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2015
Fearing death was a question of opportunity and Clark had never had much of a chance.
Clark could have counted the number of times his life had been in imminent danger on one hand and during most of them, there hadn’t been much time to be scared. Not for his own life, anyway.
Which wasn’t to say that Clark wasn’t afraid. He was—of a lot of things. What if the world found out? What if they never did? How did he know if he was doing the right thing? What if it really was better to do nothing at all?
What if he stood by at the wrong moment and lost everything as his penance?
But somewhere in the haze of pain that was stealing away his senses, there was Bruce. Bruce who was a mortal man and no less terrifying for it. Bruce who had done the right thing in the end and maybe that should count for something. Maybe it had to.
And there was the Amazon—impossible and there right when they had needed her. He wouldn’t get to talk to her when this was all over, wouldn’t get to ask her anything. He didn’t regret much, but he was sorry for that.
He’d become Superman because he thought the world needed him to. Because he had to carry the weight. Because he could do the things that no one else could. But maybe…it wasn’t down to him. Maybe someone else was strong enough to do the work.
He held to that thought as he tumbled into the dark.
2015
Luthor’s party wasn’t any more pleasant the second time around.
The stress factors were at least novel and different. The man himself was in characteristically good form, smiling and responding to Clark’s request for a quote with an almost frantic confidence. But his eyes looked past Clark, through him—like everyone else had always done because Clark had needed them to. Lex Luthor was always cordial to the press, but there was no reason he should have recognized Clark specifically or known his name. Some small-time writer in a sea of names with a higher profile; it wasn’t even his usual beat. Clark should have been warier of Luthor’s attention from the start.
Clark was no stranger to the iron grip of self-control. Superhuman strength required a superhuman level of self-awareness if you didn’t just want to let the world break itself against you. He had a temper and he wasn’t always proud of it, but he could count the number of people he’d ever hit—really hit and meant it—on one hand. And they’d all been Kryptonian. Or close enough.
(He didn’t count Bruce among their number. He’d got a few good hits in during the worst of it—enough to hurt because he’d wanted it to hurt. He really wasn’t proud of that. It had all gone too far.
He still liked to think it would have never gone quite that far.)
Looking at Luthor’s face—knowing what he was, what he’d done, what he was going to do—was a real stress test on that self-control. Rust on the iron. And if Clark had seen it the first time, he could have done something about it. Whatever security systems Luthor had, however many people his money bought him, Superman would have been able to do something more.
But all Clark Kent could do was clench his fist and bite his tongue and sit on the knowledge that while he might not have to regret decking Luthor with all his might for the usual reasons, without strength or flight or super-senses, he wouldn’t throw good money on the chances of still being bulletproof. And it wasn’t even his own name he’d ruin for doing it. Lois had stuck her neck out with Perry, staked her reputation on his freelance writing skills to get him a ludicrously competitive first gig, and all for some guy she’d met two years ago during one hell of a day. Because he’d asked. When all he was to her was just some guy who’d died and left her to deal with the story. Who’d risen and shown up at her door because he didn’t know where else to go and at least he knew how to get there.
(It used to be that he could have gone anywhere, even if he felt like he never belonged to any place outside of a little farm in Kansas. He doesn’t think that he ever appreciated that as much as he should have done.)
She wasn’t the Lois he knew. And she was. He wasn’t the Clark she had known and he was. He still didn’t know what to do with any of that; his head span around the thought in dizzy circles that made him almost physically sick if he dwelled on it too long. But he knew he didn’t want to hurt her.
He’d probably hurt his own Lois—the Lois who he’d spent those two years getting to know and like and enjoy the freedom of being known entirely by. If that world still existed or ever had. He didn’t like to think about either of those possibilities. Either he’d left her to mourn or she was gone; both potentials felt like his fault somehow.
The least he could do—and it was a low bar—was try to do right by this Lois. Which meant Luthor got to swan around and enjoy the night and Clark had to think his way around this one. It shouldn’t have been that hard considering he had a clairvoyant’s insight into the outcomes, but there was another factor he had to consider.
That factor was also very, very stressful.
Seeing Bruce Wayne back in this context was surreal. It was easy now to overlap memories of the cut of his jaw, the broad shoulders and dark colours, the eyes that were a little too quick and perceptive for his slow smile, and imagine him as something different. To see him as a swirl of black or bathed in green light. To see him—strong for a man but still only that, only human—stand against the dark. With Clark or without him. Or against him.
Clark had come here for him. He’d come here, put himself through Luthor’s borderline deranged speech about literacy (something much darker that peaked above the surface because Luthor was rich and smart and eccentric and who would ever call him on it) again because he needed to talk to Bruce and he didn’t know how else to get close enough to do it. And he was wasting all his time because every time he closed his eyes, he saw green light and felt the strange, choking weakness of his body after inhaling Bruce’s gas. And a part of him, a part of him that was still living in that moment, was afraid. It was stupid; Bruce’s weapons had targeted his weaknesses as a Kryptonian. He didn’t even know if he counted as Kryptonian anymore. Bruce shouldn’t even know who he was. Even if it could still hurt him (and there were plenty of other things that could hurt him now), what reason would Bruce have to do it?
And he’d seen Bruce, fought with him, died with Bruce at his back. Bruce had done the right thing when it counted. Clark had been wrong—he must have been. And while Bruce had certainly done his fair share of wrong in the whole mess, it wasn’t right to hold it against this version of him when he hadn’t even had the chance to make those mistakes. Only Clark still had them hanging over his head.
Selfishly, he wished that was the only reason.
Clark had done his research. He couldn’t go walking around two years-blind to how the world had changed, of course, but it was more than that. As soon as Lois had told him he’d had to know. He’d dug for every detail about Black Zero, tried to find anything that might have made the difference, tried to see what the hell had happened here. He hadn’t been looking for Bruce, but he’d found him anyway. It wasn’t a surprise that the Wayne name made the papers, much less when its last inheritor had personally run into a disaster zone to save the rank and file. That had been the same in both worlds.
(He’d done it all in a button-down vest—no batsuit, no equipment, just Bruce Wayne in all his human vulnerability while the sky came crashing down.)
He was fairly certain that in the timeline he remembered, Bruce hadn’t been inside the Wayne Enterprises building when it was knocked flat. He was fairly certain that Bruce hadn’t spent hours buried under rubble while search and rescue waited for clearance to enter what had recently been an active warzone. He was fairly certain that Bruce hadn’t been left with the building’s foundation resting on his damn back, leading to him disappearing from the public eye for months of intensive recovery.
He could understand why Bruce had hated him during the first go-round. He couldn’t imagine what he’d think of him now. If he knew.
But he wasn’t the only one paying attention to Bruce. Luthor’s eyes dogged him even when his steps didn’t, and the intensity of that regard sent chills down Clark’s spine. Last time, Luthor had manipulated Bruce for a purpose—played them both against each other out of some mad desperation to prove a philosophical point—but it had been Clark’s abilities that had drove him to it. He had no idea what had made Luthor’s interests latch so firmly onto Bruce this time without Superman in the equation, but he didn’t like it. And Bruce didn’t know.
So, Clark’s feelings and uncertainty and fear could all go to hell. He’d spent a lot of his life thinking about what he could do with second chances. He didn’t want to be the kind of man who wasted the only one he’d ever been given.
The opening was easy—words echoing in his mouth, laying the groundwork for a conversation that had already happened. At least the first attempt set a low bar; that was something. Figuring out the right place to break from the script was a little trickier. He didn’t really know Bruce and maybe that was a problem that was at least fifty percent his own fault, but he didn’t exactly remember Bruce making it easy before he’d known who he was.
When he’d mentioned the Batman, the whole tone of the conversation had changed. Bruce had to be good to keep the mystery fresh for as many years as he’d been operating, but in that moment, he’d let the mask slip just a little. It was a pivotal point. He didn’t know if repeating it was the right thing. If he didn’t open that door, he wasn’t sure how he’d even get Bruce to talk to him, as determined as he was to blow Clark off. If he did…it wouldn’t do him much good to just walk into the same mistakes with his eyes open.
Missing his cue was a natural consequence of his indecision—just a beat too long in the silence where the words were meant to be, enough to knock the moment out of place by a hair’s breadth. Maybe that was enough. He didn’t really know how any of this worked. Bruce paused on the turn of his heel, taking the decision from Clark’s hands. “Daily Planet, you said?” Clark was tangled in the considering furrow of Bruce’s brow, his own mouth gaping in a way that couldn’t have done anything for his credibility. “I don’t think I read that one much—more of a cable guy, anyway. You’ve seen Vale. But, huh.” He smiled, something empty and charming, but his brow didn’t smooth out quite enough and his eyes didn’t lose their sharpness. “Do they send you out to a lot of these things? Only I swear that I…”—he snapped his fingers, startlingly loud—"I’ve got it. You ever write the Sports pages, Mr. Kent?”
There wasn’t enough air. Never in Clark’s life had that been an issue before now, but he was too busy trying to weather the light-headed swoon his body had pitched into to appreciate the novelty. There was no way that Bruce could—no. No, he couldn’t say that, it was absurd that he’d even assumed. But if Bruce did—
For the second time that night, Bruce surprised him, catching his shoulder in a shockingly firm grip, face suddenly serious as he leaned carefully into Clark’s eyeline. “You all right, son?”
“Yeah,” he said and nearly choked on the word. “I just—Perry sticks all the new guys with Sports.” It was such an inane thing to say that he was almost embarrassed for himself, but he supposed that he deserved a little bit of slack given the overall situation.
“Seems to me you’re doing fine for yourself.” Bruce smiled, a small thing that didn’t try to match the brightness of his earlier empty grin and was better for it. He could have meant the party (still carrying on around them, though some lookie-loos were trying to find a subtle way to crane their necks). He might have meant something else.
Before Clark could think on it too much, Bruce had flagged someone down—the photographer Perry had paired him with (and wasn’t it interesting, Clark would think later when he could think, that Bruce knew who that was and was able to pick him out of the crowd). With one last pat to Clark’s shoulder, Bruce placed him in his co-worker’s care and was gone.
He’d despaired of catching up to Bruce—wondered if he could barter for a ride to Gotham, lurk around the back door of Bruce’s office until he came out—when he caught low voices around the library entryway. The uninvited press had cleared out and the party was in full swing; an opportune time for a couple to slip out for an argument. But he recognized the timbre of the lower voice. (He heard it in his sleep—distorted but so recognizable he could have kicked himself.)
Clark started forward before he had the opportunity to think better of the impulse. He had no plan, no justification even for his presence, but he couldn’t miss his chance. “Mr. Wayne.”
The voices cut off as he slipped around the corner. There was Bruce. And his conversation partner—unmistakeable even with her hair tied back and the lack of armour. They turned to stare at him with matching expressions of bland surprise, cutting off their heated discussion with unspoken synchronicity. The woman’s wrist was grasped in one of Bruce’s hands—not like she was struggling to get away, but like she might have tried at some point. He’d last seen that dainty fist wrapped around a sword that had cut into Doomsday like even his heat vision hadn’t managed. He’d seen her shake off a blow with a smile when a similar hit had leveled buildings.
She was (probably) not human. Bruce was. He couldn’t stop looking at the place where they were connected, the loose but solid curl of Bruce’s fingers around her wrist.
She smiled at him now, a small quirk of her lips as she followed his eyes and made her own conclusions about his expression. “Mr. Wayne and I were just having a discussion about sharing.”
“I’m very big on the whole concept.” Bruce’s voice was perfectly even, though the look on his face was briefly a touch too cool and tense to carry it off. He held the woman’s wrist for a moment longer before gently releasing it, turning a lopsided smile on Clark. “I think sharing can be very pleasurable for everyone involved—provided one finds himself in the company of the right people. Don’t you think so, Mr. Kent?” If Clark hadn’t known what Bruce really was, he might have been surprised that he remembered his name after only one conversation. He didn’t think Bruce missed much.
Clark could see the rest of the script as if Bruce had written it for him in the slightly too bright flash of his teeth. This was the part where the small time reporter from Kansas got flustered or offended by the lurid insinuation and left the scene; he’d write a scathing aside about the Wayne heir in his article and Bruce would get to continue his conversation (confrontation?) in peace. Clark ducked his head and hoped he’d managed to push the right amount of aw shucks into his voice to hide his amusement. “Well, now I feel rude saying I was hoping to speak to you alone, Mr. Wayne.”
For the span of a second, Bruce—eyes widening a little, the sharp edge of his smile dulling—looked unbelievably, beautifully off-balance. The woman grinned and the sincerity of her expression felt strangely out of place. “Not at all. I have to be going, anyway.” She turned a raised eyebrow on Bruce. “I’m sure Mr. Wayne will find me if he needs to.”
It was hard not to stare after her as she left. Honestly, if Clark had known she’d be here tonight, he might have chosen to speak to her in the first place and leave Bruce out of it until he had a better handle on things. Ah, well. He was committed now.
Bruce’s expression flattened a little as it turned on Clark, sour in a way that almost felt nostalgic. He sighed. “Well, Mr. Kent, it appears you’re feeling better.”
“Clark,” he said because the ‘Mr. Kent’ thing was actually kind of making him uncomfortable. And then, because his brain-to-mouth filter had apparently been damaged by the stress of the night, he heard his traitorous voice say: “Is this the part where I offer to show you how much?”
Bruce raised an eyebrow and if some part of Clark had been holding out hope for a repeat performance of that first surprised reaction, it was apparently in vain. “Another time, maybe,” he said, which was almost flattering. More so than bypassing the matter of Clark’s name entirely and addressing him by manner of resigned eye contact. “I’m sure you realize that this place is crawling with security systems given the company tonight, and I’m not much interested in giving Lex Luthor a show.”
Clark probably had realized, somewhere underneath everything, and probably should have considered that more. He eyed the shadows around the entry speculatively. “No, I don’t think that would be wise.” He managed to catch his tongue before it formed the words to suggest a more private location. His thoughts had felt strangely…slow since his return. Sluggish. He never had enough time to consider them or make sure they came out the right way when he spoke. But he might only have one shot at this (unless he died and came back again, which he wasn’t especially keen on testing). Flirting and innuendo would only hold Bruce’s attention so long. And it wasn’t the public persona he was interested in at any rate. “Actually, this is about Luthor.”
Bruce’s eyebrow found room to rise yet further, but there was that sharpness to his eyes again. “I should be insulted by that. I think I am.”
“You’ve been looking into Lex Corp’s projects,” Clark said, knowing he was taking one hell of a gamble and hoping his voice was steady enough to pull it off. “I hear they’re out of this world. Literally.”
Something in Bruce’s face twisted, briefly. A snatch of an expression, but it was enough. “And Perry White is wasting you on Sports.”
“And society bashes.”
“Even worse.” Bruce glanced out toward the dark, sliding his hands into his pockets. Clark’s heart felt fit to pound right through his throat. At last, one of Bruce’s hands made the slow journey back to freedom, a card pinched between thumb and forefinger that he held out to Clark. “I’m going to have to take a rain check on tonight, but I’m going to trust that this”—he waved the card a little before handing it over; Clark could barely make out the outlines of a phone number in the dark—“doesn’t make tomorrow’s page six. Pretty sure I own that paper, anyway.”
“Sure.” Clark’s throat clicked wetly when he swallowed. The card felt too delicate, his hands over-large. He tucked it into his own pocket, carefully.
“Give me a call sometime, Clark. We’ll get drinks.” When Bruce left, Clark didn’t fight the impulse to watch him go.
Clark didn’t have the luxury of flying home anymore and having been legally dead for two years didn’t exactly leave him flush with cab money. If he waited around the party, he could probably catch a ride with the photographer, but he didn’t much feel up to sticking things out now that he’d achieved his real objective. If he called Lois, she’d probably foot the bill without him asking, which was exactly why he hadn’t called.
He didn’t mind being out at night, honestly. Even if it was weird to see the blurry edges of shadows and confront the blunt edges of his reduced senses. He was managing, he thought. Pretty well, all things considered.
There were, of course, reasons so many people were wary of the dark. That was a lesson often instilled in childhood, exacerbated once one was old enough to move beyond the vague impression of monsters and start being scared of more tangible things. Clark had not had the opportunity to learn that lesson either.
He had enough time to regret that when he heard the slowing roll of the car engine before he saw the vehicle—black with the lights off, entering the street at a crawl. Maybe he hadn’t done as good a job at going unnoticed as he’d hoped. Or maybe it was a coincidence; this wasn’t Gotham, but he wasn’t out of touch enough to think Metropolis didn’t have plenty of the more pedestrian brand of trouble even when Superman was soaring around. That still required him to believe in coincidences and he wasn’t sure he could make that leap at this point.
He contemplated running but, well. You didn’t exactly need a lot of horsepower to catch him these days. He stood stiff, fists clenching at the pointed click of a car door.
And then someone was yelling. Surprisingly, it wasn’t him.
He turned to catch the whirl of a black cape—and, yeah, now he was able to appreciate that the blurry edges of human perception gave it a little something in the dark cityscape. In another lifetime, he wouldn’t have been happy to see the Batman crossing the bay, but it was hard to complain currently. Bruce was true to form, handling the assailants—three, men, broad with probably some combat training—with the efficiency that Clark had come to expect. It all seemed to be going really well. Until the car jerked forward.
Clark’s feet almost ripped themselves from his shoes—would have, if he’d been what he was—in his haste to intervene. If he’d been what he was, he would have made it. Superman could have. Clark Kent never would.
The car plowed into Bruce in a crunch of metal. Clark’s arms automatically flew up to cover his face, eyes wincing closed in a brace for impact that never reached them. He didn’t want to open them again. Even in the quiet afterward, his muscles trembled with the certainty of something he was afraid to make true by looking.
But if Bruce was—if he had—
He might need Clark’s help.
Lowering his arms was a slow process that seemed to take an unaccountable amount of effort. The first thing his eyes landed on was the wreck of the car, front bumper crumpled and pushed back around a collision point. The second thing was Batman in front of it. Standing tall. Unharmed.
Clark had had the opportunity to get up close and personal with Bruce’s tech. He knew how good it was, how formidable the Batman was against even a superhuman opponent. But Bruce was still human.
Or, at least, he had been the way that Clark remembered him.
Clark stumbled forward, footsteps a conspicuously loud intrusion into the moment. The Batman whirled on him, his mouth (the only bit of skin visible through the suit, unharmed, uncut even though there must have been—shards or glass or something—the car) a thin line that stopped Clark dead even before Bruce’s voice said: “Stay back.”
Clark swallowed and it didn’t make him feel any less like drowning. He waited silently as Bruce cleared the driver from the wreckage, relieved himself to find that he was alive despite, well, everything. He didn’t flinch when Bruce walked over to him, standing stiff and straight-backed as the cowl glared at him. His eyes flicked to Bruce's mouth again, still frozen in a thin, unwavering line, and was glad that he'd managed to lock his knees before the absurd impulse to kiss him could translate into something more proactive. It would be on-trend for his mouth to get ahead of him, it had been all night, but that was—well, really. Maybe that was just a thing—the adrenaline, the rescue. Maybe he understood the public response to Superman a little better.
Then Bruce was holding out something in one hand again—gauntleted this time, but the echo of the gesture nearly made him shiver. Clark swallowed again and reached out to take his glasses (frames twisted, lenses scratched, but miraculously intact). He hadn’t even realized they’d fallen off, what with—everything. “Just because you defied death once,” Bruce said, “doesn’t mean you have any excuse for being careless.” It said something about Bruce that Clark was momentarily so thrown by Batman making what sounded like a (gruff, growling, irritable) joke that it took him at least five additional seconds to process the implications of that statement.
“I—” Honestly, he didn’t know what he planned to say, but Bruce once again took the decision from him.
“I have questions. About Black Zero.” Bruce pulled something from his belt, a small screen, and held it up for Clark to see. His own face stared back at him. That was almost as disconcerting as the actual text when he read it.
“That’s, uh.” He pushed his glasses back onto his face, more for something to do than because he needed them. “I guess Mom wrote the obituary.”
“We need to talk.” Bruce looked over at the wreckage and Clark followed his gaze. “But not here.”
“Sure.” Clark had to fight against a bought of hysterical laughter, thinking about Bruce’s card in his pocket. “Want my number?”
“I’ll find you.” And then Bruce was gone, launching himself into the night—maybe by grappling hook or by flight or by jet pack quite honestly. Nothing was going to surprise Clark anymore.
“I’m sure you will,” he said. Well, at least he could say that he was doing things differently where Bruce was concerned. Check one off for that.
He thought about his next steps—the right ones, the necessary ones, the ones that made his heels itch with the need to act—the whole way back. (Though he paid a little more attention to his surroundings this time. Fool him once and all that.) It definitely wasn’t all down to him now and that was—that was still nice.
He’d just have to figure out what it was that he could still do that no one else could. He thumbed at Bruce’s card in pocket. He was sure he could find room in his schedule for drinks.