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Bruce has not believed in a god for many years.
For years after his parents deaths, he had wrestled with the ineffable by fighting rabbis in the yeshiva as though they were the ones who had wronged him. (Bruce’s favorite part of his time in yeshiva was being encouraged to verbally spar with god. He liked to think he always won.) But his every prayer felt hollow—speaking into a receiver with nothing but the lonely droning of a dial tone to hear him. Every amidah interrupted by the memory of the way Bruce’s mother gasped his name as she bled out.
But Bruce had desperately wanted to believe that someone was on the other end of the receiver, someone was able to answer for what had happened to him, that someone would be able to apologize. If he kept fighting, kept praying, kept reading and reading and reading the Akedah, maybe god would pull back the curtain at the last minute as he had done for Abraham: “Here I am!” Bruce would cry, if only god would only call his name at the mountain.
In the end, he was just as tear stained and alone as he had been that night outside the theater.
At the end of his third year, Bruce has asked to be transferred to a secular private school, one his parent’s friends had sent their children to as well. It worked too well. The distance from god made him apathetic. Widened the gulf of his loneliness like Moses parting the sea until not even Alfred could reach him there on the other side. God was there, had watched him leave, and let him go without a word.
He remained on the other side of the sea for many years—until he began his training.
Every night, a different family ripped apart by violence. Every night, a difference innocence lost. Every night, a different person felt they had no other choice but to pick up a different gun and take a different life over a different string of pearls to feed the same addiction.
Bruce watched it all, god his mute copilot, from the spires of Gotham.
“Look,” he had said aloud. “This is what happens when you stay silent. This is what happens because you won’t act.”
In his steadfastness, god had answered:
“I’m not like you,” Bruce said. “I won’t sit back and let this cycle take more lives.”
Bruce no longer wanted god’s answer; it meant nothing to him anymore. The spitefulness that silence left in its wake was infinitely more valuable.
Bruce used that spite—that driving, unending push to be better than god himself at protecting the innocent—to eat his way through the heart of Gotham, devouring all evil he encountered. He toppled crime rings and gloated to the silence. He rescued children from abusers and shoved it in god’s blank face. He invested in communities, in families, in the future of tens of thousands of underserved Gothamites.
And when a young boy wailed out a lonely, desperate prayer that his parents might survive an unsurvivable fall, Bruce met him in his grief—he didn’t let it go unanswered.
That night, he set aside his anger, his spite, his defiance at god. Those things no longer felt the same as he held that bereft child in his arms, his new son bound to him by trauma.
How wrong he was, to be angry at a god who never even existed.
And then that motherfucker fell out of the sky.
___________________________________________________________________________
Clark has always believed in something.
Martha and Jonathan Kent were faithful, God-fearing, golden-rule-following people. They had prayed for a son for years, and never lost faith that one day God would answer their prayers. Eventually, his parents had pulled and alien child out of a spaceship and had him dedicated at the First Baptist the next Sunday. He’d held his breath when he was baptized at 13, knowing he really didn’t need to. Clark’s alienness had never changed religion to his parents, only expanded it. To them, the Lord of the Universe meant the Lord of the Universe.
Every summer, he sat cross-legged on the worn carpet in the church storm cellar for VBS. He loved the stories of Samson’s strength, of Daniel’s faith, of David’s courage. (Slingshotting was a surprisingly helpful way to learn to control his strength.) When he aged out of VBS, he volunteered instead and was a well-loved favorite among the second graders. (No one could roar like Clark when he read The Lion’s Den.)
First Baptist was one of the only places he felt like a human. Talking to God, giving everything over into His hands, made Clark feel like someone else cared about his burden—someone else would shoulder it for him for a time, unconditionally. He talked to God constantly.
God spoke back to him in the way in the way Clark could sometimes hear owls hooting in a quiet forest in Minnesota; in the way Clark could fly above all creation as if God were saying “Isn’t it wondrous down there? I made you this way so you could see it all just the way I do.”
And then he began to hear prayers. Soft ones, two farms over, Kaitie praying out loud that God would help her dog find his way home.
Clark had wondered why he heard it. He wasn’t listening for anything in particular. But God had helped him to hear this little girl’s prayer—maybe He was asking Clark to answer it. So Clark set out and found the lost little dog shivering in a ditch a county over, brought him back safe and sound, and thought to himself that maybe God had a plan for him after all.
What started with dogs in ditches and kittens in trees became houses on fire and babies in car wrecks. He had traded his jeans and Carhartt jacket for an alien suit bearing an alien family crest, but God pointed him whatever direction he needed to go and he went.
God sent him to an earthquake hypocenter in Iran—saved 376 people, but lost 209.
Then to an apartment collapse in Queens—saved 89 people, but lost 23. Seven children.
To a…to a massive pileup in Colombia—where 15 people died because Clark moved an oil truck too quickly.
After three years as Superman—three years as Clark Kent, Daily Planet—he began to resent the call. How could God make a world full of disasters that only Superman could make right? Why did Clark have to bear witness to hundreds and thousands of bodies he couldn’t save—that God wouldn’t save? Why did he have to look into the eyes of people who suffered because of the words in the Bible, and still have to believe it was right? How could God ask so much of Clark and still ask for more? Questions like that had kept him away from a pew for a year by that point. Almost 12, now.
At some point, flying over creation was the loneliest Clark had ever been.
And then Bruce Wayne started praying.
____________________________________________________________________________
“I missed you leaving.”
Clark smiles. He’s 20,000 feet above the ocean welding a landing gear back onto a packed plane with his eyes. Bruce is awake in their bed, heart beating slowly, languorous, just as Clark had left him.
Bruce had trained himself to speak at exactly 103 Hz when he wanted to…talk to Clark. Talk to, pray to, commune with. It was difficult to describe to anyone who wasn’t, well, Bruce. Just a certain frequency that Clark was always tuned in to, like a one-way CB radio designed only for Bruce’s words.
“I have a meeting this morning about the Singapore acquisition; I’m still not sure what the right decision is. I hope I make the right one.”
I know you will, Clark thinks. You’ll make the best one you can.
The pilot waves his frantic thanks to Clark after he finishes up. Superman offers a camera-ready smile and quick salute before dropping speed and losing the plane. A little light work before heading to The Planet.
Clark jets back over the Atlantic to Metropolis. He changes into a suit Bruce bought for him last year. He buys a bagel and lox at the corner deli, thanks Ernie with a cash tip, then grabs a hot coffee for Lois on his way out. The walk to The Planet is as routine and comfortable as Bruce’s stream of thoughts flowing into his ears.
“I just received an audio message from Jason and an email from Brandt within ten seconds of each other. This is my serenity prayer.”
Clark laughs out loud as the elevator opens on the ground floor. A woman from the 12th floor quickly averts eye contact with him as she exits, and he blushes a little.
Jason is the thing you cannot change, but go ahead and give Brandt hell.
The elevator drops Clark off on the ninth floor at exactly 9:03—just this side of late—and he sneaks past Perry’s office. If he floats just a little bit to make it easier, that’s nobody’s business. He rounds the corner to his cubicle and finds that Lois is already sitting in his chair with her hands out.
“Oh, you angel, did you really get me a coffee? You shouldn’t have. Two sugars?” Lois’s eyes are bright, but with deep circles under them.
“And just how many cups of coffee have you had since midnight?” he asks, handing over the cup anyway.
“Hmm? Oh, just a few. My source is in Japan for the next few weeks and the time difference is hell,” Lois laments. Her brown hair is pulled hastily back into a bun, a few more strands framing her face than normal. She’s wearing a white button down with a smear of foundation at the very top of the collar under her ear, tucked into a pair of smart gray slacks. Clark pushes his glasses higher up on his nose and Lois out of his chair.
“Seems plausible. But I’m keeping an ear out for your BPM,” he chides as he flips his jacket over the chair and sits down.
“You big creep,” Lois smiles into her next sip.
“That’s what they call me.”
They work the rest of the day in relative good humor, alternating between urgent source phone calls and ribbing about deadlines. Perry barrels out of his office at some point and yells that Lois’s travel budget is out of line, and Lois yells back that the Gazette’s poacher didn’t feel the same. Clark laughs into his hand and Perry shuffles back into his office, the door slamming loudly behind him.
“I hope you wore the blue Loro Piana today. I didn’t see it in the closet this morning, so I wore my matching tie. You like when I do that.”
I did. I do.
Clark can’t help but radiate every time Bruce opens up that channel. There’s never an urgency, never a need. Only a near-tangible reminder of how often Clark’s partner thinks about him throughout the day. It’s a joy to be thought of instead of needed.
At lunch. “I think your mom has been talking shop with Alfred. There’s roasted corn in my salad again.”
At 2:15. “Tim left his bo staff in the en suite bathroom. We might need to bring in the big guns at dinner tonight and have a back-on-the-farm chat about personal responsibility.”
Right before Clark leaves for home. “Go look at the sunset, Clark. Fly right through that one cloud, I know you know which one, and tell me what it feels like when you get home.”
After Clark says good night to Lois, he changes back into the suit so he can fly without raising any eyebrows—well, anymore eyebrows than usual for Superman. He lifts up into the air until Metropolis and Gotham and the harbor are just miniatures, just figurines on display below him.
From this high up, he lets his hearing fall away. He tries not to think about the tragedies that occurred all over the world today; he tries not to think of the ways he could have stopped them; he tries to live with the knowledge that sometimes he tries not to hear it. What a lonely figure he must cut, drifting through a cloud, shut off from the world below.
“Come home, Kansas.”
Bruce’s call is always the easiest to answer.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Bruce is watching the sky from one of their bedroom windows.
Any second, Clark will trip the Manor’s airspace detector and Bruce’s watch will softly chime and red boots will melt away from bare feet as he touches down on the balcony.
Damian and Tim are arguing downstairs in the drawing room, waiting for the dinner call. Dick and Jason will be over on Friday night for family dinner. A well-staked out arms deal is going down tonight that Batman has been looking forward to intercepting for weeks. Bruce doesn’t usually associate the word “prayers” with the word “answered,” but sometimes it’s hard to look at his life now and think that they haven’t been.
Three chimes on his watch.
Bare feet on marble.
Clark looks as imposing as he always does, done up in the rest of his suit. His dark, curly hair is hardly out of place despite his flight, his cheeks incapable of being windburned. He’s of a height with Bruce which makes it that much easier to take in the unceasing blue of his eyes framed beneath a heavy brow. “Turn away thine eyes from me, for they overwhelm me,” he whispers in their frequency.
“I’m right here, yonah,” Clark breathes against his lips.
Bruce holds him for a time. Molding his lips to the impossibly yielding shape of Clark’s mouth, gliding his tongue along the seam of Clark’s lips, listening for the small sounds Clark makes when Bruce grips his waist particularly hard. To the world, Clark is as close to god as they will ever see—to Bruce, He is warm and responsive and as giving of His heart as He is His lips.
“Tell me about the Singapore decision,” Clark urges when their greeting has eased up into sweet, light kisses between words. “And about Jason’s message. And I did wear the blue Piana suit today, and I do love it when you wear your matching tie.”
This is Bruce’s favorite part of their routine. Clark works, chronologically because he never forgets, through each of Bruce’s prayers.
“I was corn-fed and there’s nothing wrong with it,” a gentle kiss.
“I’ve been saving the Barn-Kitten-Mom-Let-Me-Keep responsibility lesson for a special occasion and if you think this is it, lets rehearse it before dinner,” a deeper, scorching kiss that usually follows some mention of he and Bruce co-parenting.
“It was misty. It felt lonely, but then I heard you.” This time, just their foreheads rest against each other. It isn’t always like this. Sometimes they’re apart for days or weeks with League business; sometimes they disagree so vehemently they have to cool off away from each other; sometimes Bruce has to apologize and mean it. But tonight, they are each other’s acolytes, sharing breath across their lips like prayers.
“Y’know,” Clark starts, because he always does. “If you really need me, you can always use the JL line. I can answer right away.”
“I know you’re listening. That’s all that matters.”