Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Are you all right?"

It felt like a stupid question just coming out of his mouth, and worse than stupid when Bruce looked up, face blank, stare tinged with an edge of pointed disbelief.

But that didn't mean it wasn't worth asking, Clark told himself. Just because Bruce wanted Clark to think it wasn't, that didn't mean anything.

It was just one of a lot of things he'd learned about Bruce since he'd come back to life: on a team that included a god, an alien, and the king of Atlantis, Bruce couldn't be counted upon to admit that he was human.

Clark had thought at first—well. That Bruce might have brought him back to life, might have tacitly conceded that he needed Clark's help, but that didn't mean he wasn't as arrogant, as implacable and disdainful and frustrating, as he had always been. That it wasn't a surprise that he should be the sort of man who couldn't stand to think he couldn't keep up, the sort of man who would insist on going toe-to-toe with Superman just for the satisfaction of proving that he could. Breathe it in. That's fear. You're not brave. You were never even a man—

And then he'd shown up to help Ma move back into the house. He'd bought a bank. He'd moved the League into what Clark had learned were the thoroughly and beautifully repaired remains of his own scarred childhood home.

Clark knew him better now. It wasn't that Bruce didn't want to concede that he could be hurt more easily than the rest of them, that he was inevitably more fragile by the simple fact of his biology. It was that he honestly did not believe that that fact was important, or that it ought to factor into anyone's decision-making, including his own, except by absolute necessity. He'd accepted that it mattered to Alfred; Clark understood that much by the way Bruce allowed Alfred to look after him. But he didn't seem to grasp why it did—as far as Clark could tell, he thought it was a foible of Alfred's, a peculiarity he'd given up on training Alfred out of after trying for at least twenty years.

Clark wanted to make it clear to him that it wasn't. That Alfred might have been the only person who knew or understood or cared about Bruce personally for a long time, but that wasn't true anymore.

And the process of making things like that clear to Bruce turned out to involve a hell of a lot of standing there letting Bruce look at you like he thought you were an idiot.

Clark waited it out, kept his expression mild and inquiring like he hadn't noticed. "I heard you hit that wall," he added at last, and Bruce let a sharp breath out through his nose and looked away.

"If I couldn't survive getting thrown into a wall—"

"I didn't ask whether you'd survived," Clark said, and touched his shoulder.

Bruce went still. But he didn't move away. Another thing Clark had learned about Bruce: he didn't believe in half measures. If he hadn't thrown you across the room for laying a hand on him, then he wasn't angry or uncomfortable, even if his face seemed to say otherwise.

He was still wearing the undersuit, if not the full armor. But that wasn't thick enough to keep Clark from being able to feel it, when he concentrated on the sensation against the skin of his palm—heat, and too much of it, and something that felt altered in the contour of Bruce's shoulder under his hand. Swelling, Clark thought.

"Tell me you didn't dislocate it and then reduce it yourself."

"It's fine," Bruce said, which was so obviously not what Clark had asked to hear that it almost didn't qualify as an evasion at all.

"Did Alfred look at it?" Clark pressed.

That brought Bruce's eyes up again. "Yes," he conceded after a moment, but he kept looking at Clark, intent and unreadable in a way that made Clark think maybe he was angry after all.

"I'm not trying to tell you I don't think you should be in the field with us," Clark said uncertainly. On the one hand, he thought he'd managed to communicate a sort of infuriated awe with the depth and breadth of Bruce's stubbornness back when Bruce had first tried to kill him, and there was no reason for Bruce to think that understanding had gone anywhere; on the other hand, he could see how his mother-henning might look to Bruce like—

"No," Bruce agreed, and something that was almost warmth softened the line of his mouth, just a little. "You know better than that," and his tone was wry, mild.

Clark's breath caught, quiet in the back of his throat. It was a stupid reaction. So many of the things he did around Bruce had started to seem stupid, but he couldn't stop any of them. It was just—Clark hadn't heard that tone until the day at the house, I bought the bank. And then he hadn't heard it for weeks, so long he'd thought he'd almost imagined it, until finally it had happened again. And then again, again. Twice in the same week, startling the first time and a strange little glowing satisfaction the next, and now this made three times, which was a new record.

Bruce had realized that Clark wasn't going to destroy the planet—that instead he would die to save it. Bruce had resurrected him, had trusted him to understand that there was a reason for it and that the rest of the League was going to need his help. Clark still didn't know why, but he'd been determined to prove him right, to do whatever it took to make sure Bruce never had reason to believe he'd made a mistake.

I don't—not.

A double negative, the absence of outright rejection, had been the best he could get. He'd decided that was all right; it was better than he'd thought, better than a lot of people felt about him.

(—EARTH BELONGS TO HUMANS. GOD HATES ALIENS. THIS IS OUR WORLD, NOT YOURS—)

Bruce was willing to work with him to save the planet. Bruce wasn't going to try to kill him again.

But he'd never expected Bruce to start talking to him like he liked him.

"You shouldn't feel any obligation toward me," Bruce was saying, back to the steady even way he usually talked to Clark, and—what?

Clark blinked. "Obligation," he said.

Bruce met his eyes. "Thank you," he said very quietly, "is not enough for what you did," and Clark didn't recognize it for the quotation it was until the words were all out, belated, his throat closing, heat creeping into his ears.

He hadn't—he hadn't sounded like that when he'd said it. Surely he hadn't sounded like that; that banked intensity, that tentative wonder, that was all Bruce.

And anyway, that was beside the point.

"You think the only reason I came down here," Clark spelled out slowly, "to see whether you were okay, after you got thrown into a wall and then it fell on you, is because I still think I owe you something for resurrecting me."

Bruce turned back toward the worktable, the armor spread out on it. "You've been very conscientious," he said evenly. "I hadn't expected any less. You've reached out, you've interacted, you've engaged. You decided you had to set the right tone; you wanted to move forward, and you wanted the rest of the League to know that you were comfortable doing so, and to be comfortable doing so in their turn. I appreciate that. Dividing the team right after it had formed with a fault line as serious as whether I deserved—"

"No," Clark said, because he'd intended to be patient, to hear Bruce out, but that was—no. "I mean, yes, I wanted all those things, I still do, but that isn't why I talk to you. That isn't why I spend time around you. And it definitely isn't why I care whether you broke your shoulder."

Bruce had gone still, not even pretending to work on the armor anymore but just standing there: facing away, giving Clark a quarter-profile at best, the hard stubbled angle of his jaw, the flat of his cheek, the barest suggestion of his eyes downturned.

"I just wanted to," Clark told him quietly. "At first—I guess you might be right about that." He stopped and swallowed, let his eyes fall shut, because he had to get this right, had to make Bruce understand that even if he had half a point, it hadn't been the way he'd said it was. "When I first came back, I didn't know where I was. I thought we were still fighting, I was—I didn't remember what had really killed me."

You won't let me live; you won't let me die—as if Bruce had never relented, hadn't reached down and taken his hand and pulled him up. Hadn't saved Mom, just because Clark had asked him to.

It had been the last thing Clark had been expecting, at the time. He'd spent so long busy being furious at the Bat, furious to discover it had been Bruce Wayne all along, and he'd had so little time to wonder at Bruce's change of heart, to absorb it, before a brand-new problem had reared its massive ugly head outside. In the park, it had all been mixed up in his head, a muddle, everything out of order. He'd been talking to the Batman he remembered the most clearly—that just hadn't been the man who'd been in front of him at the time.

"I didn't remember Doomsday. I didn't remember Diana. I didn't remember you, not—" Clark shook his head. "Not the part that mattered."

Bruce moved. Clark still had his eyes closed, but he heard it, and he opened them again, startled, to find that Bruce had twisted to stare at him, eyes sharp.

"The part where I tried to murder you," Bruce enunciated very precisely, "wasn't the part that mattered?"

"Not compared to the part where you stopped," Clark said.

It was pretty simple, really. But from the look on Bruce's face, Clark had just tried to explain quantum physics to him in Kryptonian.

"Look, you brought me back because you needed me. But it was also because you trusted me. You trusted me to help you save the world." Clark lifted his shoulders helplessly, held them in half a shrug and then let them drop. "Would you have, if you couldn't remember what I'd done? If you couldn't remember that I'd been willing to help you the first time around, that I—that if I had to, I'd—"

He couldn't say it. He wanted to be calm, reasoned, clear, but he couldn't do it; his throat had closed.

Bruce's face changed. He moved, turned the rest of the way around and came half a step away from the worktable and gripped Clark's shoulder, so high up it was almost the side of Clark's throat instead. "Clark," he said, low.

"Sometimes two minutes is the part that matters," Clark heard himself say. "Sometimes two seconds is."

Two seconds. Enough to say one word, one name, without even knowing what it would mean or what it would do.

Bruce didn't argue. He didn't let go, either.

Clark reached up and closed a hand around Bruce's forearm, and there was something calming about it, about the texture of the undersuit against his fingertips. Proof that it really wasn't that same Bruce anymore, that looming white-eyed Batman who'd locked himself down inside plates of metal to keep Clark from touching him. Bruce had let him in: under the Batsuit, inside the Cave. In here, Bruce's own workroom at the Hall, and not even when there was a mission or a problem. Just because Clark, in plaid and jeans, had decided to come in and check on him, and Bruce had allowed it.

Even if Bruce had apparently been allowing it because he thought it was part of some kind of strategic plan of Clark's to avoid disrupting the League's team dynamics. That still pretty much counted, with Bruce.

"I just needed to remember," Clark said quietly. "I wanted to help you. You don't even understand how much I wanted to help you, Bruce. That day—it was terrible, dying, but you and Diana—" He stopped, and shook his head. "I'd never had anything like that. Anyone else like me. That was what I always wanted, all along. Something I could be a part of, somewhere I belonged. And you gave it to me then, even if you weren't trying to."

"For a quarter of an hour," Bruce murmured, "before you were skewered."

"It doesn't matter," Clark tells him. "I had it. I had it and then it was gone, and then you gave it back to me. I meant it when I said 'thank you' wasn't enough, but that isn't why I'm here. That isn't why I've been doing any of this. I talk to you because I want to—I like to. I worry about you because I don't want you to get hurt."

It was a simple statement of fact, the most obvious possible set of reasons there could be. But it didn't sound that way, coming out of Clark's mouth with Bruce's hand on him, Bruce's eyes on him; it didn't feel that way, to say it. It felt like too much, a little raw, and Clark's face went hot.

That tended to happen to him with Bruce. There was always something difficult about—about naming your feelings, in front of Bruce. He kept his own held so close to his chest that it inevitably seemed excessive, embarrassing, to have any of yours so obviously, and in his direction.

And of course it didn't help that Clark wanted to, liked to, worried, possibly a little too much.

He'd been grimly assuming that Bruce might already have noticed, before today. Right now, it didn't sound like he had, not if he thought Clark had been approaching him tactically the whole time—but maybe all that meant was that he was about to figure it out right this moment, watching Clark go involuntarily pink, that detective's brain of his putting the pieces inexorably together.

Hating him had been easy. Hating him had taken up so much space in Clark that—god, that even knowing Ma was in trouble hadn't stopped him from giving in to it, punching Bruce through walls until he couldn't anymore. Hating him had meant Clark didn't even have to question it: the way he wanted to get in Bruce Wayne's face, push him and press him and argue with him; the way he wanted to hurl Batman into walls or onto the ground, pin him there and feel him strain and not let go—well. That had all been about beating him, taking him down, when Clark had hated him.

It wasn't as easy to explain the way those things had transmuted, with hatred out of the equation. The way he wanted to get in Bruce's space, to stay there, to pry his way as close as he could until Bruce opened up for him; the way he kept catching himself thinking about Bruce's body, the space it took up, the way it would feel under his hands.

But apparently Bruce hadn't noticed. If he'd accused Clark of that, instead of strategic insincerity, Clark didn't know what he would've said.

And if Bruce had gotten the picture now, he didn't show it. He was just looking at Clark, hand steady and strong where it was still closed over Clark's shoulder. Something had softened around his eyes, at the corners of his mouth, that made Clark's heart clench for an instant.

"You shouldn't," he said.

Shouldn't what? Clark almost let the question out, except it didn't actually matter. No matter what Bruce meant by that, the response he gave wasn't going to change.

"Well, I do," Clark said instead.

Bruce's gaze turned briefly searching. Clark couldn't begin to guess what he was looking for, whether to hope he found it or not—and then his hand tightened, loosened again, on Clark's shoulder, and a moment later it slid away. "If you insist," he said, bland, "then make yourself useful," and the easy clap of his palm against Clark's back before he let go entirely, the tilt of his head in invitation, should have felt like a concession, victory. Clark didn't know why it felt like Bruce had slipped away from him instead.

But as long as he wasn't going to make Clark leave, that was something.

And it wasn't hard to guess what he wanted: the armor laid out on the worktable was obviously part of the suit he'd been wearing when he'd hit that wall and it had fallen on him. A lot of the Batsuit was mesh or different kinds of polymer weaves, even some sort of non-Newtonian fluid Bruce had probably invented himself. But there were also parts of it that were metal, dark and gleaming, and the half-dozen pieces in front of Bruce were twisted, crumpled, or both to varying degrees.

"The impact stress analysis scanner is the most effective on a flat surface," Bruce said, and then huffed out an absent breath as Clark picked up the first piece. "Oversight."

"Apparently," Clark agreed. He pressed his thumb into the deepest buckled curve, and pushed it gradually smooth again—it shouldn't have been so easy to tell what was damage, given that he had absolutely no idea where these pieces fit onto Bruce's body or how they attached to the Batsuit. But there was a certain vicious, utilitarian grace to everything Bruce built, and Clark felt sure he could see how the line of the armor was supposed to look, even when he only had three inches of it between his fingers.

He paused, thoughtful, and then moved his hands, caught the edges of the piece between two fingers and kept going.

"Clark," Bruce said mildly.

Clark held it out and widened his eyes, aw-shucks innocent. "Now it's even flatter," he said, and then stopped. "Unless that's actually going to mess up your readings—"

"No," Bruce admitted, and reached for it; his eyes flickered up as he took it, found Clark's, and there it was again, that fractional warmth. Almost nothing, and yet it counted for enough, when it was Bruce's face you were looking at, that Clark wanted to smile like it was a proportional response.

Which, in a sense, he was pretty sure it was. Clark had seen Bruce Wayne's smile dozens of times, had even seen Bruce Wayne laugh—but another one of those things he'd learned about Bruce was that his smiles counted for more the smaller they were. If they were noticeable, they were meant to be noticed: they were a performance. Which wasn't bad in and of itself, because sometimes the reason Bruce was putting on a show was to let you know everything was fine and he wasn't holding a grudge. That was what he'd been doing that day at the farmhouse—making gentle jokes, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Clark in a suit that had been gray instead of black. Softening himself, coming as close to harmless as he knew how.

Clark had liked it. He hadn't liked it less once he'd understood it for what it had been, because it had still been Bruce making an effort, reaching out. It had just made him want to dig deeper, that was all. It had just made him want to figure out how to make it clear to Bruce that Clark didn't need him soft or harmless, didn't need him to present himself as anything other than what he was.

Work in progress, Clark thought, and picked up the next piece of armor.

They were about halfway through the mess on the table, Clark flattening each piece with his hands and Bruce taking them from him to run them through the impact scanner, when Bruce's League comm clicked.

It was on the table. Bruce frowned just a little and picked it up, and he met Clark's eyes as he slid it into his ear in a way that Clark knew was permission to listen in—to save whoever was on the other end the trouble of comming them both.

"Bruce," Diana said, and as she said it Clark closed his eyes and concentrated, brought her into focus, the clear thinning quality of the words coming through the comm transmission and the rich full sound of Diana's actual voice as she spoke. It was easy—she wasn't far away. The other end of the Hall, Clark thought, and let himself relax a little, let not just the sound of Diana but the sounds around Diana filter in.

Oh.

"Is Clark with you?" Diana was saying, in Bruce's ear.

"Lanterns," Clark said to Bruce, and Diana let out a soft amused breath.

"I suppose that answers my question," she said. "Yes—Hal Jordan and another of the Lanterns have come, and they'd like to speak to all of us."

Bruce's mouth flattened, and Clark kept a straight face by the skin of his teeth. Bruce had taken the appearance of the Martian Manhunter in stride, had told the rest of them about it and introduced them all the next time "Swanwick" had made a stop at the Hall.

But after that had come the Lantern ring and Hal Jordan, and then the Lanterns themselves. Bruce hadn't appreciated their timing very much, coming so far after Steppenwolf's defeat, and he appreciated Hal's general approach to tactical situations even less.

"Fine," Bruce said, deliberately level. "We'll be there in a minute."

"Thank you," Diana said, and then the comm clicked off again.

And even if Bruce had been thrilled the Lanterns were here, Clark thought, he wouldn't have enjoyed being interrupted in the middle of something.

Clark touched his shoulder. "Think of it this way: they're probably looking for our help. Which means there's something they need from us that Hal can't pull off."

"Doesn't narrow down the options much," Bruce said flatly, and Clark couldn't help it, he had to laugh; it was like the warmth in Bruce's eyes, the barest motion of his mouth. It was a gift, when Bruce had eased up on himself enough to get a little petty.

"That's right, get it out of your system now," he advised, sage, and Bruce gave him a stern look—but he didn't move out from under Clark's hand, and when they left the workroom, they were shoulder to shoulder.

The first part of the Hall that Bruce had finished renovating had been the main meeting room.

He'd wanted to be able to unveil at least that much to the rest of them, to have something worth showing off—to have something to give them that had substance, that didn't rely on their willingness to imagine he would do a good job.

They'd insisted on helping him with the rest of it, and even Bruce in all his stubbornness hadn't been able to argue with the idea that a lot of super-strong, super-fast people who weren't particularly susceptible to injury would make a good construction crew. Clark had had his hands on every part of the building, by the end of it.

But he still had a certain extra fondness for the meeting room, for the memory of the moment he'd understood what it was Bruce had wanted to give them all. And the glimpse it had given him, still gave him, into what the Justice League meant to Bruce—because back then, if he'd had to guess, he'd have said Bruce just didn't have it in him to build anything that wasn't black as shadow, hard-edged and furious and deliberately difficult to see coming. But Bruce had thought of the League, planned for the League, and this was what he'd made: a bright, open space, clean and sunlit and comfortable; a table of Arthurian roundness that prioritized no one, that didn't give any of them so much as a hint of ultimate authority.

Diana, Arthur, Victor, and Barry were already sitting down. Diana wasn't in uniform, but rather in something deep red and effortlessly stylish; she must have just arrived at the Hall when the Lanterns had arrived. Victor had a hoodie and jeans over the gleaming alien metal of his body, and Barry was in civvies, too. Arthur was shirtless, because that was what he always did whenever someone new showed up at the Hall for the first time, like he wanted to see whether they were going to have something to say about it.

So Clark knew the Lantern standing next to Hal was going to be unfamiliar even before he actually looked. They were taller than Hal, narrow, with six limbs and four eyes, and yet there was nothing else insectoid about them; Clark thought for an instant that their skin was variegated, and then realized they had scales, deep violet at one edge that shaded to a lighter, bluer color toward the other edge. Their eyes were large, pale by comparison, set in pairs toward either side of their head, and if they had ears, Clark couldn't pick them out of the pattern of scales over the curve of their face and jaw. Although looking for ears was complicated by the way their scales moved; they could, it became apparent, ruffle them up tensely so that the loose edges thrust out at an angle, or smooth them down, or react with a ripple from one position to the other.

They were already speaking quietly to Diana, who looked grave and a little angry, jaw tense—Clark was careful not to listen, but it had to be about the Lanterns, whatever it was they were doing that they couldn't do without the League's help, and it had to be serious.

He took a seat, and Bruce next to him, and god, it was like high school, the way he couldn't help but notice that, the way it felt in his chest; like Lana Lang smiling at him in the cafeteria, and jesus, he needed to get a grip.

"Okay, that's everybody," Hal said, more loudly than he'd been talking with Diana and the other Lantern. "Go for it, Xilly."

The other Lantern blinked, and Clark spotted at least two layers of eyelids when they did. "You do not wish to speak?" And their voice was low, fluting, little catches in it between words; something was translating for them, maybe their ring or maybe some other kind of Lantern gadget, but Clark could guess that whatever language they actually spoke had some clicks or hisses in it.

"Nah, you got this," Hal said easily, and clapped them on the shoulder.

They looked around the room—and they did it at an oblique angle, which was fair enough. Eyes on the sides like that, that was probably how you were polite, how you let people know you were giving them your attention. Facing someone from the front when your vision was lateral had to be rude at best.

"I am Xilatlixax," they said after a moment, "protector of Sector 1046. We ask for your assistance. We are diminished—this you know. Injustice persists. Too few lights hold back the dark. Much was lost. Your world was lost. Word came to us from those who felt the New Gods reaching for you, and we returned, too late. Lanterns must do better. But we cannot do better alone."

Which wasn't an argument that was going to see a lot of pushback at this table, Clark thought.

"We understand," Diana said. "If we can help you, we will."

And Bruce didn't contradict her, didn't so much as tense up. It made something hot and more sweet than bitter clench its way through Clark's chest—proof that these days, Bruce was willing to extend aliens the benefit of the doubt.

"Our gratitude," Xilatlixax said quietly. "The Green Lanterns should be many thousands, but now it is not so. All the universe was once known to us, but now it is not so. Where there have been no Lanterns for many cycles of the stars, there is sometimes another law—and there is sometimes nothing. Even where there is nothing, our name is known; but we are not rightful keepers of peace."

"And you want us to go into one of those places for you," Bruce filled in.

Xilatlixax blinked at him, acknowledging, and then drew something from the belt at the waist of their uniform, and set it gently onto the edge of the table. A projector, Clark understood, because a moment later they touched it and light burst upward from it, stars abruptly suspended in the air over the table.

"Sector 3252," Hal tossed in. "Nasty place, if you ask me. Not that you did."

"When Lanterns were justice," Xilatlixax said, "when there was light in the dark, there were rules. Lanterns kept them, unbroken, and it was known that they were right and true. But now it is not so."

"It's outside your jurisdiction, and there isn't a single recognized set of universal laws you're currently allowed to uphold," Victor paraphrased. "And Sector 3252's got a lot of what you'd consider crime going on, even if it's legal there. What kind?"

"Slavery," Hal said.

Everyone went still at once.

"Slavery?" Barry repeated. "Like actual—for real? And you can't do anything about it?"

"We are diminished," Xilatlixax said again, and before it had been a fact; now Clark heard trapped frustration.

"And you don't have the numbers," Arthur said, flat and cool, cynical. "Guessing this isn't the only sector that figured out they could sell people while you guys weren't looking."

"Yeah, not so much," Hal agreed, but for once he wasn't smiling. "Sector 3252's at the center of the biggest region with an active slave trade, but there's dozens. Probably hundreds." He stopped, biting down on a breath, shaking his head a little. "The Lanterns are still busy trying to make contact with every sector. There just aren't enough of us to deal with literally every independent criminal operation in the universe—not yet, anyway."

"But you think we can do something about this one," Bruce said evenly.

Hal met Bruce's eyes. He and Bruce usually picked at each other, usually got snide or dismissive to each other, because they came at everything from opposite directions and neither of them was particularly good at backing down. But this time, he looked at Bruce, as calm and as serious as Clark had ever seen him, and he said, "Yeah. You can."

"Lanterns must do better," Xilatlixax said, firm. "Not alone." They touched the projector; the view changed, zooming in, one star large and fat and dim right in the middle. "Sector 3252 will host many who trade in slaves. They come to talk, to make deals. To decide who sells where, who sells what, who buys and who does not buy."

"Man, how shitty do you have to be to get blacklisted by literal slave traders?" Barry said under his breath, looking somewhere between morbidly awed and vaguely nauseated.

"We know when. We know where. But they also know us."

"You need someone who's not a Lantern to go in undercover," Bruce said. "For what?"

"Evidence," Hal said.

"But—what? You already know that they—"

"Evidence of something else," Clark said to Barry, before he could really get rolling, because the picture felt like it was starting to come into focus. "Evidence of something we do have the right to take them down for."

"Kind of an Al Capone for tax evasion thing," Arthur assessed. "Yeah, okay."

"There is one who buys, who sells," Xilatlixax said. "Most important, most sectors. He goes—" Their tone changed, abruptly vicious with satisfaction. "—and the rest will see, and understand that Lanterns are not far away, are not only a name to be known."

They touched the projector again, and the image changed—this time it wasn't space at all, but a head, a face. Presumably the person Xilatlixax was talking about, the slave trader the Lanterns wanted to make an example out of. An alien, obviously, and nothing like Xilatlixax: this one had fur, Clark understood after staring at the image for a second. Fur, a catlike head, sharp intent eyes that faced forward. A predator, built more along the lines of humans than Xilatlixax.

"Marra Dirramao. Many slaves, many buyers. This we cannot stop. But there are rules even in Sector 3252." Xilatlixax made a soft bitter sound. "Trade in people, yes. Trade in worldeater, no."

"Worldeater," Diana repeated, leading.

"Most of the intergalactic laws about that one stuck," Hal said. "Which, to be fair, it's horrifying shit. Not more horrifying than selling people, like, philosophically. But it's kind of on a different scale. It's—a bioweapon, I guess. It was all the rage a few hundred thousand years ago; all you had to do was drop it on a populated planet and wait about five minutes, and the place was yours. Just chews its way straight through everything alive. It's like space gangrene on fast-forward."

"Man, space sucks," Barry said, sounding betrayed. "I really didn't expect that."

"And you believe this Marra Dirramao is trading in worldeater on the side," Bruce said.

"Yes. We do not know where he will be, he is hard to find—but that will not be so, when he comes to this place." The projector view changed again, back to that fat dim star. "We know when, we know where. But Lanterns cannot go there. We are known; we do not buy, we do not sell. They will know us, and keep us out."

Bruce raised an eyebrow. "All of you?"

"Yeah, yeah, we've got no subtlety, we know what you think, guy who dresses up like a bat," Hal said, rolling his eyes, with most of his usual good humor restored. "Yes, the Lanterns' identities are public, and yes, that means all of them. Look, this peace and justice throughout the universe thing tends to work better when you're on the up-and-up about it. Just not in this one particular case, as it happens. Come on, tell me I'm wrong, make a list of everything we didn't think of. I know you're just itching to, Goth-Man."

Bruce gave him a flat look, but it was without heat. "Not everyone needs to wear a mask," he said quietly, and—he didn't necessarily mean Clark, it wasn't like Diana or Arthur bothered to cover up their faces, but Clark felt himself flush a little anyway. "And I assume they'll have measures in place at this meeting to prevent a disguise, even one formed by a Green Lantern's ring, from working."

"Bioscans," Xilatlixax agreed. "Deep. Interference is possible, but that does not help us get in, only makes new problem."

They hesitated. And then they turned their head a little, their paired left eyes sweeping the table and the League.

"You will get in," they said. And when they said it, they were looking at Clark.

Clark blinked. "I—probably could, sure," he said cautiously. "But it could be any of us, couldn't it?"

"No," Bruce said.

Clark turned in his chair to look at him.

Bruce was already looking back. Clark recognized the expression on his face, that unreadable steadiness, and the sharp, intent cast of his eyes was familiar, too. That was Bruce ten steps ahead, Bruce when everything had long since snapped into place for him.

"The best lies are almost true. You know that as well as I do. The Lanterns learned about you because there are already rumors out there—that Earth's still here after all, that the New Gods rediscovered it and a Kryptonian stopped them from taking it for themselves. With help from the Lanterns, we could probably invent some other planet, pick an obscure region of space and pretend that Diana or Arthur had come from it, memorize made-up names and locations and history. But why bother?

"We already have the perfect cover. Krypton ruled an empire that spanned solar systems, galaxies. That's a fact no one can contradict. Their reach extended far enough that one of their colony ships landed on Earth. That's a fact, too. Steppenwolf and Darkseid clearly didn't believe there was still a Kryptonian presence here, but they were wrong; that a hidden colony of Kryptonians has been tucked away on Earth all this time, having lost touch with the wider galaxy and settled for the world they had in front of them, isn't much of a leap from there."

Clark swallowed. "So I'd be," he said, and then stopped. His throat was tight. "I'd be going to this thing because I was—because I'm interested in—"

"Because," Bruce said evenly, "your people rule a planet with a yellow sun effortlessly unopposed by seven and a half billion slaves. And now that you've been reminded the rest of the universe exists, you might as well see what it will give you in exchange for some of them." He glanced across the table, around it. "Perhaps the Amazons and Atlanteans surrendered to you, too. Word must have gotten out about them after the original war, during the First Age. The New Gods of Apokolips obviously didn't forget about that, and somebody else out there must have noticed, if they were invading worlds without a hitch until they got to us. So it won't be strange if you've got some bodyguards with you who aren't human-baseline."

Diana inclined her head. "I'll gladly go," she said. "I have tested it little, but my power to speak and comprehend languages may not be limited to the languages of Earth."

"You might be able to overhear something," Bruce agreed, nodding. "If you have a translation device and are seen to remove it, perhaps someone will feel safe saying something they shouldn't around you."

"Well, I mean, it sounds fun and stuff," Barry said, "but, uh. I'm maybe not the most intimidating dude on this team? Like, I bring a lot to the table, I don't need a pep talk or anything, but silent glowering isn't really my thing." He cleared his throat. "Besides, somebody's got to stay and hold down the fort here, right? And let's be real, I could probably use the practice heroing."

"Yeah, I'm sticking with the dweeb," Arthur said easily, leaning back in his chair. "Silent glowering, I can do, but I don't have the patience to stand there and not punch people in the face while you guys play CSI: Alpha Centauri." He reached out, held a closed fist toward Barry. "We got this."

"Wow, holy shit, I don't think you've ever offered me a fistbump before!"

Arthur gave him a flat look.

"Sorry, sorry, right," Barry said, and then met Arthur's knuckles with his own so fast a little blue-white flicker leapt from them and curled its way up Arthur's wrist for an instant. "You realize I'm not going to let this go? I'm the kind of guy who's going to ask for a celebratory repeat on our six-month fistbump-iversary—"

"I'll go," Victor said over him, voice raised pointedly but not unkindly. "Wherever this thing is being held, there might be something in a technological system that'll help us, and if there is, I can get to it. Or shut down their security, if we need to get out in a hurry."

"And the fact that your body was built by a mother box," Bruce said, "supports our cover. That Darkseid's forces came to attack Earth with the boxes, in the first war, and then left without them—somebody must have managed to put that together. Earth has had them for a long, long time, and if anyone could have taken control of the boxes in their original master's absence, it would be a Kryptonian. A Kryptonian who chose to—alter you, to make you a more powerful warrior."

"But not you?" Clark said.

Bruce looked at him, eyebrows high.

"Don't try to tell me you aren't coming on this mission, because I won't believe you."

"No," Bruce allowed, "you're right. You're right in both respects; there's no clear rationale for you to choose me as a bodyguard, when you have Amazons and Atlanteans in your service, nor when you ostensibly remade Victor to better suit your needs but haven't done the same to me."

And there was a warning there, right then. Split-second, in the way his expression smoothed itself out, the way his gaze flickered away from Clark and then deliberately back. Clark caught it, but he didn't understand what it meant, couldn't guess.

And then Bruce said, "Therefore, I must be accompanying you for another reason," and Clark's gut lurched.

"Like," Clark said, and then stopped. He couldn't figure out how to say it, what words to use. "Like—"

Bruce glanced up the width of the table. "Xilatlixax—would it be expected that someone attending a summit like this would bring a sample of their merchandise to show off? Or a favorite slave they prefer to keep on hand?"

"Either," Xilatlixax admitted. "Both. Some go hoping to see what will be new in market, what—" They paused, and their mouth went flat, their scales briefly spiking. "What stock will be on offer," they said at last. "To find out what competition will look like, and to intimidate. Or to make deal, wanting something that is shown off."

"And you," Bruce said to Clark. His tone was calm, even. Like somehow this wasn't the weirdest pair of sentences he'd ever had to string together in his life. "You've rediscovered how much is out there, and decided to try your hand at re-establishing a Kryptonian presence in intergalactic business and politics. Why wouldn't you have brought a human with you, to see how your potential product measured up against the existing market?"

"And you think that should be you," Clark managed distantly.

"It would make sense," Bruce said, relentless, unmerciful. "Two birds with one stone—it makes it clear you've got a reason to be there, that you already keep slaves of your own and might choose to expand if you have a reason to do it. And we don't know how this is going to go, how this place will be set up. If there are any locations where bodyguards won't be permitted to accompany you, but a personal slave isn't an issue, you won't be going in without backup."

Of course. Clark almost laughed; it was so typically Bruce, to be given two minutes to think and come up with half a dozen reasons, both strategic and tactical.

It was for a mission. Bruce was volunteering because it was a mission, and because he was literally the only member of the League who was biologically human-normal, even if in every other respect he was anything but.

And it was a good thing. Wasn't it? If Bruce was willing to trust Clark to do this, to play a role like this—if he was willing to put himself in a position where Clark had power over him, even if it was only temporary, only whatever was called for by their cover story—that counted for something. The entire reason Bruce had tried to kill him was because Bruce hadn't trusted him not to use his literal superpowers to do anything other than cause harm; he'd changed his mind, bringing Clark back the way he had, but there was a heck of a gap between letting Clark help him save the world from Steppenwolf and letting Clark—letting Clark—

It was no good trying to be objective about it, trying to be calm and reasonable. The thought of Bruce as—god, he didn't even know what to try to imagine. Maybe in Sector 3252, personal slaves you refused to go anywhere without wore three-piece suits buttoned up to the neck. But even if that turned out to be true, it wasn't going to save him. Because picturing Bruce dressed up a dozen different ways wasn't the point. It was the idea of it that was a punch in the gut: of Bruce belonging to Clark.

Which was stupid. It was a cover. It didn't actually mean anything. Not fifteen minutes ago, they'd been downstairs discovering all the ways in which Bruce was anything but. Bruce had been trying to tell Clark to leave him alone, that Clark didn't need to make such an effort to talk to him or spend time with him—because he'd thought Clark had been faking it, but still.

It was for a mission. Clark just needed to remember that.

He swallowed. He'd looked away, reflexive, dimly hoping nothing he was thinking was going to cross his face where Bruce could see it; he looked up again just as Bruce's hand settled on his shoulder.

"Clark," Bruce said, quiet.

His gaze was intent, searching, flicking back and forth across Clark's face. There was a line beginning to form between his eyebrows.

"You're right," Clark said. "It does make sense." He cleared his throat, and managed to offer Bruce half a smile. "So—you, me, Diana, and Victor, with Arthur and Barry holding down the fort?"

"I'll stick around, too," Hal said brightly. "Since you kids are doing us a favor, and all. Don't tell me you're going to turn down a little free backup."

"Hardly free," Bruce observed, flat. "And in that case, let's get this over with as soon as possible."

It was a joke, or at least half of one, delivered the only way Bruce was ever going to deliver one when Hal was in the room. But Clark hoped that they did—because if this took more than about a week, he didn't know how he was going to survive it.

Bruce and Victor both had a few more basic questions for Xilatlixax. Hal made a joke, and laughed. Xilatlixax promised them a more comprehensive explanation of what they could expect, what they would be looking for, now that they'd agreed—a case file, or at least the Green Lantern equivalent. They hadn't traveled to Earth using the power of their ring alone; they had a vessel in orbit, with databanks full of all the eyewitness accounts, forensic and statistical workups, and identity profiles that even Bruce could ask for.

Clark nodded his way through all of it, and tried not to look at Bruce too much.

And then, at last, everything was settled for the moment. Xilatlixax needed to arrange the data transfer; once that was done and the League had had a chance to look through everything, then they'd worry about the details.

There were a lot of details to worry about, admittedly. There had to be records out there, aliens who'd interacted with Kryptonians before—maybe even within living memory, depending on the species. It was entirely possible that they'd run into someone who quite literally knew more about Krypton than Clark did. There were all kinds of ways this could go wrong.

But he wasn't going to be alone. Victor would be able to absorb the Lanterns' entire database in seconds, the parts that had to do with this mission and the parts that didn't; he'd be ready for anything the Lanterns had ever encountered, which would add up to a hell of a lot. Diana had come to fight at Clark's shoulder against Doomsday without even really knowing who he was—as if he had any reason to doubt he could count on her now. And Bruce—

Well. Bruce had made it clear he wasn't planning to let Clark go anywhere without him. Which was a comfort, a spark of mindless heat, and a knot of apprehension tied self-consciously in the middle of Clark's chest, all at the same time.

So it was fine. It was going to be fine.

The meeting broke up. Clark went to shake Hal's hand and thank him for offering to help Barry and Arthur while they were gone, since he knew Bruce wasn't going to do it. Xilatlixax was already deep in conversation with Bruce and Victor—probably about the Lanterns' data, the format it was going to take, how best to deliver it. Clark ducked past them, avoided Diana's eyes and maneuvered around Arthur with a clap on the back, and then left.

There was one thing he could do even before they had the Lanterns' files. He could go to the ship.

The cover story Bruce had come up with gave him some leeway; no one would know what to expect from a Kryptonian who'd been settled in luxury on Earth for a few thousand years. But the scout ship could tell him a lot. It could probably even give him some clothes, something that looked a little more elegantly excessive than the suit. It could tell him how Kryptonians had lived, how they'd acted, how they'd spoken. The kinds of things their bodyguards might have worn, if they had any. The kinds of things their slaves might have worn.

For all he knew, they'd had some. An empire that spanned systems, galaxies—a society based on guilds and castes and genetic engineering, on designing people to fill roles. The thought put a cold weight in his gut, but it had to be possible. Probable, even. He just had to hope that it had been millennia ago. That they'd figured out it was wrong, even if it had taken them a while.

The ship wasn't enclosed in a temporary research facility anymore. The DOD hadn't seized it, either, which if Clark had to guess was down to Bruce Wayne pulling some pretty serious strings, more than it had anything to do with Clark. A lot of people had been glad to see Superman again. But that didn't mean no one remembered Metropolis, or the Capitol, the hearing that had never happened and the formal investigation that had never been completed. Clark still wasn't in a position where he felt like he could count on asking for anything—on being extended anyone's official goodwill.

But the ship had been turned over to him, and he'd been given permission from the mayor's office in Metropolis to keep it in Heroes Park.

He flew. It was a nice day, and as long as he went high enough, and then fast enough, he knew no one would be able to see him clearly.

If only he could guarantee himself the same thing when he was face-to-face with Bruce.

The ship was just about done fixing itself up. It hadn't needed as much help from him as he'd thought it might, and the hull was almost whole—even the area over the genesis chamber, where Doomsday had blasted through it.

Doomsday, and then Clark, and wasn't that a reassuring parallel. He knew now that Victor hadn't fired on him deliberately. But he also couldn't have blamed Bruce for assuming the worst, for making sure the rest of them were there and ready just in case something had gone wrong. Just in case the combination of Kryptonian DNA and the genesis pool had yielded monstrous results all over again.

He sped up, touched the side of the ship with his fingertips and then went all the way around it once, and by the time he'd done a lap, the hull was opening up for him, gleaming fragments melting out of his way.

He didn't need the genesis chamber right now. He needed the data room, that big round chamber where what had been left of his father had answered all his questions.

"Commander," the ship said—level, but Clark thought he detected a note of quiet satisfaction in the word. It had taken a few months before he'd agreed to assume command of it, before he'd felt like he could be relied upon to be in charge of anything other than himself.

(He'd wanted to be part of the League for a lot of good reasons. Because it was worthwhile, because it was important. Because it was such a relief to feel like he wasn't Earth's only line of defense, whether the problem was Lex Luthor's delusions of grandeur or warlords from space.

But he could admit, silently, deep inside himself, that it had also been because it was Bruce's. Bruce's, and Diana's. Because the rest of the League might like him or admire him, might appreciate having a heavy hitter in his weight class, but at the end of the day, the final responsibility wasn't his. He was there to do whatever he could, whatever they needed him to do, and after every decision he'd made on his own had always turned out wrong—with Dad, and Zod, and Bruce, and Doomsday—that was a blessing he'd cling to for all he was worth.)

"Ship," he said, and touched down in the center of the data room, his own ordinary broken-in boots settling against alien metal thousands of years old. That was never going to stop getting to him. "Hi. Can you tell me about—" Well. No reason not to be thorough. "Can you tell me about the history of Krypton? Not the part that was in my father's program. The empire as it was when you were sent here."

"Archives include that information," the ship agreed. "Potential presentation schema include: chronological, thematic, by primary source account, by astrometric region, by—"

Jesus. "Are you able to assess which will be the most efficient?" Clark said quickly.

The ship was briefly quiet. And then the deck in front of Clark moved, shifting, susurrating, and drifted upward to form a globe. A planet, Clark understood. A planet with a subtly contoured surface, the outlines of unfamiliar continents and seas. Krypton.

"Homeworld," the ship said, almost softly. Clark felt a strange sharp pang, not for himself but for the ship—to have been sent away so long ago and never retrieved, to have a place it actually remembered coming from and knew it could never return to. Had it ever had the chance to send its evaluation of Earth's suitability for colonization? It must have; that must have been how Jor-El had known that sending Clark here would be safe. Had anyone ever answered it?

The globe changed. Shrank, slowly at first and then faster and faster, until it was nothing but a gleaming silver-bronze point, and around it the rest of the metal burst apart in the air, fragments coalescing into clusters, systems. One galaxy, another, another—half a dozen, ten, fifteen, on and on. The pace decreased at last, and then, right at the edge of the display, a second point flickered.

"Earth," the ship said.

And the display filled with a faint glow, forming an irregular shape that spread out along every dimension. It was centered around the tiny dot of Krypton and extended almost—almost—all the way to Earth.

"Imperial Kryptonian space, at its greatest territorial extent."

"So you're saying you've got a lot to tell me," Clark murmured, staring at the breadth of it.

"There is a limit to the degree of efficiency that may effectively be imposed," the ship said, almost apologetic.

"Okay, well. Let's start with this part right here." Clark reached out and moved his fingers in a circle around the lit-up area closest to Earth. "When was this—uh, astrometric region, I guess—colonized?"

The ship reeled off numbers. It took five minutes for Clark to get a date he could actually place in context out of it, which didn't seem like it boded well; but, as if to make up for the confusion, the ship obediently built him models of everything he could have asked for. The people, the way they'd worn their hair, their clothing. The cities, the skylines, the clean smooth shapes of the personal transport vehicles they'd used.

It was talking him through the basic sequence of events—which planets had been colonized in which order, which guilds and houses had been responsible for the push in Earth's direction. The House of El wasn't among them, but the house that had split and created the House of El was, and Clark figured that wasn't too much to fudge.

And then, abruptly, the ship fell silent.

"Ship?"

"A request has been made for admission," the ship said, and the models all sank back into the floor, only to be replaced almost instantly by an unnervingly perfect, life-sized sculpt of—Bruce.

Bruce, moving, breathing. With one hand held out, flattened against something; because he was outside, Clark understood, with a palm to the hull of the ship.

"Clark," Bruce said, the ship transmitting his voice so clearly Clark only just caught the doubled echo, the real sound and the false one hardly separable.

Because—he was already listening, already seeking Bruce reflexively the moment he was given an opportunity.

He was an idiot. But there wasn't any point in trying to avoid Bruce now. Clark shut his eyes, resigned. "Let him in."

He listened to Bruce's footsteps: walking normally, not that Clark had expected him to somehow get himself injured between the Hall and the park. Still wearing the uniform boots, Clark decided, letting himself sink into the sound to be sure.

Almost here. He did his best to put an unremarkable look on his face, and opened his eyes again—and then realized the statue-image the ship had made of Bruce was still standing there. Moving along with Bruce, a live render; striding in place, each step directed toward Clark without closing any actual distance.

"Put that away," Clark bit out under his breath, too hasty to be polite about it. Jesus, the last thing he needed right now was to look like he'd rushed over here just to make himself sculptures of Bruce he could stare at.

It was only half gone, but thankfully unidentifiable as anything other than a mass of the ship's little tessellated pieces, by the time Bruce actually stepped into the data room.

He'd changed clothes, was Clark's first, inane thought. But of course he had; Clark should've noticed the difference in the ship's reconstruction of him, even if it had been all one color. He wouldn't have come out to the park in the undersuit, and he wouldn't have suited up, either. It wasn't dark enough for that. The boots had stayed, because they weren't conspicuous in and of themselves.

But being able to explain it to himself logically didn't help very much. He'd thought it himself back when he'd been looking at Bruce in the undersuit: he liked it when Bruce dressed down around him, when he got to see Bruce in something less than either Batman's or Bruce Wayne's uniforms.

Because Bruce Wayne had one, and Bruce wasn't wearing that, either. No suit, no tie. Not even a dress shirt, which would have been bad enough. A henley, of all the wildly unfair choices he could've made, looking like it had been yanked on in a hurry over what had probably been the closest pair of jeans to the meeting room.

And Clark had enough problems without Bruce tracking him down looking—touchable.

"Clark," Bruce said, in a level, cautious tone of voice that said he wasn't sure what kind of welcome to expect.

Clark blinked at him. "Something wrong?"

"You tell me," Bruce said, and took a step closer. "You seemed—a little uncomfortable." He paused. "I realize it's been less than ninety minutes since you told me you didn't mind spending time with me. But I also realize that's nowhere near the same thing as having your participation in a joint undercover mission treated as a given." He stopped again; his jaw worked, and then his chin came up, almost defiant. "It's understandable. I'm not saying it isn't. But if there's any way I can convince you that you won't regret relying on me—"

"What?" Clark said blankly. "No. No, you don't need to do that. You don't need to do anything. I trust you. Even if I didn't, I know you'd never let anything compromise a mission if you could possibly help it." He felt his mouth trying to tug itself into a smile at the thought, and he let it. Even this—Bruce having followed him here to talk to him about his feelings, which had to be the last thing Bruce wanted to do—was proof that he was right.

Bruce didn't smile back. He didn't even look like he was thinking about trying. Something else passed across his face, something that was soft and strainingly intense at the same time, and he swallowed, throat working, and then said very quietly, "I won't fail you again."

Which Clark didn't understand at all, but he didn't need to. He crossed the data room, closed the rest of the distance between them that Bruce had left open after that first step, and caught Bruce by the shoulders. "I know. That's the last thing I'm worried about."

He caught his own misstep a split second after Bruce already had—the tacit admission that there was something he was worried about, and it just wasn't that. Bruce's eyes narrowed. "I know you haven't undertaken many undercover missions as Superman," he said slowly.

"Aside from the part where I'm functionally undercover every second I'm out there pretending Clark Kent can't move at the speed of sound or lift cars with one hand," Clark agreed. "Bruce, I was lying to people about who I was and what I could do for years before I ever put on the suit."

"All right," Bruce allowed. And then he reached up and closed a hand around Clark's elbow, because Clark—still had a grip on Bruce's shoulders. Clark probably should have let go of Bruce's shoulders. "Then what is it?"

The idea of you letting me own you is clawing its way so deep inside my head I'm never going to be able to get it out again, Clark definitely couldn't say.

But that wasn't the reason he was here, now, in the ship. And that reason was absolutely something he could tell Bruce.

"I know it makes sense for me to do this," he said. "I'm the alien—literally, biologically. But I grew up on Earth, and I had no idea what I was or where I had come from. When I finally found out—"

"Zod," Bruce said, almost gently.

"Zod," Clark agreed, and then he had to clear his throat, because it was trying to close for no good reason. "Zod, and then I threw the rest of them into the Phantom Zone. I've got the ship, I—I'll study. I'll find out everything I can. But I don't know what it means to really be Kryptonian, and I never will. I'll be lying about that as much as I'm lying about any of the rest of it, and nothing can change that."

He hesitated. He didn't want to say the next part, not like this. Not when he was already stumbling over himself, not when he wasn't going to be able to put it together the way he should. But Bruce ought to know that Clark understood this, that he was taking this as seriously as it deserved.

"And I know," Clark managed, and then ground to a halt.

He'd reached for Bruce in the first place as a reassurance to Bruce, a way to help make it clear to him that Clark had no reservations left about him. But now—now it felt like the only support he had, like he couldn't get through this without the solid rock of Bruce's strength under his hands, as if he could take a little of it for himself.

"Clark," Bruce said carefully.

"I know this is what you were afraid of," Clark forced out.

Bruce fell silent.

"This is what you already saw when you looked at me. An alien who was going to rule Earth with an iron fist, who was going to force humanity to serve him. And now you've got to—you've got no choice but to let me—"

"Christ," Bruce said. "No," and then, before Clark could even look bewildered, "You're right; of course you're right. That is what I saw. But I was wrong. Clark—I was wrong. I trust you, too. I'd already decided to, or I'd never have brought you back."

Clark stifled something that wouldn't quite have been a laugh. Because of course that was the closest Bruce could get to outright comfort, pointing out that he'd never have committed a logical fallacy.

"Knew it wasn't because you liked me," he murmured after a moment, when his throat would let him.

But Bruce didn't let him get away with the deflection, didn't back off. If anything, he shifted closer, the better to reach out with his free hand and clasp the nape of Clark's neck. "I like plenty of people," he said evenly. "Trusting them is harder."

Clark hadn't been making himself look Bruce in the eye; he couldn't have done it and said all of that. But now he had to—because he knew how much that meant, coming from Bruce, and he couldn't meet it with anything less.

"You don't like that many people," Clark heard himself say.

"Yeah," Bruce agreed.

And that was impossible to misunderstand. Clark felt the warmth of it, the reassurance of the steady way Bruce was looking at him and the firm weight of Bruce's hand at the back of his neck, and something loosened all across his shoulders, something that had twisted itself up tight the moment he'd understood what he was going to have to do.

"Thanks," he said at last, soft. It wasn't enough, but it was all he had.

And then he made himself let go, took his own hands back and kept them to himself. Bruce let him do it, lingering just long enough himself to clap Clark gently on the shoulder.

"And if the ship has any precedents to cite for me," he added, "let me know."

"Precedents for—"

"For what a Kryptonian would expect of me," Bruce said easily. "Anything I need to do, or say, or call you. What I should be wearing," and Clark only had a second to brace himself before Bruce tacked on, contemplative, "if anything."

God. Clark was in so much trouble.

Chapter Text

Out of all the things they were going to need before they could embark on this mission—information, some kind of halfway appropriate approximation of currency, Kryptonian clothing and cover names—the one that neither the Lanterns nor the scout ship could give them was a vessel appropriate to the individual Clark was going to pretend to be.

The scout ship would've done its best, Clark knew. But for all that it had seemed enormous, wondrous, the first time he'd set foot in it, one of the many things he'd learned from General Zod was exactly how much more impressively terrifying Kryptonian ships got. By those standards, the scout ship was compact, utilitarian. Even a little dowdy.

The Lanterns had ships. But none of those ships were Kryptonian in origin or design. The point of picking Clark for this was that his backstory could fit together neatly into a cover, and one that would hold up for anyone familiar with Kryptonian history. He wasn't going to make a mistake as basic as rolling up to a criminal summit in the intergalactic equivalent of a police car.

They needed a Kryptonian ship, and a big one. The scout ship wouldn't cut it. The Black Zero was gone, and even if it hadn't been, Clark could never have brought himself to use it.

But most of the World Engine was still lying, wrecked, on the floor of the Indian Ocean.

And Zod hadn't brought the World Engine to Earth. It was at least as old as the scout ship, and if Kryptonians had colonized Earth, had colonized Earth and then had been utterly cut off from the rest of the Kryptonian empire—why wouldn't they have kept it? Why wouldn't they have used it? Terraformed Mars, a few of Jupiter's moons, and made themselves comfortable. It was easy to imagine what it might have come to mean, a relic of all that had been lost and at the same time an emblem of power, the ability to reshape worlds.

And—and, maybe, a threat. Because those hypothetical Kryptonians hadn't chosen to wipe Earth clean the way Zod had threatened to, because they'd decided humanity could be of some use to them after all; but if they'd changed their minds, no human technology could have stopped them.

Clark didn't know whether to wish he'd had the chance to see Krypton intact, to understand it in a way the entries in the scout ship's database could never match—or whether to just be glad, grateful, that it was gone.

It turned out Bruce Wayne was able to take advantage of the openings Lex Luthor had left behind; Bruce didn't even wait long enough to be asked. He'd come to the same conclusions Clark had about the ship, and probably twice as fast, and within the week he'd accelerated Wayne Enterprises straight through what had to be a wildly complicated permit process, hired a dozen local contractors on the best possible terms in exchange for the greatest possible care on their part with the retrieval. The retrieval of the pieces left in the shallows, anyway. Arthur and Diana could dive for—and lift—the biggest pieces that had settled to the depths of the sea floor themselves.

And Clark would've worried about exactly how feasible it was to try to put it back together, except he didn't have to. It was Arthur who noticed it happening. Placed close enough to one another, the fragments of the World Engine seemed to recognize each other. Enough of the right ones, with their shattered edges allowed to touch, and they closed the gaps themselves, metallic pieces shifting, self-reassembling.

So that was one problem solved.

It was still going to take some time to make sure they'd found it all. But Clark didn't mind that part. He was grateful for the breathing room.

The Lanterns had done as they'd promised, and had delivered a mountain of data files. Profiles of everyone they expected to show up at this thing, captured images of hundreds of alien faces and names to memorize; a real work-up on the worldeater itself, what it looked like, how traces of it would appear to Victor's scans if he calibrated himself correctly, what it smelled like when exposed uncovered in various kinds of atmosphere and what it sounded like in motion—in case something went wrong, in case it was unleashed, so Clark and Diana would know what was happening and have a fraction of a chance to stop or at least contain it.

And Clark started spending three-quarters of his time in the scout ship, asking it for everything he could think of. Its rundown on the region of Kryptonian space closest to Earth had made a good starting point, but there was so much more he needed to know. Once he'd laid out the cover story the League had come up with for it as a hypothetical, it was actually capable of extrapolating what Kryptonian language and culture might have looked like, starting from its own stored baseline and adding thousands of years of human influence, diverging from any of the other increasingly distant remnants of the Kryptonian empire.

Luckily for him, the results covered a pretty broad range of possibilities, with a degree of uncertainty that the scout ship quantified as something Clark could translate to "pretty darn high". He had some maneuvering room, and nobody was going to be able to call him on screwing up, as long as the basics—clothes, jewelry, name and title—were recognizably Kryptonian in spirit.

And of course he wasn't the only one who had some work to do.

Victor could download the entire database into himself; he had it easy. He helped the rest of them, when he could, because sometimes the scout ship didn't know how to explain itself. Diana and Bruce needed to study up almost as much as Clark did.

They went over it all together. Kryptonian history, the path Earth might have taken in an isolated corner of it. Kryptonians had had slaves, or something a lot like it; Clark hated knowing it almost as much as it was a grim kind of reassurance, being told that they'd had at least that much in common with humans after all. Apparently there were a whole lot of species that had independently invented owning people, given the chance.

Diana helped him develop a bit of an accent. Her powers extended to alien languages after all; she could pronounce anything the ship displayed for her perfectly. That was the hard part, for Clark—he could memorize the syllabary, remember all the words, but holding his mouth, his tongue, in the right shape was a matter of physical practice. And he needed to sound like someone who spoke Kryptonian fluently, who'd learned a human language or two on a whim. He and Diana practiced for hours, reciting Kryptonian poetry to each other, recorded speeches made by the Kryptonian imperial council, the text of instruction manuals, even prayers. Rao's light warms us; Yuda's four moons protect us; Telle's wisdom guides us; Lorra's beauty inspires us—

And Bruce helped him practice the rest of it.

Clark had been telling the truth. He wasn't going to have a problem with the lying, the cover in and of itself. He was used to it. He'd invented another version of himself years ago, the Clark Kent who was nobody in particular, whose dad had died and it had kind of fucked him up and he'd decided to go on the road for a while, doing odd jobs wherever he could get them. He'd pretended to be that guy so hard he'd fooled people for months at a time, even if he'd never been able to fool himself.

But he'd only ever been doing it to keep people's attention off him. He'd kept to himself, kept quiet, made sure to draw his shoulders in a little when he could. He'd always tried to look normal, unimportant. Harmless.

And that was basically the opposite of Kal-El, overlord of Earth.

Bruce Wayne, on the other hand—Bruce Wayne was supposed to take up space. To draw attention, to get looked at and make it clear he didn't mind. And, frankly, to be kind of an arrogant asshole.

They worked on the basics first. How Clark stood, how he sat. How he looked around himself. Down to the angle he held his chin at, because there was no detail too small to catch Bruce's notice. It was strange, awkward, to stand there being—being looked at by Bruce. Even under normal circumstances, it would've felt odd, would've made Clark's face hot; when he was deliberately trying to hold himself in ways that were conspicuous, that emphasized his height and his shoulders and opened his whole body up to Bruce's scrutiny, it was excruciating.

But Bruce didn't make it more difficult than it had to be. He was brisk about it, even clinical; not in a way that was cold, just in a way that was professional. It was a good reminder that this was Bruce's entire life, both his job during the day and the standard he held himself to at night, because these days Batman was at least as conscious and specific a public image as Bruce Wayne had ever been. He circled Clark without haste, but he didn't linger, either. When he touched Clark, adjusting Clark's stance or the way Clark was holding his shoulders, he struck the same perfect medium: just enough attention, just enough pressure for just long enough to get Clark to make the change Bruce wanted him to make, and then he let go, moved away.

It added up to about sixteen times as much as Bruce had ever touched Clark before.

(Except maybe—that day. That day, that fight; Bruce had been in the suit, sure, but still, when they'd tackled each other, struck each other, flung each other into walls, now and then it had been full-body. Whole seconds of Bruce's hands closed around Clark's wrists, arms, throat. Bruce's knees parted around Clark's, even if it had only been so he could keep Clark pinned a little better. Bruce's face inches away from Clark's, Bruce's harsh quick breathing, the gritty rasp of Bruce's voice.

It hadn't meant anything to Clark when it had been happening. What had bowled him over then had been the kryptonite, except at the time he hadn't known that was what it was. It had just been green dust. It had just been a strange, terrible, overwhelming weakness filling him from head to toe, leaving him helpless, at Bruce's mercy—

It hadn't meant—as much to Clark when it had been happening. But he couldn't stop thinking about it, now that it was long since over. Now that Bruce had sworn to never, ever do it again.)

It was fine. Clark could handle it. Bruce was good at this, incredibly good, and the more they worked on it, the better Clark could feel himself getting at it. And if Bruce noticed that sometimes Clark's ears were kind of red, he didn't say anything about it.

Working on Clark in motion was worse. Having to stand there being looked at by Bruce didn't hold a candle to having to walk for him. And on the one hand, mercifully, Bruce touched him a little less with the walking. On the other hand, that was because it was easier for Bruce to show Clark what to do by doing it for him: demonstrating it himself. Telling Clark to watch some part of him, his shoulders or the arch of his back, the motion of his hips—

He really hadn't figured it out, was all Clark could think. He really hadn't figured out that Clark's attention was already on all of him, basically all the time.

And after that, well. Bruce had been right, to bring up clothing.

And Clark had been right to think he was screwed.

Victor was easy: his body was already armor. The scout ship made him something anyway, a simplified shirt with those Kryptonian split sleeves, a robe—but in general, it was going to serve their purposes better if he didn't cover himself up. He was their proof that Clark was who he said he was, a Kryptonian who'd mastered at least one mother box.

Diana had a little bit more trouble. They'd already agreed that she needed both armor, to wear when she was actively performing the role of Clark's bodyguard, and a selection that was more "Kryptonian high-end casual". There might be times when she'd need to pretend she was off-duty, ready to socialize, or that she'd chosen to relax in the ship because she wasn't needed.

But Kryptonians didn't armor themselves the same way as Amazons. Amazons prized history, tradition, and generous freedom of movement; lightness, quickness, and feeling the air move around you, feeling blows approach before they could land.

The ship's database, however, seemed to suggest that Kryptonians favored the same sort of strategy as—well, as Bruce had, facing Clark. Zod and his followers had had full-body suits, those environment helmets, but Clark hadn't known enough at the time to be able to tell whether that was a lot or a little, by Kryptonian standards.

And it turned out it had been a little. Zod's group had, in point of fact, been tossed off Krypton with the bare minimum of equipment any guild warrior would allow themselves to be caught in: merely enough specialized plating to survive explosive decompression if necessary, the thick mesh layer beneath that could stop even a superheated plasma bolt, and a force-shield helm and sealable personal control system, to permit survival in any hostile environmental conditions. Hardly anything, apparently.

The ship could fabricate some flawlessly, of course, and in exactly the right size to fit Diana, with the emblem of the House of El across the chest. But Diana found it incredibly hard to get used to being inside of it—to the weight and stiffness of it, the way it closed her in.

She seemed more frustrated with herself than with the armor. "I've worn armor like it before," she told Clark once, fitting the arms of it into place around herself with grace even though her jaw was tight. "But I—I suppose I'd hoped never to need to do so again."

She had the same breathing room Clark had, though. The armor didn't have to match anything in the ship's database precisely, not when it was supposed to show at least a few thousand years of the influence of humans, Atlanteans, Amazons. Not when Overlord Kal-El was trying to show off the various peoples he ruled.

She and Bruce worked together to tweak it, letting the arms of it split the same way Kryptonian sleeves so often did, letting the thigh plating give way to a skirt instead, a looser kind of restriction much closer to the way Diana liked to be dressed when she fought.

The rest of her clothes were easier. She could wear the most ornate Kryptonian dress the ship could invent out of its files, intricate metallic filigree and five overlapping layers and all, and make it look like it was simply what she had chosen to put on that day—like she belonged in it, like it was hers.

It wasn't like that for Clark.

The clothes themselves were fine. The clothes were perfect. He kept it as simple as he could to start with; he remembered the robes that had been worn by the image of his father, the projection Jor-El had made to talk to him, and the ship could make him a set of those as easily as it had made Diana's dresses.

The problem was him. It was—he'd made a deliberate choice about the Superman suit, that that would be his way of honoring the world he'd come from, the parents who'd saved him from its destruction. The idea of hope itself, written across his chest in a language even he hadn't known, at the time. And at first, that much in and of itself had still felt like a costume, another way to lie, presenting himself to the military and to Zod as if he'd known who he was and what he was doing.

This was ten times that. Once the fabrication cycle was over, he took the finished clothes out of the pod and stood there looking at them, for a lot longer than it should have taken to talk himself into trying them on.

They were easy to get into, easy to fasten. That part, at least, was just like the Superman suit—the way the fabric opened wherever you asked it to, closed up again when you told it to. And the ship had grasped the essentials of their cover story, that Clark was supposed to be someone powerful; it had made the cloth rich and heavy, grounding, a pleasure to feel against your skin.

He felt so goddamn awkward in it that it was like he was strangling.

He was Superman now, for better or worse. He'd gotten used to that role, to the things that were needed from and expected of it. Sure, it still took him by surprise sometimes that nobody seemed to be able to see through it, to tell that he hadn't earned half of what people thought and felt about Superman. But it was fine. He could deal with it. He wanted to be Superman, aspired to be what everyone else saw when they looked at him in his uniform. That was someone it was worth pretending to be.

But this? This version of himself was a nightmare—was Bruce's nightmare, almost literally. He didn't want to look like it, dress like it, act like it. He didn't want it to come to life, didn't want it to get any closer to real than it already had when Bruce had looked up on Black Zero Day and thought he'd seen it in the sky.

He closed his eyes.

It was for the mission. That was what Bruce would say, wasn't it? It was for the mission, and Bruce was the one who'd come up with the whole idea in the first place, and Clark needed to get a grip.

He kept it on, and he made himself move around in it for a few minutes. He tried everything he'd already been working on with Bruce, and muscle memory took over, all that practice, and—

And the memory of what it had felt like to do it, Bruce's eyes on him. Which wasn't comforting, precisely, but it was definitely distracting.

Distracting enough that he didn't realize he was hearing footsteps and not just his own heart jumping until it was already too late.

He turned around, breath caught in his throat, and it was—it was Bruce.

Who had clearly already made his own trip to the fabrication pods, probably at least thirty-six hours ago, and jesus.

Clark didn't know where to look; none of it was safe. The parts of Bruce that were covered were—it was clearly the same sort of fabric as the clothes Clark was wearing, luxurious and heavy, draping. A pleasure to touch, except Clark really could not afford to want to touch it, because there wasn't enough of it.

The shirt, insofar as it could be called that, ended high on Bruce's ribs—bared half of them, and the cut of muscle across his torso besides. It should have looked ridiculous, flimsy, but Kryptonian clothing design was devoted to contour, to flattering the exquisitely engineered bodies it had been made to cover, and as far as Clark was concerned, the muscles of Bruce's chest and shoulders really hadn't needed the help. It got even worse than that when you took into account the way the sides cut across Bruce's collarbones to reach the throat of the garment. The actual collar of it was high, and on its own it would have been demure; but the angle of it bared half of the web-burst of scarring that spilled down Bruce's shoulder to his chest.

Clark had gotten to see that scarring before. Once. One and a half times, if you counted a particular day—a particular moment, Bruce struck and flung, Clark unable to block out the sound of the impact in his ears. Clark had been trying to look through Bruce, that was all, to make sure his shoulder blade wasn't broken. And he'd messed up, flickered through the Batsuit and no further. Only for a split second, but still too slowly to keep the image of it from filling his head.

This time was worse. Because once he'd acknowledged that one, he was overwhelmed with them: the scattering that crossed Bruce's ribs, tiny white flecks, and the vicious arc of claw marks that wrapped around his side, and the knot over one hip where Clark knew he'd been stabbed. It was the worst kind of unintentional pornography, to be able to see so many of them at the same time—Clark had catalogued them piecemeal, caught half-formed glimpses when Bruce changed his shirt, rucked up the stretch of an undershirt across his back, stripped out of the armor with unselfconscious efficiency before Clark had managed to turn away and stop looking.

It didn't get better below the level of Bruce's hips. The waistband there, like the collar of the shirt at his throat, was fine; intricately decorated, which drew the eyes a little too readily, but at least it was wide, substantial-looking. Like the shirt, impossible to think of as flimsy.

But the fabric beneath it parted almost immediately, slit so high up Bruce's thighs that Clark couldn't bring himself to look at the cut of it straight on. It was a skirt, which should've been better than nothing but wasn't—because it was so long, a draping graceful weight that went all the way to Bruce's ankles, revealing and concealing at the same time, leaving just enough to the imagination that said imagination was a little too eager to fill in the gaps for itself.

Clark hoped distantly that Bruce was going to be merciful and not turn around.

"Good," Bruce said, even.

After several seconds too long, Clark realized this was his assessment of Clark's choice of clothing. "Oh," he managed, and then got stuck. Thank you wasn't the right thing to say, when Clark had only picked it out because he had to, when he didn't even like wearing it. The actual work had been the ship, anyway. All Clark had done was put it on. And god, he really did not want to ask Bruce how he looked in it.

Bruce took a step closer. His feet were bare, Clark understood belatedly; that was part of what had made his footsteps harder to pick out than usual.

The decorative metal pieces worked into the collar of the shirt, the waist of the skirt, caught the light and held it, and abruptly Clark recognized one of the repeating elements. It was the symbol of the House of El.

Which made sense. That was the House Bruce was supposed to belong to, the House that owned him. But it set something smoldering helplessly deep in Clark's chest anyway, to imagine Bruce—talking to the ship about it, about how to work it into the clothes he'd chosen; asking for it.

Bruce reached for Clark's shoulder, tugged a little. Circled him once, slowly, and touched the side of his throat for an instant, the small of his back only barely longer than that; ghosted a fingertip so lightly even Clark barely felt it, just over Clark's hip, before he came back around to the front and slowed to a stop again.

It was basically exactly what he'd done the time he'd insisted Clark Kent needed at least one suit that actually fit him.

Clark had had to stand as still as he could and try his best not to shiver that time, too.

"Yes, this'll work," Bruce murmured, more to himself than to Clark.

And then he met Clark's eyes and lifted his eyebrows just a little.

Right. That was his favorite cue, prompting Clark without saying a word.

Clark drew a slow breath, and swallowed. Same thing he'd been practicing on his own a minute ago, just—with Bruce here. Watching him. Dressed like that.

Great.

He let his eyes fall shut, and he gave himself room to think, to remember everything Bruce had ever told him about how to hold himself, how to look at other people. He let his spine settle into the right angle, relaxed, arrogant, and he lifted his chin, and when he opened his eyes again, it was easy to raise one brow into an arch, Kal-El of Earth amused and faintly incredulous that a slave had dared approach him and remain standing without permission.

"Well?" he said. "Go on. Kneel."

And Bruce stood there for an instant, gaze on Clark's, utterly unreadable; and then he lowered his eyes, the sweep of dark lashes against his cheek a sudden gutpunch, and he did it.

He was economical about it, because he was Bruce, but no less graceful for it. He always had such incredible, exacting control over his body, and this was no exception. He folded himself up neatly, a slow and precise descent to the floor until he was on his knees on the deck, head bowed, waiting quietly to hear what Clark would order him to do next.

It wasn't real. It wasn't real, and of course it was easy for him. This couldn't possibly be the most offputting thing he had ever done to set up or maintain a cover identity.

But it was impossible to watch him do it and not wonder whether he—whether he would. Whether there was any way at all that he would. Not for a mission, not to save the universe from a banned bioweapon or put a dent in the slave trade, but just because Clark had asked him to. Just because he was willing to. Just because he trusted Clark enough.

The tableau held for another heartbeat. And then Bruce's eyes came up again, and he rose to his feet as cleanly as he'd lowered himself down, and said, "Not bad. Not bad at all. Nicely done."

Dropping the act, just as neatly and easily as he'd put it on, because that was all it was. And Clark was going to get that through his own thick skull if it was the last thing he did, because otherwise he had no idea how he was going to survive this.

"Thanks," Clark managed, and he even got it to sound kind of wry instead of inappropriately hoarse.

Bruce's mouth slanted, just a little.

And then the slant went away, and he paused for a moment. "Based on the examples provided by the Lanterns, and the ship's own information on the expectations surrounding personal slaves throughout Kryptonian history, the ship worked up several options. If you'd prefer to see a few of the others—"

"Is there a reason you didn't pick any of them?" There had to have been. This was Bruce.

Bruce's expression took on a faintly rueful cast. "This was the least revealing," he said after a moment.

Jesus. "The least," Clark repeated faintly.

Bruce searched his face. "The least," he agreed. "But you're still uncomfortable. I suppose that's an answer—that's all right. It'll still work."

"Whoa, whoa, hang on," Clark said, "slow down. You had your half of that conversation without me. I'm not uncomfortable."

Bruce raised an eyebrow at him.

"I'm not," Clark said again, more firmly. "Not with you. Not with the clothes." Which was true enough. The problem wasn't Bruce's body, and it wasn't how much of it Clark could see. It was how much Clark wanted to see it, with or without the clothes on it. That was what was uncomfortable about this, if anything was, and Bruce wasn't responsible for it. "What did you mean, that's an answer? What will still work?"

"I'd intended this as a test run," Bruce said. "If this option is—bearable—for you, then that makes it feasible."

And that, at last, managed to get Clark's brain off the topic of Bruce's skin and his scars and his goddamn legs long enough for it to start actually working again. Clark narrowed his eyes a little. "But you'd rather do something else," he prodded.

Bruce acknowledged a direct hit with the tiniest motion of his mouth. "As best I can determine, based on the information the Lanterns have given us, this would be a reasonable choice. Conservative, but reasonable."

"But you don't think it's a good idea to give anyone the impression that Overlord Kal-El of Earth is a prude," Clark filled in.

"Considering the backstory we've constructed—that you're eager to plunge into the deep end, that you aren't particularly concerned with either intergalactic law or moral constraint, and, specifically, that you might be someone who'd take an interest in buying worldeater off Marra Dirramao, if we need to pursue that angle?" Bruce gave Clark a speaking look. "'Conservative' doesn't seem like your style, to put it lightly. You're used to having an entire world utterly your own, subject to your every whim. You're used to indulging yourself without a second thought as to how it might look, because there's never been anyone who had the right to pass judgment on you."

Clark felt dim, chilly foreboding creeping up on him. This was if anything territory, he suddenly understood. This was Bruce working up to grimly explaining that that gentle little joke was about to turn out not to be a joke at all.

"And I take it you've already got something in mind," he said aloud, as evenly as he could.

Bruce looked past him, and said, "Ship?"

And he'd worked this out in advance with the ship, because of course he had. The fabrication pod Clark had been using lit up behind him and hummed itself to life, and then shut off again almost as fast—making something small, Clark thought, something that was definitely not going to cover anyone's entire body.

Bruce stepped around him, reached out and opened up the pod, and whatever was inside of it, it fit between his hands easily.

He turned around, and held it up.

It was a collar.

Not a shirtcollar. A collar collar. Kryptonian metal, delicate and swirling, gleaming with bronze undertones, and the emblem of the House of El was worked into every inch of it, emerging from and melting away into the rest of the intricate patterning so organically that it was almost hard to see it, and yet repeating so consistently that it was inescapable.

"You think you should wear that," Clark said. "That, and—?"

He was already sure what the answer was going to be. But it still caught him in the throat, as if he hadn't been ready for it at all, when Bruce said, as if agreeing, "This," and let the conjunction drop. Unnecessary, because he didn't have anything to put after it.

A collar, and nothing else.

"Okay," Clark heard himself say.

Bruce was watching him searchingly, intent, face blank. "Okay," he repeated, as if he thought he might have heard Clark wrong.

"Okay," Clark said again, and this time it came out better, less strained, his throat not wrenched quite so tight around it. "It's your cover, and it's your decision. If you're comfortable doing it, and you think it'll benefit the mission, that's good enough for me."

Which was true. But it was steadying to say it, to remind himself of it as much as Bruce. It was Bruce's decision, and if Bruce honestly thought it would improve their chances, he probably wouldn't have let Clark talk him out of it anyway.

It was fine. Clark could handle it. And if he got through this in one piece, then the moment they made it back to Earth, he was exiling himself to the Arctic for at least six months, for the longest cold shower on the planet.

Their practice sessions ramped up, after that.

They had to. The bones of the World Engine had started to take shape, soaring curving shapes against the sky, the hull reconstructing itself by inches as more and more pieces were dredged up out of the sea.

It wasn't just about coaching Clark anymore. He pretty much had a handle on the character, now. Overlord Kal-El was prideful, disdainful—had always been inclined toward it anyway, and defeating Steppenwolf, matching raw Kryptonian power against an ancient and famed general in the service of Apokolips, hadn't given him a less inflated opinion of himself. A potentially useful ally at the same time that he would also come across as an easy mark: susceptible to flattery, readily swayed by anyone willing to let him think he had the better of them. An asset, but not a true threat, or at least not to those who'd worked out how to handle him.

And he could hold himself like Kal-El. Walk like him, talk like him. Giving Bruce orders was a relatively small step, from there.

But there were other things Bruce wanted to practice.

Clark didn't just need to take up space like Kal-El, sit like Kal-El. He had to sit like Kal-El with Bruce at his feet—leaning against his shin, his thigh, his hip. He had to settle one of Kal-El's hands with absent, dismissive inattention in Bruce's hair, or against his shoulder, as if he were an object Kal-El had every right to touch.

Bruce hadn't put the collar on, at least not in front of Clark. He hadn't stripped yet, either, which was great, because Clark didn't know whether Kal-El's arrogant composure could have held up in the face of Bruce kneeling naked in front of him. He didn't ask about it; the last thing he wanted was for Bruce to understand how much time he was spending thinking about it, how relentlessly the whole idea was eating away at him. And—

And it was easier, that way. It settled something inside him, even, leaving the decision in Bruce's hands. Bruce would do what he thought was right when he thought it was the right time to do it. Clark just had to wait, and trust him, and do what Bruce asked of him.

When he thought about it like that, he almost felt up to the task.

I won't fail you again. The soft scrape of those words, the way Bruce had sounded saying them, hadn't left him; and he wasn't going to fail Bruce again, either, not if he could help it.

And then Bruce showed up with a chain in his hands.

Not the collar, Clark understood, after the first shocked second where his head was full of nothing but dead air. Just a chain.

Just a chain; as if that wasn't enough in and of itself. A chain, and made out of that same Kryptonian alloy the ship fabricated everything from, with that distinctive bronze-edged shine. But even that much was—the awareness of it, the obvious visual cue that it was Kryptonian and gathered up like that in Bruce's hands, made Clark's face hot.

"Here," Bruce said.

Clark didn't want to take it. This was a bad idea. How had Bruce not realized this was a bad idea? A chain, and whatever Bruce was planning to tell Clark to do with it, loop it around Bruce's ankles because Overlord Kal-El preferred his slaves unable to run or—or clamp it around his throat so he could teach Clark how to lead him around on a leash, jesus, Clark didn't even want to think about it.

Usually, he was basically fine, on a day-to-day basis; he hadn't misjudged his strength when he was opening a door, handing someone a phone, twisting the cap off a beer, in years. He didn't know what it was about this, about Bruce, that made him feel so sickeningly conscious of his own ability to cause damage. But he looked at that chain in Bruce's hands and suddenly he wasn't thinking about anything except the crunching sound Bruce's trachea, the delicate bones in his ankle, would make as the links of it slowly crushed them.

(—because Bruce knew. Bruce had always known how dangerous he was, even when he hadn't known himself. That had to be what Bruce was thinking about, surely; the harm Clark could cause, the harm Bruce had to trust him not to inflict, giving himself over like this on sheer faith. It wouldn't even have to be deliberate, just a single mistake, because that was all it would ever take with Clark—)

"I don't, um," he managed to say aloud. "Are you sure that this is really—"

Bruce was looking at him oddly, searchingly. And then, before Clark had even managed to finish trailing off, he said, "You won't hurt me."

Clark swallowed. "I don't want to," he said, but that wasn't the same thing, and Bruce had to know it just as well as Clark did.

Bruce stood there silently for a moment. And then he repeated it again, quieter: "You won't."

He picked up one end of the chain in his hand, lifted it and brought it over his head and down, until it lay looped over the nape of his neck. And then he—he just left it there, the last link dangling loose down the front of his shoulder like an untied tie.

"Like this," he said, and held out the other end. "If you can lead me with it when it's like this, without pulling it loose—apply that same level of pressure when it's attached to the collar, and no more, and you'll be absolutely certain you aren't pulling too hard."

Clark bit down on something that wouldn't quite have been a laugh. It was a perfectly good idea; trust Bruce to have the knack for the kind of strategy you could use to create objective certainty, when subjective reassurance would never have been enough.

The kind of strategy Bruce himself probably needed, most of the time.

But there was still—a lot, too much, in Bruce with a chain at his throat, however loosely it happened to be hanging there right now, standing there waiting for Clark to take it from his hands and use it as a leash.

Jesus.

He made himself draw a slow breath, and let it out, and then he reached for Bruce's outstretched hand, and took it. His fingers touched Bruce's, almost clasped them, for a moment; Bruce's hand was steady, dry, warm. The chain, by contrast, was a cool smooth weight, shifting and clinking, links sliding liquidly against Clark's palm as he caught up the bundled length of it.

Bruce was right. This would work. Clark had done this a million times, calibrating his strength to the task in front of him—memorizing exactly how much or how little he'd used. He'd learned to crack eggs without crushing them, to fail at loosening a bolt now and then if someone was watching, to thump his head backwards into walls without leaving a hole in them.

"Okay," he said aloud.

Bruce gave him an acknowledging nod, the barest gentle inclination of his head. And then he let his eyes fall shut.

Because—right, Clark thought, belatedly forcing himself to look away from the perfectly ordinary and unremarkable shape Bruce's layered eyelashes made against his cheek. Right. Of course he'd want to be sure he could follow Clark's lead from the pressure of the chain itself, without any other cues to guide him. In case something went wrong, in case they were faced with a scenario they hadn't prepared for; lighting too dim for human eyes, where Clark would still be able to see perfectly, or reduced gravity, or who knew what else.

Clark swallowed, and let himself rise into the air. Just a couple of inches, that was all. Just enough that Bruce wouldn't be able to hear his shoes against the deck of the ship, either.

He couldn't pull the chain taut. That would bring it sliding off Bruce's shoulders for sure. But the slack was enough—it didn't feel like it ought to be, but it was. He drifted backwards, let a few links slip between his fingers, and Bruce waited there with his eyes closed and didn't do anything. And then Clark closed his hand, put the lightest possible expectant weight into that grip; and Bruce moved.

He drew a quick breath, first, the barest flicker of uncertainty crossing his brow. His face seemed different somehow—softer, more alive, as if with his eyes closed, he felt less observed, more able to allow his own expressions to move him without covering them up.

Or, Clark acknowledged, maybe it was just that with Bruce's eyes closed, Bruce wasn't going to catch Clark. With Bruce's eyes closed, Clark could afford to let himself look.

Bruce's weight shifted, swayed forward. Clark drew just a little harder on the chain, and Bruce took a step for real. One, and then another.

Clark tried to be systematic about it, tried to think about it like Bruce would. Clark had already been in front of him; stepping forward wasn't much of a test. He guided Bruce through an angle, a turn, and then halfway across the room in a straight line, and Bruce followed.

And there was something in the way he did it, unhesitating—in the sound of his breathing, how quiet the room was otherwise, and his closed eyes, the open and undefended quality in his unseeing face, that was—

God, Clark wanted to touch him. To touch him, to draw him the rest of the way in. To hang suspended in the air, waiting for him, until at last all the length of the chain had been taken up between them; until Bruce's arms closed around him, and he could let gravity draw him down into them—surrender the weight of himself, his body, his stupid fucking feelings, into Bruce's hands, because Bruce could take it, contain it, hold him together everywhere he felt himself unraveling if anyone could.

But that was weird, that made no sense. He couldn't let himself think things like that, and he couldn't make it Bruce's problem that he was—

"Do it," Bruce said.

Clark's mouth went dry. "What?"

Bruce was still standing there, eyes closed—and then his eyelids shifted, a flicker of eyelashes, and they were open again, that familiar dark hazel, the sharp uncompromising look in them that was all Bruce. He raised an eyebrow, because—

Right. They'd stopped moving. Clark had stopped moving, anyway, and Bruce had carefully followed his lead, and then Clark hadn't started again.

"Anything," Bruce said, and then let that eyebrow fall, let his gaze go with it, so he wasn't looking Clark in the face anymore. "Overlord," he added.

He took a step forward, before Clark had even started figuring out how to regroup. Another, another, until the chain hung low between them, until the backs of Clark's knuckles where his hand was still closed automatically around it were almost (almost) brushing Bruce's shirt, the line of buttons down his chest.

"Your universe revolves around you," Bruce murmured, "and you are the most powerful thing in it. The Gods of Apokolips tried to take what was yours, and you claimed their greatest weapons for your own, tore their army apart, and sent their servant crawling back to the void he came from. This world, and every person on it, is yours to do with as you please. And so am I."

Because Kal-El was exactly like Clark, except in every way he wasn't.

"Anything," Bruce repeated. "Whatever it is you want—do it."

Clark shut his eyes, and reached for the place where he'd started to keep Kal-El: that entitlement, that vague absent disdain, that casual arrogance. He reached for a thousand memories—sneering men in diners, dismissive looks in a dozen different flavors, everyone who'd ever done what Clark had wanted them to and decided Clark Kent, Nobody, wasn't worth two seconds of their time.

He thought about handcuffs around his wrists. He thought about General Zod.

And he thought about Bruce. About green light, the texture of mineral dust on his tongue, the feeling of a hot bright line being scored into his cheek. About hurting someone just because you could, just because you wanted them to be afraid of you and they weren't going to be able to stop you.

He opened his eyes, and felt his lip curl, cool distant amusement. He gave Bruce a brief assessing look, tilting his head to one side. And then he lifted his free hand—followed the line of the chain up Bruce's shoulder to the side of his throat, the nape of his neck. He slid his fingers up into Bruce's hair, which was just long enough to allow him to curl them afterward: to turn that idle movement into a real grip, and then tighten it until Bruce's scalp had to be right on the line between pressure and pain.

He pulled Bruce's head back, bared the line of Bruce's throat, and Bruce let him. Bruce had kept his gaze carefully lowered, but that motion inevitably raised it, and for an instant, Bruce's glance cut across his face, a quick stuttering flicker—nothing like the usual fierce weight of Bruce when he stared.

Clark hadn't lowered himself back out of the air. He was still hovering easily, a few inches over Bruce. And Kal-El—Kal-El, as Bruce and Clark had constructed him, would like that. Clark allowed the tug of his mouth to widen it into something that was very nearly a smile, and applied a gentle hint of torque to his grip on Bruce's hair, twisting harder and pulling at the same time.

Bruce's neck, the line of his back, began to bow. He let his own body strain that way for a moment, but he had to know where Clark was going with this; it had to be on purpose. So Clark took a breath and trusted him, and didn't stop, and after another handful of stretching seconds, Bruce allowed himself to begin to fold. At the ankles, the knees, the hips, allowing Clark's grasp on his hair to muscle him downward until he was kneeling on the deck.

Clark looked at him. He'd drifted a little lower himself, refusing to lose his grip on Bruce; he probably could have touched the deck again if he'd tried, maybe on tiptoe. Bruce's face was on a level with his waist, and god, it was sickeningly easy to imagine what Kal-El might have opted to do with him next—

But Clark wasn't Kal-El, and never would be.

He loosened his hand instead, smoothed his fingers through Bruce's hair, and said, as blandly and patronizingly as he could, "And what makes you think there's anything I want from you?"

Bruce was still, for a moment. "Nothing," he said at last, very softly.

"That's right," Clark murmured to him, almost approvingly, skimming an idle thumb along the shell of his ear. "If I had any need of you, you would know it. And yet you presume, slave."

He let his hand drop to the chain—the short end that still hung loose over Bruce's shoulder. The other end was still wrapped around his opposite fist, though there'd been enough slack in it that now that Bruce was kneeling, the loop of it had pooled on the deck; Clark's toes, suspended over the deck, were almost touching it.

He lifted the short end, pulled just a little: just enough to draw it across the hollow of Bruce's throat. The links crossed the collar of Bruce's dress shirt, dented soft skin very slightly and then came up at an angle over the resistance offered by Bruce's collarbone. Clark couldn't stop looking at them, at the shape they made, the contrast between the unmistakable gleam of metal and that crisp white shirt, that exposed skin. There was an inch, maybe less, between one side of Bruce's open collar and the nearest scar, and in that moment, there was nothing Clark wanted more than to catch the fabric in his fingers, yank it out of his way, give himself the view Kal-El was entitled to—

He sucked in a breath, and jerked his hands away. The chain fell back against Bruce's shoulder, the long end clanking down onto the deck of the ship as Clark dropped it, and any illusion was gone. It was just Clark, six inches off the ground, red-faced, and Bruce, looking as calm and comfortable on his knees as if Clark hadn't called him slave five seconds ago like it was his name.

"Sorry," Clark said, which was stupid, because he'd been doing exactly what he was supposed to do, but he felt like he needed to anyway.

Bruce looked at him, collected the long end of the chain in his hand without so much as glancing down, and then rose to his feet. "Don't be," he said. "That was good. Very good," and Clark felt a shiver try to prickle its way across his skin and hoped dimly that Bruce couldn't tell. "Even the voice—the vowels. I could hear the Kryptonian in it. Well done."

Clark managed to laugh for real at last, even if it was just half a breath, and then rubbed a hand across his face. "Thanks, then," he amended.

He thought that was going to be it. He was almost hoping it was; then Bruce would leave, and he could sit in the ship alone trying to catch his breath, talking himself down.

But Bruce stood there silently for a moment, and then took a step forward, closed half the distance between them all over again. At least Clark was still in the air. That kept them on a diagonal, extended the distance—put him out of range for doing anything too stupid.

"No matter what happens," Bruce said, "no matter what you have to do or say on-mission, you'll never have anything to apologize for here. I hope you know that."

"I know it isn't my fault," Clark hedged. "This is a good cover story, it's a good choice. It's the best shot we have. But that doesn't mean I—I don't want to—" He stopped, helpless, and bit his lip.

What? What could he possibly say? I don't want to treat you like that. I don't want to want to treat you like that. I don't want to be grateful for the excuse, just because this is the closest I'm ever going to get to—

"Which is exactly why you'll never have anything to apologize for," Bruce murmured. He kept looking at Clark like that, dark-eyed and serious, for a beat; and then his mouth quirked. "If anyone's to blame, it's me. This," and he hefted the chain illustratively for a moment. "—was my idea."

And that was familiar enough, a comfortable old refrain, that Clark had relaxed before he knew it, rolling his eyes. "Jesus, Bruce, I'm not going to blame you—"

"I know you won't," Bruce said. "You never do. And one of these days, you should consider extending that degree of good faith to yourself."

He reached out, and clasped Clark's shoulder. Not for long, but it was more, warmer, gentler, than a clap on the back. Clark let himself lean into it, let himself touch the back of Bruce's wrist in turn.

And at the end of the day, he was more grateful for that, that hand and that touch, that silent reassurance, than he could ever be for Bruce on the floor in front of him. At the end of the day, that was what mattered, what was going to count, even after this mission was over.

No matter how many nights in a row he spent dreaming about somehow finding himself earning the right to both.

The World Engine's main core had reconstructed enough of itself to run both diagnostics and scans, within another two days. After that, the work went twice as fast—it could tell Diana and Arthur where the rest of its pieces were, their sizes, how deep down to dive. Which parts it needed most, and which ones it could function without, or even fabricate replacements for.

It was also able to forge a data link between itself and the scout ship, which meant they could copy each other's archives; the World Engine drank down the Lanterns' files like it had gotten sick of rereading its own Kryptonian sacred chronicles for the thousandth time while it was lying at the bottom of the ocean. And the next time Clark stepped inside it and spoke to it, it answered him in the scout ship's voice—in the AI's voice, cool and calm, with that mournfully gentle undertone.

Apparently the World Engine's main core was larger, and its own AI profiles were either missing or badly damaged. The scout ship's AI had no problem stepping into the breach, and Clark thought he detected more than a little smugness over the increased processing speed.

But he was hardly complaining. It was nice. He hadn't been sure what it would feel like, exhuming the World Engine when he still remembered it best as it had been—looming over him, impossibly high, huge clawlike limbs extended into the sea; straining against the force of that relentless light, those gravitational pulses hammering their way through him, until at last he'd been able to destroy it. Lying there afterward, feeling broken, smashed-open, except he hadn't been able to rest, had had to keep going, because Zod wasn't going to stop and that meant he couldn't either—

But it didn't feel so strange, to step into a ship and speak to it, and have that voice answer him. The World Engine had been following its commander's orders, after sleeping for twenty thousand years, after waking over a world about which it had been told nothing except that it was time to do what it had been built for. He couldn't blame it for that.

And then, at last, it was—they were ready.

They'd all gone through the files backwards and forwards. They had the World Engine, and they had the scout ship; a fleet of two, Overlord Kal-El's personal dreadnought plus a support vessel as escort. They had clothes, and a baseline working knowledge of Kryptonian, and they knew where they were headed, who they were looking for, what they would be there to do.

Which meant it was time to go.

Saying goodbye to Barry and Arthur and Hal was the easy part, which wasn't a surprise once Clark thought about it. Barry and Hal were both the type to crack jokes, to make it feel like an interstellar undercover mission was basically the same as bowing out of game night early—i.e., they were feeling it deeply, somewhere in there, but they'd soldier on without you, and next time you owed them their weight in Funyuns to make up for it. And Arthur settled for a punch in the shoulder, and then raised his eyebrows at them all and said, "Don't get yourselves killed."

Taking off was pretty easy, too. The World Engine and the scout ship had both been designed to break atmosphere without too much trouble. Clark was half-expecting something, some kind of noise or turbulence, but he had to open his senses up to catch the hot rush of air across the hull, and the hum of the main deck beneath his feet stayed smooth and even, undisturbed.

And then that rush of air turned thin, insubstantial; went silent. It hadn't bothered him before, that the World Engine was visually and structurally identical to the Black Zero—the ship where Zod had choked him with an atmosphere anyone raised on Krypton would have been able to breathe, had walked right into his head and brought a tornado with him. He'd stood on an island in the Indian Ocean and looked up at the shape of the World Engine, and he'd felt fine.

But the Black Zero had been in space, when Clark had been taken to it. That silence—he remembered that silence, and here it was again, and suddenly he couldn't quite breathe.

He put a hand against the nearest bulkhead, and closed his eyes. Looked out through himself, through his eyelids, through his own feet, through the World Engine's hull, and there was Earth, hanging in the middle of that void, round and bright and beautiful.

And already growing smaller. The only home, the only anchor, he had ever had. Every time he'd ever been looking at it like this, it had been—that nuke, when it had hit him, and then afterward. When he'd been strained to the breaking point, couldn't survive without pure unfiltered sunlight. It had never been a good thing, not really.

It had never been a good thing before, anyway, he told himself firmly. First time for everything. It was going to be worth it, it had to be, to stop the kinds of things they were going to stop. He was fine. Everything would be fine.

But suddenly he couldn't keep looking anymore. He couldn't stand to have to watch the world shrink away from him and disappear.

He squeezed his eyes shut tighter, willed himself to let everything turn opaque again.

And then the World Engine spoke to him, the soft familiar voice of the scout ship's AI, and said, "Your presence is requested on the command deck."

"Right," Clark said, and went.

Bruce and Diana and Victor were already there, by the time he arrived.

The World Engine's command deck looked like the Black Zero's, too—the huge curved viewing pane, the immense and smoothly arched support frames that crossed its interior surface, the way the deck itself bloomed from the ship's core structure and spread out like the pad of a water lily's leaf.

Victor was standing at the main interface console, with a small live render of the World Engine hovering in front of him, a gently curving suggestion of Earth's surface in the distance behind it. Clark could hear the ship murmuring to him, at the same time. Probably post-launch diagnostics, maybe status updates on the ship's speed and position. Or on the jump engines; Clark could hear them warming up, too, the deep accelerating hum of it, if he let himself.

And Bruce and Diana were standing at one of the auxiliary consoles off to the side, looking at another model—a star, and Clark didn't recognize it in and of itself so much as he recognized the pattern of its neighbors in the background behind it.

Sector 3252. The star where the summit was going to be held.

This model had been updated with a few more details than Xilatlixax had had to share with them at first. The Lanterns had collected more intel, as the summit had drawn closer; it wasn't being held on the star, or even on a planet or a ship in orbit around it.

The kind of people showing up at this thing were the kind of people without a lot of trust to spare. They'd needed neutral ground, territory that held no advantages or disadvantages for anyone—and nothing that would tempt any one party to try to commit a takeover, either.

This star had been chosen for a reason. Because it was old; a red supergiant, headed straight for core collapse inside a few thousand years. No planets, either. Nothing valuable there already, and nobody was going to try to build anything valuable, either, when it was just going to get wiped out by a supernova in what was barely any time at all, on the scale of most interstellar civilizations out there. Not worth the trouble.

The one thing it did have was a ring.

Not an asteroid belt, not natural rings like Saturn. A station, of a sort, built around it.

As far as the Lanterns had been able to learn, nobody knew who'd built it, or when, or how. But it was stable, inert, and perfectly usable—at least if you liked being in the middle of nowhere, intergalactically speaking.

And the ship had rendered it perfectly. It was almost beautiful, really: the star, surrounded by a faint shifting cloud, the nebula that had formed around it as its mass spun away; the ring around it, visibly artificial in its shape, the way it thickened and thinned in an obvious pattern, decorative curves.

"—drop out of the jump at the edge of the system," Bruce was saying, eyes narrowed thoughtfully, "and that will give us a chance to scope out our options for the approach, and confirm Dirramao's presence while we're at it."

"And," Diana added, mild, "if we should then choose to swan in like Bruce Wayne, arriving fashionably late in his most conspicuously shiny limo—so be it?"

Bruce's mouth slanted, just a little. "You said it, not me," he murmured, and then glanced past her, and Clark felt an irrational, pointless urge to hide in the instant that Bruce's eyes found him, the still beat before Bruce said, "Clark."

Diana turned, already smiling, and greeted him with a gentle touch to the shoulder. "We were just discussing our transit and arrival. The ship tells us a jump of this kind will be swift. Approximately five days."

Clark blinked. "Yeah, that's—swift," he agreed. "Really? That fast?"

"FTL," Bruce supplied, and Clark at least still had it together enough to cut him a flat sideways look for it; the scout ship had shown him the Kryptonian empire, and it was pretty obvious they'd never have been able to expand as far as they had without the ability to travel somewhere north of lightspeed. Bruce made an acknowledging, surrendering gesture in response, and added, "3252. And Earth's in Sector 2814, as Lanterns reckon it. Apparently they're numbered in order. In intergalactic terms, it's not all that far away."

"Oh," Clark said. "Right."

He'd never thought to wonder about it, about how it was all laid out and measured; but Xilatlitxax had said it themselves, practically. The Lanterns had lost contact with Sector 3252 a long, long time ago—and with Earth, too. A whole region of space left to its own devices, after the last time the New Gods of Apokolips had decided to siege the universe itself.

"And, for the record," Bruce added, "that's five Earth days. Which is not how anyone is going to be measuring time once we get there. According to the ship, the most widely used system of reckoning in Sector 3252 will work out to somewhere close to a thirty-two-hour day for us."

"Oh," Clark said. "Do you want to have the ship switch over in advance?"

Bruce raised an eyebrow at him. "No point, for you," he said. "Or Diana, or Victor. This won't exactly be the first time Bruce Wayne's dealt with jet lag—"

"Ship," Clark said over him, mild, "are you able to calculate a transitional schedule, moving from a twenty-four-hour ship's day to one that matches the—most widely used system of reckoning in Sector 3252, to permit adjustment by the time we arrive?"

"A gradual increase in the length of internal ship's day from Earth reckoning to—" and here the ship used a word Clark had never heard, full of purring consonants; had to be the name for the standard time system in 3252. "—is readily achievable."

"Fantastic," Clark said. "Go for it."

Bruce was giving him a steady, unreadable look. Too late, Clark realized it was the shoulder all over again. Why did everything he tried to do for Bruce keep coming out backwards, a thumb in the eye instead of the olive branch he wanted it to be?

Everything he tried to do for Bruce except putting him on his knees and grabbing him by the hair. That kept coming through probably a little too clearly—

He bit down on the inside of his cheek. "I didn't mean—I'm not trying to say you need the help," he said quickly. "I know you could power through it and we'd never notice a thing. You don't need to, that's all. You don't have to."

Bruce was silent, for a long moment. "You know better than that," he said at last, low; a deliberate echo, Clark understood, the same thing he'd murmured last time, except Clark hadn't said the same thing first. Except it meant something different, inevitably, spoken in reply to You don't have to, and Clark didn't know what the hell to do with that.

It should only have been the truth: of course Bruce didn't need to make everything as hard for himself as it could possibly be. Of course Bruce didn't have to power through everything as if it didn't matter what it did to him—even something as simple as a little temporary exhaustion. Except it was Bruce; except Clark did know better than that after all.

"Okay, got those numbers for you, Bruce," Victor called, from the central console. "I put the engines through a test cycle, and the jump calculations are done."

Bruce didn't look away, for a long moment—and then did, turned and stepped away and crossed the deck toward Victor, and was as good as gone.

Clark blew out a breath, let his eyes fall shut and then rubbed a hand over his face. Jesus. The last thing he needed right now was to go around turning every conversation he had with Bruce into a minefield, even when they weren't undercover—

"Clark," Diana said gently, and a warm strong hand covered the back of his shoulder.

Clark let himself stay where he was for a second, and then got a grip, scrubbed his hand up through his hair instead and made himself meet her eyes.

"It isn't wrong to worry for him. Don't let him convince you otherwise."

"No, I—he won't," Clark said, because it was just the truth. He was way too far gone to back off, even if that would have been the smart thing to do. He was as hopeless over Bruce's relentless self-castigation, Bruce's resigned certainty that his flaws were all that mattered, as he was over any of the rest of it: Bruce's eyes or scars or hard-earned muscle, the raw and bleeding compassion he tried so hard to shut away or the frankly terrifying competence. It was all of a piece, it was Bruce, and Bruce might think sooner or later Clark was going to hit yet another of his million tripwires and decide it just wasn't worth it, but that was only because he didn't know Clark was—that was only because he didn't know.

Diana looked at him, in that warm, sage way she had, and said, "Good." She paused, and tilted her head. "Yet something troubles you. To be aboard a ship such as this again?"

Clark swallowed. "A little," he admitted. "It just—looks the same. But it's fine. I'm fine."

And Diana was being much too careful with him right now to tell him outright that he was full of shit. "It is our ship now," she said instead, as if in agreement. "And this time you aren't alone. We are with you." She squeezed his shoulder. "And we will be with you on this mission, whatever happens. If it all goes wrong, then it all goes wrong; we will do all we can, and fight if we must—"

"No, I know," Clark said, and reached up to touch the backs of her fingers, to apply a quick responding pressure in return. "I know you will. And going undercover like this, I can do it." He bit at his mouth, and tried not to laugh; it wouldn't come out right if he did. "That's the part that scares me."

Diana frowned, just a little. "Clark," she said carefully.

"I've done this before, you know," he elaborated. "Not exactly, obviously. But I was undercover for a long time, before I was ever Superman. Pretending I wasn't different. Pretending I wasn't even Clark Kent, sometimes. I'm not that good a liar, I never have been, but it wasn't that hard. It wasn't that hard, because it was always part of me. It was in me already, the person I was telling everyone I was. Somebody quiet and unremarkable, somebody who didn't have anything, somebody no one knew or wanted to know. Joe nobody-remembers-his-last-name."

Diana's expression turned softer, grave and knowing.

"I wish I thought I couldn't do this," Clark said, hoarse and halting. "Because if I can—what does that mean? That Overlord Kal-El is in there somewhere, too, and he always has been?"

"Oh, Clark," Diana murmured, and turned her hand—caught his, before he could let it fall, and clasped it warmly. "There is a lesson I learned, a long time ago. It doesn't matter whether you are human or not; every person who has ever been has had both brightness and darkness within themselves, both light and shadow. Every one of us strives to choose, at every moment, which will govern us—which we will try to become, and which we will try to set aside. And we will all fail, now and then, either way." She pressed her mouth into a wry line, and raised an eyebrow. "Bruce once endeavored to snuff out all the light within himself, and failed. You know that.

"And I—I have been cruel, in my time. Callous, and unforgiving, and selfish. I've turned my back on those who needed my help most, because I believed they didn't deserve it. And I've clung to what I thought myself entitled to keep, and helped to break the world by it. To try to be better is hard work, and it never ends, not for anyone. And that you know that—that you know you aren't done, that you know there is still work to do—" She smiled, and it was small and soft and wise. "That means you are still doing it right."

Clark shut his eyes, gripped her hand and let out an unsteady breath. "I sure wouldn't mind if it were easier, though," he managed.

"Me neither," Diana said, so frank and rueful that he had to laugh, then, even if the laugh didn't amount to much.

Behind them, Bruce and Victor were talking to the ship. Something was happening, Clark understood, hearing that strange hum rise in the engines again; and he squeezed Diana's hand, opened his eyes and looked out at Earth, hanging there glowing and perfect in the void of the universe, and then blue-white light split everything apart: they had jumped.

Chapter Text

Five days wasn't enough.

The ship's transitional schedule didn't help—the way their "days" lengthened as the jump went on turned five days into four. Combined with the part where they hardly felt like days anyway, when the lighting never changed unless someone asked the ship to dim it, when the view out the massive side panes of the ship was always the same hot blue-white smear of light, it was just one more way the passage of time didn't quite feel real.

There wasn't a lot left to do, either. The ship didn't need their help during the jump; all the real work had been done in that initial set of jump calculations. The way the ship had explained it to Clark when he'd asked, "jump" wasn't the wrong word: after that first burst of impossible energy from the jump engines had sent them hurtling "up" through space-time, they kept going "up" on the strength of that velocity, and then they were going to fall back down into regular space again. Which meant even the engines weren't actually doing much of anything right now—they didn't need to be monitored or checked up on.

They reviewed the files some more. It turned into almost a game, reciting pieces of them to each other, reminding each other of the weirdest or most obscure facts the Lanterns had managed to dig up. They practiced speaking Kryptonian to each other; Bruce especially wouldn't let up, made Diana sit and listen to him and correct his pronunciation again and again. He could sound like someone who'd learned it as a young teenager, maybe, but no worse than that—at least according to him.

And they all made a deliberate effort to spend some time alone. That was Bruce, too. Once they reached the summit, they might be together for the entire length of the event, or at least for as long as it took to find out whether Marra Dirramao was smuggling worldeater. And whether they were forced into each other's company or not, unless they were able to guarantee themselves an enclosed area that was free of surveillance, they'd always have eyes, ears, or your sensory equipment of choice trained on them. They'd always have to be playing a part, constantly self-monitoring, making sure their masks didn't slip. It was going to be hard to relax, and it was going to be hard to take even a moment to just exist.

Clark knew intellectually that Bruce was right. But no matter how long he'd spent doing it—or maybe precisely because he had—he'd never liked being alone.

And then, suddenly, their time was up.

The ship had given them advance warning, before the drop back into regular space. Clark would've felt it happen even if he hadn't known it was coming—there was an odd stretched-out hitch, a lurch, like missing a step on a staircase, and the insubstantial hiss of jump-space was abruptly gone, replaced by the utter silence of actual space.

They'd come out right where Victor had said they would, right where Bruce had wanted them to: off at the edge of the star system, with plenty of time to make a long leisurely approach. The ship had established communications contact with the ring station, Diana coolly announcing the arrival of Overlord Kal-El of Earth as if she expected the name to be received with reverence.

And now they were about half an hour away from actually docking, which meant there was nothing left to do but—change.

Clark was ready for it. He had to be ready for it; there was no more time. He had the clothes he'd picked for the first day, Overlord Kal-El's casual finery, laid out across the wide bunk in his quarters. He made himself smooth a hand over it, slid his fingers along the width of the shoulders, the cuff of one sleeve.

He had to put it on. He didn't know why he wasn't doing it.

And then the World Engine said, "Entry requested. Permission granted?"

"Permission granted," Clark said, and turned to look as the door to his quarters unsealed itself and melted away into the walls.

It was Bruce. Bruce, and he had the collar in his hand.

Clark stared at it helplessly, swallowing, and then jerked his eyes up to meet Bruce's.

"Want a hand?" Bruce said.

It could have been a joke, a teasing jab; as if Clark could honestly need help putting clothes on. But the words were quiet, careful and even. A question, that was all, with neither judgment nor amusement implied.

"Yeah," Clark admitted, throat tight.

Bruce looked at him searchingly for a moment, and then crossed the room toward him, reached out with the hand that wasn't wrapped around the damn collar and touched his elbow. "Okay," he said, and then set the collar on the edge of the bunk, too, a good foot away from Clark's—Overlord Kal-El's—clothes.

He moved his hand; ghosted it up Clark's arm, and then over to Clark's collar, and oh.

Clark had meant—he didn't know what he'd meant. He wanted Bruce there, that was all. He'd never liked being alone, and he wanted Bruce there, and he hadn't thought about what he was asking for beyond that.

He was wearing a button-down with an undershirt, jeans, an old pair of hiking boots. Another piece of Bruce's advice, from before they'd left: a handful of sets of clothes they liked and were comfortable in, clothes they felt like themselves in, before they had to give them up for at least a few days straight. And it was two birds with one stone, because those were also the clothes that would be waiting for them on the ship, ready for them to slip back into their own skins, when this was over.

Bruce caught the first buttoned button between his fingertips, and undid it. Another, another. Clark's ears felt hot. He ought to move away, shake Bruce's hands loose and laugh, tell Bruce he hadn't meant—he hadn't been trying to make Bruce think he needed to—

He'd rolled his sleeves up, left the cuffs unbuttoned and just folded them over up to his elbows. Bruce rolled them back down, one at a time, and then pushed the open sides of the button-down apart, off his shoulders, down his arms. And as undeniably weird as it was to have Bruce—undressing him like this, the way Bruce was going about it, so steady and calm and unhurried, made it almost calming. Bruce's face was calm, too, calm and even soft; there was no tension lurking in the corners of his eyes, the lines around his mouth. He got the button-down off over Clark's wrists and hands, and then looked at Clark and offered him a tiny slanting smile.

"If you tell anyone Bruce Wayne folded up your plaid flannel shirt for you, they won't believe you," he murmured, and then did just that.

"Yeah? I don't know, I can think of one or two tabloids that might take it anyway," Clark managed.

And as easily as that, the worst of the awkward strain was gone. There was still a little too much heat in Clark's face; he could feel it. He still felt clumsy, self-conscious, and Bruce reaching out to pluck at the edge of his undershirt, to skim it up his waist until he lifted his arms and let it come off over his head, definitely did not help.

But Bruce seemed utterly impervious to it. Bruce did it as if there were nothing strange about it at all, with a straightforward unspoken conviction that felt impossible to contradict.

He did at least let Clark undo his own fly; that probably would have catapulted them straight back into territory so hazardous even Bruce couldn't have willed it away. But he did it so naturally that it almost managed to pass for a coincidence, that he'd happened to step away to find a place for Clark's shirts in a storage unit at exactly the moment when Clark's jeans were the obvious next step.

Except, crap—hiking boots.

Clark made a face at himself, dropped to the edge of his bunk and took them off, and his socks, too. The Kryptonian outfit came with boots, not unlike the ones on the Superman suit: material that was thick and lush, richly textured, almost the same as the fabric for the rest of the clothes except for a certain stiffness in it, a structural quality.

Bruce was about to turn around. Clark could tell by the way he was standing, the shift of his weight, and—he'd sped up, he realized. That was why Bruce seemed to be moving so slowly, why he had so much time to think about exactly what was going to happen next. About Bruce looking at him standing here barefoot, with his jeans open and loose around his hips; and Bruce would probably be perfectly considerate, brisk and collegial, about reaching out to tug them down Clark's thighs, but jesus, he didn't know how he'd survive it, the idea that it would mean nothing in particular to Bruce when he had already tied himself in knots about it—

He didn't slow down. Stripped his jeans off himself, while Bruce was still only just beginning to turn, and by the time Bruce was actually facing him, he had Kal-El's undersuit pulled up to his waist, and he was smoothing one sleeve up his arm.

Bruce went still. Only for an instant, the barest hitch in his step, but Clark couldn't look at him. Heaving them both straight past it like this made him at least as obvious as he would have been if he'd let it happen, and then Bruce had happened to glance up at his face in the middle of it. But at least this way it would be easier to ignore, surely.

And Bruce did ignore it. The barest hitch in his step; and then he went smoothly into motion again, reached out and helped Clark draw the undersuit up and over his shoulder and get his arm into the other sleeve. It had split itself down the chest to let Clark put it on, and once it was in place, he ran two fingertips up the front and the fabric sealed itself up behind them, tiny gleaming tessellations locking themselves together, and in a moment it was as if it had never been anything but whole.

The rest of it was easier. The split-sleeved overshirt, the long draping robe, armor too twistingly complex to be anything but decorative at the shoulders and up the forearms, and belting around the waist. The cape, longer still—the robe hung to Clark's ankles, but the cape went to the floor. Clark couldn't imagine how Kryptonians had ever managed to keep them clean. Maybe they'd once had a yellow sun, or at least a handful of yellow wavelengths. Maybe they'd all just floated everywhere.

Each new layer put a little more distance between Bruce's hands and Clark's skin. And each new layer made Clark look more like Kal-El, made him feel more like Kal-El. It was almost too easy to let himself look at this, Bruce's fingers testing each join and fastening, from another angle entirely: only as much as Kal-El expected from the personal slave he trusted to dress him. The personal slave he'd brought here to show off. Perhaps he would do business, strike a deal here, at least if someone made him an offer that was worth his time. Perhaps he wouldn't, and if he didn't, that would hardly bother him; he already ruled a world he was perfectly happy with, and had proven he could defend it against some of the worst the wider universe had to offer. He would lose nothing, if he walked away from this place and returned to wallow in its comforts, to revel in the throne that was his.

But he would also enjoy leaving an impression, as long as he was here. With the clothing he had chosen, with the way he conducted himself—and with his favorite slave, the one that pleased him above all others. The one he valued above all others.

An illusion, that was all. But as each piece of the outfit settled into place, it was an illusion that drew closer and closer, close enough that Clark could almost have stepped into it if he tried.

Close enough that when Bruce picked up something else from the surface of the bunk and put it in Clark's hand, Clark took it without hesitating.

And then he looked down at it, and realized it was the collar.

Bruce had adjusted the design a little, since the last time Clark had seen it. It matched the armor on Clark's arms and shoulders better, that was it. Echoed the layering shapes there more clearly, and the symbol of the House of El, centered at the front of the throat and then repeating more subtly along the upper and lower curves, stood out more obviously for it.

He'd gone through the list of clothes Clark was having the ship fabricate for Overlord Kal-El. Clark had known that, had been there when he'd done it. But he'd thought that had just been Bruce being Bruce. Jesus, Bruce had probably made as many collars as Clark had outfits, had made them to match.

Clark bit down on the inside of his cheek, closed his hand around the collar, and made himself look up.

Bruce already had his shirt open.

He wasn't Clark. He was utterly unselfconscious, face relaxed and impassive as he shrugged the dress shirt off and folded it up. He had the foresight Clark hadn't, and toed off his shoes, took off his socks, before he even touched his slacks—and then he did, slid them down his thighs and off his legs as if that were no more significant an action than removing his shoes had been.

Somehow, he'd done it again, changed the feeling in the air just through the way he moved and acted. The slow deliberateness of it all, the precision and the lack of haste, made everything he did seem like ritual, something calming and even meditative instead of embarrassing or uncomfortable.

It helped. Clark wouldn't have done anything stupid anyway, when Bruce stripped out of his briefs also—that was a mistake too obvious even for him. But it made it easier, that Bruce had managed to bring such a settled steadiness to the action itself.

And then Bruce met Clark's eyes, standing there naked as if it wasn't anything all that remarkable, and lifted his chin.

Right. The collar. Bruce had given it to him for a reason.

Clark turned it in his hands, ran a fingertip over the surface of it. It was probably—yeah, there it was, just like the suit. Ask in the right way, at the right point along the width of it, and the metal melted away, opened itself up.

Which meant Clark had no more excuses left.

He crossed the space between them in two strides. Bruce waited for him, and didn't look away. Clark drew a sharp breath, and lifted the collar, and jesus, he couldn't be doing this, he couldn't be except that he was. He set it against Bruce's collarbone, and the metal wasn't cold, not when Clark had been clutching it in his hands the way he had, but he could still track the ripple of response, a brief prickling of Bruce's skin beneath it.

He slid it into place against the base of Bruce's throat, the lowest point of the emblem of the House of El extending just into the hollow of it. He felt the shape of it change under his hands: adjusting itself to the topography of the surface it was touching, adapting automatically to fit itself to the contours of Bruce's throat. And then he had to—he had to follow it, slide his hands around to the nape of Bruce's neck to tell it to close again, form a perfect unbroken whole.

He could still feel the shape of Bruce's throat against his fingers, the living warmth of Bruce's bare skin against the sides of his hands, after he let go.

He cleared his throat. "And the chain?" he made himself say.

Bruce tilted his chin toward his slacks, folded in half and draped across the foot of Clark's bunk. "In the pocket."

Clark stepped away. Part of him had been hoping, dimly, that that would make a difference—that the weight of Bruce's eyes, of Clark's relentless awareness of every inch of him, would lighten with a little distance. But he wasn't that lucky.

He used his vision to check which pocket before he actually reached for Bruce's slacks. It was shutting the door to the henhouse after the horse had bolted, nothing in comparison to the rest and basically irrelevant, but jesus, he didn't want to end up stuck standing here pawing his way through Bruce's pants searching for it.

The chain wasn't the same as last time, either. It was more delicate, which was why it had fit in one of Bruce's pockets so easily, and it glittered a little, the surface of each link subtly textured in a way that caught the light.

It worked the same way as the collar and Clark's armor—he could lift one end toward the center of the front of the collar, press the loop of the last link there just below the apple of Bruce's throat, and the metal shifted under his hand, melted and flowed and rearranged itself until it had joined without any visible mark or seam.

He let go and backed away, but he kept the chain in his hand, let it play out between his fingers until an arc of it hung slack between them. And then, just the way Bruce had made him practice it, picturing that loose chain hanging over Bruce's shoulder and the exact amount of pressure he'd needed to ask Bruce to move with it, he drew Bruce forward one step.

It worked perfectly. Bruce moved without hesitating, took the single step and yielded just as readily the moment Clark wasn't asking anymore.

God. It was and wasn't exactly as bad as Clark had been expecting, having Bruce naked and leashed in front of him. He'd thought the hard part would be how mortified he'd feel, how much he'd need to work to hide a flush Overlord Kal-El shouldn't be wearing because of a slave.

But Bruce made it easy. He was so matter-of-fact about it. He didn't try to shield himself, didn't try to hide anything. Bruce Wayne had been caught in flagrante a lot, and maybe some of it was down to sheer practice. But Bruce was also—he always inhabited his body so thoroughly, so much more readily than he could inhabit himself. He didn't trust his own mind, his own heart; but he did trust his body, trusted the muscle he'd earned and the skill he'd drilled into himself. That had already made him beautiful to watch in a fight. Clark just hadn't expected it to apply here, to make him look as if he walked around naked all the time.

Except that was a problem all its own. Clark had expected to want to look away, to find it hard to bring himself to do anything else with Bruce's bare body on display in front of him. And instead, it was—everything Clark usually never got to see, the play of muscles that had always been hidden by three-piece suits or the Batman uniform, presented to him as if he had every right to look, as if Bruce expected him to.

At least, he thought distantly, he was managing not to stare at Bruce's cock.

Bruce raised an eyebrow. "Satisfied, Overlord?"

He put just enough dryness into it that Clark, startled, couldn't help but crack a smile. He recognized the gesture for what it was—one last moment where they were going to be able to set the masks aside, talk to each other without having to think about where they were or what they were saying, who might be listening.

"Yeah, I guess you'll do," Clark said.

"Thanks," Bruce said, bland. "I think."

And then the World Engine said, "Incoming communication," and a moment later the voice had changed.

Diana. "The ship is making our final approach to the station," she said. "Five minutes until we are docked."

"Got it," Clark said, and sucked in a breath, let it out—wrapped the chain once around his hand, let it tangle in his fingers, and the weight of it, of Bruce on the other end of it, was an anchor. "We're ready."

Clark didn't know what he'd expected, but it hadn't been for the docking area to look so much like an airport terminal.

He almost wanted to laugh. He couldn't help it, just imagining how Barry would've reacted. After reconstructing the World Engine, using it to violate the laws of physics and jump an impossible distance so they could go undercover at a meeting between alien crime lords, here they were at last, on an ancient and mysterious space station built around a dying star—and they were standing in a large, bright, streamlined space that wouldn't have been out of place at Metropolis International.

But Kal-El didn't laugh at things like that. Clark didn't pause, kept walking. Bruce was at heel, a stride behind him and a little to one side, the chain dangling absently from Kal-El's hand; and Diana and Victor flanked them to either side, another step or two away. Diana was in her Kryptonian armor, looking fierce and strong and stern, and Victor had rearranged his body into something a little more substantial than usual, thicker limbs and bulkier joints, a sense of hard-hitting mass to him.

The docking area was lit up, all gleaming metal and straight lines that guided the eye—and the feet—gently toward a graceful archway, where the deck began to angle itself upward into a ramp. That tracked; docking had meant the World Engine guiding itself toward the edge of the ring and then slightly under the horizontal axis of its surface, so the docking bays were clearly lined up along the underside of it.

The archway was filled with pale light. And not just light, Clark understood as they drew closer. Not just light, but some kind of field, an active glittering vibration in it that was right at the edge of his hearing.

"Bioscan," Victor said, very low.

Right. That made sense, too. Everybody who showed up for this was going to need to dock, and then pass from the docking bay onto the station. Why not set up your bioscanners in between, so they'd step through on their own? Plus, that way you didn't end up with lines—and Clark had to bite down on the inside of his cheek again, because Barry would have loved that one, too. Interstellar criminal masterminds, queueing up patiently to walk through the alien equivalent of the security gate at the airport.

Kal-El would probably be familiar with that kind of technology, or at least not afraid of it. Clark didn't slow down, didn't let his stride change. He stepped into that humming field of light, and for a moment there was nothing else, just an endless wash of pale shimmering.

And then they came out the other side, and—okay, this was a little more like it. Jesus.

Clark had assumed that the ring was hollow, that what made it a station was that there was space inside of it that was usable. But that wasn't how it worked at all. The docking bays probably did form the edge of it, but they'd walked up through theirs and out of it, and now they were standing on the ring's surface instead.

Clark couldn't begin to guess how it worked, how it had been made habitable. There had to be some kind of artificial gravity involved, some kind of invisible system retaining and circulating atmosphere—the ring itself couldn't possibly have enough mass to do that naturally, and yet, looking up, he could see it.

At the "horizon", if the edge of the ring could be called that, there was a sky. Clark didn't know how else to say it. Not blue; a kind of pale orange-pink shade. It stretched upwards in a gradient, and that part was familiar enough, the way any sky on any world was palest at the horizons and then deepened in a bowl if you looked up. But here, it didn't just deepen—it faded out entirely. Space opened up above them, endless and starry, and from here, the nebula that surrounded the star was a brilliant glittering net overhead, lit up pink and violet and gold, an endless frozen aurora.

It felt almost unfair, that a place like this, a place that was being used for the things this place was being used for, should be beautiful.

Clark only let himself give it a glance. Kal-El wouldn't stare, he felt pretty sure about that. And Clark Kent, coming from Kansas to the big city, had learned pretty quickly not to let himself get caught boggling up at the heights of skyscrapers like a country mouse.

Looking ahead was less astounding. It was as though they were standing at one edge of a plaza, essentially. An alien plaza, though, and that made for a hell of a view in and of itself: the elements were all recognizable, a crowd of people in front of them, plants and trees neatly installed at intervals. But the plants and trees were—blue, purple, orange; unfamiliar shapes, growing in patterns and angles that Earth plants just didn't, leaves and fruits Clark didn't have any words for.

And the crowd was the same. Clark had spent a lifetime feeling helplessly out of place, knowing how different he was from everyone around him and hiding it as best he could. But he'd never looked different, and now he suddenly felt aware that as aliens went, he was a pretty darn boring one.

He sure looked like a matched set with Bruce, compared to some of the people in front of them—some of the people in front of them, and some of their slaves.

Furred, feathered, scaled, or a dozen different combinations. Hair everywhere, or in limited places that were not at all the same ones human evolution had picked, or not at all. The variety of color and pattern was almost dizzying, every which way Clark looked, and not all of them stayed the same, moment to moment—Clark could pick out half a dozen figures flickering through a sequence of shades, or with scales that flexed and shifted to form patterns that faded in and out, reshaped themselves in one orientation or another, in an instant.

It was almost too much, for a second. Clark had to tighten his hand around the chain, press the links into his fingers and remind himself it was there, and think of an island. Not just how much he could see, but how much he could hear, if he let himself; anyone who came close enough to them, who spoke to them, would be picked up by their personal translators, but at a distance, the rush of incomprehensible speech went unaltered. The range of sounds went both above and below the limits of human hearing, registers of noise Clark didn't usually have to worry about blocking out. And smells, tastes—jesus, Clark probably should've guessed there would be species out there who communicated with pheromones, by saturating the air around them with subtle scents or flavors, but for an instant it was impossibly intense, nauseating.

He could tell at a glance that Bruce had been right about the collar, and that he'd been right to think they'd fit in better if he weren't clothed. Clark could spot a handful of slaves who were wearing something. But they weren't in the majority, and a lot of them seemed to be secondary, one of two or three following the same person, maybe performing some kind of specific role Clark didn't understand.

"Kryptonian?"

Clark turned.

There was an alien standing at a console by the edge of the archway they'd just passed through—because sure, running bioscans meant you had to have somebody on duty checking the results. This one was short, narrow, six-limbed and covered in subtly variegated purple fur, and their eyes were huge, round; they seemed to be built kind of along the lines of a lemur, complete with the startling stare.

Or maybe they were just staring at Clark. Them, and after they said the word, Kryptonian, half a dozen of the closest aliens in the crowd jerked and turned on their heels—or the anatomical equivalent, at least—and turned their sensory apparatuses toward him, too.

Their whole cover story was built on the idea that at least a few people at this thing would've heard about Steppenwolf and the New Gods, that they'd rediscovered Earth and tried to conquer it, and failed. That a Kryptonian had stopped them. And given the long leisurely approach they'd taken to the star from the edge of the system, somebody had to have noticed, maybe even recognized the shape of the World Engine and passed along the word that a Kryptonian had actually shown up.

But Clark still hadn't really been expecting—this.

Some things were universal. The murmur of voices, the ripple of reaction through the nearest part of the crowd, the way people turned and pointed, was pretty much exactly the way any busy street in Metropolis reacted to Superman, at least when there wasn't an imminent disaster, when he was just dropping someone off for the authorities or lowering someone safely to the ground.

And Superman was at least a little like Kal-El. Superman didn't duck away from attention.

Clark kept his shoulders back, the line of his spine full of Kal-El's arrogance instead of Superman's confidence, and raised an eyebrow.

"Yes," he said, and he did it in Kryptonian, just in case the alien's translation system told them what language he was using. "Is there a problem?"

"What—no, no," the alien at the console said hurriedly. "Clear, you are all—you and your companions are—clear. Your biosignatures have been registered. Do, um. Do any of you require a translation unit?"

"Oh, we came prepared," Clark said, as patronizing as he could get it, and reached up to indicate it; they couldn't have come walking in here with standard Lantern devices, but the ship had been able to fabricate the Kryptonian equivalent, a tiny unobtrusive unit that could be pinned to clothing near the throat.

Or pressed gently into place, so your body could build a fitting for it or it could be asked to join to the metal of your collar, if you were Victor or Bruce and you had no clothes to pin it to.

And just like Clark had hoped, the alien looked at his, and then at Diana, at Victor, at Bruce. Anybody who was looking for them would probably notice them, and be able to guess what they were—which meant Bruce's idea of a trick, Diana or Victor removing theirs and walking around to eavesdrop, might work pretty well, if they needed it to.

"Of course, of course. You must, uh. You must offer your personal identifications?"

"Overlord Kal-El, of Earth," Clark said, and then waved a dismissive hand over his shoulder, a gesture that encompassed Diana and Victor and Bruce. "These are mine."

The alien didn't press the inquiry, just turned back to the console and did something. Clark wondered grimly how that information got entered, whether that was how the system was designed to work: whether a third of the crowd in front of him had their names listed in there, and the rest were just and one slave, two bodyguards.

And then it was over, and they were waved past.

For all that it had been awkward and difficult to get through it at the time, Clark was distantly grateful that Bruce had made him practice so much. He walked the way Kal-El walked, and he didn't look back over his shoulder to make sure Diana and Victor were keeping up with him, because Kal-El would simply be certain that they were. And Bruce—

He didn't have to look for Bruce. Bruce was at his shoulder, and yes, he was also naked, collared, with the chain that leashed him wrapped around Clark's hand, but at the same time there was a part of Clark that wanted him there, that registered his presence the same way Superman would have, standing in the bay of the Flying Fox with Batman standing at his shoulder. Clark could keep the worst of the noise and press of the crowd shut out, and still let himself breathe Bruce in, still let the low steady beat of Bruce's heart fill his ears.

"Two o'clock," Bruce murmured, an undertone no louder than a whisper, almost subvocalized—but he'd know Clark would be able to hear him anyway. "Paajasiila."

Clark flickered a glance in the right direction, and recognized the woman instantly, straight out of the Lanterns' files. He'd stared at her holoimage a dozen times over the past week, running through the lists of Marra Dirramao's known associates.

And it was a weird kind of reassurance. The proof that the files had been right, and that it had actually sunk in—that, given the opportunity, Clark really did know who he was looking at, and could probably have picked her out himself, her sloping black eyes and tattooed face, the long graceful sweep of her tentacled limbs, if he'd been glancing in the right direction instead of Bruce.

He drew a slow breath, and let it out, and he could almost feel the moment his brain started to work again: not caught up with absorbing every single thing around it, not trapped on the one track of checking every single move he made against the picture of Kal-El in his head. Because he didn't need to. He'd taken a look around, he had a frame of reference. He'd practiced this over and over, he knew how to be Kal-El even when he wasn't talking. He could do this.

Bruce would have followed Clark's glance, would have known Clark had understood him; Clark didn't need to say anything. He kept walking, an idle unhurried pace, and let Kal-El's disinterested eyes wander a little. "Eleven o'clock," he offered in return, after a moment. "K'rr Khavvi."

They moved through the crowd together, making identifications where they could. No sign of Marra Dirramao himself, at least not yet, but they knew already that he had to be here, they'd identified his personal flagship, so it was only a matter of time.

They'd have stuck it out, tried to find something actionable that the Lanterns could use, no matter what had happened. But there was a spark of satisfaction in noticing things like—an arms dealer Marra Dirramao had done considerable business with, talking to the head of a smuggling ring that had most likely moved a hell of a lot of cargo for him. A sign that maybe there really was going to be something here they could catch, something they could stop.

Kal-El kept drawing glances, and more of them rather than fewer as word apparently spread. Clark kept his chin up, kept the look on his face dismissive and vaguely bored, as if none of this seemed particularly impressive compared to an overlord's imperial palace back on Earth. Space opened up around him, around Diana and Victor where they flanked him, as he kept walking along.

And then, at last, after maybe half an hour by Clark's reckoning, someone chose to close that space.

Clark recognized her, too. Nazhura Mulballu—but she'd been included by the Lanterns because she was a minor player in a nearby sector, not because she had any particular connection to Dirramao.

She looked essentially the same as she had in her holoimage, in person. Bipedal, built on an almost familiar model but with legs like a lion's, the ankle extended compared to a human's in a way that made it look like a back-jointed knee, the true knee much higher. Hairless, with a striking ornamental crest of bone; apparently she'd picked up a few more piercings in it since the holoimage had been taken, and all of them had been filled with much bigger, danglier ornaments, strings of beads and gems or long glittering chains that looped from one to the next, making soft musical sounds as she moved. She was dressed differently, too, rich draping layers of skirts, and even more jewelry, dripping from the curves of her shoulders, closed around her arms and wrists and every single one of the three fingers on each of her hands.

She had only one slave with her, but they probably doubled as a bodyguard—scaled, in a range of brilliant shades of red, and the huge black eyes of a species that must have started out as burrowers, which made it impossible to tell where they were looking, whether they were gazing forward or cutting a glance sideways. They stood at her shoulder, a mirror of Bruce at Clark's, and she had them on a leash that was actually a leash, woven fabric that was beautifully embroidered to match Mulballu's skirts.

She'd stepped out in front of Kal-El, who paused a moment as if to allow her the chance to clear his path properly, and only gave her his actual attention when she didn't keep moving.

"So," she said, in a clear soft voice. "You're the Kryptonian, then."

Clark raised an eyebrow, and settled on a look of vague, patronizing amusement. "Indeed I am," he said. "I take it you've heard of me?"

Mulballu's head tilted, her eyes half-closing in the expression Clark knew was equivalent to a smile in her species. "Overlord Kal-El of Earth, they say—and they've said it so much today, it would've been harder not to hear. You may call me Nazhura, if you wish." She leaned in close, her tone mild and confiding. "And I'm not the overlord of anything, sadly."

Clark grinned, because that was the kind of half-joke Kal-El would appreciate. Probably why she'd made it—someone like her had to be used to sucking up to big egos, making herself seem pleasant and unthreatening to anybody more powerful than she was. Not a tactic Kal-El would mind having used on him, to say the least.

"There were rumors you might attend," Mulballu added, which the Lanterns were going to be happy to hear; they'd planted a few where they could, but whether word was going to be picked up and spread was hard to control, especially when you needed that spread to feel unforced. "And as many who didn't believe them as were eagerly spreading them, until your ship arrived in-system. A Kryptonian world-maker! No one's seen such a thing in a thousand cycles, and certainly none of them expected that to change today."

Clark offered her a look of mild interest, a shrug of one armored shoulder. "To me, it's just my ship," he said with a laugh. "The largest ceremonial vessel I had on hand—a relic of the empire of my people, and a reminder that I didn't fall with them."

"Yes, of course," Mulballu agreed, and then glanced past him. "And your guards, are they Kryptonian also?"

"Hmm?" Clark followed her gaze, as if Kal-El might have forgotten which particular bodyguards he'd actually brought with him on this trip, out of the hundreds he had to choose from. "Oh, no. There are a handful of other species on Earth, you know—my ancestors decided they might prove themselves useful to us, and they have. That one is an Amazon. Her kind fought in the ancient war, the first time the New Gods came to Earth."

Mulballu went briefly still, and then her weight shifted—the barest carefully controlled reaction, but Clark dared to hope that it meant what he wanted it to. That that was known universal history after all, that it was almost as startling and impressive to show up with an Amazon on hand as it had been to be here himself.

"Ah, yes," she said aloud, carefully even. "I've heard of such a time, in the First Age. How remarkable. And these two?"

"Both the same species," Clark assured her, and hooked a thumb at Victor. "I made a few improvements to that one—otherwise he'd look more like this," and Bruce was helpfully standing there like a perfect anatomically correct model, as if Clark had thought ahead and decided to bring along a visual aid.

"Improvements," Mulballu echoed, eyes wide. She took Victor in, up and down, and then Bruce, clearly making the side-by-side comparison and understanding what a drastic process Kal-El had to be describing with that single word. "So much of his body! Remarkable. And these are native to Earth?"

"Oh, yes," Clark agreed. "Astonishing, isn't it? They look almost Kryptonian, if you squint. Little wonder my people thought they showed some potential, I suppose—"

"Excuse the interruption, but I just have to ask, however did you do it?"

Mulballu's approach had broken the ice; another alien had dared to inch a little nearer to Kal-El, and this wasn't anyone who'd been part of the Lanterns' work-up, a six-legged being with too many eyes to count, on stalks, that moved crabwise.

"Hm?"

"Your improvements," the alien clarified, with an apologetic little bob of about half their eyes. "I enjoy improvements! But above perhaps fifty or sixty percent of the original body mass, my own hardly ever survive."

Jesus. Clark didn't let himself acknowledge the sharp heave of nausea in his gut, didn't let himself look at the slave behind the crablike alien—feathered, beautiful, vivid as a bird-of-paradise, but Clark could pick out the gleam of metal from between those feathers, and he didn't know whether it would be better or worse to know the exact percentage.

"I'm sure it depends on the method," he made himself say, in an easy unconcerned tone. "The change machines my people use are very efficient, and highly effective."

"Change machines?" Mulballu repeated, gaze sharp.

They'd agreed beforehand that it would be a little too conspicuous to just throw the phrase mother box around. Kal-El was supposed to have grown up in an isolated community that had been using the boxes for ten or twenty thousand years, that was used to having them to hand—and not used to thinking about where they'd come from.

So he didn't offer up the name, even though it was one they'd probably recognize. He just shrugged again, and held out his hands to indicate the approximate size. "Artifacts of my people," he said. "Cubes, like this? They generate energy for us, shape environments—make improvements. I'm not engineering-guild, but I use them myself now and then, for personal projects."

And yes, that had to be enough. Mulballu's eyes had gone wide again, and the crablike alien's stalks were all extended to their fullest length, tense with surprise.

"I see," Mulballu murmured after a moment. "How fascinating." She tilted her head. "I'd assumed it must have taken you some practice, considering the marks on that one."

Clark blinked, and glanced at Bruce.

And—oh. She meant the scars. She had to mean the scars; to Clark, they were so much a part of the map of Bruce's body, one of the things that made it Bruce's, that that was the only thing they really meant to him. But once he gave himself a second, he could see what they probably looked like to Mulballu. Stretching over Bruce's skin in so many different directions, and clearly made by so many different things, spiderwebbing burns and the stippled leftovers of road rash scattered alongside the starbursts left by bullets, the neat thin lines of grazes and the tight short dash-marks of stab wounds.

She apparently didn't go for improvements herself. And there were gradations, Clark had noticed that already—the slaves with clothes versus the slaves without them, bodyguards versus personal slaves. Bruce was far from the only one in the crowd with a decent collection of scars, whether they showed up as white lines in fur or crumpled furrows in scales.

But almost all the other slaves who were presented the most like Bruce—naked as if they were used to it, delicate decorative collars attached to leads of silken thread or slim jeweled chains—didn't have them. It was a sickening metaphor, but it was the only one Clark had: they were the indoor pets, not the guard dogs.

That probably should have occurred to Clark a little sooner. But he couldn't ask Bruce about it now, and if he had, Bruce might not have had an answer, considering he hadn't made any effort to cover them up. Had he thought of it? He must have, but he hadn't brought it up either.

Which probably meant there was something Clark was missing, but there was nothing he could do about it. He just had to hope that giving the obvious answer was going to be good enough.

"Oh," he said aloud, and then smiled at Bruce, reached out with the hand that was holding the chain and brushed the backs of his knuckles up Bruce's arm, an absent caress. "No, no, not at all. This one's far too great a prize to me as he is."

Bruce had been standing there silently since Mulballu had first approached them—utterly passive, gaze lowered, a slave who knew nothing was expected of him for the moment except decorative obedience. But Clark spoke, and something in his stance, the way he held himself, shifted indefinably; he looked up, met Clark's eyes for a single piercing instant, and Clark had no idea why.

But it didn't matter. Alien standards for politeness and deference had to vary a lot, and Clark had just finished saying how valuable Bruce was to him. Even if Mulballu had noticed Bruce's downcast eyes, had guessed that it was somehow expected, she'd be able to infer just as well that Bruce was allowed to do otherwise, now and then.

"He's a prince among his kind," Clark elaborated, looking back at Mulballu, letting the traces of Kal-El's pride and pleasure in owning such a slave linger on his face where she'd be able to see them. "His species can be terribly stubborn—I've had to deal with the occasional rebellion. You know how it is."

She didn't; she was a businesswoman, not a queen, and she'd already acknowledged as much. But Kal-El didn't have room in his head to consider what that difference meant, and Mulballu was much too diplomatic to point it out to him.

"Yes, of course," she said instead, with one of those decorous eye-smiles.

"Well! Last time, it was him they rallied around. Magnificent warrior, by far the best of them. I defeated him, of course, and took him for my own—but it was a close thing. Not only strong, but clever; a worthier opponent than I'd expected." Clark beamed, and then paused for a single beat, as if Kal-El were assessing the expression on Mulballu's face, and finding something in it he hadn't anticipated. "Isn't that how you assess value, among your slaves?"

Mulballu shared a sidelong glance with a quarter of the crablike alien's eyes. "Methods vary," she hedged at last.

"Ah, of course. Well, among my people, defeating a great warrior is worth considerable respect, and more still if you're able to tame them well afterward." He offered Mulballu a confiding sort of smile. "Considering he almost defeated me in combat several times before I was able to subdue him, well. It was especially satisfying to—master him, at last."

And Clark had never been a very good liar, but some lies were easier to tell than others. This one was almost the truth, if you looked at it a little sideways—and then counted some of the things Clark had imagined afterward, alone and flushed hot in his own bed, other ways that fight could've ended once Bruce had had him on his back on the floor—

Anyway. Even the translator had to be able to convey a certain degree of innuendo in his choice of words, the speaking pause he'd dropped in there. And if it didn't, well, Clark just had to hope Kal-El's pleased leer wasn't difficult for Mulballu to interpret for herself, if she had enough familiarity with the facial expressions of humanoid species.

"I'm sure it was," Mulballu said, and yeah, okay, maybe it had worked—her voice had dropped low, turned a little throaty, and judging by the lazy heaviness of her eyelids, that was amusement with a good amount of warmth in it.

"Impressive indeed," the crablike alien agreed. "Perhaps a demonstration might be in order at some point, if the circumstances allow?"

"Of course, of course," Clark said. "I'd be delighted to show him off, by all means." He turned, offered Bruce a smug pleased look, and if Bruce had a problem with the idea, it didn't show—but maybe he was just saving it for later, behind closed doors.

Great.

Mingling with the crowd started to go a little more smoothly, after that.

Kal-El had made a splash, in exactly the way they'd been intending; Clark had to field a decent number of questions about Earth, about Kryptonians and Amazons and humans, the kinds of slaves he had and what they were good at, what he used them for. But it wasn't anything that sounded particularly suspicious, or like anyone was trying to poke holes, searching for a weak link somewhere in his story.

They were invited to select private quarters for themselves on the station instead of returning to the World Engine to rest, an offer from the consortium that had done the bulk of the organizing. Without being able to actually ask whether it was a good idea, Clark decided he might as well accept—if it was the wrong move after all, then Kal-El could always claim the accommodations hadn't been up to his standards, or something equally obnoxious.

He didn't miss the attention everyone who approached the administrative consoles was giving to each other's selections. Once they'd actually reached the rooms themselves, he made a point of looking around and sniffing a little, unimpressed, before he turned to Victor and said, "Well? Go on, do a sweep."

"Overlord," Victor acknowledged, with the tiniest wry quirk tucked into one corner of his mouth.

The rooms were actually beautiful. A suite, and a large one—the entire ring, along the inner surface of the station, seemed to be packed with them, more than enough room for everyone who'd showed up even if each of them had insisted on taking two. Everything had the same flowing graceful lines as the docking bay had had, with its clean sweeping walls, its ramps and archways; and Clark, looking around, felt a helpless pang. Whoever it was who'd built this, whichever ancient people had put all this effort into making something beautiful, they'd vanished and left it behind, only for someone to take it over and use it for something like this.

"Overlord—a moment of your time, if you would be so generous?"

Clark blinked, turned and met Diana's eyes; she tilted her head, indicated one of the side rooms that Victor had already worked his way through, and he sighed as if put-upon, went and drew Bruce along with him.

"As you foresaw, Overlord," Diana said, with a long steady look, and gestured to the surface of the low table in the center of the room.

A handful of devices—and most of them looked completely different from each other, different materials and different designs. Jesus. Just how many people had managed to bug these quarters? And Diana wasn't calling him "Overlord" just to tease him, but Victor couldn't have missed any of them, surely.

Clark huffed a laugh, out loud, and bent down, ran his fingers over the surfaces of a couple of them, while he tried to think it through. God, he wished he could just talk to Bruce, but never mind. Maybe Victor had missed some—on purpose. It would have been impossibly stupid not to look for any at all. But at the same time, what would happen if they found every single one, destroyed them all? They'd probably just end up with even more, snuck in here every time they stepped out for so much as a minute. At least if Victor left some in place, then they knew where they were.

That had to be it. But it made something in Clark want to fold itself up in a corner and not come out, to imagine they were going to be watched, forced to pretend, every moment of every day until they left this place.

He swallowed, kept his face still and didn't let any trace of that feeling touch it. "Well," he made himself say. "Predictable, aren't they?"

No reason not to make a bit of a demonstration out of it. He straightened up again, and like this it was easy to let his eyes go hot, to blast each device in the line into a smoking puff of debris with a quick flash of laser vision—timed precisely enough that he didn't so much as scorch the surface of the table underneath.

There had to be some stories going around about Kryptonian abilities. They must have colonized at least a few yellow-sun worlds, even if Krypton hadn't been one. But in the last days of what was left of the Kryptonian Empire—Krypton had been it. Maybe Kryptonians hadn't seemed particularly impressive, with that as a baseline. Maybe a lot of people thought those older stories had been exaggerated.

And if they had, well, now they knew better.

He'd just blown the last one away when Victor stepped back into the room. "Overlord—the main personal chamber has been cleared for you."

"Excellent," Clark said.

Victor inclined his head, and then lifted it again, and added, with a certain even weight, "I wouldn't take less than the utmost care. Every listening device planted in that room has been removed."

Every listening device, Clark thought. Not every monitoring device. He must have left a camera or two, then; they'd still have to act, in the way they stood and moved and gestured to each other. But god, if they could actually talk to each other in there—that would be more than enough.

"Yes, yes, very well," he said aloud, dismissive. "Come along, then," he added over his shoulder, to Bruce.

And he'd been right, he must have been, because the moment they'd stepped into the room, the moment the door sealed itself shut behind them, Bruce murmured, "We should be able to talk in here. Just don't move your mouth too much."

"Every listening device," Clark agreed, and strode across the room without faltering. That low generous surface had to be a bed—it was barely raised off the floor, but he crouched down and pressed a hand against it and jesus, it was like a dream, memory foam taken to an impossible extreme.

At least they were probably going to be able to sleep pretty well.

He straightened up, and turned.

"He'll probably pick a few more zones to clear," Bruce told the floor, and he was following his own advice: he'd kept his voice low, and his mouth was barely shifting with the words. "Get all the cameras out of one, all the audio bugs out of another; both, but only in one or two spots. We'll have to keep track of where we are, take turns briefing each other as necessary. If all four of us keep disappearing into a dead zone and then stepping back out again—"

"We'll look like we know, and we're meeting in them deliberately," Clark agreed, and then rubbed his face. It was all right to, wasn't it? Kal might, if he were tired and a little bored—and jesus, this was exhausting. Was this how Bruce thought, the kind of byzantine labyrinths he forced his mind to work through, all the time?

"We need to appear to believe we aren't being surveilled at all, within these quarters," Bruce said, and then fell silent.

Clark had a moment's warning in the sound he made, the soft brush of the bare soles of his feet against whatever alien material it was that formed the floor in here. And then Bruce touched his arm, slid a hand gently from his wrist to his upper arm, just beneath the shoulder armor, and squeezed: a slave approaching a tired master, gently urging him to rest and allow himself to be taken care of.

Except the thing Bruce said next was, "A prince among his kind."

Clark felt his face go hot, and hoped distantly that whoever it was whose transmitters Victor had left intact in here, they'd decide Bruce had just said something really obscene.

"Sorry. I—sorry. You must've had a plan, I know that, because you didn't cover the scars up, but I didn't think about it. I should've asked what you wanted me to say—"

He stopped. Bruce was giving him that look again, almost exactly like before—the first moment he'd met Clark's eyes at all since they'd stepped off the World Engine, in the middle of that crowd of aliens; the sharpness of it, the intensity.

"I," Bruce said, and then stopped. His throat worked briefly. "I should've told you. The oversight was mine." He stopped again. "I thought you'd choose the obvious explanation."

Clark blinked at him, bewildered. "I did."

The barest line carved itself between Bruce's eyebrows. "You did," Bruce repeated. "You believe the clearest, most obvious explanation for why the personal slave you chose to bring with you to this event is scarred as heavily as I am is because—your culture values warrior slaves, and I'm the best you'd ever seen."

Well, yeah, Clark carefully didn't say. "Bruce, I don't—"

"Slaves get punished, Clark," Bruce said.

Oh.

"Oh," Clark said, and swallowed.

Now that Bruce had spelled it out—he did have a point. Punishment was probably much closer to a universal point of understanding; it wasn't something that needed to be explained by specific cultural values, a lingering tradition from an otherwise obscure corner of the galaxy.

On the other hand, Clark couldn't imagine he'd have been able to do it. He liked to look at Bruce's scars because of what it meant that he could; because Bruce's bare skin was a gift, and so was the physical proof of every single thing that had ever tried to kill Bruce and failed. But that didn't mean he liked the wounds that had put them there. And turning to someone with a smile to say he'd inflicted them himself, broken Bruce down by beating him and burning him and carving holes in him until there'd been nothing left of him, god. It made his throat close just thinking about it.

"You could have told them anything," Bruce was saying, soft but pointed, deliberate. "That I'd been vicious, impossible to reason with. That you'd had to deal with me as harshly as you knew how, and it still almost hadn't been enough. That you—"

"—made you bleed," Clark said slowly.

Bruce went silent.

"Hurled you into the side of a car," Clark added. "Lifted you off the floor by your jaw. That kind of thing?"

Bruce didn't say anything.

"That I needed to punish you. That I wanted to. That's the—that's the obvious explanation, according to you."

"It would have made sense," Bruce said at last, quiet and even, and his face was unreadable.

"Sure," Clark said.

They were being watched, even if they weren't being listened to. Neither of them had moved in a minute or two. It made sense, it was only reasonable, that Clark should keep the illusion going, with Bruce standing in front of him like this—that he should do something like lift his hand, the chain still wound loosely around his knuckles, and run the backs of his fingers along the line of Bruce's jaw.

"I didn't think of it," he admitted. "I wouldn't have, no matter how much time I'd had."

Bruce's eyes fell shut. He was utterly still against Clark's hand, a statue but for the warmth of him.

Far too great a prize to me as he is—

"It's fine," Bruce said. "Yours worked. An equally useful angle: the more impressive your slave is, the more impressive you are for owning him. I'll be able to adjust my approach to match."

"Your approach?"

And at that, Bruce opened his eyes again, met Clark's and raised an eyebrow—it looked teasing, probably, to a camera. Or whatever alien sensors had been shoved into the ceiling in here, anyway.

"You're saying you didn't break me physically. You didn't grind me down until I'd given up. You fought me and you won, but you were impressed with me; you like me strong, skilled, capable. You're—proud of me, pleased with me." He paused, considering. "In point of fact, you've probably done that before. To you, boasting about me is boasting about yourself, if you can win respect on Overlord Kal-El's Earth by owning a famed warrior."

And—that was what Bruce had been doing back there, wasn't it? The way his weight had shifted, that subtle change in how he'd been holding himself. It hadn't been an accident, Bruce frantically trying to tell Clark to shut the hell up, that Bruce had lifted his eyes and met Clark's right at that moment. Bruce had been improvising on the fly, that was all; understanding, in the span of a handful of words he'd never expected Clark to say, that Clark's choice for their joint backstory meant Bruce was no longer the kind of slave who kept his eyes trained on the floor.

"Right," Clark said.

"It's fine," Bruce said again. "What's done is done." His thumb shifted on Clark's arm, traced out a wide slow arc, out and back again. "It went well, overall. We just need to locate Dirramao, see what we can learn—give Victor a chance to access his ship's systems, if we have to."

Right. The mission. That was what mattered.

But Clark didn't have a chance to agree out loud before the door unsealed itself.

It was Diana. She inclined her head and said, "Overlord," and—there were probably still listening devices in the hall, which would be able to catch Clark with the door open.

He drew a breath, and got a grip. "Yes?" he said, in the vaguely annoyed tone Kal-El might use, interrupted right when he'd hoped to relax with his favorite slave.

"Forgive the interruption," Diana murmured. "The communications console with which these quarters are equipped—there is a message."

"A message?" Clark repeated.

"An invitation," Diana elaborated, and then cleared her throat, and her voice was even, steady, when she said, "The illustrious and respected Marra Dirramao would be greatly pleased if you would be willing to join him for a banquet he'll be hosting for certain select guests, in two hours."

"Oh," Clark said.

So maybe they weren't going to have that much trouble finding Dirramao here after all.

Chapter Text

The banquet room was beautiful.

Not in the same clean, elegant way as the station's architecture—or, well, presumably it was, somewhere behind the explosion of lush ornamental hangings, the twisting statuary positioned at intervals along the walls, the dim glow of a thousand golden lights that hovered in the air, suspended.

Apparently Marra Dirramao's taste in interior design ran in a direction Clark couldn't help but categorize as "Hollywood Genghis Khan with a side of alien warlord".

It had been a tense couple of hours, preparing. Bruce had been right about the way they'd need to communicate with each other—switching off who was briefing who, checking in and sharing their thoughts on the best approach in an extended game of telephone without giving away that they were aware of the bugs.

But at last, they'd been ready. Victor, of course, was fine as he was; Diana had taken the opportunity to change into one of her long, sweeping Kryptonian dresses, ornate doubling and redoubling layers and the arching metal frame that twisted over the curves of her shoulders.

Clark had gone in kind of the same direction—swapped out the armor at his shoulders, the overshirt, for a different jacket, longer and a little more glittery, and a similar radiating metal fixture. It felt like a good choice, reminiscent of the armor that had been there instead but lighter, less substantial; a signal that he wasn't there to make enemies, at least not if he didn't have to. And—

Well. And it was a little bit like Bruce's collar. It had felt like a reminder that they were together in this, no matter what they had to do while they were on-mission.

As for Bruce, it turned out he'd brought some of the other options the ship had fabricated for him. He hadn't switched to the skirt; Clark hadn't been able to decide whether that was good or bad, and still couldn't, given that what he had switched to had been a set of body chains.

Clark had been doing a pretty good job not—not getting hung up on Bruce's body. It was something Kal-El was supposed to be used to seeing, and Bruce had kept up that attitude, that casual ease, that suggested with every motion that there was nothing particularly unusual or interesting about the fact that he was naked, and had been for practically an entire day.

But the chains simultaneously failed to actually cover anything, and naturally drew your eye to follow them over the contours of Bruce's chest and waist, his hips, his thighs. Clark could tell they were Kryptonian in origin precisely because they were so goddamn good at it; Kryptonian clothing wasn't designed around the use of color or contrast. It was all figure, form, emphasizing curves and shape, and apparently body chains had been no exception.

He'd thought he'd been exhausted by maintaining his cover. But instead, it was turning out to be a relief. Clark might be twisting himself up so tight he was going to snap over Bruce's—everything. But Overlord Kal-El had simply brought his most valued slave on a trip with him, and had decided on a whim to attend a dinner thrown by a man he'd never heard of, for the sake of seeing whether anything on offer there might please him.

And the banquet room was beautiful. A hall, really, and it was laid out not like a medieval banquet hall, no ornate chairs or long high table, but like a Roman dinner party: massive couches, low and plush, each one made to fit several people who were all reclining. They were arranged at right angles to each other, around an equally low square table.

Several of Dirramao's other guests had already arrived. Mulballu was there, which was a surprise—but maybe she'd managed to maneuver her way into an invitation thanks to having made the first friendly overtures toward Clark.

And her slave, the one with the brilliant red-toned scales, was kneeling at her feet, in the open space between the couch and the table.

Okay. Great.

Kal-El strode in without hesitating, glancing around the hall as if more curious than impressed. His gaze passed over K'rr Khavvi, Paajasiila, a green spiked face Clark recognized as Shejamriz Saboth, without particular interest, because he hadn't spoken to any of them and knew nothing about them—but Mulballu, he knew, and she smiled with those lovely eyes, tilted her head so the jewelry dangling from her crest jingled and chimed, and then one of her ears twitched, swiveling: an invitation to help himself to the seat beside her, if he liked.

Kal-El smiled, and took it. Diana and Victor followed in his wake, silent and unobtrusive, and they couldn't have asked for a more convenient setup if they'd tried. Victor would be able to stand in place behind Clark, and reach out to any technology in range, and no one would notice a thing. He wouldn't need to move, wouldn't need to talk to anyone, and the attention of everybody in the room would be focused low, at the level of the couches and the food. Even the other bodyguards stationed against the walls would probably spend most of their time watching the people reclining around the table, keeping an eye out for any sudden movements or dangerous tension.

He was just going to need time to work. Time, and Marra Dirramao.

Clark had time to sit down, to greet Mulballu and remind himself aloud of her name, as if he hadn't bothered to think of it since he'd last seen her.

She looked amused, but not irritated. "Yes, Nazhura, that's right," she agreed mildly.

"Wonderful," Clark said, already looking away. He reached out absently, trailed a finger down the outside of Bruce's nearer thigh and then followed the curve of the chain that draped across it, and Bruce moved smoothly into the touch; Clark's throat closed, his heart jerking in his chest, before he realized Bruce had been moving for a reason, folding himself up to sink neatly to the floor at Clark's feet.

There was enough space for him to kneel there, but not much more. And it was—it was something they'd practiced, Clark seated and taking up space with Kal-El's entitled arrogance while Bruce sat on the floor and leaned against his shin or thigh.

But jesus, Bruce had always had clothes on before.

Clark's layers felt like nothing in comparison, nowhere near enough to shut out the sensation. The muscles of Bruce's back, the tension that rippled through them as he shifted his weight for an instant and the release that followed as he sat back more comfortably against Clark's leg. The heat of him; even the motion of his chest expanding as he breathed felt wildly intrusive when Clark was so helplessly aware of his bare skin, those few slim clinking chains, pressed against the rich fabric of Clark's robe where it draped his knee.

Clark realized belatedly that he still had a hand half-extended. With Bruce seated, there was nowhere to put it except the nape of Bruce's neck, unless Clark wanted to slide it into his hair, and—no, that was really not a good idea. Except the nape of the neck wasn't that much better: all that soft skin, usually sheltered by the collars of Bruce's dress shirts and suits, and now it was right there, Clark's palm covering the width of an entirely different kind of collar.

It was an oddly vulnerable place, the back of the neck. A thousand times that, when the person touching it was Superman—when the person touching it could, with only a mild amount of effort, exert enough pressure to not just break your neck, but crush the bones to splinters.

But Bruce didn't so much as tense. The whole expanse of his back, one shoulder, was pressed against Clark; if he had, Clark wouldn't have missed it.

"—of—Earth, yes? Right?"

Clark blinked, and made himself look up.

It was Paajasiila who'd asked, those soft angled eyes focused attentively, one tentacle curling beckoningly in tacit encouragement of an answer.

"Yes, exactly," Clark said with Kal-El's best vaguely bored smile, hoping dimly that she hadn't gotten his title wrong. Though it wouldn't exactly be out of character for Kal-El to have allowed his attention to wander, and then answer the question authoritatively anyway.

Lucky for Clark.

"Ah," Paajasiila sighed. "The Defiance of Apokolips! To meet a citizen of such a world—great honor, great honor. And the slave, too?"

"Hm? Oh, yes," Clark said, and let his hand slide up, thumb against the side of Bruce's throat, fingertips against the line of his jaw on the opposite side, spanning the base of Bruce's skull.

"No fear?" Paajasiila pressed, translucent eyelids flickering sideways and then vanishing again. "The army that broke Apokolips, secure under your heel? Truly secure?"

Clark sank back against the couch, slung an elbow up and over the back of it and favored Paajasiila with a lazy, smug smile. "You said it yourself. Earth needed an army to defy Apokolips the first time. It nearly broke them, in the First Age. But the second time?" He let the smile widen. "The second time, it was me."

Paajasiila made a soft chittering noise—Clark would've assumed it was chastising, except she also found his hand on the back of the couch with an extended tentacle, ran the end lightly up his forearm and then retreated. So maybe it had been more of a flirtatious murmur of awe, instead.

And then a fifth guest, on the couch opposite Clark, let out a jeering squawk that seemed somewhat less ambiguous.

Clark had seen him in the crowd earlier, but hadn't spoken to him. The arms dealer, Ztelzt Tlin—he was hard to miss, what with the brilliant crest of feathers that arched over his head, vibrant red and yellow and green. He had sharp golden eyes, round and piercing, and a beak. The translator could capture whatever chirps and screeches he was actually making and turn them into words Clark was able to understand; but it couldn't eliminate the shrill scraping overtones, and the sound of his beak under every word came across like a repeated dismissive cluck of the tongue, as he said, "And you expect us to believe that?"

Clark shrugged, and didn't let his smile slip. "It'll be the truth whether you believe it or not."

Paajasiila made another chittering noise, this time sly and sharp—a snicker.

Tlin's head cocked, and Clark couldn't help but silently make the comparison: birdlike. "Sure. So a lone Kryptonian is powerful enough to take down Darkseid's most famed general, and yet you've rotted away happily on that pathetic backwater for, what? Ten comet cycles? Fifteen?"

Clark had no idea what kind of time scale that was supposed to be, but Kal-El wouldn't particularly care. It would amuse him, Clark decided, to be confronted by someone like this—Mulballu had been aware she was outranked and outmatched, had acknowledged as much, and Kal-El had been pleased by it; who did Tlin think he was, to refuse to do the same?

"A pathetic backwater the New Gods of Apokolips wanted for themselves," he observed blandly.

Tlin clacked his beak. "What a boast—when you couldn't drop a nut for entire comet cycles without hitting an army of the New Gods trying to invade somewhere or other."

"Make up your mind, Ztelzt," Mulballu murmured, so warmly it almost sounded friendly. "Does defeating a general of Apokolips mean something, or doesn't it?"

Tlin hissed a little through his beak, feathers ruffling up in a wordless puffing warning and then gradually smoothing down again. But he sat back, ceded ground by it, and then switched gears: reached out, and ran a clawed hand through the mane of his own slave. "It isn't as if it's never been done before," he said. "Surely you're aware of that, Overlord? Why, the people of Ukayat have done it—isn't that right, Atish?"

"Yes, master," the maned slave said quietly.

"Atish is Ukaiti," Tlin repeated, pointed. "His kind are great warriors, great fighters."

Looking at him, Clark could believe it. The mane was long pale hair, the rest of his fur short; but aside from that, and the fur in and of itself, there wasn't actually anything particularly lionlike about him—he didn't seem to have claws, retractable or otherwise, and he did have too many eyes, and his ears were more like a deer's, long and folding, lowered decorously into the flow of that mane. And yet it was hard not to draw the comparison anyway, because he looked, moved, like something effortlessly and powerfully lethal, something that could chase you down and drag you to the ground before you knew what was happening.

And it wasn't actually funny, but Clark still had to bite down on the inside of his cheek. Jesus, Tlin just couldn't help himself. He must've been hearing stories about Kal-El all day—about Kal-El, and about his warrior slave, how skilled and valuable that slave must be to be considered so precious to the Kryptonian who'd defeated Steppenwolf. And now that Tlin had the chance to try to one-up Kal-El to his face, he was absolutely taking it.

"Knives," Tlin was saying. "They fight with knives—Ukaiti knives are prized throughout the universe for their craftmanship, their balance, their ability to hold an edge. They're given their own knives as children, and they're taught to treat them as a part of themselves. No Ukaiti would ever willingly surrender a knife, or allow theirs to be taken from them, because for them to lose the knife that is yours is death."

"Is that so," Clark said, with Kal-El's poorly-concealed disinterest.

Tlin's feathers ruffled up again. He'd probably been hoping for a little more attention, attention or even jealousy—possessing a warrior of a kind Kal-El couldn't ever have seen before, not on his pathetic backwater of a world. But Kal-El was supposed to be looking for a market for his own slaves, not trying to buy new ones; and that was actually really convenient, because Clark didn't particularly want to give this dick the satisfaction.

"I'm told yours almost defeated you personally. What weapon does he use?"

Jesus. Clark couldn't help but shift his weight, rub his thumb in a few quick strokes against the soft skin beneath Bruce's ear—warning and reassurance both, before he gave the answer, because, well.

Clark knew it wasn't something Bruce liked to think about. But Bruce had said it himself, sitting around the table in the Hall and debating how to handle this mission. The best lies are almost true.

"Against me? It was a spear," Clark said, and then let a new, slow smile cross his mouth. "But he's—versatile."

"Little wonder he's so valuable to you, then."

Clark turned, and felt a cool weight tighten his gut, a certain sharp focus settling inexorably over him.

It was Marra Dirramao.

Just prowling through the entryway to the banquet hall, and "prowling" was the only word Clark could possibly have used for it—where the longer Clark had looked at Atish, the less the man had seemed like a cat, it was almost the other way around with Dirramao.

Clark had thought, in the first moment Xilatlixax had shown the League his image, that he was built like a predator, furred and sharp-eyed. He had the slit pupils, the intense fixed stare of a cat, and he moved like one, smooth and lazy, sleek.

There were differences, too. He had six limbs instead of four; Clark couldn't spot a tail anywhere. But, meeting his eyes, Clark had no trouble imagining him crouched over a mouse, entertaining himself for the hell of it even after he'd already won.

"All due apologies for my tardiness," he was saying, inclining his head as he rounded the set of dining couches.

And Clark got lucky—he'd decided to cross the room by passing behind the couch Clark was sitting on, instead of Tlin's and the opposite wall. Which meant Clark had an excuse to look behind him, and meet Victor's eyes for an instant.

Victor was already concentrating; Clark recognized the tiny furrow in the middle of his forehead. But he'd found what he needed, he must have, because when Clark's glance reached him, he dipped his chin the barest fraction.

Dirramao had something, then. Something he was carrying, some sort of personal communicator or digital identifier, something, and Victor was going to be able to interface with it, if he just had enough time to work.

Which on the one hand was great news. On the other hand, that probably meant no skipping out on dinner early.

"How gratifying to have you all here," Dirramao added, as he reached the head of the room. He had a couch all to himself, and the way he laid himself out on it, stretching out luxuriously, was just like any barn cat Clark had ever seen, smug and satisfied in a patch of sun. "Some of you have been my trusted business partners for a long time now," and he gave regal acknowledging nods to Tlin and then Saboth on one couch, Khavvi and Paajasiila on the next. "And some of you will perhaps come to appreciate the opportunities open to you at my table, hm?"

Mulballu got a nod, too—and then Dirramao's fierce green eyes fixed themselves on Clark.

"Overlord Kal-El of Earth," he murmured. "It seems as though I have heard talk of nothing else today, and yet no one knows anything about you, no one has ever done business with you before." He leaned forward, two limbs on the same side flexed beneath him. He hadn't blinked once. "Tell me, how did you come to learn of this place? How did you come to decide to join us here?"

Which was actually a pretty fair question, considering how hard the cover story was leaning on Kal-El's previous ignorance of the wider galaxy. But that meant Clark already had an answer.

"The invasion of Apokolips was a pressing reminder that there's more to the universe than my own star system," he said, with another of Kal-El's lopsided, unconcerned shrugs. "And, luckily for me, Steppenwolf brought his flagship with him. A flagship with a great deal of interesting information stored in its archives."

Dirramao's eyes narrowed just a little. But he didn't press further—hummed for a moment, low in his throat, and then said, "Luckily for all of us, perhaps! Well, enough. No one enjoys talk of business on an empty stomach. Come, come."

He hadn't raised his voice, hadn't activated any kind of signal as far as Clark could tell. But just that quickly, a dozen slaves had entered the hall in a line, with vast gleaming platters supported by a wide variety of different kinds of limbs.

Food, presumably. None of it looked familiar, and some of it was in frankly distressing shapes and colors. But some of it was steaming, some of it in bowls, some with implements alongside that Clark could guess were utensils—yeah, pretty definitely food.

Beside him, Dirramao was explaining idly to Mulballu that the results of his guests' entry bioscans were used to ensure none of the dishes served at his table were incompatible with any one of his guests' physiology; naturally, no one wanted a mix-up in the servery to result in illness or worse.

Interesting combination of reassurance and warning, Clark thought. That he had access to the bioscans of every single person on the station, and that they were in fact detailed enough to be used to prepare a menu, of all things—clearly the Lanterns hadn't been wrong to think he'd have caught them almost instantly. And talking warmly about being careful to avoid unfortunate accidents was never going to come across as anything but threatening, coming out of a crime boss's mouth.

Still, there wasn't much point in making such a show of going on about it if you were about to turn around and poison the punch. And it wasn't like Clark had anything to worry about; he'd have felt the buzz of tingling pain, a slow tide of nausea already rising, if anything on the table in front of him had had kryptonite in it, and he didn't. Short of that, he was pretty sure nothing else could kill him.

The first platters were deposited. More continued to arrive. Slaves were entering, leaving, passing each other, a brief swelling commotion of movement.

Clark found his gaze snagging on a point of contrast: stillness. One of the slaves had ground to a halt—because Tlin had caught them by the arm, drawn them close, and was speaking quietly into the large mouselike shell of their ear.

Clark opened himself up reflexively, listening, except his translation unit couldn't help him at that kind of distance, when Tlin wasn't speaking to him. God, he wished he could turn around and ask Diana.

But he couldn't, and a moment later Tlin was done, had let the slave go. Clark looked away before Tlin could catch him watching, and the only other things in front of him were the platters of food, and Bruce.

Clark still had a hand closed idly around the back of Bruce's neck. He rubbed his fingertips up into the short fine hair there, and a ripple—a shiver?—passed through Bruce, who turned into the pressure of it, tipped his head back against Clark's knee and left it there.

Jesus. Earth, the League, the Hall, felt impossibly far away right now; but suddenly the only thing Clark could think was how much he'd have liked to do this anywhere but a crime lord's dinner party. How much he'd have liked to sit in the lounge in the hall just like this, with Bruce's head against his leg and Bruce's hair sliding between his fingers—

"And of course I am more than happy to extend my hospitality to your most prized possessions, as well," Dirramao said.

Clark looked up.

Another set of trays. Smaller, much smaller than the platters on the table, and Clark could tell at a glance that the food was simpler: it came in way fewer colors, for one. Less varied textures; the trays looked mostly the same, in comparison to the much more diverse selection arrayed across the platters on the table.

And this apparently qualified as a courtesy, respectfully extended to each guest's personal favorite. Even slaves weren't just slaves—favorites, pets, were different from bodyguards, different again from the slaves doing the serving. There was always someone who was less important, owed less, worth less.

Not that Kal-El would think twice about it. That was the way his world worked, too.

The slave with the mouselike ears was among those handling the trays. Clark had wanted to keep an eye on them anyway, and was distantly surprised when they made it easy, deferentially approaching the table toward Clark's side, maneuvering nimbly past Mulballu's scaled slave.

And offering Bruce—an empty tray.

Clark blinked. His helpless first thought, Clark Kent's rather than Kal-El's, was that there had been a mistake; but no, that didn't make any sense. Nobody could possibly have carried a tray all the way around this hall, along the wall to the head of the table and then past the couch to reach Bruce, nothing else in their hands and nowhere else to look, and not noticed the tray had nothing on it. And this was the slave Tlin had pulled aside, the slave he'd spoken to.

Given an order to, maybe.

Clark wished, for a single powerful second, that they'd come up with a reason for Bruce to be the one who'd conquered Earth, who'd subdued and mastered a Kryptonian he could show off in a collar. Bruce would already be five steps ahead, but Clark had to think it through. At least he had superspeed, could let the world slow down around him a little and give himself a moment.

Was Tlin hoping he would make a fuss? Make a fuss, and have Dirramao take offense, even? Storm out? Or had Tlin not thought it through that far? Maybe he'd just wanted to teach Kal-El a quick petty lesson about thinking his slave was better than anyone else's—maybe he'd seen the opportunity and taken it, and just wanted to enjoy seeing Kal-El feel slighted.

Clark bit down on the inside of his cheek. He couldn't ask Bruce directly. But maybe he could—could offer Bruce a chance to let him know what Bruce thought he ought to do.

He huffed a laugh, which he figured he could play off as either Kal-El believing it was a joke, or Kal-El perceiving the slight but shrugging it off, whichever turned out to be the better option. And then he leaned down, moved his hand to cup Bruce's jaw from behind and tilted Bruce's head, so he could murmur into Bruce's ear, "What a fine selection you have there."

"Mm," Bruce agreed, and tipped his head back—Clark hadn't quite been expecting it, and his mouth skipped down the line of Bruce's cheek, almost to the side of Bruce's exposed throat, before he could draw away and stop it. "I'd offer to share, Overlord, but that wouldn't leave much for me," and his tone was dry, wry acknowledgment rather than escalation.

Okay. So he wasn't encouraging Clark to pretend to be angry about it.

"Yes, I see what you mean," Clark said, against the angle of Bruce's jaw, and carefully didn't shiver at the sensation of Bruce's stubble against his lip.

"But perhaps I shouldn't be so stingy," Bruce murmured, "when my lord has always been so generous to me."

Oh.

It was just more teasing, the familiar flirtation of a slave who was comfortable in his place and knew what was permitted. But coming from Bruce, that was pretty unambiguous.

Clark drew a slow breath, and ignored the way his heart had kick-started its way to pounding. "And you've never wanted for anything it was in my power to give you," he said, "and never will."

It came out a little quieter, a little rougher, than he'd wanted it to. Bruce met Clark's eyes, a dark intent look that was like a punch in the gut, and okay, apparently they were going all in on this.

"Set down that tray," Clark told him.

Bruce lowered his eyes. "Yes, Overlord," he said softly, and slid the tray to the floor in front of him, beneath the table, neatly out of the way.

"Good," Clark said.

Conversation had continued around them. Mulballu was busy making the most of what was probably the best opportunity she had ever had to charm Marra Dirramao in person, hanging on his every word with bright interest. Paajasiila and Saboth were arguing with Khavvi, but not in a way that made Clark think anyone was likely to pull a weapon anytime soon; they were eating already, Paajasiila gesturing with a tentacle wrapped around some kind of bright red spiral-shaped fruit. And Tlin—

Tlin was ostensibly listening, leaning in Saboth's general direction with one clawed arm folded casually under himself, reclining across his half of the couch, nodding absently along. But Clark caught his gaze flickering sideways, once and then a double-take as he understood that Kal-El was looking at him.

Checking. Checking to see what Kal-El was going to do.

"Now, let's see," Clark said, and reached out to the closest platter, picked up something purple and rounded that didn't look too frightening.

He didn't know whether Dirramao had considered the slaves in his physiological assessments. He was just going to have to make the best guess he could, based on how things tasted—thank god his expanded senses included taste, and if worst came to worst, he could grab Bruce and get him back to a stasis pod on the World Engine within half a second, before anything could even finish poisoning him.

He probably should have thought a little more about how it was going to look, maybe. He took a bite out of the purple thing; it was crisp like a pear, as it turned out, though the taste was savory rather than sweet. Nothing bitter, nothing sharp, and Clark had seen the medical file Bruce kept on himself—Bruce didn't have any allergies.

He at least remembered to raise his eyebrows, act out Kal-El responding with mild interest to this unfamiliar food.

And then he lowered it, closed the fingers of his other hand in Bruce's hair and tipped Bruce's face up toward him, and—

It made sense, didn't it? Kal-El felt entitled to Bruce, to his body. Kal-El wouldn't just hand it over politely and wait for him to eat it himself. It made sense to press the purple not-a-pear to Bruce's mouth, to hold it there and wait for him to bite it.

And Clark could admit there was a certain petty satisfaction in lifting his eyes away from Bruce to Tlin, across the table, to watch his stupid hooked beak gape.

He gave himself another bite of the not-a-pear, and then let Bruce finish it. He tried to find other things like it, at first—things that were easy to hold, the crisp wide circles of some kind of sliced-up blue vegetable, slim crusty sticks that were softer on the inside and might have been baked.

But he couldn't keep that up forever. Small orange blobs, tart and sweet in a way he thought Bruce might like, except he couldn't—he was—he had to keep his hand still while Bruce closed his lips around it, and there was no way to keep his fingertips from pressing into the curve of Bruce's mouth.

It got worse, a bit at a time. He was getting less careful, or maybe Bruce was; at first it was just Bruce's lips, around his fingertips or against the side of his hand, his palm. But then he picked out something juicy, and Bruce bit into it just the wrong way—swallowed it down and then murmured, "Oops," and licked Clark's knuckles, Jesus Christ. Clark watched himself pick up something that looked like a tiny pastry, frothy with what had to be alien icing, and he ate one himself and then pressed the next into Bruce's mouth whole, further than he needed to, and couldn't stop staring at Bruce's lips as they closed around his fingers—

He realized abruptly that Tlin wasn't the only one sneaking glances at them anymore. That was what made him aware, at last, that maybe it was weird that he was being so careful: acting like he was Bruce's taster, trying everything first before he let it get anywhere near Bruce's mouth.

Or maybe it was just the feeding thing. Maybe he was implicitly insulting everyone else at the table, giving the same food they were all eating to a slave right in front of them.

But in a way, Kal-El was his armor. Kal-El didn't know how things worked around here, had his own customs and his own rules. Bruce was the greatest prize Kal-El had ever possessed, a deeply personal treasure; surely it just made sense that Kal-El would look after him. Would make a point out of it, even, so that anyone who believed they could get away with insulting Bruce would understand that they'd been wrong—

Well. At least, Clark thought, he could be pretty sure nobody was looking twice at Victor.

By the time the banquet was over, Clark was pretty sure Ztelzt Tlin wouldn't spit on Kal-El if he was on fire. Mulballu had looked progressively more and more amused, eyes heavy with delighted satisfaction. And K'rr Khavvi, weirdly enough, had leaned in all the way over Paajasiila and extended kvir mouthparts to click out what Clark's translator had interpreted as effusive praise for the good behavior of his slave—some pets were so spoiled, but Kal-El's had waited so patiently for every bite! What a pollen-heavy honey-flower, which Clark could only guess was a hell of an endearment, coming from an insectoid.

And Marra Dirramao had seemed—well. Entertained. Clark hadn't been able to help flashing back to his own thought, Dirramao lying back and idly batting a mouse to death. He'd been working with Tlin for a long, long time, according to the Lanterns, and yet he'd neither prevented Tlin's little stunt in the first place nor intervened to stop Kal-El from escalating. Clark got the feeling that he wouldn't have minded if they'd each sprung up from their couches and started tearing each other apart; that he'd have just leaned back on his four elbows and watched the show.

But at last, Shejamriz Saboth begged everyone's pardon for excusing themselves, and made it possible to get the hell out. Clark tried not to rush it—he had no reason to turn around, but Bruce could, to talk to him. One game of semaphore, Clark drawing Bruce's attention so Bruce would be able to look over his shoulder and make eye contact with Victor, Bruce relaying Victor's silent answer back to Clark by dropping his gaze, lowering his eyelashes: of all the classic systems, one blink for yes and two for no, and Bruce didn't follow that one up with another.

The whole way back to their quarters, Clark's fingertips tingled with the remembered sensation of Bruce's mouth against them.

But there was nothing he could do about it.

Practically the moment they were through the main door, Victor made an appropriately side-long but unmistakable suggestion that Overlord Kal-El might like to relax for a little while and look out at the stars. Their quarters included an observation area—a balcony, really, except that it obviously wasn't open to space, had a long transparent viewing panel covering almost a full hundred-and-eighty-degree view. Clark obediently went out, leading Bruce along, because this had to be another of the dead zones Victor had cleared for them, and if Victor was about to make a report on whatever he'd picked up off Dirramao's personal tech, then Bruce was going to want to hear it.

Until he knew for sure, though—

He didn't let any uncertainty show on his face. He stood, leaning a shoulder against the pane so it was almost as though he were standing on the station's hull instead, and he drew Bruce in by the chain, hooked a finger on the width of Bruce's collar and stroked it absently. "Bet you enjoyed that, didn't you?" he murmured, in case there was still a listening device in here that could pick it up.

"As if you could doubt it, Overlord," Bruce said blandly.

But the look on his face and the line of his mouth were soft; the way Bruce looked when he was teasing. It was a reassurance, anchoring—both the teasing itself, and that glimpse of Bruce, Bruce Bruce, real and perfectly intact under there, almost close enough to touch.

Clark smiled before he could stop himself, tried belatedly to ladle some of Kal-El's arrogance on top and only sort of succeeded. The look on Bruce's face changed, no longer teasing but something else, and he lifted a hand, set it against Clark's chest.

And then Clark heard Victor's steps approaching, the metallic scuff of his feet against the floor, and turned his head.

"Overlord," Victor said—but he was standing in the entryway to the observation balcony. He crossed it toward them, and inclined his head, and the next thing he said was, "All the audio bugs are gone out here, too. That end," and he cut a glance to one side, "is clear of visual surveillance. If you really need a break, just go all the way down toward that wall, and—" He shrugged, mouth slanting. "Stand on your head, juggle, whatever you need to do. I don't judge."

"Noted," Bruce murmured, bone-dry, and stayed right where he was; but he was doing that thing again, that thing that made it seem like it was totally normal that he should be standing here in body chains, talking to Victor with his hand spread across Clark's chest. "Dirramao?"

"There's good news and bad news," Victor said. "Good news is, he does in fact carry around a personal data device, and it's designed to be able to link up to his ship's systems without a physical interface. Didn't give me any trouble."

"And the bad news?" Clark said.

"There's actually a little more good news first, believe it or not. There's a pretty strong chance the Lanterns were right—he might be buying worldeater. He had some notes in there, the terms of a deal he negotiated with Tlin and Saboth. Didn't do anything convenient like label it, but the size and weight measurements worked out about right when I did the math, if it's worldeater in standard canisters. And the asking price came out pretty close to the Lanterns' best estimates for what might be on the table, too."

"But there's still bad news," Bruce said.

"Not bad bad," Victor offered. "Just kind of inconvenient. We're a little early; they haven't actually made the transfer yet. Tlin secured it, Saboth brought it in, but Dirramao's insisting on inspecting it before he pays out."

"So we need to wait until he actually has some before the Lanterns can arrest him for it," Clark said.

"Exactly," Victor agreed. "I should be able to make some adjustments to the console in here—conceal a signal, maybe piggyback on somebody else's. I'll report in, let the Lanterns know, and they can do whatever it is they do. Get a fleet ready to jump into the system, so they can nab him as soon as we do nail him with it. But it's probably going to be at least a few more days before we see any movement."

"Makes sense," Bruce said, with a crisp nod, and then raised his eyebrows at Clark. "Give me a minute to change into something more comfortable?"

The words were deliberately flat with irony; Clark grinned at him, feeling an indefinable weight lift, and said, "Don't tell me that means the skirt again."

But he lifted his hand, touched the end of the chain where it had linked itself to Bruce's collar and drew it away; and it felt his intent and came free, to allow Bruce to step away.

"I like the skirt," Bruce said mildly, and then turned, with one last long glance for the sake of the surveillance, and left.

Clark had an instant to be grateful Bruce had spent most of the day trailing a pace behind him. He'd done a decent job not letting himself stare at Bruce's body too much, except when Kal-El might have lingered on it; but maybe that was just because he hadn't had Bruce's naked ass in front of him. Jesus.

He kept his eyes fixed firmly on Victor, and cleared his throat. "Any other dead zones I should know about?"

"I left an audio bug in the washroom," Victor said. "Figured that was better than leaving visuals available in there, and you can still talk if you need to, as long as you're quiet and you leave the taps running. It's not water," he added, "but it's safe to use—some kind of synthetic fluid, inert and recyclable. And it still makes a noise in all those basins."

"Sounds good," Clark said. "And, um. Listen, Victor, I—"

He didn't bite his lip. Couldn't. No audio meant he was allowed to stammer as much as he wanted, out here; but Kal-El wouldn't bite his lip, talking casually to his bodyguard inside his own quarters.

"I'm sorry about earlier. The—improvements thing."

Victor shrugged a shoulder. "It's fine. That was part of the plan, we knew it was going to come up. Wasn't your fault. You're doing a good job, man. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes here, and I'm glad I don't have to. I just get to stand there glaring at people with Diana, it's great."

Clark laughed, startled. "Yeah, next time, I'm definitely going as the bodyguard, for the record."

"We'll rock-paper-scissors for it," Victor proposed, and then inclined his head before he stepped away, a pointed gesture for the cameras. "Thank you for your patience, Overlord," he added more loudly, in the entryway, but even that couldn't wipe the smile off Clark's face entirely.

The observation balcony was actually pretty nice.

Clark lingered on it for a little while even after Victor had left. He could hear Victor working on the communications console, the familiar bright hum of Victor's circuits; and Diana was singing to herself under her breath somewhere slightly further away, words Clark recognized as one of the Kryptonian songs they'd learned together from the scout ship, twenty thousand years old.

And there was—there was Bruce, too.

Clark didn't even have to search for his heartbeat. It was easy to find, habit. He probably wasn't actually changing into the skirt. But he was moving around, the angle about right for the main personal chamber Kal-El was going to be using, and that was familiar, too: the sound of Bruce's feet against a floor, Bruce breathing.

There was going to be a new test waiting for him when he went in, and he knew it. They'd been awake for about twenty-six hours of their new thirty-two-hour day—no wonder it felt like it had been about a month since they'd stepped off the World Engine. Lots and lots of species had some kind of rest period, and there was no reason not to take advantage of that fact to give themselves time to regroup.

But the personal chamber still had surveillance on it, too. And Clark was pretty sure Bruce wasn't taking a separate bed.

He dragged it out as long as he felt he could. And then he went in—didn't wish Victor or Diana goodnight because Kal-El wouldn't, just strode straight to his room, and sure enough, Bruce was waiting for him.

The body chains were gone, at least. That was something, Clark thought dimly.

Bruce raised an eyebrow. "Want a hand?"

Because—right. Clothes.

Kal-El had worn slightly fewer layers to the banquet. Clark couldn't decide whether that made it better or worse; it did take less time for Bruce to help him undress, which meant less time stuck standing there with Bruce's hands moving over him. But it also meant fewer layers under those hands, fewer layers between those hands and Clark's skin, and Clark had already felt a little too aware of the warmth of Bruce, of the amount of space between him and Bruce at any given moment.

He waited it out, and he didn't do anything stupid. He thought about Kal-El, about how normal and unremarkable a routine this was for him. It gave him something to concentrate on, making sure he was standing the way he was supposed to, making sure he looked bored.

And this time, the undersuit could stay. An underlayer like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to sleep in, after all.

The bed felt just as good as Clark had expected it to, after he'd pressed his hand into it earlier. By default, there wasn't a pillow; but he found a panel off to one side that made the material that covered it flow up into a thicker shape at the head of the bed, which was basically the same thing.

And he was bracing himself for Bruce to get into it with him—to offer him all the reasons it made sense to, in a ventriloquist's undertone that would keep his mouth still for the cameras.

But when Bruce did settle onto the bed, it was at the far end: stretched out, long and warm and solid, just past the lump of Clark's feet.

"I assume you'd blow a gasket," he murmured, "if I tried to argue for the floor."

Right. Slave. Not supposed to wear the same clothes, or eat the same food; probably also not supposed to sleep in the same place.

"Damn right I would," Clark muttered back, and shut his eyes.

Bruce was right there anyway. It was probably better—safer—than having Bruce up here. Less room for Clark to make a mistake. Clark should be grateful.

But he hated it. He hated how far away Bruce felt, after the banquet: after having had Bruce kneeling against him, head on his thigh; after having slid his fingers into Bruce's mouth, over and over and over again.

It was for the best, though. He told himself that, and kept his eyes shut, and eventually, after what felt like a long, long time, he fell asleep.

The next few days were just as long as the first had been, and a lot more repetitive.

Having earned a second look from Marra Dirramao seemed to have given Overlord Kal-El a certain cachet. Everyone and their mother seemed to want to talk to him—to make vague icy threats, to say warm charming things about how amazing it was to meet a real live Kryptonian, or to ask increasingly off-putting questions about the characteristics and abilities of humans, Amazons, and Atlanteans. What uses Kal-El found they were each best-suited for; what sorts of environments they could survive in. Clearly the neutral atmospheric mix employed here for the duration of the summit was appropriate, but—

He was invited to more dinners, but also to meetings, negotiations, and what had begun as one or the other but then devolved into long dull shouting matches he had no context for. He was lucky, probably, that Kal-El was too self-involved to take any interest in territorial disputes over distant stars, in who'd broken which deal first and who'd tried to blow up whose personal vessel entirely unprovoked.

The best and worst thing about any of it was Bruce.

Bruce was probably carefully tucking away every word, memorizing all of it. Bruce was probably going to walk out of here understanding the state of the criminal underworld in at least twenty sectors of the universe better than the Green Lanterns did.

He knelt wherever he had deemed it appropriate, in front of Clark's seat or beside it, and he leaned into Clark's body, Clark's hip or thigh or knee. Clark didn't even have to try, was barely playing a part at all—kept thinking to himself belatedly that he ought to do something, act in kind, and then discovered he'd already been running a hand through Bruce's hair, leisurely.

It was the most time he and Bruce had ever spent in each other's company, essentially uninterrupted. It was the most time he and Bruce had ever spent touching each other.

Kal-El also wasn't insisting on having both of his bodyguards attend him at all times. Victor and Diana were taking it by turns to pretend to be searching the station—not for a bioweapon, but for any sign that Apokolips might have sent agents to pursue their revered overlord. Victor had managed to create a link-up between the communications console and the station's docking system, which meant he could interface with just about any ship he wanted to from there; Saboth had a small fleet of smuggling vessels, and Victor was tracking all of them, checking for signs that anything had been removed from any of them, or that Dirramao had gone aboard.

The wait was making all of them tense, stretching them thin. Sometimes Clark felt so itchingly impatient he could've screamed—if Dirramao would just move already, they could get this over with, and then it would be done, they could go home. They could go home, and Clark could settle back into the quiet, suffocating kind of pining he was pretty sure he could live with, instead of being wrenched apart by degrees; Bruce's bare body lounging against him, Bruce's skin and hair and mouth under his hands, but Bruce himself not an inch closer than he had ever been to Clark, not in any way that counted—

In retrospect, though, he should have appreciated the calm before the storm.

Clark wasn't expecting anything in particular when he saw Ztelzt Tlin coming toward him along the station's main promenade, except maybe some more petty sniping. Tlin had veered back and forth between pointedly ignoring Kal-El, and attempting to cut him down—sometimes even in ways that might have worked, except that Kal-El had no particular reason to care about his standing in the sector, even without the part where he was a fake cover identity. Tlin had presumably polished these tactics by using them against people who did, and who would respond, defend themselves, in return; he seemed to have a lot of trouble accepting that they just weren't that effective a choice, in this specific case.

At the bare minimum, though, Clark did get a certain petty satisfaction out of pretending that Kal-El mostly hadn't noticed—that Tlin hadn't made enough of an impression for Kal-El to even bother hating him.

"Overlord," Tlin clacked out, when he was near enough.

Clark raised his eyebrows, blinked and turned his head a little as if he hadn't noticed or registered Tlin's presence until Tlin had spoken. "Oh—Tlin," he said, with a bland smile.

"Enjoying yourself? Found a market for your marshbirds yet?"

Clark didn't need a dictionary to guess that that was derogatory, coming from a feathered tree-dwelling alien who used drop a nut as an idiom.

But Kal-El had gotten more than enough inquiries, over the last few days, to brush it off with easy smugness, even a patronizing sort of pity.

Clark committed to it, offered Tlin a condescending smile and said, "Mm, still considering my options. I'm sure you know how it is."

Tlin parted his beak and hissed, thick parrot-like tongue extending for an instant, and his crest flared up into an even higher arch than usual.

But he got himself back together, with a moment's effort—shook out his feathers a little, let them settle back into place, and said almost evenly, "I don't suppose you've thought about putting on a bit of a—demonstration."

"A demonstration," Clark repeated.

"A fight," Tlin said.

Clark glanced at Bruce.

He couldn't help it; he didn't know what to do. The first day—he'd said, blithely, that he'd be delighted to show off his pet, because he'd thought Kal-El would. He still did.

But he hadn't said it to Tlin. There was room to maneuver, if he needed to. And Kal-El wasn't Clark. Just about everything he'd said about Bruce had been true: Bruce was strong, and smart, and he'd beaten Clark, badly enough that he could've killed Clark if he hadn't stopped.

With lead time—with equipment, a strategy, a plan. Humans weren't actually at the bottom of the scale, in terms of strength and physical ability. But they also weren't at the top, and Clark wasn't about to trap Bruce in a cage match with an unfamiliar opponent Bruce might not be able to prepare for.

Bruce met his eyes, lifted one eyebrow in the barest arc.

Which meant he wanted more details, Clark thought, more information.

"My Atish," Tlin was saying, and then he jerked the lead in his hand, a thick woven cord.

Atish didn't stumble; used to it, or else he'd been able to guess it was coming. He took one quick stride forward, and—yeah, there was the knife. Clark hadn't been able to see it at Dirramao's banquet, but that was because Atish had been folded up on the floor, then, and apparently he kept his knife strapped to the outside of one lean thigh.

"With the knife?" Clark said.

"Can't your prize handle a knife? And you say he's the best among all his kind."

Jesus. Clark gave him a long, steady look. "It'll be the truth whether you believe it or not," he said, a pointed echo.

"So you like to say," Tlin snapped, clearly recognizing the words. "Will you put him forward or not? Will he fight or not? Come, Kal-El, prove your prize is worth the value you place on it."

Clark cut a glance at Bruce.

Bruce was looking at Atish—sizing him up, assessing. And then Bruce met Clark's eyes, and dipped his chin.

He'd decided he could do it.

Clark could probably still get them out of this. Scoff at Tlin, laugh him off dismissively and leave. But hell, maybe this was the better option. Maybe he'd shut up, back off, after this.

Yeah. Right.

But Bruce had decided he could do it, and Clark didn't have any reason to stop him. Or at least not any reason Bruce would accept.

"A fight," Tlin said again. "Here, now. Yours and Atish, that's all. Atish with his knife, yours with whatever weapon he'd like. Agreed?"

"Sure," Clark said. "Agreed."

"To the death, then," Tlin cried, pleased.

"To the—what?"

Bruce moved instantly, gripped Clark's arm. "Overlord," he said, low, a sharp warning in it.

Cover. Keep the cover. Kal-El wouldn't like that he'd been tricked; but a bit of a crowd had already started to gather, anyone close enough to have heard Tlin and curious enough to want to know what was happening. And Kal-El wouldn't want to back down, either.

But—jesus. Bruce couldn't.

Diana was the one who'd come out today, Victor busy monitoring Saboth's ships. She was standing at Clark's other shoulder, tense and silent, and Clark wished fiercely that there was some way to volunteer her instead. She'd be fine, better than fine. She could do whatever she had to do.

But Bruce couldn't. Bruce couldn't—he couldn't kill someone. He wouldn't. The closest he'd ever come had been Clark, and it had almost destroyed all that was left of him. Bruce once endeavored to snuff out all the light within himself—and if he did it again, like this, just because Clark had walked him straight into a trap—

"Overlord," Bruce said again, closer, nearer.

He'd stepped forward, pressed up along Clark's side. Clark just hadn't quite felt it, because right now he was numb and sick by turns.

Clark turned into the solid strength of him, gripped his arm—Kal-El might, in frustration, and jesus, did he ever hate having to second-guess every single thing he was doing—

"Bruce," he said, because Atish had a name, because that made it okay.

"You agreed," Bruce murmured, almost gentle, as if Clark needed the reminder. "I'll fight."

"Bruce—"

"I'll fight, and I'll win," Bruce said.

Clark's throat closed. There was no way to say half of what he was thinking, no way that made any sense for Kal-El; that he knew Bruce might, that that was almost as bad as imagining Bruce losing, that it was impossible to decide which he was more afraid of. That one of those outcomes would leave Bruce dead on the floor, and the other would kill him.

But Bruce had to know it. Didn't he? He had to know it, and he was still standing there, looking at Clark, unwavering, even calm.

"Trust me," he said.

And there could only ever be one answer to that.

"All right," Clark heard himself say.

What Tlin had meant by yours with whatever weapon he'd like had apparently been yours with whatever weapon he'd like and can lay hands on within the next two seconds. Bruce squeezed Clark's arm, quick gentle pressure, and held still as Clark separated the chain from his collar; he lifted his hand away from Clark's arm to touch the chain, still hanging there in Clark's grip, and then looked over his shoulder. And almost the instant he had, Tlin was making a sharp fist-like gesture with his claw-tipped fingers, and Atish leapt forward.

Clark almost moved in response, sheer reflex in the face of an attack even if this one wasn't technically aimed at him, but something caught his wrist, restrained him sharply. He felt an opposing jerk of pressure, a sensation that might have been pain if he had been human but was only a vague sort of shock, impact.

"Kal-El, don't," Diana said into his ear. "Wait."

And it was only then, Diana anchoring him in place, that his brain started to work again—that he understood what had happened.

The chain. Bruce had still had a hand on it when Atish had rushed him, and that jerk, that pressure, had been him yanking the other end free of Clark's fingers, knowing it wouldn't hurt Clark even if it would've broken half the bones in a human's hand.

Clark knew, from any dozen lectures of Bruce's about how little Clark really understood about fighting, that knife fights didn't typically last very long.

But knife fights also weren't typically between Bruce and an alien who'd been raised to believe they were the most important thing in the universe.

Atish's knife really was beautiful. Moderate in length, clearly well-balanced, with a graceful curve to the blade, a gleam along the edge that said he probably cared for it tenderly.

The first swing he'd taken at Bruce had been at an upward angle. And Bruce hadn't tried to stop it, to chop his arm back downward; he'd slung the chain under Atish's arm, helped it swing up and past him harmlessly.

"Remember," Diana murmured. "You can stop this, if you must. You can do it so quickly Tlin won't even know what's happened."

Right. She was right. Clark had thought it himself, at the banquet—he'd been worried about poison, toxins, back then, but the point was the same. If he had to, he could put himself between Bruce and Atish's knife; he could let it bounce off him, pick Bruce up and run all the way back to the World Engine with him, and by the time he was back, Tlin might—might—have been able to blink once and begin opening his eyes again.

Bruce had wrapped the chain around Atish's knife arm, now, looped it and pulled to trap it. Atish simply opened his trapped hand, let the knife fall from it and then caught it by the hilt in his other hand, and immediately stabbed inward toward Bruce's side.

Bruce jerked back, let the chain slide free—rolled away and came back up onto his feet, and jesus. Clark felt a weird stupid lurch of heat; he hated that he did, but he did. He'd always gotten kind of caught up, whenever he had the chance to watch Bruce fight. But it was a hundred times worse like this, able to not just imagine but see the play of Bruce's muscles across the width of his back, in his arms and his thighs—the smooth rolling motion of them, point and counterpoint, every relentlessly evocative contour.

Atish came at him again. Bruce slapped the strike neatly away. The next time, he seemed to have a better feel for the movement, for Atish's preferred angle of attack; he caught Atish's lead arm in a lock, trapped the knife against himself. The blade cut him, a line of dark blood beading there—but all the momentum of the stabbing motion had been lost entirely, and by Bruce's standards, Clark knew, it was a scratch.

Atish was the stronger of the two of them. He used that lock to hurl Bruce to the floor of the promenade. But Bruce was used to fighting people who were stronger than he was, who weren't human, and he knew how to use that fact to his advantage; Atish had put him right where he wanted to be, and he struck Atish's leg, not against its natural bend but toward it.

Atish stumbled. Bruce pressed the advantage, caught him around the throat and let his own body weight do the work, and then they were both on the floor. Atish rolled, lurched up and tried to stab downward at Bruce, and Bruce let him—guided the blow past himself but didn't try to change its direction, and Atish's arm, his shoulder, dropping like that made it easy for Bruce to push him into rolling further than he'd meant to, back onto the floor, and this time it was with Bruce's knee pinning that arm.

Bruce still had the chain. He used it again, but this time it wasn't to loop Atish around the arm, but to loop the knife. He pulled it taut, yanked with a single sharp effort of his entire upper body.

They'd both been fighting in utter silence; all the noise, murmurs and gasps and ripples of reaction, had come from the crowd stalled in a loose circle in the promenade, watching.

But right then, Atish screamed.

Clark didn't understand what had happened, at first. He thought it must've been Atish's hand, that the chain had gone around the back of it, or around Atish's fingers, and what Bruce had been able to do to Clark without hurting Clark at all had crushed Atish's hand.

But nothing looked wrong to him. There was no blood. He couldn't see anything that seemed bent the wrong way, not even when he looked through Atish's skin, through muscle to bone and back out the other side.

The chain, tangled around it, had brought the knife sailing up at an angle. Bruce let the arc of it find his newly free hand, and caught it, and came to his feet.

The crowd had gone quiet. And Bruce was—Bruce was standing there, the knife still caught in the chain in his hand, breath quick, smudged with blood from the slice across the front of his shoulder. But he didn't do anything. He turned away, like the fight was over, and his eyes found Clark.

"To lose the knife that is yours is death," he said, not loudly but clearly.

And then he crossed the promenade, the open space left clear for the fight, without looking away from Clark. He loosened the chain, slid it free of the knife. And then he went to his knees at Clark's feet, let the chain tumble to the floor between Clark's feet in a slim snaking pile, and held the knife up—not closed in his hands, but suspended on his upturned fingers. Offered up to Clark, for the taking.

Jesus. Clark felt—he didn't know what the fuck he felt. Dizzy, disoriented, with the impossibly powerful swell of relief, the moment he'd understood exactly what it was Bruce had just done, how neatly he'd flipped Tlin's own trap back on Tlin himself. And without the sick, curdling fear of the worst things Clark had been able to imagine to drown it out, he was—

God, he was hard.

Watching Bruce fight like that; watching Bruce fight like that for him, to show off for him, to put someone who'd challenged him in their place. Having Bruce stalk toward him that way, breathing hard, lean and naked, and with that smear of blood—Clark wanted to clean him up, bandage him, pet him, at the same time that he wanted to bend down and tip the plane of Bruce's shoulder up to his mouth and lick it off. With that smear of blood, with Clark's collar still around his throat. Offering him Atish's knife like there was no question who it belonged to, because Bruce had won it off Atish, and everything that was Bruce's, that was Bruce, belonged to Clark.

Belonged to—Kal-El.

Clark took the knife out of Bruce's hands. Smiled down at him, held the knife by the hilt and slid the fingers of his free hand into Bruce's hair, smoothed them down to the nape of Bruce's neck and gripped Bruce there. "Well done, slave," he said, and he didn't know whether Kal-El would have meant it as a reward in itself or a promise, but he pulled Bruce's head back, tilted Bruce's face up; and Bruce let him, and Bruce's mouth parted, and Clark kissed him.

Hard, deep, declarative. Once.

And then he drew away, and straightened up. Turned, and faced Tlin with a smile—tilted his head, and raised his eyebrows, and held out the knife.

"This is yours, I think?"

Tlin looked furious, eyes sharp, crest high. "Keep it," he bit out. "I don't have any use for it now."

He meant Atish, too, Clark understood distantly. Atish, who still lay on the floor where Bruce had left him, staring at his own empty knifeless hand as if he didn't understand how the very sight hadn't already killed him.

"If you say so," Kal-El said, and shrugged, and looked over his shoulder at his bodyguard. "Take him to the ship, then," he added, to her; and, almost as an afterthought, he tossed the knife through the air.

Ukaiti—sharp. But Ukaiti also meant the balance was good. She caught it by the hilt, and then inclined her head. "As you will it, Overlord."

Chapter Text

Clark held himself together, somehow, until he and Bruce had reached the team's quarters.

The instant he was through the door, he moved helplessly, unseeingly, toward the balcony. The balcony—the wall, at the end. The dead zone, visual and audio, where no one could see him, no one could hear him, because he was—he had to—

God. He couldn't handle this. He couldn't bear this. At first he'd thought this would be the same, really, as any other time he'd ever hidden himself away, any other time he'd ever pretended he was someone else. And then he'd understood it was going to be harder, but he'd decided it had to be because Kal-El was such an entitled dick, no one he wanted to be able to pretend he was. He'd decided it had to be because of this place, because it was so unfamiliar; because of the surveillance, because even on an oil rig, even on a fishing boat, there had been places he could go where he was alone, where he was himself.

But now, he was pretty sure he'd worked out what the heart of the problem was. The heart of the problem was that he wasn't alone anymore.

Not that he'd been alone back then, not exactly. But he'd have crumbled in a second if he'd been in a room with Mom. He'd left her, gone anywhere she wasn't, and he'd been able to pull it off just fine, because there hadn't been anyone who knew any different, who understood there was any more to him than he'd told them there was.

Diana had been right, and at the same time so, so wrong. She'd meant it as reassurance, when she'd been talking about the Black Zero: We are with you now. You are not alone.

And he wasn't, and he couldn't bear it, because when he wasn't alone he couldn't stop feeling it.

He wasn't even alone now, because there was Bruce.

He hoped distantly for a minute that maybe—maybe Bruce wouldn't come near him. Maybe Bruce would decide he just needed some space, and he'd stay out there puttering around; because they'd agreed to be careful, to always make sure there was someone outside the dead zones, someone being watched. Maybe Bruce would stay away from him, and he could put himself back together, and then he'd go back out when he was ready, and they'd pretend none of this had ever happened—

"Clark," Bruce said.

Clark squeezed his hot eyes shut, let his forehead tip forward against the wall. Smooth alien metal, cool and solid and unmoved, everything he wasn't.

"Clark, I'm sorry."

What?

Clark sucked in a breath, rubbed a hand over his face and swiped at his eyes, and then made himself turn around.

Bruce had—Bruce had put clothes on. Kryptonian ones, that was all. He did like the skirt, apparently. The skirt, but he hadn't paired it with the cut-off top this time—a sash, that was all, probably draped and tied with some incredibly complicated traditional Kryptonian knot he'd made the ship teach him to tie a month ago. Because he was still bleeding from the shoulder, and he probably hadn't wanted to get it on the shirt. Jesus.

"I couldn't explain," Bruce said, low, hurried. "I didn't intend to make you think I was going to kill him. But I couldn't explain, Tlin would have heard me—"

He ground to a halt, brow furrowing. Clark realized belatedly that he had no idea what his own face was doing, but he couldn't—he couldn't figure out how to fix that. He felt raw, cracked-open, and he couldn't keep covering it up. He couldn't make himself cover it up anymore.

God, he was tired.

"And that's not what's wrong," Bruce concluded slowly.

"No, you were—that was perfect," Clark heard himself say. "You were perfect. I'd never have thought of that, I'd never have remembered. I'm not—I'm not angry. I don't know why you always think I'm angry with you." He shook his head, helpless; tilted it back, leaned the weight of it against that nice solid wall, because it felt so heavy right now. "I don't know how you can be so smart and so stupid at the same time."

"Clark," Bruce said, and took a single long step closer.

"I just," Clark said. "I can't—I can't. I can't be this person. I can't stand there and watch you have to—and then—" Jesus, he couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear himself. He was going to be sick.

"Clark," Bruce said again, quiet, and touched his face. "You were perfect, too."

Clark sucked in a shuddering breath. He needed to keep talking, needed to get Bruce to understand this.

"You were perfect, back there. You did so well."

Jesus. Clark let his eyes fall shut. He was aware, dimly, that his whole body was trembling, fine shivers working their way through him without a pause.

Bruce moved his hand, against Clark's face. Touched Clark's jaw; opened his hand, spanned Clark's throat, thumb swiping just beneath Clark's ear on one side and his fingers loose against the side of Clark's throat on the other side, the tips of a couple of them just barely sliding beneath the edge of Kal-El's thick heavy shirtcollar.

"You told me this was what I was afraid of," he murmured. "But I'm not. You told me this was what I'd seen in you, and I'd have to see it again, and I'd hate it. But I don't. You wanted to stop me back there, and you could have. In an instant, you could have, and there wouldn't have been anything I could've done about it. But I asked you to trust me, and you did.

"And you're telling me you can't do this—as if you didn't, back there? You were perfect, Clark. They all believed you. You did exactly what you were supposed to do, exactly what I asked you to do."

He moved again; altered the angle of his thumb, let his hand slide around to the nape of Clark's neck, and Clark—gave. Swayed, head tipping back, to make room for it, to follow the pressure of it.

Bruce went still. And then he let go, a sudden punishing loss, and Clark didn't know what he'd done wrong, didn't even know how to try to ask; and then a faint familiar clink filled his ears.

The chain.

Bruce had picked it up off the floor, after Clark had taken Atish's knife from him. He must have. But Clark hadn't been thinking clearly, hadn't reattached it to his collar. Bruce had just carried it back with him, loose, and now he had it in his hands.

Clark stood there against the wall, shivering, waiting. His heart was pounding; he could feel it in his throat, his wrists, his ribs. His thighs—his cock.

Bruce crowded him in. Slid the chain around him, behind the back of his neck, and drew the end down until it hung loosely along the front of his shoulder.

"Good," he said, very softly.

Clark shuddered, and dug his teeth into his lip.

Bruce didn't leave it there, the way Clark had when they'd been—practicing. He let the rest of the chain fall, a slim glittering trail to the floor, and then he took that short end and he drew it across the front of Clark's throat, and he pinned it to the wall with his palm.

It wasn't tight. Nothing like the way he'd yanked it taut, pulled it with all his strength, to force the knife out of Atish's hand. Nothing like the way he'd torn the end of it away from Clark, where Kal-El had kept it wrapped idly between and around his fingers.

But it was—it was enough. A soft persistent tension, just enough pressure to tell Clark that this was where Bruce was asking him to be, and it was the easiest thing in the world, in the universe, to do it.

He dragged in a ragged breath. He'd needed this. He'd needed to stop being Kal-El, and he'd needed to stop having to—to think so hard, to guess and second-guess, not knowing from one moment to the next what was going to happen or what he was going to have to do about it when it did.

And now all that weight was gone. Bruce had taken it, just like that.

Clark shouldn't have let him, though. Clark should take it back. This wasn't—this wasn't supposed to be happening—

"Good," Bruce said into his ear.

"Okay," Clark heard himself say, and stayed right where he was.

After maybe ten minutes, Bruce let him go.

He felt okay. Clear-headed. He felt like he could think, like he could breathe.

Bruce gathered up the chain and put it in his hand, and he cleared his throat sheepishly, picked out an end and pressed it to Bruce's collar until the last link melted and reformed, attached.

"Overlord," Bruce murmured, wry but not unkind.

And then something let out a low chiming tone.

Clark blinked. Bruce had heard it too—he'd turned his head, frowning.

"The communications console," he said.

Clark put Kal-El back on in an instant, and that was easier, too: the look of vague curiosity he'd have on his face, wondering who might have sent him a message. Bruce followed, of course, quiet and obedient, and stood there while Clark tapped the console awake and brought up the message.

It was short, to the point. "Trouble with Tlin's slave, on the ship," Kal-El muttered to himself, sighing, and shook his head.

But Clark knew that couldn't possibly mean what it seemed to. Trouble with the slave—Atish hadn't seemed likely to give anyone trouble, in the state he'd been in, and certainly not Diana.

Diana wanted them to come to the World Engine, then, and that was just the best excuse she'd had to ask.

"Dirramao paid—the worldeater has been moved."

Clark blinked. "Wait, really?"

"Can confirm," Victor agreed, with only the barest hint of strain in his voice.

"Victor has already signaled the Lanterns," Diana went on quickly. "But we've all read the file—many times. Even a hint that something is wrong, and Dirramao will run, and it will be twice as hard to catch him in the midst of such a thing again."

"And you think he might notice something?" Bruce said.

"He has already," Victor admitted. "Sorry. I locked down everything as fast as I could. But this station's big, and these ships are—I've never had to deal with this many different kinds of systems at the same time before. I shut down everybody's sensors, so no one's going to see the Lanterns closing. And I shut down comms, so nobody on sensor duty is going to be able to tell anybody there's been a blackout until it's already too late.

"But Dirramao's crew is good." Victor shook his head a little, reluctantly admiring. "He must've really put the fear of god into them. One of them opened up a line. I cut it off, but—"

"But he heard it get cut off," Bruce filled in, "and he knows it came from his vessel. He knows there's something wrong, even if he doesn't know what, and if he makes it to that ship and finds out, he's going to run."

"So we've got to stall him," Clark said.

Bruce met his eyes, a quick steady look. For no reason he could pinpoint, Clark thought: Good, and it sounded like Bruce, and just that fast his ears were hot.

"Basically, yeah," Victor said. "The Lantern fleet's closing in already, we're talking minutes. But if he gets his ship undocked and he jumps, and he's got that shit secured onboard—"

"Right, right. We have to slow him down. I have to slow him down," Clark amended after a second, "because he's got no reason to talk to any of us except Kal-El."

Bruce was already nodding. "You want to join up," he said. "You want a piece of the pie. You've started to figure out how this works, and you've heard a lot of good offers over the last few days, but you know Dirramao must have something even better up his sleeve."

"And we all know how long it apparently takes this guy to close a deal," Victor agreed. "So if you can get a little back and forth going—that'll probably be enough."

"All right," Diana said, already crossing the deck. "Then let's go."

Luckily for them, even Dirramao had to take the same route back to the docking bays, the inner loop of the ring that was the station, as anybody else: along the main promenade, that long slope of a plaza, that looked upward through that glimmering peach-bright atmosphere to the stars.

Somewhere Kal-El had every excuse to be, in other words, especially since he had just been called back to his own ship by a message in his quarters, in full view of half the bugs left in there.

It was easy to pick out Dirramao—the height, the sharp eyes, and of course he already suspected trouble, which meant he had twice as many bodyguards as usual, arrayed in an obvious formation around him.

They just had to keep him talking. Minutes. Once the Lanterns were in visual range overhead, once they could be spotted even without a single one of the thousands of sensors Victor had under his thumb, it wouldn't matter—it would be too late, by then.

Just keep him talking, Clark thought, and quickened his pace, calling out warmly, "Dirramao! Marra Dirramao—a moment?"

Dirramao turned, and the way he tensed as he did it, the reflexive crouch of his body in surprise, was as catlike as the rest of him.

But he recognized Kal-El, and he didn't think Kal-El knew anything whatsoever about his business. He relaxed, and his bodyguards relaxed with him, and he allowed Kal-El to catch up to him.

"I won't detain you long," Clark said. "I've been meaning to speak to you, that's all." He smiled. "I think I've talked to just about everyone at this summit about business, the markets they have access to, the kind of product they want to be able to offer—but not you."

Dirramao's eyes narrowed. "Is that so," he murmured.

"And yet the one name I hear from everyone is yours. As you said yourself," Clark added, "if there are opportunities open to me at your table, I'd—like to think I appreciate them."

Dirramao tilted his head, and gave Clark a long searching stare.

Which was fine, Clark reminded himself. The more time this took up, the better. And it didn't matter if he thought Kal-El's approach was clumsy, if Kal-El sounded ridiculous to him—if everybody who was anybody knew better than to approach Marra Dirramao like this. Because Kal-El didn't, and that meant Clark pantsing his way through this was actually the best possible approach.

"I see," Dirramao said slowly.

And then he turned and stepped out from among his bodyguards, the better to face Kal-El—to face him, and then begin to circle him slowly, and that was good, that was great. He'd let himself get distracted after all.

"What you must understand, Overlord Kal-El of Earth, is that I demand a—certain degree of commitment from my business partners. I ask a great deal, and it's worth it to those work with me because I offer a great deal in my turn. To be regarded as reliable, as someone who can be depended upon to keep the interests of my business partners in mind, is essential in my position."

He rounded Clark once, and then again. Clark could hardly claim to mind waiting through it. He could pontificate about his principles as much as he wanted; it was eating up time nicely. Clark knew what he was and what he did, what he intended to do, even if he'd somehow managed to fool himself.

And then Dirramao came around to face Clark again, and Clark looked into his eyes and understood in a bright cold instant that Dirramao wasn't fooled either. He wasn't kidding himself at all. He was working up to something, something in particular, and any second now, he was about to—

"So," Dirramao purred, and turned his head, and bared what seemed like far too many teeth at Bruce, one at a time. "This is yours, hm? Your favorite."

Clark swallowed. That word had sounded like a lot of different things to Clark lately, but Dirramao made it an unmistakable threat.

The banquet had been Dirramao's. He'd been—he'd been sitting there watching, too, while Clark had smiled at Tlin across the table and slid food into Bruce's mouth. He'd been talking to Mulballu all evening; what had she said? Had she told him how she'd met Kal-El, the things he'd said about the slave he took with him everywhere?

"The prince," Dirramao was adding as he moved, circling Bruce now instead, and it was an answer Clark hadn't actually wanted to get. "Prince among his kind, and a warrior. And your people win respect by owning such a slave as this."

"Yes," Clark said, and he aimed for the unconcerned tone he wanted to give Kal-El right now and didn't quite make it.

Dirramao's eyes flashed, as if he'd noticed. As if he'd noticed, and he was satisfied by it.

"The one who defeated Ztelzt Tlin's lovely little Ukaiti."

"That was—"

"Today, yes," Dirramao agreed. "Hardly any time ago. But long enough. Word moves quickly in this place, and it moves even more quickly toward me." He paused, right at Bruce's shoulder, and looked past Bruce at Clark, tilting his head. "That was very embarrassing for Ztelzt, you know. Ukaiti don't come cheap."

Jesus.

"Ztelzt has worked with me for a long time," Dirramao said softly. "And he doesn't like you. He doesn't like you at all."

Clark didn't look away, didn't blink, didn't let himself flinch.

He could see it in Dirramao's face, in his eyes. This wasn't actually about Tlin at all—though Clark didn't doubt that Dirramao would be equally willing to tell Tlin that it had been, that he'd done it to help Tlin save face, that Tlin owed him in return.

But it wasn't about Tlin. Tlin was an excuse, that was all.

Because Dirramao didn't like Kal-El either. Clark had told himself it didn't matter what anyone thought of Kal-El, because as soon as this mission was over, Kal-El—or at least the one who was Overlord of Earth, the one Clark had constructed for this—would cease to exist.

But he existed right now. Dirramao had been amused, intrigued by something new, at first; he'd invited Kal-El to that banquet because of it. But he'd already been hearing more than he wanted to, even then. It seems as though I have heard talk of nothing else today.

This was his show. This summit; this sector, his business. This was his show, and he liked it that way. And Kal-El had swaggered right into the middle of it, and Marra Dirramao wanted to rip him apart for it.

Wanted to, and knew exactly how.

Little wonder he is so valuable to you, then.

"So," Dirramao said. "You see my conundrum. You see the position you've put me in. If you wish to do business with me, Kal-El, I'll need something from you. Something that will make it clear you're able to offer the kind of commitment I require. And if it should happen to help smooth things over with Ztelzt, so much the better."

"And I take it you've got something in mind," Clark said, as steadily as he could.

"I do indeed," Dirramao agreed, and then gestured with a motion of his chin toward Bruce. "Punish him."

Clark met Bruce's eyes. Bruce was looking back at him calmly; he hadn't so much as twitched, not while Dirramao had been circling him and not at the sound of those words in Dirramao's soft rasping voice.

"Punish him for causing such embarrassment to my respected colleague," Dirramao elaborated. "Or I will."

Keep him talking. Minutes. But he was about to stop talking, about to stop talking and have some fun with the mouse he'd picked out for himself today. And Clark could use the speed, could get Bruce out of here in an instant and safely back to the World Engine; except if he'd misjudged how long all this was taking, how long there was left to go, then he might be giving Dirramao the chance to reach his ship after all, and run.

Clark looked at Dirramao. "He's less valuable by far if he can't fight," he tried, last-ditch.

"Oh, I have no doubt some use can be found for him," Dirramao murmured, tone low and sweet.

There was a stride, less, between Bruce and Clark. Clark crossed it.

Bruce lifted a hand, turned it palm-up.

He wasn't asking for anything, wasn't offering a touch or reassurance. Clark knew him too well to pretend that he was.

He was telling Clark to start with it. That that was the best way he could think of to stall: the hand had so many bones.

Clark dug his teeth into the inside of his cheek, and made himself reach for it—drew his fingers haltingly along the length of Bruce's thumb.

God. He couldn't do this. He was going to be sick. He couldn't do this. He'd pick Bruce up, speed him to the ship and then come back, and Dirramao wouldn't have had time to move; Clark could just restrain him, just wait like that—

If his bodyguards, his crew, didn't cut and run without him. It wasn't just Dirramao that the Lanterns needed, it was the worldeater, the worldeater on his ship.

Clark could take Dirramao to Diana; she could hold him at least as well. He didn't know which ship was Dirramao's, but he could find it, or—no, Victor could tell him. He could try, at least, he could try, and even if it didn't work it would still mean he hadn't broken Bruce's goddamn hands himself.

Come on. Come on. Come on—

And then, in an instant, the open span of space above Clark's head flared bright green.

Lanterns.

Clark jerked away, yanked his hands back and didn't look at Bruce. Dirramao was shouting, wide-eyed and furious, and his bodyguards had pulled out some kind of pulse weapon and started firing—but hard green light bloomed, and the plasma pulses splashed off it harmlessly, and a moment later there were ten, fifteen, twenty Lanterns touching down along the promenade.

A shouted order, a moment's concentration, and a shimmering green cube closed itself around Dirramao and his three closest bodyguards, neatly sealed, unbreakable.

More green lights were descending, streaking down like falling stars. And the closest one, the one that was coming down almost on top of Bruce and Clark, had a familiar figure in the middle of it.

"Fancy meeting you guys here," Hal said.

Clark couldn't think, couldn't figure out how to joke in return. His throat was too tight to let anything get out.

But Bruce raised an eyebrow, easy as anything, and said, "Thought you were supposed to be doing us a favor and staying on Earth."

"Yeah, well, a little bird let us know you were going to need a little help." Hal shrugged—and then paused, and looked Bruce up and down. "Nice skirt."

"Thanks," Bruce said blandly.

They took the World Engine home.

They had to wait around for a little while, first. The Lanterns needed statements—from Victor in particular, as it turned out, since he'd been interfaced directly with so many crucial pieces of evidence, and he'd made copies of every single file he'd touched, just in case.

The Lanterns were able to take Atish, too. Diana had calmed him down, had gotten him to rest, and Clark had made sure his knife got back to him, just in case he still wanted it; but they didn't even know where Ukayat was, and the World Engine's archives didn't know it, either, or at least not by that name. The Lanterns had recruited a couple Ukaiti before, though, and they had much better odds of being able to locate his family, his clan herd, than the League did.

But after that, it was—they were done.

It was fine. It was good. Everything had worked out, in the end, and the Lanterns had both confiscated the largest amount of worldeater they'd ever seen in one place and secured Dirramao. And a whole lot of his slaves, too.

It wasn't enough. But it was something; it was a start.

And sitting through all those debriefings, it was—that was good, too. It needed to happen, that re-adjustment period. Bruce wore clothes, and he stood on his own two feet instead of kneeling next to Clark's, and there was no collar around his throat. He looked fine, normal.

It was like it had never happened.

Which was probably for the best. Bruce would move on from it, probably already had, and Clark would, too. He had to. He was doing a pretty good job already—he was patient with the Lanterns, helpful, repeating everything they needed to hear as many times as they needed to hear it. He sat there and carefully didn't flex his fingers against the phantom sensation of a slim chain wound through them. He talked, and he smiled, and he was normal, and he didn't look at Bruce more than he had to.

It was fine. Everything was going to be fine.

It was amazing how different it felt to jump in the World Engine when the thing waiting on the other end of the jump was Earth.

Clark was looking forward to being back. Not that he minded the jump, either: he could use the time. Five days ahead of him with nothing he needed to do, nowhere to be, no briefings or files or lessons in Kryptonian. Five days, to figure out how to lock all of this back into whatever box it had come out of and throw away the key, and by the time he had to walk into the Hall six days out of seven and look Bruce in the eye, he'd be able to do it.

He had to be able to do it, by then.

His quarters were the same. Big, comfortable. They'd been fine on the way out, and they'd be fine on the way back.

He had to tell himself that a couple times in a row before he could make himself unseal the door.

He'd been in here already, since Sector 3252. He'd come straight back here, in fact, to change out of Overlord Kal-El's clothes and into Clark Kent's—and if he'd sped through it so fast his buttons had still been smoking a little for a couple minutes afterward, well, everyone had politely ignored it.

The point was, it shouldn't exactly have been a surprise that all those Kryptonian layers were still spread out over the bunk, right where he'd tossed them.

Clark swallowed, and made himself cross the room.

He'd move them, that was all. He'd pick them up and move them, put them away, or even ask the World Engine to recycle them for him. He'd have to move them to use the bunk; that was the reasonable thing to do.

He reached for the overshirt first. Just because it was the closest.

It was weird, touching it again. Back in jeans and flannel, he'd almost managed to forget what that thick heavy Kryptonian cloth felt like.

He ran two fingers down the front of the shirt. Down the front, and then up, and then along one curving edge of the sleeve, where the cloth split open before joining again at the cuff of the wrist.

He wished—

"Entry requested. Permission granted?"

God. He wasn't ready for this. But at the same time, he was pretty sure he knew who it was going to be, and that meant there could only ever be one answer to that.

"Permission granted," Clark said, and stayed where he was, and made himself breathe.

And, sure enough, he'd been right. He didn't need to turn around, didn't need to look. That was Bruce's breath, Bruce's heartbeat. Bruce's boots on the floor, now that he wasn't going barefoot everywhere.

"Clark," Bruce said.

Clark bit his lip. "Hey, Bruce," he said, when he was pretty sure he could do it without sounding weird.

He did let himself look, then. Bruce hadn't moved very far in from the door, and he was standing there with his hands in his pockets, watching Clark carefully, face unreadably blank.

"I thought we should talk," Bruce said.

Which was probably true. But it was also inevitably hilarious, coming from Bruce; and Clark had snorted half a laugh through his nose before he could stop himself.

"Sorry," he said quickly. "Sorry, I didn't mean—you're right. Of course you're right." He drew a breath to steady himself, looked up again to offer Bruce a quick half-smile, and Bruce was—

Bruce was staring at him.

"I," Bruce said, and then stopped, and slowly wet his lips. "I—assumed I'd crossed a line. That last day—"

"It's fine," Clark said, much too loudly. Jesus. "It's—it was fine. It was fine, you don't have anything to worry about. I'm—"

I'm not angry. I don't know why you always think I'm angry with you—

He cleared his throat, swallowed the words down where they couldn't get out, and then said, "It's fine," again.

"Except it isn't, is it," Bruce said.

He didn't say it as though it was actually a question. He was looking at Clark searchingly now, intently.

"You didn't cross a line either, for the record," he added after a moment. "Nothing you did, before or after we arrived on that station, was a problem for me."

That couldn't be true. That couldn't possibly be true.

Bruce wanted him to think it was, that was all. Which was generous of him, even if it also made something sour crawl its way up the back of Clark's throat.

And jesus, Clark had to say something, but he couldn't think what. He couldn't thank Bruce for that, that would be—he couldn't. He couldn't say the same in return, either; not because anything Bruce had done had been a problem, so much as because Bruce mostly hadn't been doing anything at all, except following Clark's lead the way he'd needed to.

"Bruce," he managed, because that was basically the only word he could ever reliably find in his head.

Bruce took a step forward, gaze flicking intently back and forth across Clark's face. "You still don't understand, do you? Clark, it was easy for me. It was the easiest thing I've ever done. You still think that I'm afraid of you, that I don't trust you—that I might be trying my best, but there's still some part of me that looks at you and sees the nightmare.

"But I do trust you. I know who you are, and I trust you. If anything, it's—"

He stopped, and for the first time he looked away, lifted a hand and rubbed his mouth.

"If anything," he said again, "it's me I don't trust."

And then he drew his hands out of his pockets; and one of them was empty, but in the other he was holding the looped-up length of the collar chain.

Clark stared at it, heart kicking in his chest. He didn't understand why Bruce still had it, why he—why he'd kept it.

"I liked it," Bruce said, carefully level. "I liked being able to hand myself over to you. I liked being able to put myself under your control. I've tried so hard to find ways to leash myself, to bear myself; I make rules, and then I figure out how to justify breaking them, and it feels right, in the moment I do it, but it never is.

"Trusting you is never like that. Every time I've decided to trust you, it was the right choice. And being able to just let go, to do nothing except what you were asking of me—"

Jesus.

"Jesus," Clark heard himself say. That was—but that didn't make any sense. He couldn't make any sense out of that. "But that person, the person who owned you, that wasn't—I shouldn't have been capable of that. If I were who you think I am, I wouldn't have been."

Bruce gave him an odd wry look. "Clark, you were supposed to be convincing people you were a callous tyrant with no regard for anyone but yourself. I was supposed to be your property. And instead you went around telling everyone I was a prince who'd almost defeated you in combat, and none of them were—" He paused. His throat worked. "None of them were good enough to own me. None of them deserved me." He shook his head. "If you enjoyed any of that, I'm telling you, the thing you were enjoying wasn't the fact of having a slave. You weren't treating me like chattel. You were treating me like I was yours."

"I didn't—I mean—I trust you, too," Clark blurted helplessly. "I didn't know what I was doing, Bruce. Fighting Zod, or afterward. When we fought. When you brought me back and then I hurt you."

"You didn't remember—"

"I know, I know, I just." Clark stopped, and shook his head. "Back then, you thought you had to take me out before I got the chance to realize that you could, before I got the chance to stop you. But it wasn't—I'm grateful for it. I'm glad you can. When I lose control of myself, I level half a city. I need someone to be able to stop me, and it's a good thing, to me, that it's you. It's a good thing that you can make me yield myself to you."

He was just trying to find the words for it, that was all—stumbling around throwing together whatever came the closest to sounding right. He didn't realize exactly how desperate that had come out until he saw the way Bruce was looking at him.

And Bruce—still had the chain in his hands.

Clark's breath had caught in his throat even before Bruce abruptly burst into motion, closed the rest of the distance between them and lifted a hand to Clark's face. "I liked giving it to you," he said, low. "And you liked taking it from me, sometimes. But you liked it when I took it away from you again, too."

Clark felt himself flush.

Bruce took a step forward, and Clark moved helplessly with him: took a step back, and Bruce crowded him relentlessly along until there was nowhere left to go, until he'd come up against the bulkhead. And it was just like the balcony, the wall. Bruce's hand on Clark's face. Bruce, lifting the end of the chain, sliding it around the back of Clark's neck, drawing it just barely taut across the base of Clark's throat.

God. He meant it. He actually meant it. He wanted to—

Bruce slung the short end of the chain at Clark's throat over the length of it once and then again. Didn't join it to itself, didn't even tie a knot. The other end was still in his hand.

And then he raised his other hand to his own shirtcollar, and undid a button.

Another, another. He shrugged his shirt off his shoulders, and his bare chest was—jesus, Clark wanted to touch him.

He didn't do it. He stayed where he was, where Bruce had put him; and Bruce stripped in front of him, methodical, unhurried, and suddenly they almost had it back again. Bruce naked, and Clark still clothed, waiting for him, with the wall the only thing holding him up.

"Kneel," Bruce said, very softly.

Clark shut his eyes, hot and grateful and overwhelmed, and did it.

He felt clumsy, awkward, on the way down. But then Bruce sank a hand into his hair, guided his face to rest against Bruce's naked thigh, and Clark let out a long slow breath and felt something deep down in him settle.

He'd tried so hard not to look, because he'd known it would've made the whole thing a thousand times more difficult. But jesus, Bruce's cock was beautiful.

Bruce let him touch it, for a minute—guided his mouth along it a few times, slid it in over his tongue and then drew him away again with that hand in his hair, and it had already been half-hard, but by the time Bruce pulled him off it, it was thick and hot, dark at the head, brushing wetly against Bruce's belly.

Bruce used the chain to urge him over to the bunk. He had to stop and shove Overlord Kal-El's clothes out of the way, but really that made it better, almost as if Clark had only just taken them off after all.

Bruce wasn't as brisk, as efficient, with Clark's clothes as he had been with his own. He took his time—made Clark wait there, poised, shivering, until he'd decided it was time to undo one more button. One more. One more.

But finally there were no more buttons, and Bruce slid his shirt off him, gave him Bruce's hands against his skin; everywhere he'd touched Bruce on that mission, everywhere, he'd found skin waiting for him, and yet Bruce's touch in return had always been dulled, his senses opening up and straining for it and even then he'd never quite been able to feel it.

Bruce put him on his hands and knees to fuck him, first. Held him there, the tension on the chain around his throat so light it was barely there, and then pushed into him, and it didn't hurt—couldn't, except he almost wished that it would.

The burn of it was nearly as good as pain would have been, though. The burn of it, sticky friction doubling and redoubling with every stroke, because Bruce hadn't used anything, had just pinned him there and pushed into him until he yielded. And he did yield. He opened up for it, he took it and took it and took it, and Bruce rewarded him, fucked him harder.

And then suddenly Bruce made a soft strained noise, leaned in over Clark and hooked his arms beneath Clark's, beneath and then up the fronts of his shoulders, and lifted him—and the long end of the chain that was still in his hands was caught against Clark's throat, spanning it.

Clark cried out, squirming; he didn't know what Bruce wanted, didn't know whether he was doing it right. Bruce had hauled them both upright, and Bruce was kneeling on the bunk, but Clark's knees weren't touching the bunk, couldn't, and he fumbled helplessly and tried to brace them on the outsides of Bruce's thighs instead, and oh, fuck, fuck. Bruce wasn't fucking him anymore, wasn't really thrusting in—he was jerking Clark's entire body weight upwards, rolling his hips and then letting Clark slide back down onto his cock, and Clark couldn't do a goddamn thing

(—except everything he'd already been able to do, and always had; except move so fast Bruce wouldn't even be able to see him do it, or flip them and push Bruce down and swallow his cock, pin him there by the hips and not let go, or—)

except let him.

After about three strokes like that, Clark realized dimly that it wasn't his body weight anymore, that he was rising a little too high; but Bruce still had him hooked by the shoulders, still had the long end of the chain stretched between his hands and jerked flat against Clark's throat, and jesus, fuck, fuck, maybe he'd guessed, maybe he'd known Clark might lose control of the flight, or maybe it was just luck. But the chain caught Clark, he couldn't drift out of Bruce's grasp, and Bruce pulled him back down with it like gravity, forced him back onto Bruce's cock where he belonged.

It surprised him, distantly, when he came. He'd been so caught up, drowning in sensation with every single part of his body from his toenails to the roots of his hair, that he hadn't been thinking especially hard about his cock in particular. He became vaguely aware that something was building, a tightness in his gut and a quivering tension in his thighs. And then it broke over him like a wave, and he gasped and shook, and Bruce fucked him through it without stopping until his whole body had gone helplessly slack, wrung out.

It only took about two seconds after that for Bruce to come, too. He had to have been close, Clark understood dimly. All that damn self-control.

But maybe he could take it on, make Bruce let go instead, next time. At least if Bruce would let him.

Clark didn't need to sleep, after. But he wasn't about to hold Bruce to the same standard. He kind of liked the idea, even—lying there awake, allowed to look at Bruce's sleeping face.

Bruce just kept looking at him, though. Thoughtfully, almost.

And then Bruce's eyebrows drew down just a little, and Bruce reached out and unwound the short end of the chain from itself: two rounds, that was all, but it had felt to Clark like a kryptonite bolt.

Clark felt a weird cold weight, somewhere in his chest, and he had to fight not to slap Bruce's hands away from it.

By the look Bruce gave him then, he hadn't managed to keep that thought off his face.

"You don't need this," Bruce said quietly, drawing the chain away, sliding it gently out from underneath the nape of Clark's neck. "You don't need to have this on you, to be—mine." His tone was even, controlled; but the flicker in his gaze, the way he couldn't quite look Clark in the eye while he said it, gave him away.

Clark drew a slow breath, and let the warmth of those words settle into him instead.

"And you don't need to walk around naked all the time, to be mine," he said, when he was pretty sure he could do it steadily. "Though, for the record, I won't complain if you do."

"I'll keep that in mind," Bruce murmured, dry; but the gentle lines around his eyes, his mouth, added up to a helpless smile.

"And I won't say no to the skirt," Clark added.

Bruce's expression turned ruminative. "I do like the skirt," he said, as if to himself, and Clark had to laugh then, had to reach out and touch him, just for the sake of knowing that he could: of finding himself allowed, welcome, home in a place that was his.