ate to the sugary junk food children and teenagers preferred. There was a French press and an entire cabinet of coffee options. The fridge was overstuffed with fresh produce. The appliances were all top-of-the-line and gleamingly modern.

Clark plucked a banana from a perfectly ripe bunch and poured himself a bowl of multigrain cereal with some fancy plant-based milk. After he finished eating, he wandered through a series of rooms: a living room with a fireplace and a series of comfortable couches and bean bag chairs all facing an enormous television littered with gaming consoles and controllers, a library with shelves bursting with classics and school textbooks and young adult literature, a wine cellar prominently featuring bottles from a vineyard Bruce apparently owned in California.

After his self-guided tour, Clark settled into the library, where he’d located his laptop. He thanked his past self for not changing his password any time in the last three years. It wasn’t the most security-minded decision, but it sure was coming in handy now.

First things first, he logged into his personal email, his work email, and his bank account. He was pleased to discover how much he’d managed to save by living rent-free with a billionaire. His email inboxes were both overflowing with unread messages and he started reading.

He was quickly distracted by his own thoughts, which inexorably dragged him back to the reason he was in Wayne Manor in the first place: because he lived there. Because he was dating Bruce Wayne.

Clark had gotten past the initial shock of learning he was three years behind the rest of the world fairly quickly. It wasn’t the worst or even the weirdest thing to have happened to him. The knowledge that he’d spent those three years dating Bruce Wayne had taken a little longer to sink in (it was telling that that was the less believable of the previous day’s two major revelations), but once it did, he handled it like any reporter would: He asked questions and looked for answers.

At the moment, sitting in the Waynes’ library with neither his nor Bruce’s memories to rely on, Clark had relatively few resources at his disposal to find those answers. There were always gossip magazines, the ones that followed Bruce Waynes’ many relationships because he was rich and handsome and mysterious, but Clark was an experienced journalist for a major news outlet and he wasn’t about to start getting his information from the fucking tabloids. (He also wasn’t sure he wanted to read what they had to say about him: that he was a gold digger, probably, along with some casual homophobic language and insults to his rural upbringing thrown in for good measure.)

Then there was Lois, who clearly knew at least something about Clark’s relationship with Bruce, but she would be at work already, and Clark didn’t want to bother her for something so trivial. There was Clark’s phone, which he searched thoroughly. Clark used social media primarily to promote his work, so he hadn’t posted about his relationship online anywhere. His texts with Bruce contained nothing detailed, nothing revealing, nothing scandalous.

His camera roll turned out to be the most useful source of information. The pictures didn’t start until about two years ago, which would have been about a year into their relationship. That made sense. Bruce didn’t seem like the “take selfies with your significant other” type of guy. Even after that first year mark, most of the pictures on Clark’s phone were of the Wayne kids, not Bruce himself. The photos painted a promising picture, one of Clark getting along with Bruce’s children, celebrating holidays with them, going on vacation with them: Dick stealing his phone on New Year’s and taking three dozen drunken, blurry selfies that made Clark laugh; weeks’ worth of landmarks in countries Clark had never visited for anything more than a quick League or solo mission, which left little time for sightseeing; a ten-minute video of Cass dancing en pointe; Tim and Kon posing with big grins and opposing team jerseys at a Kansas City Royals versus Gotham Knights baseball game.

Still, Clark found no answer to his most burning question: How had he and Bruce gotten together? He couldn’t imagine a world in which Bruce had been the one to initiate their relationship; it had to have been Clark. But what would have convinced Clark to do so? He would have needed a pretty clear indication that Bruce reciprocated his feelings, and even then, he still wasn’t sure he would have made a move. Clark was constantly hyper-aware of the risk of overstepping his bounds around Bruce. There would have had to be some crazy extenuating circumstances for him to set those worries aside.

Clark’s super hearing picked up the sounds of footsteps descending the stairs, disrupting his thoughts of Bruce. Someone else was finally awake. According to his phone, it was well past noon. When the footsteps entered the kitchen, Clark snapped his laptop shut and went in for a snack and some company.

He found Jason drinking coffee straight from the pot, wearing Gotham U sweatpants and a Wonder Woman t-shirt. He didn’t acknowledge Clark’s presence, so Clark started pulling together a sandwich: whole grain bread, free range turkey, fresh lettuce, swiss cheese, cucumber. He sat at the counter to eat. Jason rummaged around in the pantry and came out with a package of Double Stuf Oreos. Clark kept his thoughts about the nutritional value of Jason’s breakfast to himself.

“So,” he began. He didn’t have the first clue how to talk to Jason. He’d rarely interacted with him before, that he could remember. Jason and Bruce hadn’t been on the best of terms three years ago. But he needed to start catching up on all the things he was missing, and Jason seemed like the type of person who would give it to him straight. “What’s the deal around here?”

Jason side-eyed Clark. “What’s the deal with what?” he asked, a trace of amusement in his voice.

Clark shrugged. “Anything. Everything. I know nothing.”

That got a laugh out of Jason, one sharp syllable before he clammed back up. “Uh, sure, I guess I could get you up to speed.” He twisted an Oreo in half, ate the side without any frosting first. “You and Bruce started dating three years ago and you moved in about a year and a half ago. That’s all I know about your relationship. That’s all I want to know.”

“And how many of you kids live here? All of you?”

Jason shook his head. “Dick has his own place in Blüdhaven. Everyone else, though, yeah. I guess if you want to be technical about it, I don’t actually exist as far as the media or the government or, like, the public is concerned. Hard to explain your kid coming back to life without giving anything away.” He ate the frosted side of the Oreo, then twisted another one in half. “I guess everyone could pretend I was a new kid, but then I’d have to go to all those lame ass social functions the Wayne family is constantly invited to. Hard pass. So, legally, I don’t live here. Bruce can’t claim me on his fucking tax forms or anything, is what I’m saying, which, y’know, serves him right.”

“Do I get along with everyone?” Clark asked.

“Now, yeah.” Jason washed his Oreos down with a swig of black coffee. “Dick was already, like, in love with you. Did you know he had a crush on you when he was a kid? I seriously doubt he was subtle about it.”

“He wasn’t.”

Another bark of laughter. “I knew it. Took a while for everyone else to get used to you being around all the time. Especially Damian. But you’re too nice for anyone to hold a serious grudge against you. It’s really annoying.”

Dick sauntered into the room, stretching and yawning. He’d spent the night, apparently wanting to be with everyone while they dealt with Bruce’s memory loss. “Are you trying to scare Clark off? It didn’t work the first time you tried it, and it’s not going to work now.” As he walked by, his hand darted out and snatched the Oreos out of Jason’s reach. “Eat a real breakfast.”

“Hey!” Jason protested, making a grab for his stolen snack before deciding it wasn’t worth it to actually get up and go after Dick. He slouched forward in his stool and brushed away a handful of Oreo crumbs. “And I’m not trying to ‘scare him off.’ God. I was just telling him how things work around here.”

Dick rinsed off a spotless apple and deposited it in front of Jason, who scowled but took a big bite. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Clark. Everybody likes you. Just don’t make Jason talk about his feelings, don’t give Damian the impression that you think of him as a little kid, and don’t ever talk to anyone before eleven if they went out the night before. Don’t even make eye contact.” It would have sounded like a joke coming from anyone else, but Clark got the feeling Dick was dead serious.

By the time Clark had finished his sandwich, the entire family was gathered around the counter and the kitchen table, eating Poptarts and Froot Loops and bagels with cream cheese. Bruce was dressed more informally than Clark had ever seen him, in a long bathrobe and slippers, the way Clark had always pictured rich old men dressed when they hung out in their mansions with their young wives. Not that much of his skin was showing, but Clark spied a series of nasty purple-green bruises on his shins. Wonder Woman’s handiwork. The kids and Alfred had collectively lobbied against Bruce going out on patrol the night before, in light of his memory loss. Realizing he was outnumbered, Bruce had reluctantly agreed. “One night off,” he said. Clark was privately relieved. Bruce had to still be in a ton of pain.

Clark watched Bruce out of the corner of his eye. His hair was still wet from the shower. Under the scent of freshly brewed coffee and sizzling bacon, Clark’s super senses picked up traces of soap and shampoo. In his own shower that morning, Clark had spent a long time standing under the spray pushing at the boundaries of the fog in his mind. He did his best thinking either in the shower or while flying, and had hoped he might be able to recall something, but all he’d come away with was a killer headache. And Clark didn’t get headaches, so he was a real baby about it.

Now, as he stared intently at Bruce making breakfast in his bathrobe, Clark thought he felt a pang of familiarity, but it was gone as quickly as it came.

“Remember anything yet?” Bruce asked once he had a plate of food and a cup of coffee in front of him, apparently thinking along the same lines as Clark.

“Nothing,” Clark said regretfully. “What about you?”

“Nothing.” Bruce scowled, looking as frustrated with their situation as Clark felt.

“I’ll probably spend today catching up on what I need to know for my job,” Clark offered. “That’ll mostly involve learning everything that’s happened in the news for the past three years. I can speed read everything the Daily Planet and other major outlets have written and then I could give you the highlights. That way you can focus on your company.”

Bruce gave him a familiar look, one that said that was such a good idea he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it himself. Privately, it was one of Clark’s favorite looks. Bruce Wayne was a difficult man to impress, which made it that much sweeter when Clark managed to do just that. “That would be convenient,” Bruce said.

“At some point we should talk to Diana to get caught up on League business. Lois can tell me most of what I’d need to know about my personal life and any changes to our work environment. And you’ve got the kids and Oracle to get you up to speed on Bat business.” Clark paused and thought for a moment before asking, “Am I missing anything?”

He was missing one rather obvious thing, and he knew it. But Bruce had specifically requested he not bring up their forgotten relationship, and even though Clark was desperate for one of them to acknowledge the elephant in the room so they could talk about it and decide how to move forward, Clark knew better than to try to force Bruce to talk about something he didn’t want to talk about.

“I think that sounds like a good start.”

“Great,” Clark said. Even though it wasn’t great. It was as good as he was gonna get right now.

Chapter Text

Bruce

Bruce still didn’t remember anything. Not that he’d expected to. He’d woken up earlier than usual, having not gone out the night before, and used the extra time to try everything he could think of to focus his mind. He tried meditating, he tried doing push-ups until his already sore body screamed at him to stop, he tried reading every single text he and Clark had exchanged over the past three years. His memories were as inaccessible as when he’d first woken up in the Watchtower.

He’d promised himself the day before that he wouldn’t think about his forgotten relationship with Clark until he had everything else in his life figured out. He justified it by telling himself that his work at Wayne Enterprises, in Gotham, and with the Justice League was more important than his personal life, but he knew deep down he was really just procrastinating. Everyone knew he didn’t like talking about his feelings. Well, he didn’t like thinking about them either.

Unfortunately, it was hard not to think about it. And at some point that morning, around when he decided to read all those texts between him and Clark, he gave in.

The texts were largely uninteresting. They painted a picture of domesticity, but there were no deep discussions of their feelings, no salacious details. Bruce’s children liked to tease him for being a “boring texter.” They were right. He used texts to communicate short, simple thoughts. Anything else was better communicated in person, over the phone, or not at all. He’d never used an emoji in his life and he didn’t plan to.

Salacious details or not, it was surreal to read all the words that had passed between himself and Clark over those three years neither of them could remember. Bruce tried to imagine a series of events that might have led him to enter a relationship with the man he secretly thought of as his best friend. Bruce had harbored a private attraction to Clark for an embarrassingly long time, but he’d never felt tempted to do anything about it. What he had with Clark – their friendship, their working relationship – was good enough for him. He wouldn’t have done anything to jeopardize that by bringing up his potentially unreciprocated feelings. Bruce was a master of self-control and an expert in self-deprivation. It was relatively easy for him to just ignore his feelings for Clark. Keep them bottled up and never speak of them to anyone. So why hadn’t he?

There was only one explanation: Clark must have made the first move. Bruce imagined how he would react if Clark had approached him and admitted his attraction. Would he have been able to deny him? Did he have that much self-control?

No. Definitely not. Bruce put on a good show of being cold and heartless, but he was only human. Sure, Bruce might have resisted initially, said a lot of things about how the two of them being together was a bad idea and sure to get them in trouble one day and they needed to keep things professional and blah, blah, blah, but if Clark had been persistent enough, Bruce would have given in.

So that must have been how they’d gotten together. But, God, how had they stayed together? For three years. How had Bruce not scared Clark off with his cynicism and his stubbornness and his extensive trauma and emotional issues and everything else that was wrong with him?

That was the point when Bruce forced himself to stop thinking about it, and went downstairs.

After their brief conversation over breakfast (lunch, for Clark, who ran on a normal human schedule, unlike the rest of them), Bruce and Clark split up to do their own independent research into what they’d missed. They didn’t reconvene until after dinner, when Bruce was about ready to head down to the Batcave and get ready for the night.

“I emailed you a summary of all the news we’ve missed,” Clark said. Bruce took out his phone and found Clark’s email in the middle of his crowded inbox. He skimmed it. It was surprisingly thorough for something the man had thrown together in the space of an afternoon.

“Can you speed type as well as speed read?”

“I can speed anything.” Clark gave him a self-satisfied smirk. It was… a very attractive look on him. Not that Bruce would ever say so.

“Convenient.”

Clark seemed to pick up on the way Bruce was angled toward the hidden entrance to the Batcave. “Are you going out tonight?”

“I was planning on it.” Bruce pocketed his phone and met Clark’s worried gaze. Oh God, they weren’t going to do this whole song and dance, were they? The tired old routine where Clark expressed “concern” over Bruce’s “reckless” behavior? As if Bruce didn’t get enough of that from Alfred. Bruce didn’t think he could handle that tonight. He was still sore from getting beaten to hell and back by Wonder Woman, pissed at the alien invaders he couldn’t even remember for giving him fucking amnesia, not to mention antsy at having already missed an entire night of patrolling. He didn’t need an overprotective Superman hanging over him like he wasn’t a grown man capable of making his own decisions.

Clark ignored the warning glare Bruce shot him and asked, “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Have you had a chance to catch up with Oracle?” Apparently they were going to do this whole song and dance. Bruce clenched his fists and repressed an eye roll.

The answer to Clark’s second question was “no.” Bruce had gotten in contact with Barbara and told her what had happened to him, and she’d agreed to catch him up on the state of Gotham tomorrow, because she needed a little time to pull together all the details of everything he’d missed. Until then, Bruce was still operating on three-year-old intel. It hardly mattered. He knew Gotham better than anyone. He could hold his own for a single night with a few missing memories.

“I’m sure when we started dating I told you I didn’t need a babysitter,” Bruce growled.

Clark held up his hands, signaling his surrender. “I’m just looking out for you,” he said. “Believe it or not, I actually care whether you live or die.”

Bruce blinked.

He remembered another conversation, much like this one.

He was sitting in the Batcave, battered and bruised, maybe even sporting a broken rib or three, half-dressed in his Batman suit. Clark was standing over him, arms crossed over his chest, the picture of disapproval.

They were having an argument they’d had a thousand times, the same argument they’d keep on having until Clark finally got sick of him throwing himself into danger and gave up on him, like Bruce had always known he would. Except what Clark said next struck Bruce in a way Clark’s previous arguments hadn’t. “You’re too important to keep putting your life on the line like this,” Clark said. “You’re too important to your family, you’re too important to the League, and you’re too important to me.”

It wasn’t that Bruce had never considered the potential consequences of his superhero work, how it would affect other people if something happened to him. On the contrary, it kept him up at night, picturing his kids losing yet another parental figure and ending up in the same shitty situation he’d ended up in when his parents died, with an emptiness in the very core of him that no amount of money could fill, with some fundamental aspect of himself broken or twisted or just… missing; he could never quite figure out which. It tortured him to think of Alfred burying yet another Wayne.

But he’d never once imagined that anyone else – that Clark – would care whether he lived or died.

The words escaped his chest before Bruce could stop them: “I’m sorry.”

Clark looked even more shocked than Bruce felt. Bruce rarely apologized for anything. He never apologized for doing what had to be done out on the streets of Gotham to protect the innocent and bring the guilty to justice. But maybe he could have been more careful out there tonight. Maybe he could have thought twice before putting himself in such a dangerous situation.

Maybe Clark was right. He was reckless with his own life, and one of these days, it was going to catch up to him.

The memory ended. Bruce tried to build some context around it – What had happened beforehand to give him those injuries? What had Clark said to him after? – but that now-familiar fog surrounded everything else from the past three years. Everything but that one, single, solitary conversation, dragged out into the open by what Clark had just told him. “I actually care whether you live or die.”

“I can look out for… myself,” Bruce said, quieter than he’d meant to, distracted by what he’d just… remembered? Is that what had just happened? That memory certainly hadn’t been from longer than three years ago; he knew instinctively that the conversation had occurred after he and Clark had started dating. He didn’t know how he knew it. He knew it like he knew the sky was blue.

“What?” Clark asked, stepping forward, reacting to the confusion that must have been plainly written on Bruce’s features. “What’s wrong?”

“I think I just… remembered something,” Bruce said slowly. He didn’t want to get Clark’s hopes up if he was wrong, but he didn’t have any other explanation for it.

“What do you remember?”

“A conversation we had. An argument.” Bruce met Clark’s gaze. So much for not getting Clark’s hopes up. Clark looked like Bruce had just told him he’d found the cure for a loved one’s terminal illness. “It was related to what we were just talking about. That must have been what triggered it.”

Clark paused. “This afternoon, when you were making breakfast, that felt… familiar to me, just for a second. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now…”

Bruce froze, putting the pieces together. If he had remembered something, and Clark might have remembered something, then it was possible their memory loss wasn’t permanent. They would recover their memories, in time. It sounded too good to be true, which was almost enough to make Bruce dismiss the possibility out of hand.

But then again, the possibility of dating Clark Kent had once sounded too good to be true, and apparently Bruce had been wrong about that. Who was to say he wasn’t wrong about this too? He felt an unfamiliar swell of optimism in his chest and, instead of shoving it away, he grabbed hold of it and refused to let go.

“So if we’re assuming those two incidents weren’t flukes,” he said, “It seems like putting ourselves in situations similar to ones we may have encountered during the past three years might help jog our memories.”

“You’d think we’d have run into plenty of those situations already,” Clark said, for once the voice of reason.

“The brain is a complex thing. Who knows what might trigger it? We’ll just have to stay alert. If either of us remembers anything, we’ll share it, and maybe we’ll start to see a theme.”

Clark nodded. Bruce thought longer, and came up with an idea. It was a long shot, but it was worth trying. “Sleep in my room tonight,” he told Clark. “Maybe it’ll help. With the remembering. I’ll be out most of the night anyway, and when I get back, I’ll take the guest room.”

“Okay,” Clark said.

With that settled, Bruce descended into the Batcave, Clark’s concerns about his readiness forgotten in light of this new, fragile promise of remembering the past three years.

Clark

The night before, Clark had only briefly entered Bruce’s bedroom to grab his things and take them to the guest room. Now that he was planning to sleep there, he had plenty of time to look around. Once Bruce and the kids left the manor to flood the streets of Gotham with their particular brand of vigilante justice, Clark entered the room quietly, holding his breath as he crossed the threshold like he was afraid of disturbing some ghost of his past. But wasn’t that exactly why he was here? To shake out the memories that might be associated with this place?

The heavy door swung shut behind him, sealing him inside. At first glance, the room wasn’t that much different from the guest room Clark had slept in. The four poster bed was a little grander, the color scheme a little darker. The window presented the same view of Gotham, buildings towering toward the cloudy night sky lit by the fuzzy outline of a half moon.

Clark peeked into the walk-in closet. Half of it was crammed with tailored suits and polished shoes, a row of watches that each cost at least as much as a car and a row of nearly identical ties. The other half was more sparsely filled with noticeably less luxurious attire: Clark’s things. Far fewer suits and far more jeans and khakis, a plethora of button-up shirts, a modest collection of shoes for all occasions, and only two watches, one a graduation gift from his parents and one a birthday gift from Lois. He chuckled. He could practically picture Bruce insisting they split their closet evenly, even though Bruce had at least twice as many clothes as Clark did.

The bathroom was next to the closet, and the only thing that differentiated it from the guest bathroom was the collection of men’s grooming supplies in the shower and on the counter. Clark picked up a minimalistic black bottle of cologne and spritzed it into the air in front of him. It was too much for his super senses to handle, and when he closed his eyes, Clark thought he remembered pressing his face into the spot where Bruce’s neck met his broad shoulders and inhaling the familiar scent of him and then kissing him there, but then he opened them again and the memory drifted away with the mist of cologne in the air. Clark staggered backward, swept off his feet by desire.

That moment in the kitchen, Bruce in his bathrobe making breakfast, Clark could have explained away as a strange sense of deja vu, but this? It couldn’t have been anything else but a memory. Clark’s daydreams weren’t that vivid. His imagination could never have captured the weight of Bruce’s hands holding onto his waist like an anchor, the heat of Bruce’s skin under his lips.

Maybe this idea of Bruce’s, to stay in his bedroom, had been a little too good. Clark wasn’t sure he could handle remembering these particular details.

Logically, Clark knew that the fact that he and Bruce had been in a three-year relationship likely meant all his dirtiest, most shameful fantasies had come true. But it didn’t do him any good to dwell on that now. Not when they were still stuck in this annoying limbo of refusing to acknowledge their relationship.

Driven to distraction, Clark got ready for bed quickly and then laid down and replayed that memory of a kiss over and over again in his mind until sleep claimed him.

He dreamed, and it was not unlike dreams he had had in the past. He dreamed of Bruce’s hands, and Bruce’s skin, and Bruce’s mouth. But in the dream, they were in this bed, and the details were all correct: the color of the bedsheets, the texture of the carpet, even the glimpse of the Gotham skyline through the curtains. It didn’t feel like a dream at all. It felt too real, too familiar. Like he’d done it all before.

Clark woke with a start to the sound of a door opening, and footsteps. His eyes found Bruce’s figure standing just outside the bathroom. His breath came shallow, and he was grateful to the thick bedspread that concealed the evidence of what he’d just been dreaming.

“What are you doing here?” Clark hissed.

Bruce held something up in his hand. “Forgot my toothbrush,” he said, and his deep, rumbling voice did things to Clark that were entirely inappropriate for their current situation.

Technically, this isn’t inappropriate at all, an unhelpful part of Clark’s brain provided. Technically, Bruce is your boyfriend of three years, and you’re allowed to get turned on by his voice any time you please. Clark shook his head to clear these thoughts and focused on slowing his breathing.

“How do you sleep when you can hear everything?” Bruce was asking, seemingly oblivious to Clark’s predicament, which was exactly how Clark wanted it.

“Not well.”

“Remember anything?”

Clark debated lying. But what good would that do him? What good would that do either of them? And what reason did he have to be embarrassed? He’d remembered an intimate moment between the two of them. That was hardly strange; they’d been in a relationship for three years and had no doubt had plenty of intimate moments. So he told the truth. “I sprayed some of your cologne in the bathroom,” he began. “It reminded me of a specific incident of us kissing. I didn’t remember much; just a kiss. No context.” Clark paused. Bruce seemed to sense he had more to say, and waited. Clark thought about the dream. It was just a dream, he told himself. “That’s it,” he said aloud.

“It’s a start,” Bruce replied, in no way reacting to Clark’s mention of them kissing. “I’ll let you get back to sleep.”

He left. Clark didn’t sleep a wink for the rest of the night.

Chapter Text

Bruce

Upon waking, it took a few moments for Bruce to remember where he was. The guest room looked just enough like his bedroom to confuse his sleep-addled brain. Once he put the pieces together and it all came back to him – everything that had happened in the past two days – he was sorely tempted to just close his eyes and go back to sleep. The world was so much easier to deal with while unconscious. Every time he thought his life couldn’t possibly get more complicated, he was proven wrong.

Bruce ignored the temptation and forced himself out of bed. Nothing would get better by his ignoring it. The only thing to do about his memory problem was to keep moving forward. He’d spent the bulk of the previous day catching up on the recent developments in Wayne Enterprises. It’d take him a while longer until he knew every little detail, but he was confident now that he’d gotten the gist of things. Today, he’d talk to Barbara about what Batman had been up to in the past three years. At some point, he’d need to have one-on-one conversations with his kids and catch up on their lives.

He was still feeling optimistic after recovering his first memory. Even more so after Clark admitted to experiencing a similar phenomenon, not just once but twice. He still hadn’t decided what to do about his relationship with Clark in the meantime, while they remained in this limbo of not knowing how many of their memories would come back to them and how many would remain permanently inaccessible. They’d probably have to actually, you know, talk about it at some point. He was hoping to put that off for as long as possible.

He found Clark, once again, in the kitchen, eating lunch while the rest of them ate breakfast. Dick had returned to Blüdhaven once Bruce had reassured him he had things under control, leaving only the younger four children. Cass was still trekking through the Harry Potter books, leaning back in her chair with her feet propped up on the kitchen table. Damian and Tim got in a fight over the last strawberry Poptart and spilled a pot of hot coffee all over the counter and were yelling at each other about whose fault it was. Jason had run upstairs to change his shirt, a casualty of said spill, after swearing up a storm and giving each of them a piece of his mind. In short, a typical morning in the Wayne household.

After breakfast, Bruce went down to the Batcave to talk to Barbara, a conversation that took the better part of the afternoon. Her report was as detailed as always, a fact Bruce appreciated immensely. As intelligent and capable as they were, he wasn’t sure his five adopted children could be relied upon to remember every pertinent thing that had happened in Gotham over a span of three years. But Oracle was, as the name implied, practically omniscient when it came to these things. Bruce could hardly remember how he’d managed without her.

“Any more questions?” she asked when they were wrapping up.

“Not at the moment,” Bruce said. “I’ll let you know if anything comes up.”

Barbara’s face on the monitor in front of him flickered with a brief, amused smile before she suppressed it and asked, “How’s Clark holding up? I hear things are a little tense over there.”

Bruce sighed. “Who told you, Dick or Cass?”

“You think I’d reveal my sources to you?” The mischievous smile was back. “I’m no snitch.”

“It’s none of your business,” Bruce said flatly, even though he knew how Barbara would respond.

“Everything’s my business.”

The monitor flickered off. Bruce leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his hair. He’d taken a good, long look at himself in the mirror that morning. It was a sight he was more than used to: all the usual scars, plus a generous helping of black and purple bruises, courtesy of Wonder Woman. Clothes on, he knew he was still an incredibly attractive man, even with his younger days firmly in the rearview mirror, but underneath the expensive suits, his body was a war zone. Bruce Wayne was not the type of man to feel self-conscious about his appearance, but he came pretty damn close when he considered that the man he was dating was literally, biologically flawless.

As if summoned by Bruce’s thoughts, Clark stepped out of the elevator that connected the Batcave to the manor above. “I’m not interrupting, am I?”

Bruce shook his head, and as Clark approached, he regarded him. Clark looked at least ten years younger than he was. He didn’t have a single gray hair, and any fine lines in his face were invisible from a distance. Bruce had read what the tabloids had to say about them: Bruce Wayne, father of five, having an early mid-life crisis; Clark Kent, lowly journalist, says he’s Bruce’s age but no one has been able to dig up a birth certificate to confirm it. A gold digger if any of those gossip columnists had ever seen one. A hot, young sugar baby for the billionaire whose glory days were behind him.

What the hell did Clark see in him?

“I’m glad you got caught up with Oracle,” Clark said, coming to stand behind Bruce. “I’ll feel a lot better about you going out tonight.”

Bruce shot him a look. “Because that’s my number one concern when I’m out there,” he said, injecting more venom into his voice than was strictly necessary. “How you feel about it.”

He was lashing out. He knew that. But Clark, saint that he was, didn’t react with anger; instead, he placed a hand on Bruce’s shoulder and said, in a perfectly understanding voice, “I know. I can tell you think I’m… overbearing. I try not to be.” Their eyes met in their reflection in the blank monitor. Clark gave a small, conciliatory smile. Bruce felt even more keenly that he did not deserve this man.

“I used to feel the same way when my parents worried about me,” Clark continued, oblivious to Bruce’s inner turmoil. He did an impression of himself ten-odd years ago: “‘I know what I’m doing, Ma.’” He chuckled, then suddenly went silent. “Shit.”

Bruce turned to give him a questioning look. Clark dug his phone out of his pocket, unlocking it and scrolling furiously. “I haven’t told my parents,” he said.

“What haven’t you told them?”

“That I’ve lost three years of memories.”

Ah. Yes. Sudden memory loss did seem like the sort of thing loving parents would want to hear about immediately after it happened.

Clark opened his phone app and froze again. “Oh, God.”

“What?”

Clark turned to face him. He looked nervous. “I don’t think there’s a chance in hell you and I have been together for three years and you haven’t met my parents,” he explained. “I don’t even know what they think of you.”

Bruce snorted. “Your parents definitely hate me.”

Clark was quick to contradict him. “My parents don’t hate you,” he said, sounding absolutely sure of himself. “My parents don’t hate anyone. Other than the people who try to kill me regularly.”

“I’m not the guy you bring home to impress your parents,” Bruce said, equally confident in his own assessment. “I’m the guy you bring home when you’re going through a rebellious phase and you want to get a reaction out of your parents.”

“That’s not true. You have a great job and five kids. And you know how to turn on the charm.” The conversation ended abruptly when Clark tapped his parents’ home number and held his phone to his ear. Bruce quieted, listening to the half of the conversation that he could hear.

“Hey, Ma,” Clark said when his mother picked up. “Listen, there’s something I need to tell you…”

For the second time in two days, Bruce remembered another conversation.

Clark was on the phone with his mother in the other room. It wouldn’t be polite of Bruce to eavesdrop. But he had never set much stock in politeness, especially weighed against his own curiosity.

“Hey, Ma,” Clark began, like he began all his conversations with Martha Kent. “There’s, uh… something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” Silence for a moment while Martha replied, then, “I’m seeing someone new.”

They’d been dating for three months. Bruce knew Clark had already told Lois – they told each other everything, if Clark was to be believed – and it was fucking impossible to keep a secret in the Wayne household, so naturally, Alfred and all of the children knew. It was about time Clark’s parents were finally brought into the loop.

“You know how it is, Ma,” Clark was saying. “There aren’t that many people I can be completely honest with.” Another pause, longer this time. “His name’s Bruce Wayne.”

Bruce knew Clark was out to his parents as bisexual. Apparently they were very accepting.

“He lives in Gotham. We met through work.” Not technically a lie. “He’s, uh… he runs his own business.” Pause. “Have you heard of Wayne Enterprises?”

Oh boy. Bruce hoped Clark’s parents weren’t the type to run a Google search on him. He wasn’t sure they’d like what they found.

Clark’s voice brought Bruce back to the present. “What?” he said into the phone, sounding surprised. “No. Why would you immediately assume—? No, Ma. I have memory loss. I can’t remember anything from the last three years.”

Bruce could only imagine how Martha was reacting to the news. He wasn’t sure how parents were supposed to react to the news that their son, a superhero, had inexplicably lost three years’ worth of memories. He hadn’t had parents to worry about him in a long time. He had Alfred, which was similar, but Alfred took everything in stride. And he himself was a parent to superheroes, but that wasn’t quite the same, since he was also a superhero and it was entirely his fault his kids were superheroes too.

“He also has memory loss,” Clark told his mother after she asked him something Bruce couldn’t hear. “Did you see that alien invasion on the news? It happened then.” The questions kept coming, and Clark answered succinctly: “We don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it.” Pause. “A little overwhelmed. But it’ll be okay. I’ll figure it out. I might come visit.”

He ended the call with a short goodbye and a heartfelt “thanks, Ma” before hanging up and turning to Bruce. “They like you,” he concluded.

Bruce was skeptical. “You didn’t even ask.”

“The first thing she said to me when she picked up was to ask whether we were engaged yet.”

Bruce didn’t mean to, but he laughed, sharp and quick. He couldn’t help it. Him? Engaged? Bruce Wayne was not marriage material. No one in their right mind would legally bind themselves to a man like him for time and all eternity, even if divorce was always an option. Not if they really knew him. “I guess that settles it,” he said.

Eventually, Clark left the Batcave. Bruce remained a while longer, even though he knew it would be dinnertime soon. He needed to think, and he did that better here.

The surrealism of his situation continued to build and build. He was in a relationship with Clark. Clark was living with him. They’d been together for three years. His children liked Clark. Clark’s parents liked him. It was such a perfect picture of domestic bliss, and none of it squared with what Bruce knew about himself: that he was not allowed to have something so good in his life without it being taken away in the cruelest manner possible.

Maybe that was what the memory loss had done: taken the life he’d been living with Clark away from him. Maybe this was the beginning of the end for them.

An alert rang through the Batcave. Someone had entered through the doors that led to the rest of the city. Very few people had the access code to those doors, and when the sound of the door opening was immediately followed by the whoosh of flight as the visitor sped down the runway into the cave proper, Bruce knew exactly who it was.

Diana landed in front of him with her hands on her hips. She was dressed as Wonder Woman, a warrior from head to toe. “I came as soon as I heard,” she said, kneeling in front of Bruce to bring them at roughly eye level with one another. The concern on her face morphed into annoyance. “Thanks for telling me, by the way. I had to find out from J’onn.”

Right. Diana had been absent from the League meeting where Bruce and Clark had broken the news of their memory loss. She’d gone straight from the alien invasion back to Themyscira, and it was pretty impossible to get a message to an island that was shielded from the rest of the world by the gods. “I’ve sort of got a lot on my plate right now,” Bruce said, “And unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to find the Queen of the Amazons’ contact information.” He switched off the sarcasm and added, “I would have told you eventually.”

“‘Eventually,’” Diana repeated dryly. “Are you and Clark working it out?”

“Working what out?”

“It must be difficult for you, neither of you remembering your relationship.”

Bruce shrugged. “We haven’t really talked about it.”

“Of course you haven’t.” Diana rolled her eyes. “I assume that’s your fault.”

“He hasn’t brought it up either,” Bruce said defensively.

“He wouldn’t, if he knew you didn’t want him to. That’s why it took the two of you so long to get together in the first place.” Diana poked a finger at his chest accusingly. “I don’t think I have the patience to go through that a second time, so do us all a favor and try to skip to the part where you talk about your feelings even though you really don’t want to.”

“I don’t remember asking for your advice.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t need it.”

Bruce changed the subject before Diana could give him even more advice he needed but didn’t want, and asked her something that had been on his mind ever since he’d first learned of his relationship with Clark. “It hasn’t disrupted the League? Us being together?”

Diana shook her head. “You already acted like an old married couple. Practically nothing has changed.” She indicated a nasty bluish bruise that was visible on his collarbone. “Was that one me?”

“Yes.”

She had the decency to look chagrined. “Sorry. I did try to be gentle with you.”

“You did what you had to do. I don’t blame you for it.” It was true. He didn’t. He would have done the same thing in her place. Well, he would have tried. And failed. The thing about Superman was, if he ever went rogue, at least Batman had a secret stash of Kryptonite to take him down. Wonder Woman didn’t have a Kryptonite. “And you were gentle. You didn’t break anything.”

This got a laugh out of her, like Bruce knew it would. “Think of all the notoriety you’ve earned now that you can claim you fought Wonder Woman and lived,” she said, and then she stood. “Is Clark home? While I’m here, I might as well catch you up on League business.”

“He’s upstairs. I’ll get him.”

Chapter Text

Clark

It was finally Saturday, which meant Lois was off work, and Clark had blocked off the entire day to catch up with her. When he arrived at her apartment, she opened the door and immediately enveloped him in a hug. Somehow she always knew exactly what Clark needed. He smiled into her dark hair and took a calm, cleansing breath of the familiar air filled with the fading scents of the cranberry and orange muffin she’d had for breakfast, the perfume she’d sprayed in the bathroom, the citrusy cleaning supplies she used in the kitchen.

“Coffee?” she asked once she’d released him. She brandished a mostly empty pot. “I saved you some.”

“Sure,” Clark said. Caffeine had no effect on him – one of the less convenient side effects of his Kryptonian biology – but he’d developed a taste for the stuff working at the Daily Planet, where anyone who didn’t rely on stimulants to get through the long work days was regarded as certifiably insane. Lois poured the last of the coffee into a Superman mug and handed it to him. She kept that mug specifically for Clark to use whenever he came over; no one else was allowed to drink from it.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. She led him over to the couch and sat down with her feet propped up on the coffee table. Clark sat next to her.

“Completely normal, except for the fact that I can’t remember the last three years.”

“You can’t remember anything at all?”

“I’ve had… flashes of memory. Like deja vu, sort of. But for the most part, it’s like that part of my brain is off limits. The memories are there, but I can’t access them.”

“When do your memories stop?”

Clark had tried to figure that out himself, and hadn’t come up with a definitive answer. “It’s fuzzy,” he explained. “There’s no specific moment I can point to as my most recent memory. All I know is that it was almost exactly three years ago, because when I looked at the date on my phone, I didn’t realize something was wrong until I saw the year. March fourteenth, that sounded right to me.”

“And you said Bruce can’t remember anything either?”

“We’re both in the same boat.” Clark finished off his coffee and set the empty mug down on the table. “How much can you tell me about our relationship?”

“I don’t know all the sordid details. But you kept me in the loop.”

“Do you know when we first got together? And how it happened?” These were the questions Clark kept coming back to. If Lois could at least give him some insight into them, he’d feel a lot better prepared to work things out with Bruce.

Lois thought for a moment, then took out her phone and started scrolling. “It couldn’t have been too long after the last of your memories,” she said. “I know it was spring, because I remember my allergies were fucking killing me. I know the messages are still in my phone.” She scrolled for a few seconds longer, then, “Here it is. May twenty-first.”

“So I’m only missing two months’ worth of memories before our relationship started.” It was shocking to Clark that so much had changed in just two months, that he and Bruce had gone from being just friends to being so much more. “What happened on May twenty-first?”

Lois grinned. “May twenty-first was the morning after.”

“Morning after…?”

“Come on, Clark. You’re a grown-up. You know what ‘morning after’ means.”

Clark thought back to the dream he’d had in Bruce’s bedroom. Not helpful. “Right.”

“You and Bruce confessed your feelings and then slept together,” Lois told him. “Like I said, you spared me the sordid details, but you were on cloud nine all day at work the next day, so it must’ve been good. Shortly after that you started dating for real.” She held up her phone, which displayed all the text messages between them, going back years. “It’s all here in our chat logs. Your first date, your first fight, moving in with him, trying to get his kids to like you. Take a look.”

Clark speed read their texts. Lois was right. It was all there. “Did it seem like I was happy?” he asked.

“In the relationship? Yeah. It did.” Lois held out her hand to take her phone back. “And I was happy for you.”

“I wish I could remember it.”

Lois put a comforting hand on Clark’s knee and gave him a genuinely remorseful look. “I can only imagine what it must be like,” she said. “Are you doing okay? Really?”

“I’ll be fine. We’ll work it out.” Clark wasn’t so sure they would, but he could hope.

“Have you talked about it yet? You always say Bruce is terrible at talking about his feelings.”

“Not yet. I know I’m going to have to be the one to bring it up. I just… haven’t found the right time.” Clark remembered feeling similarly back when he’d started working at the Daily Planet. He had such an embarrassing crush on Lois, and he was so nervous about ruining their working relationship and budding friendship that he hadn’t made a move. She’d had to make the first move, warning him that “you’d better not be one of those guys who gets intimidated when a woman asks you out.” He hadn’t been. He’d been relieved.

“What are you afraid of?” Lois asked.

This was why Lois was such a stellar reporter: She always asked the right questions. Clark hadn’t put it into words yet, but now that she mentioned it, he was afraid. And he knew exactly what he was afraid of. “I’m afraid things will go back to the way they were before. At the time, I was fine just being friends with Bruce. For a long time, I didn’t think we’d even get that far, so it felt like a victory, and I didn’t want to rock the boat. But now that I know I can have more… I want more. I’m not ready to give it all back.” He paused, let out a long, slow breath. “I don’t think I ever will be.”

“So what are you gonna do about it?” Lois asked gently, quietly, in that voice that said she knew Clark had a very important choice to make and that she would support him no matter what he chose.

“I haven’t decided.”

“You should just talk to him.”

“I know.” Clark flashed a small smile. “I’m a coward.”

Lois scoffed and came in for another hug. “You are the farthest thing from a coward I have ever known,” she said into his shoulder.

The feeling of Lois’ arms around him triggered another memory.

“He hates me,” Clark said into Lois’ hair as she hugged him on the couch in her apartment. He could feel Lois shaking her head.

“I’m sure he doesn’t hate you,” she said when she pulled away. “You’re dating his father. That must be a scary change for him.”

“I’m not convinced he’s scared of anything.”

“Sure he is. Everyone’s a little scared of change. Especially kids. You just need to get to know each other better. No one can hate you once they’ve gotten to know you.”

“How am I supposed to get to know him when he won’t give me the time of day?”

“Meet him on his level. Do something with him that he would enjoy. What are his hobbies? What does he like?”

Clark racked his brain. “Violence,” he said, only half-joking. At Lois’ warning look, he gave a more serious answer: “Animals.”

Lois nodded. “Animals. Okay. We can work with that.”

Clark couldn’t help but smile. “I just remembered something,” he said. Lois pulled back from the hug and put her hands on Clark’s shoulders, looking at him expectantly.

“What did you remember?” she demanded.

“You were helping me figure out how to get Damian to like me.”

She nodded, a brilliant smile lighting up her face. She looked just as excited as Clark felt to be putting the pieces together, however slowly. “I remember that. It was a couple years ago. How much else have you remembered?”

“It’s not much. I remember Bruce making breakfast. I remember kissing him. I might remember having sex with him.”

“What does that mean, you might remember it?”

“It was a dream,” Clark admitted. “So it could’ve just been a fantasy my brain cooked up.” Lois raised an eyebrow at him, and he added, “It was surprisingly realistic, okay?”

She scrunched up her nose in an exaggerated display of disgust. “I don’t want to hear about your ‘surprisingly realistic’ sex dreams, Clark!”

They both burst into laughter, and for the first time since he’d woken up and learned he was three years behind the rest of the world, Clark felt like, at least in one area of his life, nothing had changed at all.

Bruce

Clark was spending the day with Lois, and Bruce had taken advantage of that fact to have a proper family dinner for the rest of them. Usually, dinner in the Wayne household was a “do it yourself” affair, with everyone swinging by the kitchen and eating what they wanted when they wanted. But once a week, Bruce made an effort to get them all in the formal dining room at the same time and encourage some family togetherness. No phones allowed. (Yes, he’d gotten the idea from a mommy blog after he’d done some desperate Google searching somewhere around the time he adopted kid number three and realized he was in way over his head.)

It would be Bruce’s first family dinner with Jason present (that he could remember), and he had to admit, he was a little nervous. The Jason he remembered wanted nothing to do with him, couldn’t even be in the same room as him without starting a physical fight.

Alfred ate with them, as he always did when they had family dinners. “You’re a part of the family,” Bruce had told him when he’d first instituted the tradition. “It wouldn’t be a family dinner if you weren’t there.”

Tonight, they were digging into a hearty pasta-based meal – vegetarian, to accommodate Damian – with a fresh salad to sneak some vegetables into the kids’ diets and delicious hot garlic bread to make up for the fact that they had to eat vegetables. Alfred brought a bottle of Bruce’s favorite red from the wine cellar, and Bruce hesitated after filling his, Alfred’s, and Dick’s glasses.

“Are you old enough to drink yet?” he asked Jason. Keeping track of five kids’ ages when your brain was three years behind the rest of the world was as tricky as it sounded.

“Yes,” Jason said instantly.

“Not legally,” Dick said in the same moment.

“Legally,” Jason clarified, “I’m dead.”

“You don’t even like wine,” Dick protested.

Bruce filled Jason’s glass. “Only at home,” he warned. Jason shot Dick a triumphant grin. Dick rolled his eyes.

Tim held out his glass expectantly. “No,” was all Bruce said. “Ha,” Damian taunted.

They tucked in, talking around bites of kale, penne, and garlic bread. Tim and Damian got into a heated debate over the best way to combat organized crime in Gotham. Cass not-so-sneakily finished the final chapter of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire under the table and bounced her leg impatiently until Bruce let her run down the hall to the library to get the next book. Jason smugly sipped his wine, making eye contact with Dick every time he did.

As the conversations around the table waned, Bruce asked the all-important question, the one he’d been meaning to ask them as soon as he could get them all together in one space. “You all like Clark, right?”

Dick was the first to answer. “Of course we do,” he said immediately. “He’s a great guy. I’d consider him a friend even if the two of you weren’t together.”

Tim and Jason nodded. “We all think you could do a lot worse,” Jason said.

“He’s nice,” Cass added.

Bruce turned to Damian, who huffed melodramatically. “We talked about this already,” he whined. “Don’t make me do it again. He’s fine.”

“C’mon, Damian, you know he can’t remember,” Tim was saying, but Bruce wasn’t paying attention. He was remembering.

“I’m thinking about asking Clark to move in with me,” Bruce told Damian slowly. “But I don’t want to do it unless everyone’s on board.” He had to tread carefully here. He knew he was in dangerous territory. He’d already run the idea by the rest of the kids, and all of them, even Jason, had accepted it without complaint. (“Do whatever you want; it’s your house,” Jason had said impassively. “And it’s a fucking mansion. It’s not like we’re tight on space.”)

Damian reacted about as poorly as Bruce had expected. “Move in?” he practically shouted, shooting to his feet. “Here? With us? But you’ve only been seeing him for—”

“A little over a year,” Bruce interjected before Damian could get himself too worked up. “I know. It’s sooner than I would have expected. But I’ve known him for much longer than that. I’ve known him longer than I’ve known you.”

“You’ve known the Joker longer than you’ve known me,” Damian retorted. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides. “Doesn’t mean you’d let him live with us.”

Bruce sighed. Clearly Damian wasn’t ready for this. That was okay. It could wait. The benefit of dating someone who could travel at supersonic speeds was that he could visit just about whenever they both wanted at the drop of a hat. “I hope you like Clark at least a little more than the Joker,” was all he said.

And then a second, related memory:

Damian stormed into the study and collapsed into an armchair. “Fine,” he said, providing no explanation for his behavior.

“Fine, what?” Bruce said, glancing up from his desktop computer.

“I guess he can move in with us. If that’s what you want.”

“I remember… something,” Bruce said. In a split second, all eyes were on him.

“You’re getting your memories back?” Dick asked hopefully.

“I think I might be. Slowly.”

The table erupted into chaos, five loud voices all talking over one another, shouting questions, competing for Bruce’s attention. Bruce tried to answer them all as best as he could until Alfred shooed them all out of the dining room, giving him some much needed relief. “Put your dishes in the sink,” Alfred reminded them.

Bruce leaned back in his chair and turned to Alfred. “What do you think of Clark?”

Alfred took a seat in the chair next to Bruce and folded his hands in front of him. “I think he’s a genuinely kind person. He’s pleasant to be around. He clearly cares about you. He makes an effort with the children. What’s not to like?”

The consensus about Clark seemed to be that there wasn’t anything to dislike. Bruce wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He didn’t like feeling like he was in a relationship with the perfect man. How long would it take for Clark to realize he was settling for Bruce? “Do you think he’s…” Bruce began, before trailing off, not quite sure how to phrase what he wanted to say, or even if he wanted to say it. But if he couldn’t talk to Alfred, who could he talk to?

“What?” Alfred prompted.

“Do you think he could do better?”

Alfred shook his head emphatically. “You mustn’t think that way. Clark is an intelligent man who knows himself a great deal better than you do. If he entered a relationship with you, it was because he wanted to, and if he remained in that relationship, it was because he got something positive out of it.”

“I just can’t imagine what that might be,” Bruce admitted.

“Perhaps you should ask him.”

“When are you planning to ask him?”

Bruce looked up at Alfred, surprised. “I wasn’t,” he insisted. Of course he wasn’t. That would be… absurd. He couldn’t possibly ask Clark. Certainly not at this stage in their relationship. Possibly not ever. “This was a hypothetical conversation. We’ve only been dating for three years. It would be far too soon.”

“You think so?” Alfred prompted.

“You don’t?”

“I think the fact that you’ve asked me about it means you’ve given it a great deal of thought,” Alfred said carefully, “And decided it’s what you want to do.”

Bruce was dumbfounded. Not only had he recovered three separate memories in the course of a single meal, but that last one led him to believe that, at some point in the very recent past, he had actually considered… proposing to Clark? He couldn’t think of any other way to interpret the conversation he’d just recalled. And he’d considered it to the point where he’d brought the idea to Alfred, which meant, as Alfred had said, he’d already been thinking about it for days, weeks, months even.

If Bruce dwelled on the memory, closed his eyes and transported himself back in time to that conversation with Alfred that he could only remember such a small piece of, Bruce swore he could even remember how he’d felt at the time. Uncertain, but… hopeful. Bruce didn’t often allow himself to feel hopeful. People do stupid things when they’re in love, he thought. Because he could remember that too, faintly: being in love.

“Master Bruce?”

“Alfred,” Bruce began, tentatively, “Did you and I have a conversation about…” He trailed off again. He couldn’t even bring himself to say it.

“About what?”

He shook his head. He wasn’t ready to admit it yet. Not out loud. He and Clark hadn’t even talked about their relationship yet. And whose fault is that?

“Never mind. I must be misremembering it.”

Chapter Text

Clark

Coming home to Smallville after a week of living with memory loss was exactly the relief Clark needed. He’d spent the past week in Wayne Manor, a place he couldn’t even remember living, trying to fit back into a life that felt about as foreign to him as he could imagine. There was something about returning to this place full of memories that soothed him. On his way to his parents’ house, he stopped to walk down Main Street and take it all in.

Not everything about Smallville was the same as it was in Clark’s childhood memories. There was a Walmart in what used to be an empty field, and noticeably fewer local businesses than there used to be. Many of his former classmates had left town, searching for bigger lives in bigger cities. The ones who stayed were rarely how Clark remembered them; they were married with children, and when they tried to make conversation with him, they quickly realized they had nothing in common anymore.

But the beat-up pickup trucks were still there, sitting in nearly every driveway. The town was still buffeted by vast fields of corn and wheat and soybeans. Large, fenced-in plots of land were dotted with cows. The streets were just as shitty as they’d always been, pitted and cracked, if they were paved at all. The ice cream parlor still stood, and the feed store, and the Baptist Church with the same old sign out front: “SUNDAY SERVICE 8AM 10AM,” followed by a brief line about God or faith or Jesus that changed week to week.

And there was the high school, looking exactly as Clark remembered it, in desperate need of renovation. It was a Monday afternoon. Clark scanned the building with his x-ray vision and found Conner sitting with his head bent over a test, concentrating. He called out Conner’s name, just loud enough that he knew the kid would pick up on it with his super hearing; sure enough, Conner looked up with a start, eyes searching for a moment before his face broke into a grin. Clark waved, then left Conner to his test.

Clark arrived at his parents’ door smiling and brimming with nostalgia. His father opened the door and he and his mother took turns enveloping Clark in warm, familiar hugs. Clark felt his whole body relax into their embrace. No matter how long he lived in the big city, this was home.

“How are you?” his mother asked once they’d released him and ushered him into their home.

“I’ve been better. I’ve also been worse,” Clark said honestly. He didn’t want to go into too much detail. Not yet. He wanted to relish his first day here, forget all about the problems waiting for him back in Gotham and Metropolis.

They entered the kitchen, and Clark discovered the source of the delicious smells he’d picked up two miles away. The kitchen table was overflowing with food, a smorgasbord of dishes that didn’t all go together, but that all had one thing in common. “Your mother couldn’t decide which of your favorite foods to make, so she made all of them,” Jonathan explained.

“I hope you’re hungry,” Martha added.

Clark grinned. “Starving.”

Seated around their abundant lunch, Jonathan spoke first. “We’ll let you take the lead, son. Do you want to talk about it, or do you just want us to be here for you?”

Clark was grateful his father had asked instead of assuming. “Today, I just want to catch up with you both. We can talk about me tomorrow.” He paused to fill his plate. “Tell me everything that’s happened to you in the past three years.”

They did. Jonathan and Martha did not lead exciting lives, by most people’s standards, with the glaring exception of their adopted alien son and cloned grandson, but Clark hung onto their every word like he was following one of those trashy reality shows about people who were famous for being famous.

“We were so happy to hear you’d finally found someone you liked,” Martha said, once they got to the part where Clark had apparently told them about his relationship with Bruce. “It had been so long since you and Lois broke up. It was time for you to move on.”

Clark’s mother had this idea in her head that the reason Clark had taken so long to enter another serious relationship after Lois was that he had never truly gotten over her. While he had been sad to see that relationship end, it hadn’t taken long for him and Lois to transition smoothly into a close friendship. The real reason was that Clark didn’t want a serious relationship with anyone who didn’t know he was Superman, and there were so few people he felt could trust with that information. He’d told Martha this before, but she also had that motherly habit of believing she was always right.

“To be honest,” Jonathan said, “I wasn’t so sure about this Bruce Wayne fellow in the beginning. He’s got quite the reputation.”

Clark winced. He was actually glad he’d forgotten whatever his parents’ initial reaction had been to learning about Bruce. They were open-minded, but Clark knew Lois had been a far more… conventional partner, easy to let into their lives. Bruce was famous, he was rich, he had five kids, and he was a man. It was a lot to take in.

“Most of the stuff people say about him isn’t true,” Clark assured them. Yes, Bruce had slept with a lot of people. But, contrary to popular belief, he actually was capable of monogamy, in those rare occasions when he found someone he actually liked.

“We know that now,” Jonathan said.

“You never had anything bad to say about him, so we decided to trust your judgment,” Martha said. “And then when he and his children visited last Thanksgiving…”

“They came here for Thanksgiving? All of them?” Clark couldn’t imagine a group of people less likely to fit into a town like Smallville than the Waynes. He couldn’t even imagine his parents fitting all of the Waynes into their tiny farmhouse. Where had they all slept?

But Jonathan nodded, confirming Martha’s statement. “And you too, of course. Bruce flew you all out on that fancy private jet of his.” Of course, because Bruce was the most ostentatious man alive (and because Jason couldn’t travel commercial). Clark could almost picture it: landing in Kansas in a private plane, the Waynes filing out in their all-black couture ensembles, probably hiring a pair of shiny black SUVs to take them to Clark’s parents’ farm, causing a scene the rest of the town would talk about for years to come. He was glad he hadn’t run into anyone who’d recognized him on Main Street; he didn’t think he would ever live that down. He wondered if this meant he was out to the whole town now.

“Oh, let me see if I can remember their names,” Martha said, disrupting Clark’s train of thought. She ticked the Wayne kids off on her fingers. “Dick is the oldest. He was such a sweetheart. A perfect gentleman. Next was Jason. He struck me as a bit of a troublemaker. And Tim, of course, Conner’s friend. Cassandra, the quiet one, very polite. And Damian. He spent most of his time with the animals. I could tell they were all on their best behavior. And you get along with them so well.”

Maybe Thanksgiving hadn’t been so bad. At least his mother seemed to like all of Bruce’s kids. “What did you think of Bruce?” Clark asked, because that was what he was more worried about.

“He was also a perfect gentleman.”

“Definitely a city kid,” Jonathan added, though not derisively. His own son was half city kid, these days.

“You’re right about that. He’s lived in Gotham his whole life.”

“I feel like I understood him a lot better after he told us all about… what he does,” Jonathan said cryptically, and Clark frowned. Was his father referring to…? No, he couldn’t be.

“You mean at Wayne Enterprises?”

“The other thing,” Jonathan said, then lowered his voice. “You know. The Batman thing.”

Clark was shocked. “He told you about that? Really?” Bruce was even more protective of his secrets than Clark. Why on earth had he revealed his secret identity to Clark’s parents? It seemed like the sort of thing he would only do if he was really serious about his relationship with Clark. Even more than “moving in together” serious. This was on another level, one Clark didn’t even feel comfortable contemplating because it felt so impossible.

“He said we clearly knew how to keep a secret,” Martha said. “And that’s true.”

“Did you take any pictures while they were here?” Clark asked, suddenly struck with a desire to see what he couldn’t remember, what his parents could only tell him about.

“Of course.”

“Could I take a look at them? I’m hoping it might help me remember.”

At the mere mention of Clark remembering anything, Jonathan leapt to his feet. “I’ll get the photo album.”

Bruce

With Clark in Smallville for half the week, Bruce took the opportunity to have those one-on-one conversations he’d been meaning to have with his kids.

It was a well-established fact that none of the Waynes were particularly flush with free time. They spent their nights fighting crime, Bruce and Dick both had day jobs, and the rest had “school,” which took the form of in-home private tutoring, a solution Bruce had decided on when it became clear that any form of conventional schooling wouldn’t fit his children’s odd schedules or unique academic needs. As a result, it took all three of the days Clark was gone for Bruce to schedule time with each of them.

First up was Cass, who had a camera roll full of photos of everything noteworthy that had happened in her life. There were videos of her ballet performances and plenty of selfies featuring Barbara, Steph, or one or more of her siblings, and even a few with Bruce or Clark. She took out her schoolwork and showed him how far she’d come. She dragged him down to the Batcave and sparred with him to demonstrate all the new moves she’d learned. She was gradually learning Mandarin, and they had a halting conversation in the language, one of the many Bruce was fluent in.

Tim gave him an incredibly thorough report of his work with the Teen Titans, and then went on about how nice Clark’s parents were; he’d met them before, thanks to his friendship with Kon. “We visited them last Thanksgiving,” he said. “Damian loved it there. He’s been lobbying for you to let him start keeping chickens ever since. There should be pictures on your computer. Maybe it’ll help you remember.”

Indeed, Bruce found an entire folder on his desktop computer of photos from their family trip to Smallville: the Kents and Waynes posing in front of the fireplace in cozy sweaters, and all of them squished around the crowded kitchen table helping themselves to turkey and mashed potatoes and green beans, plus a series of photos of each of them individually or in smaller groups. Jason and Cass competing for the last slice of pie and Cass triumphantly stuffing it into her mouth, Kon and Tim bickering and then turning to face the camera and grinning, Dick and Clark chatting in the living room, Damian surrounded by chickens and looking like the happiest kid in the world.

Bruce couldn’t remember any of it. He sat there for hours, scrolling through the photos, scrutinizing every tiny detail, but the fog in his mind refused to lift. He couldn’t figure out why he was remembering some things but not others. It was almost as frustrating as not remembering anything at all.

Then he talked to Jason. Jason gave him a concise rundown of their reconciliation, a clearly dramatized version of events that began with Jason at death’s doorstep having to recover from extensive injuries at Wayne Manor. “I guess us spending so much time together forced us to work it out,” Jason summarized with a shrug, downplaying the more emotional parts of the story. “I don’t know. You apologized a lot. And I was very gracious and decided to forgive you. Sort of. For some things. Like I said, you’re on thin ice.”

Bruce prodded Alfred for more details. “I remember a great deal of shouting,” Alfred said. “But in the end, I think you realized that you hadn’t seen things accurately from Jason’s point of view. All this time, you thought you were giving him space and letting him come to you when he was ready. But instead, he saw it as you avoiding him, even abandoning him.”

At the edges of his memory, Bruce felt something, and he reached for it desperately.

“You like this, don’t you?”

Bruce shot Jason a confused look. He was cutting the stitches out of a healed gash on Jason’s chest. A knife wound. One of many. “Like what?” he asked.

“Me being injured.”

Internally, Bruce reeled like he’d been slapped. Serious conversations with Jason always felt to him like the emotional equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight. He set the scissors down on the nightstand and met Jason’s unforgiving gaze. “Of course not. Why would you say that?”

“Because now you get to play the loving father figure. Even though you don’t fucking deserve to.” There was a hitch in Jason’s voice, a crack in his otherwise impenetrably hostile exterior. “You weren’t there for me when I needed you. What gives you the right to be here now?”

“Do you want me to leave?” Bruce stood, demonstrating his willingness to go if Jason told him to.

Apparently, this was the wrong thing to say. “No!” Jason shouted, and a single tear slipped down his bruised cheek. He swiped at it angrily. “No, I don’t fucking want that. I’ve never fucking wanted that. I don’t know why you do it.”

“I thought you wanted space.”

“People say that all the time! They never fucking mean it!”

Bruce knelt beside Jason and put a hand over where Jason’s fist was clenched in the bedsheets. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Now I do. I’ll do things differently from now on.”

After he’d unlocked that memory, the rest of it came back to him all at once, in a rush. Once Jason had had a chance to get out all the things he’d been holding in since he’d returned to the land of the living, and once he’d felt like Bruce had groveled sufficiently, he and Bruce had reached a fragile truce. He stayed in the Manor until his injuries healed, and then he kept on staying there afterward, and no one said anything about it, but they all knew what it meant. All was not forgiven, but some of it was.

When Damian gave his update, he had little to say about any of his siblings and even less to say about Clark. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it. Damian was living proof that not wanting to talk about your feelings was genetic, because even though he’d spent his early childhood thousands of miles away from Bruce, he’d still managed to inherit that particular trait. Instead, he talked about his victories against their shared nemeses and went into great detail on the progress he’d made in his training (and, in far less detail, the progress he’d made in his schoolwork). He’d started cat-sitting for Selina whenever she needed it. He wanted to keep chickens.

Dick was the last of the kids Bruce needed to talk to, but because he didn’t live in the manor, they hadn’t been able to schedule a time for it until Wednesday, the last day Clark would spend in Smallville. It had been such a busy two days so far, Bruce had hardly had a moment to think about Clark, which meant he didn’t have to think about the conversation he’d had with Alfred that night Clark had gone to visit Lois. Which was good.

He wasn’t ready to think about that yet.

Chapter Text

Clark

His first night at his parents’ house, Clark stayed up late with their photo album, flipping through pages and pages of the most recent Kent family Thanksgiving. Martha Kent was an avid chronicler of her family’s short history. She had filled countless albums with photos of Clark’s childhood and kept them organized on a bookshelf, labeled neatly: “CLARK 1ST GRADE,” “CLARK 2ND GRADE,” and so on. Their spines were well-worn and each photo was captioned in Martha’s tidy script.

The album in Clark’s hands covered everything from the start of Conner’s current school year to New Year’s, with Thanksgiving taking up a good third of the pages. Clark strolled through the house in the dark while his parents and Conner slept, following a trail the photographs led him on. He started in the living room, where the Kents and the Waynes had posed for a family photo in front of the fireplace. There were smiles all around, warm sweaters, a blazing fire.

“Okay, everyone smile! Conner, honey, you’re too tall, you need to stand back here. Oh, hold on, Jonathan, let me fix your hair. Perfect. I’ll set the timer. Stay still!” The camera went off where it was precariously balanced on a stack of books on the coffee table in lieu of a tripod and Martha scrolled through the photos it had taken of them. “Everyone looks great.”

“Can we eat dinner now?” Conner pleaded, voicing what was on everyone’s mind. “It smells delicious in there.”

The scents of turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and cranberry sauce and Martha’s famous pumpkin pie filled the house. As soon as Martha gave the go-ahead, both families piled into the room, jostling each other for plates and claiming generous helpings, crowding around the Kent’s too-small kitchen table. They were so squished, Clark couldn’t take a bite without elbowing Bruce on his left or Jonathan on his right, but no one seemed to mind the close quarters. Conversation drifted through the room, punctuated by laughter. It was positively Rockwellian, and Clark couldn’t wipe the big, stupid grin off his face all evening.

There were plenty of candids of the dinner itself that jogged Clark’s memory, bringing back snippets of sensation like a highlight reel: spreading butter on a steaming hot dinner roll, asking Conner about school, chuckling as Dick loudly shushed Jason before he could get out the punchline to a crude joke, sipping the wine Bruce had brought with them. (“You really don’t have to bring anything,” Clark tried to tell him, but Bruce wasn’t having it. “My mother would roll over in her grave if she knew I went to my boyfriend’s parents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner and didn’t at least bring wine,” he insisted, and Clark let it go, but not before rolling his eyes and muttering something about “rich people manners.”)

The photos from after dinner showed them playing board games and video games, talking, watching football. Each photograph unlocked a memory, and each memory unlocked five more.

“I don’t understand,” Damian said for the hundredth time. “I thought they had to carry the ball into the goal.”

“The end zone,” Conner corrected, refusing to tear his eyes away from the screen even as he answered all of Damian’s tedious questions about a sport he’d never watched. “To score a touchdown, yes, they have to either run the ball into the end zone or catch it there. But right now they’re trying to score a field goal.”

“A what?”

“The yellow bars.” Conner pointed. “You have to kick it in between them.”

Damian watched as the ball soared through the goalposts. Conner cheered. Damian’s gaze drifted to the bottom of the screen and he frowned. “The clock said there were three minutes left almost ten minutes ago. Shouldn’t the quarter be over by now?”

“It’s not like soccer,” Tim explained, looking up from where he and Cass were bent over their handheld video games. “They stop the clock for lots of reasons.”

Damian groaned. “No wonder this is taking so long!”

Clark turned to the next page in the photo album. The heading at the top read “FRIDAY.” The photos underneath depicted Damian surrounded by chickens looking like he was in the midst of a revelatory experience.

“I’m never going to hear the end of this,” Bruce said from where he sat next to Clark on his parents’ porch swing. “The first thing he’s going to say when we get home,” he raised his voice in an impression of Damian, “‘Father, we have to get chickens.’ I’m blaming you for this.”

“Chickens aren’t so bad,” Clark reasoned. “You’ll always have fresh eggs.”

“You’re an enabler, Clark.”

“That’s true. I enable your terrible behavior all the time. That’s half the reason you keep me around.”

“What’s the other half?” Bruce asked.

Clark leaned back and grinned. “I’d demonstrate if we weren’t sharing a room with three other people tonight.”

Bruce smirked back at him and glanced around them. They were alone in the yard, save for Damian. Apparently determining that Damian was sufficiently distracted by the Kents’ chickens, Bruce leaned in and kissed Clark deeply, one hand under Clark’s chin, the other resting on Clark’s thigh. Clark closed his eyes and sighed into the kiss.

“Father!”

Bruce withdrew, an innocent look on his face as he turned to his son. “Yes, Damian?”

Damian was glaring at them, arms crossed over his chest. “Can you at least take that inside?”

Not likely. The house was packed with people, and Bruce was not the type to indulge in public displays of affection. They would have to keep their hands to themselves for the remainder of the trip. They were three years into their relationship, long past their honeymoon phase, yet every time Bruce touched him Clark felt like he was experiencing everything for the first time. He didn’t think it would ever get old.

Driven by memory, Clark crept silently out the back door and sat on the porch swing. He bit his lip, remembering how it felt to kiss Bruce Wayne. Practically the entire four days he’d spent here with his parents and Conner and the Waynes had come back to him, and he felt hopeful. Being in this place, surrounded by the familiar sights and sounds and smells of home, must have unlocked something, and he knew with more surety than he felt in all the days since he’d awoken in the Watchtower with memory loss that he would remember everything if he just gave it time.

Bruce

Dick’s life had been as action-packed as ever over the past three years, and, being the most emotionally well-adjusted of Bruce’s children, he was the only one of them to go into much detail about things like feelings and relationships in his recap, including his relationship with Bruce. He seemed genuinely pleased that Bruce was dating someone seriously, and even more pleased that that someone happened to be Clark.

“And then you told me you were going to ask Clark to marry you,” Dick said casually, like this wasn’t an absurd thing to say. Bruce knew about the hypothetical conversation he’d had about marriage – about engagement, really, which was only the first step to marriage – with Alfred, but he wouldn’t have announced that he was going to marry Clark unless he was one hundred percent certain it was what he was going to do.

At Bruce’s skeptical stare, Dick backtracked. “Well, you didn’t say that exactly. You said, ‘How would you feel if Clark and I got married?’”

That made a lot more sense, and fit with what Bruce now knew about where his head had been in those last few weeks or months before he’d lost his memories. He’d been entertaining the idea of proposing to Clark, but that didn’t mean he was serious about it. He was just… considering his options. It was the rational thing to do, really.

Along with putting Bruce’s mind at ease, Dick’s revision triggered another memory.

“How would you feel if Clark and I got married someday?” he asked, as casually as he could, even though he knew it was no use. After years of knowing him, Dick could see through Bruce’s poker face like glass.

“‘Someday’?” Dick repeated, raising a questioning eyebrow.

“In the very distant future,” Bruce amended.

Dick didn’t look like he believed Bruce about that, but he let it slide. Instead, he said, “I’d be happy for you. You and Clark are great together.” And then he paused, and looked at Bruce closely, with that “detective look” he’d gotten from none other than Bruce himself. “Why? Have you been thinking about it?”

“Only hypothetically.”

“I think you should do it. I think it’s a great idea.”

Bruce shrugged noncommittally. “It’s only been three years,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” Dick agreed, “But you’ve known each other for way longer than that.”

Dick was speaking when Bruce’s mind jolted back to the present. “And I said—”

“You’d be happy for me,” Bruce finished for him. Dick looked up and smiled. The kids hadn’t quite gotten used to Bruce spontaneously remembering things, and it was a happy surprise every time it happened.

“I would.”

Bruce let out a long sigh and looked out a window to the world outside. The sun was a sliver on the horizon. They’d have to go out soon. “How did everyone else feel about the idea?” Bruce asked.

“Of you and Clark getting married? I don’t know if you told anyone else. If you did, no one mentioned it to me. But it wouldn’t be that much of a change. He already lives with us. If you had the wedding out in Kansas on the Kent farm, you’d even make Damian happy. He loves it out there.”

They stood in silence, watching the last traces of pink and orange dissolve from the sky. Bruce had a lot of thinking to do, but it could wait until morning.

Morning came and went. Bruce spent the whole time thinking about how few hours he had left until Clark returned. He resolved to talk to Alfred again.

Alfred joined him in his study, where they sat in silence for several long minutes before Alfred prompted him. “Is there something on your mind?”

Bruce took a second to gather his thoughts before he spoke. “I feel like the version of myself that I was before I lost my memories was a completely different person. I can’t picture myself ever becoming someone like that.”

“Someone like what?”

“Someone who would have a healthy long-term relationship.” Bruce tempered his words with a self-deprecating smirk, but Alfred wasn’t fooled.

“Because you don’t deserve it? Or because you wouldn’t allow it?” Leave it to Alfred to cut straight to the heart of the issue.

“Both.”

“In that case, you have both underestimated and overestimated yourself.”

Of course Alfred would think so. He’d long hoped Bruce would find someone to settle down with, someone who would make him happy for the rest of his life. He didn’t mention it often, but it sat unspoken between them, hanging heavy in the air.

“Did I ever discuss with you the possibility of proposing to Clark?” Bruce asked.

“You mentioned it.”

“How serious do you think I was?”

There was a long pause while Alfred regarded Bruce, his expression betraying nothing. Although he was not related to any of them, Alfred had the Waynes’ infamous poker face. There was never any telling what he was really thinking, although Bruce, having known the man all his life, could sometimes venture a guess.

Finally, Alfred spoke. “Do you remember where you used to keep a stash of Kryptonite, for emergencies?”

“Of course.” Wait a minute. “‘Used to’?” He kept that Kryptonite, in a lead-lined safe hidden behind a false wall with a combination only he knew, in case anything happened that caused Superman to lose his control and Wonder Woman and Supergirl and anyone else with any chance of taking him down was missing. It was an unlikely scenario, but someone had to prepare for the worst. Bruce couldn’t imagine himself ever getting rid of the stuff, no matter how much he trusted Clark. He needed it. Just in case.

“I think, perhaps, you should see for yourself what you’ve replaced it with,” was all Alfred said.

Bruce didn’t need telling twice. He took the elevator down to the Batcave. He slid the false wall out of place. He entered the combination and opened the safe.

There were multiple safes in the Wayne household. There was another in his parents’ old bedroom, the one bedroom in the house Bruce never let anyone stay in, a room that stayed closed and locked at almost all times, everything exactly the way his parents had left it. That safe contained anything small and precious that had belonged to them: his mother’s jewelry, his father’s watches. They’d been buried with the wedding rings they’d been wearing the night they died, but they’d had others, other bands they’d retired or only worn on special occasions.

The safe in the Batcave was empty of Kryptonite, as Alfred had implied, but one small item from the safe in Bruce’s parents’ room had been moved there. Bruce picked it up, held it in his hand.

He still couldn’t fully remember the man he’d been before he’d lost his memories, but he had learned some valuable information about that man. He now knew that, up until a week ago, he had been in love. Truly, properly, unprecedentedly in love. With Clark. In love enough to have thought about proposing to him. Not just thought about it, but chosen one of his own father’s wedding rings to propose with.

In love enough to have cleaned out his stores of the one weapon that was effective against the most powerful man on earth. (Although he hoped he still had his backup Kryptonite hidden in another lead-lined safe in a biometrically locked storage room in the Watchtower. He was in love, not stupid.)

If he closed his eyes, he could almost feel it. He could almost remember what it had been like to love Clark. But then he opened them, and the feeling was gone.

Well, not gone. Just… diminished.

Chapter Text

Clark

Clark returned to Wayne Manor on Wednesday night. Spending three days in his childhood home had done him good, but it had also made him restless to get back into his familiar routine. Normally, after coming home from a vacation like that, he’d throw himself into his work with a renewed vigor. Sitting around a mansion researching his recent past suddenly seemed like a giant waste of time; he needed to get back out there. He knew he was still missing a lot of the last three years, but he had always been the type to learn by doing, and he hoped he might catch up with the rest of the world faster in the offices of the Daily Planet, surrounded by world news and current events and his intelligent, helpful coworkers.

There was just one loose end he needed to tie up before he came back to work, and he wasn’t sure how long it would take. He sent Perry an email saying he’d be back in the office on Monday and set his mind to the problem at hand: Bruce Wayne.

A part of Clark, the part of him that preferred to avoid confrontation, thought it might be a good idea to just wait things out with Bruce while they recovered their memories. Hopefully they’d eventually remember enough that they could pick back up where they’d left off without having any awkward conversations.

But there was another, even stronger part of Clark that was feeling uncharacteristically impatient. He could remember just enough of his life with Bruce to convince him of how good that life had been, and he wanted it. He wanted it in a way he rarely wanted anything. He’d been playing a waiting game with Bruce Wayne for the better part of a decade. It took years of working together for Batman to admit he liked Clark as a person. Clark still remembered the first time Batman had (begrudgingly) used the word “friends” to refer to their relationship. Clark had convinced himself that was as far as they’d get. That was enough for him, back then.

It was no longer enough.

He took Thursday to formulate a plan of action. On Friday, he approached Bruce in his study while the kids were occupied with their schoolwork. He shut the door behind him, ensuring their privacy. Bruce looked up from the armchair he was seated in, laptop on his knees. Something in Clark’s expression must have conveyed his intent, because Bruce shut the laptop and set it to the side, giving Clark his full attention.

“It’s been almost two weeks,” Clark said, finding a seat in an armchair next to Bruce’s, repositioning it so that they were facing each other. “We need to talk about it.”

Bruce let out a long breath, glanced away at nothing in particular, and leaned back in his chair. “I know.”

This was not the response Clark had been expecting. He’d expected Bruce to at least deflect a little, try to change the subject, anything to avoid the conversation they were about to have. “You do?” He sat up straighter, thinking maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Maybe he’d been worried about nothing. How very Bruce of him, preparing for the worst.

“We’ll have to eventually,” Bruce said. “It might as well be now.”

“Good.” Clark took a moment to reconfigure his game plan to fit this new, surprisingly cooperative Bruce, and then he spoke. “I guess we can start with the basics. How much have you remembered?”

“Bits and pieces. Nowhere near enough to form a clear picture.” Bruce seemed annoyed by this. Clark understood. It was frustrating, memories teasing the life they had forgotten but never giving the full context. It made Clark feel split in two: pre-memory loss Clark, and post-memory loss Clark. Currently, he was somewhere in the middle, straddling the two versions of himself, and it was an uncomfortable place to be.

“I’m in the same place.” Clark paused again. This was the tricky part, he knew. He needed to impress on Bruce how much he wanted to work out this thing between them without coming on too strong and scaring him off. Thankfully, that particular tightrope was one Clark had years of experience walking. He started with a question, giving Bruce the opportunity to take the lead, even though Clark knew he wouldn’t take it. In every other scenario, Bruce was decisive, articulate, and rational. But when it came to feelings, his primary strategy was avoidance.

“What have you been thinking, this past week?” he asked. “About us.”

“What have I been thinking? I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” Bruce’s expression was inscrutable, but if Clark knew him – which he did, knew him better than almost anyone else, anyone but Bruce’s own family – he knew Bruce was uncomfortable. And he’d done exactly what Clark had expected him to: deflect. Avoid. Three years ago, Clark would have let him get away with it. He always did. That ended now.

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Clark began, treading carefully, watching Bruce for signs, “That we’ve stumbled into something really good here. I’ve been attracted to you for… God, longer than I knew what you even looked like, which is crazy. You’re one of my closest friends, and I trust you with my life. More importantly, you’re one of the few people who knows every side of me.” Clark resisted the urge to reach out and take Bruce’s hand. With anyone else, he would have done it. Maybe even a few weeks ago, when Bruce was his boyfriend of three years, he would have done it. But this Bruce wasn’t that Bruce, nor was he the Bruce he had been three years ago. He was, like Clark, somewhere in between.

“After all these years,” Clark continued, “I like to think we understand each other. I like your kids, and it seems like I’ve put a lot of time and effort into getting them to like me. On paper, we have everything going for us. And I remember…” He almost stopped himself, almost decided it would be too much to keep going, but no, he had to make Bruce understand, and this was the only way he could think to do it. “I swear I remember how I felt about you.”

Bruce finally made eye contact, his piercing blue gaze steady, unwavering, but his expression still betrayed nothing. He was waiting for Clark to finish what he had to say.

“I think I could feel that way again. In fact, I know I could. I know it’s not what we had, but I’m hoping it can be enough for now. And maybe we’ll get the rest of our memories back, or maybe we’ll build something new. Either way, I think we should try to make this work.” Clark took a breath. He didn’t usually get this nervous, about anything, but Bruce was always the exception to his rules. “But to do that, I need to know you want the same things I do.”

There it was. That was his pitch. It was up to Bruce now. For what felt like an eternity, they just sat there, staring at each other. The tension between them was a tangible thing. Bruce leaned forward, almost imperceptibly, and Clark felt compelled to do the same, like there was a string connecting them, pulling them inexorably toward one another.

When Bruce spoke, his tone was matter-of-fact, but his words hit Clark like an express train. “I want… you.”

Later, Clark wouldn’t be able to say which of them had started it. All he knew was that they were kissing, and it was just like Clark remembered it, and oh, yes, he remembered it, they’d done this before, countless times, and how had he forgotten? It wasn’t like a first kiss at all. There was no hesitation, no fumbling; they fit together instantly, like they were made for each other, and Clark shut his eyes and sank into the feeling.

He remembered another kiss.

In moments like this, Clark’s Kryptonian super senses were almost overwhelming. Bruce’s heartbeat pounded in his ears like a drum. He smelled like sweat and rain and blood. He was soaked through, except for his face, which had been shielded by the cowl until mere moments ago. His hair was a mess, and his expression was murderous, and Clark had never been this turned on in his life. He forgot, in an instant, what they’d been talking about. Arguing about? Fuck. This had been happening to him more and more frequently as of late, and he wished he could hate Bruce for making him feel like this, but he could only feel one thing for Bruce and it was the farthest emotion from hate.

It struck him, suddenly, how close they were. Bruce was a half-step out of the Batmobile, the door still open behind him. Clark was inches from him, so close he could feel Bruce’s breath on his face, feel the heat from his skin. Bruce’s heart raced. Distantly, Clark attached a meaning to that observation. Arousal? Maybe Clark was projecting. But then he caught the hitch in Bruce’s breath, and the dangerous flash in his eyes, and even though the rational part of his brain insisted there was an alternative explanation for all this – Bruce had just been in a fight, he was hopped up on adrenaline, he was angry at Clark for… something, God, Clark couldn’t even fucking remember – instinctively, he knew.

He was not projecting.

He closed the meager distance between them, and Bruce didn’t even react like he was surprised. He kissed Clark like it was exactly what they had been leading up to all this time. Maybe they had.

Clark got his hands around Bruce, pressed their bodies flush against each other, while Bruce tilted his head and slid his tongue into Clark’s mouth. Clark tasted blood from where Bruce had split his lip. His grip faltered over Bruce’s rain-slick Batsuit and he felt the rapid rise and fall of Bruce’s chest against his. He was dimly aware of their location, knew that any one of Bruce’s children, or Alfred – oh, God, not Alfred – could walk in on them at any moment. He couldn’t bring himself to care. His entire world narrowed to Bruce’s mouth, the hand Bruce had on the back of his neck, fingers in Clark’s hair, his other hand clutching a fistful of Clark’s red cape. Finally. Finally.

Clark drew back, gasping. The words tumbled out of him. “I remember our first kiss. It was in the Batcave.”

He expected Bruce to quiz him, but Bruce didn’t look like he gave a shit. He dragged Clark back by the collar of his shirt and kissed him again. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said, voice as low as when he put on the Batman persona, lips moving against Clark’s as he spoke, sending a shiver down Clark’s spine. Bruce kissed both like a man who’d done this a thousand times with a hundred people and like there was no one else in the world he’d rather do this with. He kissed like he was desperate and like he had all the time in the world. He shifted, trying to get closer to Clark, and when it wasn’t enough, he grunted in frustration and hitched himself up onto Clark’s lap, straddling him, and Clark thought he would probably die right there and then but at least he’d die happy.

“Bedroom,” Bruce said roughly, and Clark couldn’t agree more.

Bruce

Sex with Clark was achingly familiar. Even though he couldn’t explicitly remember having done it before, Bruce instinctively knew what Clark liked, how to get a reaction from him, and from the looks of things, so did Clark. Afterward, Bruce left Clark in bed, covers draped artfully across his sculpted back. Clark didn’t move, just watched Bruce disappear into the bathroom to rinse off in the shower, throw something on, and head downstairs. At no point did he try to stop Bruce or lure him back into bed, which Bruce appreciated. He did have responsibilities, after all. Clark, of all people, could understand that.

None of the kids had seen the pair of them abscond to the bedroom that evening, but Alfred gave him a knowing look. Alfred had an uncanny sixth sense; he somehow knew everything that happened in Wayne Manor the moment it happened. There was no keeping secrets from him.

Bruce came home exhausted, showered again, and collapsed next to Clark. Clark flung an arm over Bruce’s chest, and Bruce let him. They fell asleep that way, with that single point of contact connecting them, and Bruce slept better than he had since the memory loss, and instead of his usual nightmares, he dreamed of Clark, and when he woke, he thought it might have been another memory.

It had been a busy night in Gotham. Bruce took a long shower when he got home, then disinfected and bandaged his wounds. At least nothing needed stitches.

He found Clark asleep in their bed. Clark didn’t live with him officially, but Bruce already thought of this as “their” room, no longer “his.” He had tried not to think too hard about what that meant, but the conclusion was inescapable, even though he’d yet to admit it out loud.

Clark had been the first to say it, which anyone could have predicted, although the way it happened was unexpected. It was at the end of a quick phone call confirming a dinner date, and Clark said it like he hadn’t even thought about it, hadn’t even meant to: “Okay, see you then, love you, bye.”

Bruce hadn’t stopped thinking about it since.

He got into bed slowly, carefully, but the movement still woke Clark. Not once had Clark managed to sleep through Bruce coming back from patrol. He was a light sleeper. He blinked up at Bruce, smiled groggily. Bruce lay next to him, one arm propping his head up, and he felt that tight knot in his chest, like a fist around his heart. He resented that feeling, and at the same time he never wanted it to stop.

“Go back to sleep,” he whispered. Clark shut his eyes obediently. Bruce hesitated. He had wanted to say it dozens of times and always thought better of it. This time, he said it before he could change his mind: “I love you.”

He didn’t know if Clark heard until he felt Clark reach under the covers to take his hand. They fell asleep that way, with that single point of contact connecting them.

Chapter Text

Clark

Clark woke in Bruce’s bed, in Bruce’s room, with Bruce’s sleeping figure beside him, and in those few fuzzy moments before his waking mind took over, he didn’t find anything particularly noteworthy about this situation. In that fragile, temporary state, suspended between dreams and reality, it was like he remembered everything, every word and glance and kiss that had passed between them, every night he’d spent in this bed and every morning he woke up to that same sleeping figure. On instinct, Clark wanted to close his eyes and drift back to sleep, stay curled up in this space where he was a man content, a man in love, a man who thought he finally had everything figured out. But it was already too late, and as Clark’s consciousness drifted back to him, the memories drifted away.

Clark sat up and sighed. He was getting pretty sick of playing tag with his memories. But there was nothing he could think to do about it but keep moving forward. After all, things were coming back to him, slowly but surely. Last night, for example, had been nothing short of revelatory, in more ways than one; Clark didn’t know if it was the endorphins or the familiar sensory experience or some combination of both, but either way, he’d remembered quite a bit, most of it R-rated.

It was mid-morning, according to Clark’s phone on the nightstand, around the time Clark usually got up on a Saturday. He figured Bruce probably had at least a good three hours of sleep left in him. Bruce was a deep sleeper, Clark knew, though he wasn’t sure how he knew it. The sight of Bruce lying there, all but drooling into his pillow, must have reminded him. With that knowledge, Clark didn’t feel any guilt rolling out of bed, padding over to the bathroom, and running a shower. Sure enough, Bruce didn’t even budge.

Clark emerged refreshed and ready for the day. He spritzed the cologne that had given him back his first memory and inhaled deeply as the scent washed over him. Yes, things were finally heading in the right direction.

He was rooting around in his half of their shared closet when his super hearing picked up a change in Bruce’s breathing pattern. He turned just in time to see Bruce roll over and prop himself up in a lazy approximation of a seated position, squinting at Clark’s stark naked form. Clark was briefly flustered, moving to cover up, before his rational brain took over and reminded him that they were way past modesty. Instead, he stared right back at Bruce, taking in his uncharacteristically messy hair, the muscles of his chest and abdomen that disappeared under the covers, the expanses of skin that looked like it hadn’t seen the sun since Bruce had started fighting crime by night, marked with the scars Clark had already started memorizing.

“What time is it?” Bruce slurred, blinking at the thin shafts of morning light that escaped through the heavy curtains concealing each of the room’s windows.

“Nine-thirty.”

Bruce seemed to consider this, pausing to rub his eyes and yawn. He looked Clark up and down. Clark put away the shirt he’d been holding and waited. Finally, Bruce beckoned him over.

Clark broke out into a satisfied smirk and wasted no time climbing back under the covers. “I’m going back to sleep after,” Bruce warned, but Clark wasn’t paying attention. He kissed Bruce deeply, slowly, with none of the impatience they’d both felt last night. His stomach growled – he’d missed dinner, and it was past when he usually ate breakfast – but he ignored it. He was going to be here for a while.

When Clark finally made it downstairs, a few of the kids were already up, Tim and Cass in the living room battling it out in a familiar video game. Clark wasn’t much of a gamer, but he knew the classics when he saw them. He watched Cass repeatedly destroy Tim in Super Smash Bros., her Link always coming out victorious. “You’re… so… bad… at… this… game…” she taunted.

Tim was frowning intently at the screen – “Not my fault you’ve sold your soul to the gods of Smash,” he snapped back – and when he lost again, he gave a dramatic shout and collapsed onto a bean bag chair. “That’s it. I quit.”

Cass turned to Clark. “Want to play something?”

“I don’t think I’ve played a video game since the Nintendo 64,” he warned.

“We have an N64,” Tim said, perking up immediately. He flung open a cabinet filled with what looked like every gaming system known to man, a veritable museum’s worth. “I’ll hook it up.”

“You’ve played with us before,” Cass told Clark. “You don’t remember.” Then, to Tim: “Put in Mario Kart.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Tim assured her. He got everything hooked up, handed Clark a controller, and popped in the cartridge. The game loaded up and they started playing.

“Do you guys all like video games?” Clark asked.

“Yeah, but we all have different tastes,” Tim explained. “Cass is the queen of fighting games. No surprise there. I’m better at platformers. Jason likes first-person shooters. Dick likes story-driven single-player games. Damian likes stealth games. And Bruce thinks video games rot your brain.”

“He’s so lame,” Cass added.

They played for a while, the three of them fairly evenly matched. “You might have forgotten everything else,” Tim said, “But you clearly haven’t forgotten how to play Mario Kart.”

“It’s all muscle memory,” Clark replied.

At some point, Bruce entered the room, and Clark spared him a grin over his shoulder before returning his attention to the game. Bruce sat on the sofa behind them and watched. “Who’s winning?” he asked after a moment.

“Clark,” said Cass.

“Nice work.”

“I have an unfair advantage,” Clark said. “This game came out before they were born.” He finished in first place, again, and unplugged his controller. “I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead,” he told the kids, joining Bruce on the couch.

“Let’s play GoldenEye,” Cass suggested, never tearing her eyes from the screen. Clark sat closer to Bruce than he would normally dare, wondering how much physical intimacy Bruce would tolerate outside the confines of their bedroom. Feeling bold, he decided to test those limits, draping an arm around Bruce’s shoulders and leaning into him.

“Are we allowed to kiss in front of the kids?” he asked under his breath.

“Don’t be gross,” Cass admonished.

Apparently Bruce was in a rare mood, because instead of shrugging Clark off of him, he put a hand on Clark’s knee and stared at Cass defiantly. “Don’t look,” he instructed.

Cass grimaced and turned away just in time for Bruce to kiss Clark on the mouth. He smelled like that cologne and he tasted like toothpaste. The kiss didn’t last long, but it sent shivers down Clark’s spine all the same. Kissing Bruce made him feel the way he had when he’d first woken up that morning: like he remembered everything, even though he didn’t.

The rest of the weekend felt like a honeymoon, and it was over too fast. Clark almost regretted telling Perry he’d be back in the office that week, but he knew it was for the best. He was already stir crazy, and it would only get worse the longer he went without working.

So he flew to Metropolis, arriving early, as he always did. Three years might have passed since the last time he remembered being there, but the Daily Planet offices hadn’t changed a bit. The Planet occupied one floor of a high-rise in an enviable part of the city, overlooking a small park and within walking distance of more coffee shops than you could count. The staff worked in cubicles, except Perry, who had his own office. There were glass-walled conference rooms and a little nook with a coffee maker and a water cooler and a minifridge filled with La Croix.

Clark’s cubicle was a disaster, papers and office supplies everywhere, sticky notes scrawled with indecipherable reminders. He logged onto his computer and got straight to work.

Lois arrived not long after, standing on tiptoes to peek over the cubicles, scanning the room for Clark. When she saw him, she hurried over.

“Finally!” she said, pulling him into a one-armed hug, her purse and jacket taking up the other arm. “You’re never allowed to work anywhere else, Smallville; this place is so boring without you.”

“I’ll try not to be insulted by that,” called Jimmy from across the room.

“How are you?” Lois asked, lowering her voice to signal that she meant the question not in a general sense but in a very specific one: How’s the memory loss?

It had been over a week since Clark had visited Lois in her apartment, and although he’d kept her mostly up-to-date via text, a lot had happened since then. “I’m alright,” he said. “I remember more every day.”

“That’s good to hear. How was Kansas?”

“Great.”

“And your parents?”

“I can tell they’re worried, but I really enjoyed visiting them. I think it was just what I needed.”

“And how are things with Bruce?”

Clark tried to stifle the dumb grin that threatened to give him away at the mention of Bruce, but Lois was too quick and she knew him too well. “Clark,” she said, putting on a serious face even though they both knew she was joking around. “Without giving me any details of your sex life, how are things with Bruce?”

“Good,” Clark said. “I wouldn’t say we’re back to normal – whatever ‘normal’ was for us before we both forgot everything – but we’re getting there.”

“Excellent.” Lois ducked into her cubicle and started booting up her computer and hanging up her things. “You’d better not be busy this afternoon,” she said over the short wall that divided them, “Because you and I are getting lunch. There’s this new vegan taco place that opened two years ago and it’s criminal that you can’t remember it.”

Bruce

Bruce was starting to regret making up a story about getting in a cliff diving accident. Usually, when he lied about injuring himself doing some extreme sport, it was to cover up the fact that he’d actually injured himself fighting crime. He chose a fake injury that matched closely enough to his real injury and, when the real injury had healed, he returned to the public eye, complete with realistic scrapes and bruises.

This time, there had been no injury, beyond the bruising he’d gotten from Wonder Woman that was already beginning to fade to a sickly yellow-green. Which meant he had to stay cooped up in Wayne Manor, unable to go to work, unable to host or attend fundraisers, unable to even venture out in public until such time had passed that he could believably show his decidedly uninjured face.

He briefly considered picking a fight with someone who could toss him around a little, make it look like maybe he had been in a cliff diving accident two weeks ago. It was only imagining how Alfred and Clark would look at him if he did that convinced him not to. Which was disturbing, slightly; since when did Clark’s guilt trip have that much power over him?

Probably around the same time you slept with him. But no, Bruce thought; it wasn’t the sex that had done it, and that was even more disturbing.

So Bruce worked from home – he pictured his fellow executives teasing him from their offices, “That Bruce Wayne, doesn’t even stop working to recover from breaking his entire body” – and he drew up plans for future Wayne Foundation projects and he helped his kids with their homework even though they probably didn’t want him to.

He noticed that he tended to remember things when he was around other people, and he had the presence of mind to consider this ironic, considering how antisocial he was. He took to spending less time shut away in his study and more time in the kitchen or the living room, his children talking or laughing or arguing in the background. Whenever one of his kids helped him remember something, he told them, and before long they’d turned it into a game, keeping track of how many new memories they were each responsible for, challenging each other to relive the past three years in ever-greater detail, talking about anything and everything, going off on random tangents, starting every other sentence with do you remember when…?

It helped. With every day that passed, more memories came back to him. Clark seemed to be having similar success now that he was working again. It really felt like everything was coming together.

In other words, it was the perfect time for the treacherous voice that resided permanently in the shadowy recesses of Bruce’s mind to make itself known, to drag him down off the optimistic cloud he’d been riding on, to remind him of all the ways it could all come crashing down around him. He was used to this. He wondered how many times, over the past three years, he’d gone down this same road, obsessively dwelling on every single thing that could go wrong in his relationship with Clark. He counted them off, a masochistic tally, always coming back to the same conclusion: Out of all the ways they could fall apart, the most likely catastrophe was that Clark would one day wise up and leave him.

It was the only outcome that made any sense. Bruce could almost roll his eyes at the version of himself that had foolishly considered proposing to Clark. Maybe he was trying to trap Clark in a legally binding relationship before the last vestiges of their honeymoon phase petered out, before Clark started thinking rationally about what little Bruce had to offer, about all the things he deserved but couldn’t get from a man like Bruce, about all of Bruce’s glaring flaws. But it wasn’t the 1950s; if Clark realized, after marrying Bruce, that he’d made the biggest mistake of his life, well, divorce was easy. People did it all the time. He’d probably even get some good money out of it.

Bruce was surprised how much it pained him to consider this possibility. It seemed that, along with his memories, his feelings for Clark had come rushing back with the same force. He’d gone from simply attracted to Clark to somewhere very dangerous indeed, somewhere much too close to love and much too far from reason, all in the span of a few weeks. It felt like emotional whiplash.

It would be easier for everyone, Bruce knew, if he and Clark broke it off sooner rather than later. Three years was already far too long to keep up the charade that their relationship could actually work in the long term, that anything in Bruce’s life was ever permanent. And their joint memory loss presented the perfect opportunity for a clean break.

But Bruce was selfish. He wanted to be with Clark, and if he couldn’t have that forever, well, then he wanted it as long as it was possible. So he didn’t say anything. And he acted like everything was just fine.

He did, however, take his father’s ring out of the safe in the Batcave and returned it to the safe in his parents’ old room. He wouldn’t be needing it.

Chapter Text

Bruce

Not two days had passed since Bruce returned his father’s ring to his parents’ safe when Alfred approached him in his study. He placed the ring in front of Bruce on his desk with just a touch more force than was strictly necessary.

“You still need this,” he said.

Bruce glared up at him. He’d managed to make it a full forty-eight hours without overthinking his decision to leave things with Clark where they were, to not rock the boat, to simply ride out their relationship as far as it could go before Clark moved on to greener pastures. He didn’t need Alfred second guessing him. In fact, he relied on Alfred to keep his dissenting opinions to himself, except in those rare cases when Bruce was about to make a monumentally terrible decision. This, Bruce thought, was not one of those cases.

“You’ve made it this far without getting involved in my relationships. Don’t break your streak.” Bruce dipped into his most threatening tone of voice, the one that could send Gotham’s most hardened criminals fleeing, though he knew it had no effect on Alfred.

Sure enough, Alfred was unfazed. “I haven’t cared for any of your previous relationships,” he said. “And you clearly need a little push.”

Bruce glanced past Alfred to make sure the door to the study was closed. It was, but he still lowered his voice, just in case. “I’m not proposing to him,” he hissed. “I briefly entertained the idea but ultimately decided against it.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“We’ve only been together for three years,” Bruce lied.

“Your parents were together for two before your father proposed.”

“I am not my parents.”

“I can accept this,” Alfred said, referring to Bruce’s change of heart, “As long as it’s only a matter of timing. But if this is the beginning of you pushing Clark away because you believe you don’t deserve him—”

“Alfred,” Bruce warned. He wasn’t in the mood for Alfred’s psychoanalysis, accurate though it may be.

Alfred was not deterred. He came right back with his most threatening tone of voice, the one that Gotham’s most hardened criminals were lucky they never had to hear, because it put the Dark Knight to shame. “I refuse to stay silent and watch as you repeatedly sabotage every chance you have at happiness,” he said firmly. “Tell me that isn’t what you’re doing.”

“I won’t push Clark away. But I also won’t commit to something that isn’t going to last.”

“Has Clark shown any indication that he intends to end your relationship?”

Bruce averted his gaze. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“Have you spoken to him about this?”

“Of course not.”

“You should.” Alfred waited, patiently, until Bruce made eye contact before continuing. It was something he’d done since Bruce was a child, to make sure he was really listening. “If you believe the relationship is doomed, then you’re going to behave as though you have one foot out the door already. I know because I’ve seen you do it before. And when the relationship inevitably fails – not because it was fated to, but because you destroyed it – you’ll take it as confirmation of your belief that you are unlovable. You are not unlovable. I would not still be here were that the case.”

Deep down, even Bruce had to acknowledge the truth in this. Alfred had worked for the Waynes for decades, he was a frugal man, and Bruce’s parents had left him a respectable sum of money when they’d died. He could retire any time he wanted and live out the rest of his days in comfort, instead of catering to the whims of six wealthy vigilantes. He wouldn’t have stayed as long as he had if he didn’t consider the Waynes family, love them like family, and they all felt the same about him.

When Bruce didn’t say anything to contradict him, Alfred nudged the ring closer to him. “Keep this,” he said. “Think about what I said. And talk to Clark.”

Bruce at least managed the first two. He didn’t talk to Clark. But he did keep the ring, in a box on his side of his and Clark’s shared closet, tucked behind a pair of shoes he rarely wore, so it was close at hand but not somewhere he’d have to look at it every day. And he thought about what Alfred had told him, that his conviction that Clark would leave him could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, that he might end up chasing Clark away with his own self-doubt. He thought about it every time Clark was near, and as the days turned to weeks, he realized he’d started avoiding Clark, going out earlier at night and coming back later, so that, on weekdays, he and Clark were never home and awake at the same time. He thought this might be how it began, their unraveling, and still he didn’t talk to Clark.

At the same time, every day brought more memories, until a month had passed since the alien invasion and Bruce felt less like a man split in two – part of him the man he’d been before entering a relationship with Clark, part of him the man he’d become after three years together – and more like one person, with nearly all the context he needed to make sense of his current situation. He knew how he and Clark had gotten together, and he remembered asking Clark to move in with him. He remembered their arguments, their dates, the enemies they’d faced together and the ones he’d faced alone.

He remembered taking the ring from the safe in his parents’ room. He remembered removing the Kryptonite from the Batcave and taking it all to a secure storage room aboard the Watchtower, where no one but he and a select few League members could access it, ones he’d chosen specifically because he trusted them not just with his life but with Clark’s. He remembered keeping the ring in that safe in the Batcave instead, and he remembered wondering how he would ask, if he did decide to ask, which he still hadn’t been certain he would.

But he still didn’t remember why, and that was the question that burned at the front of his mind. What had convinced him proposing to Clark was a good idea? What had convinced him this thing they had between them could last?

Clark

Over a month had passed since Clark lost his memories, and he was convinced he remembered, if not everything, then at least the important things.

One thing he remembered was how to discern Bruce’s moods. It was a skill he’d begun developing shortly after they first met, but he’d honed it well over the past three years, and now he considered himself something of an expert.

But it wouldn’t take an expert to figure out Bruce was upset about something, something that had to do with Clark. He’d been avoiding Clark for over a week; Clark saw Dick more than he saw Bruce, and Dick didn’t even live with them. It was immensely frustrating; just when it seemed like they’d managed to get on track, they’d run off the rails again.

Clark knew he was going to have to confront Bruce again, and it was going to be an even more difficult conversation than their last one, because this time, Bruce was going to have to actually talk about his feelings instead of just listening to Clark talk about his feelings and then responding in the affirmative.

He waited until the weekend, when it was more difficult for Bruce to come up with excuses not to be around him. He made a game plan. He woke up on Saturday around his usual time, but instead of getting out of bed and getting dressed and ready right away, he lingered, watching Netflix on his laptop until around noon. He then threw on one of Bruce’s plush bathrobes and went downstairs to make a cup of coffee the way Bruce liked it. He brought it back to their room and set it on the nightstand, checked the time to make sure he’d allowed Bruce a good eight hours of sleep, and then he nudged Bruce awake.

“Wake up.”

Bruce groaned and flipped over, blinking up at the light Clark had turned on when he’d reentered the room. “What time is it?” he mumbled.

“Past noon.” Clark held the coffee in front of Bruce like a peace offering. Bruce blinked a few times, confused, then took it and drank deeply. The Waynes never, under any circumstances, turned down coffee.

Once Bruce was properly caffeinated but before he could get out of bed, Clark launched into the confrontation he’d prepared: “We need to talk.”

Bruce frowned. Even a man with as little real relationship experience as Bruce would know to be wary of those four words. “About what?”

“Whatever you’ve been thinking so much about lately,” Clark said. “I can tell when something’s bothering you, and something is definitely bothering you.”

Clark could almost see the shields go up behind Bruce’s expression. He knew Bruce was about to try to shut him out. Clark wasn’t going to let him. He could be every bit as stubborn as Bruce when he really applied himself.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bruce said.

“Is it about me?” Clark persisted.

Bruce got out of bed and made his way toward the bathroom. “I’m not playing twenty questions with you.”

Clark followed him. “That’s a yes. Have I done something wrong?” He tried for levity. “I did, technically, forget our anniversary, but we both had memory loss at the time so you’ll have to cut me some slack.”

“Of course you didn’t do anything wrong,” Bruce said immediately, leaning back against the bathroom counter. “And you know I don’t care about that stuff.”

Clark leaned next to him. “I’m just going to keep guessing until I get it right.”

“Please don’t.”

“Then tell me.”

Silence stretched between them, and still Clark refused to back down. He was wearing Bruce’s bathrobe and Bruce wasn’t wearing anything at all, but he didn’t let that distract him. His eyes never left Bruce’s. Finally, Bruce looked away, and when he did, he spoke.

“How long was your relationship with Lois?”

That was just about the last thing Clark had expected Bruce to say. He was dumbfounded for a moment before he could gather his bearings. “Are you jealous of me and Lois?” he asked, hardly believing what he was saying. Bruce was not the jealous type. He couldn’t afford to be, with a list of conquests a mile long. Glass houses, and all that.

“I’m not jealous,” Bruce said, sounding insulted by the mere suggestion. Clark felt a measure of relief. “How long?”

“Four years,” Clark answered.

“Did you break up with her? Or did she break up with you?”

“It was mutual. We realized we wanted different things.”

“And you dated that girl in high school.”

“Lana.” Okay, what could Bruce possibly want to know about Lana? That was ancient history.

“How long was that relationship?”

“Four years. We broke up when we both went off to college. Why do you all of a sudden want to know these things?”

Bruce ignored his question. “And those have been your only serious, long-term relationships.”

“Before this one, yeah. Bruce, what are you getting at?” Clark was starting to lose his patience with this line of inquiry. Thankfully, Bruce put him out of his misery, although what he said next was almost as unexpected as his first question about Lois had been.

“If the trend continues,” he said, “I’ve got one more year.”

Clark gaped. It took a second for him to interpret what Bruce was saying. Bruce couldn’t possibly be serious. This was what he’d been so upset about lately? This was why he’d been avoiding Clark? He thought their relationship had a fucking expiration date ? “Bruce, you’re working off a sample size of two,” Clark stressed. “I’ve had two girlfriends. I happened to break up with both of them after approximately four years. You’re reading too much into this.”

Bruce shrugged, like what he was saying wasn’t off-the-wall insane. “I just want to know how much time I’ve got left.”

“I’m not going to break up with you!” Clark insisted, losing some of his composure. Is that what Bruce thought of him? Is that what Bruce thought of their relationship? Clark couldn’t figure out where he’d failed in their three years together that Bruce thought he would just… break things off. Just like that. That he’d just get tired of Bruce and move on. Surely Bruce must have remembered enough of what they’d been through together to know that wasn’t how Clark thought of him. Clark was in this relationship for the long haul. He would have Bruce as long as Bruce would have him. Bruce had to know that.

But all Bruce said was, “I don’t know why you’d stay.”

“Because I love you. What makes you think I’d want to leave?”

“I’m terrible at relationships.”

“You’re doing pretty well so far.”

“I push people away.”

“I’ve known you for how many years? If you were going to push me away, you would’ve succeeded by now.”

Still, Bruce shook his head. “I can’t give you what you want.”

“I want you. I’m not going to leave you unless you want me to go. This is it for me.” Clark took Bruce’s hand in his and held his gaze. “I don’t know what else I can do to make you believe that.”

Bruce’s expression was guarded, revealing none of what he was feeling, and even Clark’s years of experience interpreting Bruce’s emotions yielded him nothing.

“I need to take a shower,” Bruce said. Clark’s heart sank. If everything they’d been through together over the past three years hadn’t convinced Bruce of the truth, he didn’t know what would.

“Okay,” he said. He stepped out of the bathroom and shut the door between them.

Bruce

Bruce didn’t actually need to take a shower. He’d showered when he’d gotten home from patrol, like he always did. What he did need was a few minutes to himself, time to process the series of memories Clark’s words had unlocked, the last pieces of a puzzle he’d been working on for the past month.

He remembered a dozen other conversations with Clark, serious conversations, like the one they’d just had. Late at night, early in the morning, when one of them came back from a particularly perilous mission or when one of them had had a long day, and they’d just… talked. The first time it happened had been in the Batcave, and he’d remembered that one already. It was the first memory he’d recovered, the time Clark had said Bruce was important to him and Bruce had reeled with the knowledge that his life mattered to someone other than his family.

But there were other conversations. Conversations where Clark said things that stuck to Bruce’s brain like flypaper, things like how much he cared about Bruce and how much he valued their relationship, things Bruce couldn’t picture himself ever saying out loud but that Clark said like it was no big deal, like it was the most obvious, most inevitable thing in the world. “How could I not care about you?” his attitude seemed to say. “How could I not value our relationship?”

Suddenly, Bruce knew, and it was like waking from a dream. He’d thought he’d remembered enough of the last three years, but he’d been missing the most crucial pieces. Now that he had them, everything had shifted and become crystal clear.

Maybe Clark could do better. Maybe Bruce wasn’t good enough for him. And it was true that no relationship came with a lifetime guarantee. But he’d be an idiot to let this one go.

Chapter Text

Bruce

He told Dick first, because he wasn’t yet ready to give Alfred the satisfaction of knowing he’d won. He waited until their weekly family dinner, when Dick always visited. After the meal, he took Dick aside and stood with him on one of the balconies looking out onto the Wayne family’s vast estate. They leaned against the railing in the cool night air and companionable silence before Bruce took his father’s ring from his pocket and held it out for Dick’s inspection. Dick squinted at it in the dark.

“What is this?” he asked, taking it from Bruce to get a closer look.

“One of my father’s old wedding rings,” Bruce said.

Dick’s eyes widened comically. He gaped at Bruce. “No,” he exclaimed in disbelief. “Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

“Does this mean what I think it means?”

Bruce nodded. “I’m proposing to Clark.”

Dick pumped a victorious fist in the air. “That’s fantastic! I’m so happy for you!” he shouted, then, realizing Bruce probably didn’t want the entire city to overhear his proposal plans, lowered his voice to a more appropriate volume. “When are you going to do it?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“Have you told anyone else?”

“You’re the first.”

Dick looked over his shoulder into the house. “You should tell them tonight,” he said. “Everyone’s here.”

Bruce took Dick’s advice, mostly because he knew there was no point delaying the inevitable. He was slightly worried about how Damian would react to the news, but the kid seemed to have warmed up to Clark since Clark had moved in with them, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

He gathered them in the Batcave before they went out for the night. Dick hovered on the edges of the group in his Nightwing costume, practically vibrating with excitement.

“Before you all go out,” Bruce began, addressing five pairs of curious eyes behind domino masks, “I have news.” He paused. “I’m going to ask Clark to marry me.”

Cass grinned. She looked pleased, but was succinct as ever, offering a simple, “Nice.”

“Yeah, that’s great news,” Tim agreed.

Jason shrugged. “I guess you guys are good together,” he said, always reluctant to offer Bruce anything that might even vaguely resemble a compliment.

All eyes turned to Damian, who stood expressionless, the patented Wayne family poker face revealing none of what he felt. “Damian?” Bruce prompted.

“What’s in it for me?” Damian asked.

Tim elbowed him sharply. “Damian!” he admonished. Damian glared at him.

“Nothing’s ‘in it for you,’” Bruce said, exasperated. “I’m not asking your permission.”

“Then what are you going to do if I say I don’t want you to?” Damian challenged.

“I would talk to you about it and try to change your mind.”

“And what if you couldn’t change my mind?”

Bruce sighed. He saw what Damian was getting at. “I guess I wouldn’t go through with it,” he admitted.

Damian smirked, a sly look he’d inherited half from his mother and half from his father. “Sounds to me like you’re asking my permission.”

“I don’t want to bribe you into saying yes if that’s not what you want. I want your honest opinion,” Bruce said.

“Okay. I’ll give you my honest opinion, but first, I want something from you.”

Bruce had learned very early on in the parenting process that he had to pick his battles. He wasn’t picking this one. He rolled his eyes and gave in easily. “Fine. What do you want?”

Damian’s smirk transformed into a grin, but it was still just as smug. “You know what I want.”

Another sigh. “You can have chickens,” Bruce offered. “But they’ll be your responsibility. You have to take care of them.” He’d known all along he would let Damian have chickens. It was far from his most unreasonable animal-related demand; he’d just been saving it for a rainy day, a day when he really needed Damian to do something and he needed a bargaining chip to get him to do it. Today was that day.

“Yes!” Damian’s grin lost his smugness and transformed into a childlike expression of pure excitement. He added, almost dismissively, “Kent’s fine. You can marry him.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow. “That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say?” Damian had already pulled out his phone and was scrolling to a webpage he’d saved in his bookmarks. “Anyway, I found a place where you can adopt chickens rescued from factory farms. That’s where we should go. I’ll send you the information.”

They went out after that, Tim catching Bruce’s attention and rolling his eyes over Damian’s head at the youngest Wayne’s behavior. But Bruce wasn’t upset about Damian’s manipulation; he was just pleased he’d obtained all of his children’s approval of his plan to propose to Clark. All he had to do now was break the news to Alfred. He did this after patrol, after the kids had filed upstairs to shower and get in bed, when he and Alfred were the only ones remaining in the Batcave.

“I’m not sure if any of the children mentioned it,” Bruce said, running a hand through his cowl-flattened hair, “But I’ve decided to ask Clark to marry me.” He tried to say this casually, but he knew there was nothing he could do to prevent the triumphant glint in Alfred’s eyes, that familiar old “I told you so” expression. Bruce couldn’t be too bitter about it; after all, Alfred had, in fact, told him so.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Alfred said. The delight in his voice was the British stiff-upper-lip equivalent of jumping up and down with joy. “Do let me know when you plan to ask him so I can arrange for the family to celebrate afterward.”

“You’re assuming he’ll say yes,” Bruce pointed out.

“The only reason Clark hasn’t proposed to you himself is that he doesn’t believe you would say yes,” Alfred countered. Bruce figured this was probably the truth. Clark didn’t have any of the fear of commitment Bruce carried around with the rest of his extensive collection of emotional baggage.

Bruce and Alfred exited the Batcave together, pausing in the halls of the manor before going their separate ways, Bruce to his and Clark’s room and Alfred to his own private set of rooms on the other end of the house, separate from the rest of the family’s living space. They happened to stop just beneath a portrait of Thomas and Martha on their wedding day, posing regally, Martha in an understated white gown that, decades later, still made its way onto future brides’ aspirational Pinterest boards and bloggers’ lists of the best wedding dresses of all time.

“Do you think they would have liked him?” Bruce asked, looking in his parents’ eyes, wondering how they had felt on that day, if either of them had experienced the same doubts that plagued him. Alfred had known them then; maybe he knew.

“Clark is a very difficult man to dislike,” Alfred said candidly, placing a comforting hand on Bruce’s shoulder. Bruce accepted the gesture. “But they would have loved anyone who made you happy.”

Clark

Spring had finally settled on the Northeast, the last bitter winds of winter blowing north and leaving cool breezes and dusty yellow pollen. Lois complained of allergies every day, keeping boxes of tissues at her desk and sticking to a strict regimen of antihistamines and nasal sprays. Damian had somehow convinced Bruce to give into his demand for chickens, and he spent more and more time outside with the birds, delightedly watching them go about their chicken business.

Crime rates rose with the temperatures, and Bruce’s nights were busier, but he seemed to have stopped avoiding Clark, so they ended up spending more time together regardless. Clark wondered if maybe their conversation in the bathroom had been more effective than he’d initially assumed, if maybe something Clark had said had gotten through to Bruce. Whatever the catalyst, he was grateful for it.

One Saturday, Bruce invited Clark out to dinner at a restaurant Clark had never heard of but that Google assured him was well out of his price range. He agreed. They hadn’t been on a proper date since the memory loss, so if Bruce wanted to do something special, he wouldn’t complain. They left the kids in Alfred’s expert care and drove across town; the restaurant was situated on the roof of a building near the waterfront, facing Delaware. Bruce found parking on the street and they ascended the elevator to the top floor, where a hostess took their jackets and escorted them to their seats on the restaurant’s balcony, decorated with blooming plants and modern furniture.

It was prime dinner hour, yet to Clark’s surprise, they were the only ones in the restaurant. He’d been under the impression that this place was new and trendy; the Gotham Gazette had even highlighted it in its Food section. A waiter came to take their drink orders, and Clark deferred to Bruce’s wine expertise. Clark frowned at the smartly dressed server’s retreating form. “This place isn’t very popular,” he said.

“Huh?” Bruce replied, looking up from his menu with his brow furrowed.

“No one else is here,” Clark said, pointedly looking around the large outdoor space.

Bruce’s confusion cleared. “Oh. I rented out the whole restaurant,” he said dismissively, like this was something normal people did all the time. Clark rolled his eyes.

“Of course you did.” He paused, then asked after a moment, “What’s the occasion?”

“We both forgot our anniversary,” Bruce said, hearkening back to their conversation in the bathroom. They weren’t really the anniversary-celebrating type of couple, but last year they had gone out and had a nice dinner, so this wasn’t entirely unprecedented.

“I hope you didn’t bring a gift, because I have nothing,” Clark said with a smirk. Bruce knew how much he hated surprise gifts. They made him feel guilty. He didn’t like receiving things when he had nothing to give.

“No,” Bruce assured him. “No gifts.”

The waiter brought their wine, poured it into their glasses and left the bottle on the table. Clark took a sip. It tasted… like wine. He wasn’t a connoisseur. They gave their food orders and the waiter once again disappeared into the kitchen.

Clark turned and looked out over the glittering waters of the Delaware Bay. The sun had set but the moon was nearly full. “That’s some view,” he said appreciatively.

“I thought you’d like it,” Bruce said. “You can see Metropolis from here.”

Clark gave a teasing, smug look. “I can see Metropolis from anywhere.”

Now it was Bruce’s turn to roll his eyes, although he didn’t keep the amused smile from his face. The waiter returned with their entrees in record time, likely due to the fact that they were, again, the only ones in the restaurant. Clark unfolded his napkin onto his lap and dug in.

“This also happens to be where we first met,” Bruce said after a few bites.

Clark looked up and frowned. That couldn’t be true. He remembered the first time they’d met, at a charity gala Bruce had hosted at Wayne Manor. “I could’ve sworn we first met at one of your fundraisers,” he said.

“I mean, where we really first met,” Bruce said cryptically, even though they were alone on the balcony. Clark got his meaning. He meant where Batman and Superman had met. But this wasn’t that place either, Clark thought, until Bruce added, “This whole area used to be nothing but warehouses.”

Suddenly, the view of the harbor looked a lot more familiar. Clark could picture the low, squat buildings that used to line this very waterfront, some of which looked to have been converted into pricey condos and others of which had been torn down and replaced with high-rises like this one. “Really?” Clark asked, though he was already beginning to see it. “This is where…? Wow.” He shook his head in disbelief. “There’s gentrification for you. I can’t believe you remembered the exact spot.”

Clark may not have remembered the location, but he remembered the incident itself. It was burned into his brain. He’d been investigating a string of murders in Gotham and Batman had shown up and told him in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of his city and never come back. He chuckled at the memory, wondering how that version of Batman would react if he could see them now. They’d come a long way.

The rest of the meal passed pleasantly. The food was good, the wine was good, the view was excellent. Clark still felt a bit odd being the only ones there, but there were some aspects of Bruce’s privileged life that he didn’t think he would ever get used to. After the waiter came to take their empty dishes, Clark dabbed his mouth with his napkin and polished off the last of the wine.

“That was one hell of an anniversary dinner,” he complimented. “You really know how to pull out all the stops.”

Bruce was gazing out at the water, and he turned abruptly to face Clark, an inscrutable look in his eyes. “Before we go,” he said, “There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

Clark looked at him expectantly, awaiting his question. What he didn’t expect was for Bruce to push out his chair and get down on one knee. His heart skipped a beat at the implication, though his brain lingered in denial. There was no way. Bruce couldn’t possibly be asking him to—

“Will you marry me?”

Clark gaped. He knew he probably looked ridiculous, but he couldn’t help it. “Are you serious?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

“Yes!” Clark had already exclaimed before Bruce could get out his question. Then, registering what Bruce had just said, he clarified, “I mean, no, you don’t look like you’re joking, and yes, I will marry you!” He shook his head. “I didn’t think… you really want to do this?”

“I really want to do this,” Bruce assured him, and the tone in his voice sounded so much like a man in love that Clark believed him instantly. “Now can you put the ring on so I can get up off the floor?”

“Sorry.” Clark took the ring and slid it onto his ring finger. It fit perfectly. He wondered how Bruce had known his size. “This is nice. I hope you didn’t spend a fortune on it.”

“I didn’t spend a cent on it. It was my father’s.”

If Clark was an emotional crier, by that point, he would have been sobbing. Bruce mentioned his parents so rarely that every scrap of information Clark learned about them felt like something precious. He felt honored that Bruce trusted him with something of his father’s. “Bruce, I…” he began, but stopped. He didn’t know what to say, except to say, “I love you. I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you.”

And they kissed, on the roof of the building that used to be a warehouse where Batman told Superman to fuck off for the very first time.

Chapter Text

epilogue

A year had passed. On a hot, sunny day in August, a private jet landed in an airfield in Kansas and a crowd of black-clad vigilante billionaires disembarked, chatting excitedly about what was to come. Their eyes shaded with sunglasses, they piled into a pair of shiny black SUVs with their minimal luggage, mostly backpacks and duffle bags. The cars sped off onto the dusty highway, making a beeline for what seemed like nowhere.

After an hour of driving, a small, well-kept sign welcomed them to a town called Smallville. The main street was lined with the sorts of buildings one would expect to see in a small Midwestern town: struggling local businesses, several churches, a school. Locals who happened to be walking down the street or peering through their windows would see the cars and frown at how new and expensive they looked, how incongruous with the beat-up pickup trucks and functional minivans they were used to, and wonder who had family visiting from out of town. One or two of them might remember two Thanksgivings ago when a very similar pair of SUVs had parked outside the Kents’ farm, and the town had been abuzz with rumors about the unassuming old couple’s supposedly gay son and his extremely wealthy boyfriend.

Sure enough, the cars pulled into the Kents’ gravel driveway and their occupants spilled into the freshly painted farmhouse, dragging suitcases behind them. There was Clark Kent, the only one among them not dressed all in black, embracing his mother as she threw open the door to welcome them. There was that billionaire boyfriend of his (fiancé, technically, though not for much longer), shaking hands with Clark’s father. There were the billionaire’s five children, chatting excitedly with one another and with Conner, who had followed Martha and Jonathan Kent out of the house.

The last person out of the cars was the only one among them who had never visited Smallville, a man who observed the landscape around him and decided that the countryside of England was much nicer than this vast, flat expanse of space in the center of America, though he would never say so out loud. Alfred Pennyworth politely greeted Martha and Jonathan, complimenting them on their lovely home.

Once everyone was settled, Martha ushered them into her modestly sized kitchen, where she’d set up an additional folding table and chairs next to her regular kitchen table and chairs for more space. Her guests dug into the meal that was prepared for them, extolling her delicious cooking at regular intervals. Martha glowed from a combination of the praise and the knowledge that her son was (finally) about to get married, and she was going to get five ready-made grandchildren out of the deal.

After lunch, everyone crowded into the house to get changed. Some of the guests at this particular wedding were very busy people with very tight schedules, so all the events were planned for a single day, and those among them who needed to jet off immediately afterward could do so at their discretion. The boys took over Conner’s room, changing into their smart black-and-white suits. Cassandra, so far the only girl in the wedding party, had the upstairs bathroom to herself.

Once everyone had changed and filed out to the space in the barn that Conner and Martha and Jonathan had set up for the ceremony, a second crowd started arriving, either from the airport in Wichita or from the nearest hotel a few towns over. Barbara Gordon wheeled her chair over and Dick ran up to greet her. Stephanie Brown snuck up behind Tim and Cass and surprised them with a group hug (well, Cass pretended to be surprised, anyway). Kate Kane straightened the jacket of her well-tailored suit and shook her cousin’s hand, voicing her congratulations over the din of conversation. Kara Danvers took her cousin aside and told him how happy she knew his parents would be for him and how much they would have loved to be there. Lois Lane hugged Martha and Jonathan, who always looked forward to seeing her; with her long black hair and sleek black dress, she could have been one of the Waynes.

Finally, the last guest arrived, flying all the way from an island in the middle of the ocean that no man could locate, wearing an elegant Grecian-inspired dress and sandals. She greeted Bruce and Clark with bone-crushing hugs and invoked a few Hellenic deities in her exclamations of how excited she was. At her signal, the grooms’ family and friends took their seats, and the grooms took their place under the arch Jonathan had constructed, flanked by their best man and best woman, Dick and Lois. The infamous Diana of Themyscira stood between them.

They’d planned the ceremony to be a small, private affair. The Daily Planet Style section had tweeted the moment their engagement went public – “@WayneEnterprises CEO and Gotham’s former most eligible bachelor, @BruceWayne, proposed to his boyfriend of three years, the @DailyPlanet’s own @ClarkJKent” – and Style editor Cat Grant had already prepared a similar tweet for when Clark returned from his honeymoon, but for now, Bruce and Clark had escaped the public eye. Their guests were limited to those who knew of the grooms’ secret identities and therefore wouldn’t think it strange that Wonder Woman was officiating. They sat in folding chairs and not one among them could stop smiling.

The ceremony was brief. The grooms exchanged vows, and if Alfred, Martha, and Jonathan were exchanging tissues during that part to dab at their eyes, everyone else pretended not to notice.

“I feel like the luckiest man alive,” Clark said.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever been able to picture myself spending the rest of my life with,” Bruce told him.

They kissed, and the small crowd cheered. There was a buffet-style feast in the kitchen, and drinks on the porch, and Conner single-handedly cleared the chairs out of the barn so they could all dance. The moon and stars were bright, and the night air was a cool counterpoint to the sweltering day. A few of the guests had brought gifts, although the invitations had stressed that none were needed. Everyone agreed that it was the best wedding they’d ever attended.

Long after the sun went down, the guests who weren’t staying with the Kents gradually trickled out. Bruce and Clark thanked Diana for officiating. “You don’t have to thank me,” she said, waving them off with a hand. “I was honored you asked.” Lois hugged Clark tightly before she departed. Damian disappeared without a word, and his siblings knew, if they needed him, they’d find him among the Kents’ animals. Finally, it was just the Kents and Waynes (and Alfred). The house was full, but they would make do for a night before Bruce and Clark left for their honeymoon and the rest of the Waynes went back to Gotham.

One by one, everyone fell asleep. It was late for Kents and still very early for the Waynes, but none of Gotham’s vigilantes had anywhere to be that night and none of the Kents had anywhere to be in the morning. The last of the lights in the house flicked off. The drone of crickets was a peaceful chorus in every direction, the only sound other than soft, slow breathing and the noises a very old house makes.

“I love you,” Clark whispered where he and Bruce lay sharing a bed in the room that had once been Clark’s and now was Conner’s.

“I love you too,” Bruce replied.