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Clark is touching Bruce's scars.
Not the ones on his body, the ones there for any eyes to see: not the tiny white speckles from a recent chemical burn, nor the one that curves along his lower back like a nightmare smile. Not even the fresh and jagged one just a few inches from a femoral artery.
Clark is touching the scars that matter.
Most people's auras are bright, shining swirls of opalescent light. When Clark opens his inner vision, he can see them glowing like pearls, clear and numinous.
Bruce's aura is different: fitful, marred with cracks like a shattered window, like a precious vase mended many times over. Some of the scars are deep, raw-edged; one made by a crowbar in a desert years ago still seeps pain. Others, more numerous, are fine as paper cuts: missed opportunities, unthinking words, the small regrets that make up a life.
Most are small but deep. Clark can see the stories behind each one. This one--he brushes it gently--is a small boy found too late. This one a person driven past hope into despair and then oblivion. A mark for every life Bruce feels he failed, every soul in Gotham he didn't reach in time.
As Victor Zsasz records his kills on his body, Batman records each loss on his soul.
Most auras are beautiful, ethereal, precious and to be cherished. Bruce's goes beyond beauty into something else, something that makes Clark tremble each time he dares to open his vision and see. Bruce wears his scarred and shattered aura with an unbearable grace, and is made complete by it.
That Clark can see this fills him with awed gratitude.
That other people cannot see it fills him with sadness.
That Bruce himself cannot see it--
Long into the gray morning Clark touches Bruce's scars with gentle hands, rapt with grieving joy.