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Bruce doesn't know about the situation in the STAR Labs office building on 5th until Clark is already in the middle of it.
An unpardonable intelligence failure, obviously. He's already looking up the building, the blueprints, all coverage or interviews with personnel during the last six months that might give him some clue as to what they've been working on in there, typing with one hand and finding his League comm, fitting it into his ear, with his other hand.
The channel isn't open. Clark hasn't tried to call any of them in yet. Which is fair enough—there are a lot of problems that Superman can solve by himself.
But there are also a lot that he can't, so Bruce activates the cameras on the closest drone, sends it hovering overhead, just in case a bird's-eye view will tell him something.
Fortunately—unfortunately—the building's roof is still intact. He's about to flip one of the cameras to infrared mode, to at least give him some idea what Clark might be facing, and then—
He can't say for certain what happens. The camera seems to fail, for a moment, except all its self-diagnostics indicate it's working perfectly; it's just that the feed has gone dark, midnight in the midafternoon. And then it comes back, and it takes him a precious second to understand what he's seeing—that the drone is spinning, turning over on itself in the air, as if struck by something. He manages to get the controls to respond, to steady it out, in time to see something stretching out beyond it, some kind of wave of dark energy dissipating into the sky.
And then the comm comes alive in his ear, but it isn't Clark. It's Victor.
"I figured I should check in, but I'm seeing reports popping up that S has already left the scene. All wrapped up there?"
"Left the scene?" Bruce repeats, frowning, and reorients the drone, does flip the secondary camera to infrared. And there, unmistakably, is Clark—a figure that's blazing red, blurring across the lab like a falling star toward the vaguely chilly outline of something Bruce can only assume is artificially cooled machinery. "No, S is still inside the building."
A tone. Bruce blinks, looks away from the drone feed and checks the console.
It's the security system that monitors the perimeter of the property surrounding the Hall. It's—readings that almost can't be anyone but Clark, a blur in the air; Barry can't fly, Diana doesn't usually move that fast unless she needs to catch a bullet, and Bruce is already talking to Victor.
It can't be Clark. It has to be Clark.
Bruce can't make sense of it. He stares at the security data, a single selected freeze-frame, and says slowly, "Victor, you should—go to STAR Labs. Something might be wrong—"
The sound, the rush of air, is familiar. Bruce turns around.
It's Clark. Clark, right there in the doorway of the monitor room; Superman on a mission in every way, the uniform and the cape, the hair, the unmistakable power so casually put to use as he sinks the last foot out of the air and touches down against the floor, except—
Except the set of his jaw, the twist of his mouth, the fury written in every line of his face, is familiar to Bruce for another reason entirely, a nightmare come to life.
"There's two of him," Bruce says into the comm, quick. "Something happened to him—copied him, split him."
"B," Victor says warily.
Bruce reaches up and shuts off the comm.
His timing is perfect. He manages to do it in the instant before the version of Clark who's facing him crosses the room, a blink of an eye; and then an iron grip closes around Bruce's arms, and he feels the sensation of his own weight leaving his feet, an instant's freefall as velocity takes charge of him, and then—the sharp sudden ache, jarred to his bones, the breath knocked clean out of him, as his body slams into the wall.
He struggles, instinctive, knowing already that it's useless. But he has nothing else to give, nothing else left, except the reflexive refusal to submit—and it's only as much as he owes them, Barry and Victor, Mera, even Deathstroke. After everything they've fought for together, this dead, ruined world all they have to show for it, it can't be allowed to end like this. It can't be allowed to; and yet it was always going to, wasn't it? He knows that much. He knows Superman's eyes are about to glow red, searing behind the dark crawling silhouettes of his veins, before he cuts Bruce's head off—
No. Bruce shuts his eyes, catches his breath. No, that's—that's not right. That's not where he is, not when he is. He's in the Hall of Justice, whole, still standing. And this Clark's eyes aren't heating up at all.
If anything, in point of fact, the most terrifying thing about the Superman of Bruce's worst nightmares is that he was so deliberate—every movement, the curl of his lip, his disdain, his coldly casual rage, equally choreographed. But this Clark isn't like that.
This Clark is angry; but his eyes are wet. His hands are still closed so tightly around Bruce's arms, fingers digging in hard, bruising, so much more forceful and less careful than the Clark Bruce knows best has been with him, at any point since the day Bruce tried to kill him; but he hasn't so much as snapped a humerus, let alone crushed Bruce's skull between his palms.
This Clark pulls Bruce away from the wall, pushes him into it again, emphasis, shaking him bodily. "Why?" he snarls. "Why?"
Bruce finds the backs of Clark's wrists with his hands, swallows, tries to convince himself to adjust to the idea that he simply will not have a floor under his feet for this conversation. "Clark," he says cautiously.
"Why couldn't you understand? Why wasn't it enough for you? I killed him, I as good as destroyed the rest of them. I gave up everything, every answer I ever wanted, every chance I had to understand myself—for you, for all of you, and you still tried to kill me."
"Clark—"
Clark's face twists. He grips Bruce's arms impossibly harder. "God, I hated you for that," he bites out. "I still do. I'm not sorry I threw you into that car. Did you know that? I never have been. I just wanted to be," and then he stops, breathes out half a laugh, a bitter pale mockery of the real thing. "Or should I say 'he'? He wanted to be, so badly that he told you he was. He tries so goddamn hard to pretend I don't exist, every second of every day. Can't stand to think of himself as someone who gets angry, someone who wants to hurt people—someone who wants to hurt you. But he is."
One of them has to be rational, reasonable. One of them has to be sane. The rest of it can wait; the salient point, right now, in this moment, is obvious.
Bruce wets his mouth, keeps his tone level and calm. "So you're aware that you've been separated from him," he says.
And this Clark grins at him, wide, not really a grin at all, teeth bared. "Separated from him," he repeats, almost softly. "Oh, he'd like to think of it that way. Like he's the real Clark, like I'm something else he could just scrape off and throw away if he could figure out how."
"But you're not," Bruce says.
"No," Clark agrees. "I've been there the whole time. I'll always be there. We've been separated from each other, if you want to get precise about it. He's no more the whole thing than I am, right now."
And Bruce looks at him, his face, so strange and so well-known at the same time—at his eyes, and thinks he understands.
When he had shut off the comm in his ear, it had been because he had expected the worst. He'd assumed the best thing he could do would be to occupy this Clark's attention as thoroughly as possible for as long as possible—and as soon as they were done with whatever had happened in that lab, Victor would come, would bring the rest of the League with him; would bring the other Clark—the actual Clark, he'd thought—and leave no window for this Clark, whatever kind of fabricated evil duplicate he might be, to go on some kind of rampage. To tear Lois Lane in half, to run to Kansas and snap Martha Kent's neck before she knew what was happening.
He'd thought, insofar as he'd had time to think at all, that he was protecting them—everyone Clark knew and cared about, from whatever this Clark might do to them to entertain himself. But now—
That isn't the danger here, and it never was. If anyone needs to be protected from whatever this Clark might do or say, it's Clark himself; the real Clark, the whole entire Clark that is so much more than the sum of his parts. The Clark who would be caught in the aftermath, if this Clark were free to—to shout every tiny frustration he'd ever had with Lois during their relationship into her face in the middle of the Planet's offices, to vent every hurt or disappointment he'd felt in his childhood at Martha.
All Bruce has to do is keep him here. And his anger, his aggression, every vicious petty urge Clark's ever suppressed in his life, will be directed at the one person Bruce can guarantee will not hold them against Clark after it's over, the one person who will not face even a moment's struggle to forgive him for them.
"And you're angry with me," he says aloud.
Clark scoffs, incredulous. "Does that surprise you? Jesus, you are so goddamn arrogant. You think you know everything, you think you're always right—you still do, even though you were so wrong about us," and something flashes across his face, ugly, as he releases one of Bruce's arms, keeps Bruce pinned to the wall by his opposite shoulder and grips his jaw. "You wouldn't believe the things we've thought about doing to you to try to make you listen, to stop you from throwing yourself into the middle of every single goddamn fight you can find—"
Bruce has no hope of keeping the flicker of startlement off his face. And of course this Clark is watching for it; of course he clocks it. His lip curls, grim amusement.
"Did you think that didn't bother us? Do you think that doesn't grate on our last nerve, the kinds of trouble you get yourself into, the way you never ask for our help with anything, the way you're always trying to leave us behind?" Clark scoffs. "If I thought he'd let me get away with it, I'd hit you over the head and lock you up somewhere, weld the door shut for good measure. Nothing in or out but me, not one single goddamn way for you to get yourself killed—you never even think about it, do you? How easy you'd be to kill? God, of course you don't, you stupid son of a bitch."
And he says it as if it's cruelty, his face hard, his tone scathing. But that can't change the fact of it; even Clark's anger, his frustration, brought to the boiling point, come from the same place in him that Superman does—the way he wants to protect people, to bear what they can't, to keep them safe.
"Of course I think about it," Bruce says aloud.
But Clark isn't mollified. "Not like I do," he says, low, ferocious. He grits his teeth, shakes his head, hand still tight around Bruce's jaw. "Jesus, sometimes I just want to—"
He goes still. A moment later, Bruce can hear it, too: voices. Voices, footsteps.
The first person to come into view isn't Victor. It's Diana, with the shield high, a wary gaze flicking back and forth between Bruce and the Clark who's in here with him, and then—
Bruce knew, intellectually, that there were two Clarks—that that was the only halfway reasonable explanation for the things he'd seen, the Clark who'd shown up on the Hall's monitors at the same time that Bruce had had that drone tracking the infrared signature of a Clark inside the STAR Labs building. But that can't make it anything less than strange, a visceral kind of shock, to see another Clark step into the doorway.
He stops there, pauses, watching them quietly. There's something in his hand; a stone, dark and gleaming, unpolished onyx.
The Clark who's pinning Bruce to the wall turned to look at the same time Bruce did, and now he's sneering viciously, lips drawn up in what's practically a snarl. "Surprised you aren't just trying to kill me," he spits.
"We don't actually know what that might do to us," the other Clark says gently; and then his gaze shifts to Bruce, and his face is—sweet, soft, full of concern. "I'm sorry, I—if he's hurt you—"
"I'm fine," Bruce says.
And the other Clark lets out a breath, relieved, and then looks at—himself—and holds out the stone.
A moment's stillness. The Clark pinning Bruce to the wall slowly, grudgingly, allows him to slide down it, an inch at a time, until his feet are touching the floor again.
"We have to undo it," the other Clark says.
It earns him another sneer. "Of course. Can't have me running around doing whatever I want, being honest—hurting anybody but you, you goddamn martyr."
But the other Clark's expression has nothing in it but warmth, gentle sorrowful sympathy. "You'll be even more alone than you already are," he says, quiet. "You can't want that."
He crosses the room, touches his own elbow. Clark wants to flinch from it, Bruce can see it in him; and then he turns back to Bruce for a moment, face sharp. "I'm not done yet—"
"That's not a good idea," the other Clark tells him gravely.
Clark huffs out a breath. "You say that about everything."
And the other Clark's face flickers for a moment, equally grim amusement, acknowledgment, before it settles back into soft, serious lines. "We don't deserve it. You know that."
It isn't the moment. Of course it isn't. But Bruce has to bite down hard on the inside of his cheek to control the urge to cut in—to demand to know what in the world Clark could possibly want that he wouldn't deserve to get.
He hopes, for an instant, that the part of Clark who's been with him for the past fifteen minutes will say it for him. But it doesn't happen. Clark looks at Bruce again, silent, and when the other Clark holds up the stone, the—kryptonite, it must be, even if somehow this piece is black—Clark closes his hand over it.
This time, Bruce has some idea what's going to happen, and he isn't watching it through a drone. There's a burst of it, that same odd dark energy, billowing out as if from an explosion, as if it should be light but it isn't; it's disorienting, almost impossible to parse visually. And when it's over, when it's gone—
When it's gone, there's only one Clark, standing there with the black kryptonite between his clasped hands.
"Turn to your left," Bruce says.
Clark does it.
"And now to your right."
The scanner hums, completes its cycle, returns to its starting position. Bruce glances at the screen, irrepressible reflex; the bioscanning program he wrote is complex, and it tends to take at least two minutes to analyze its results and compile them in a readable format.
But there is the worry, always, every time another piece of kryptonite manages to find its way anywhere near Clark, that it will have hurt him—that there will be something wrong, some lingering side effect, something he can't recover from. There's no reason to think that should be the case this time. But the black kryptonite STAR Labs managed to create, running a series of experiments on significantly more green kryptonite than they should have had available to them, clearly has a very different effect on Clark than usual, and Bruce is proportionally disinclined to assume the best.
Unfortunately: at least two minutes.
Bruce risks a glance at Clark.
There's only one of him. He's shown no signs of spontaneously splitting into two, or more. He seems fine.
But he's barely said a word to Bruce since he was recombined, and he's sitting on the edge of the medical cot now with his shoulders around his ears, his head ducked low.
Bruce is—still looking at him. Bruce has been having trouble not looking at him.
"We don't deserve it," he says, at last.
Clark looks up, startled. "What?"
"That's what you said. What half of you was saying to the other half. 'We don't deserve it'. And neither of you disagreed."
Clark bites at his mouth, throat working, and then says, abrupt, surprising, "Shit," and leans forward, elbows on his knees, covering his face with his hands. "I thought you'd at least decide to be angry first. Insulted. Jesus. Of course that's what you want to ask."
"That wasn't a good version of you and an evil version of you, was it?" Bruce presses. "It was just—the parts of you that you like, the parts of you that you think are good; the parts of you that are kind, generous, forgiving. The parts that are self-sacrificing, the parts that are willing to be hurt. And the parts that you don't like. The parts that are still angry, in pain, isolated. Unhappy."
Clark lifts his face out of his hands. He's breathing quickly, sharply; his eyes are bright, his expression strained, anguished. "Bruce—"
"But neither of them, no part of you, thinks you deserve to get what you want."
And Clark draws in a breath at that as if he's been hit, turns his face away; but Bruce was already right in front of him, takes a step in close—manipulative, unkind of him to bank on it, but he's betting Clark would do just about anything rather than shove him away, with whatever vague memory he has in his head right now of part of himself slamming Bruce into a wall.
He touches Clark's shoulder; skims his hand across it to the edge of Clark's shirtcollar, the hollow of his throat—keeps his thumb there, his fingertips at the nape of Clark's neck. His heart is pounding.
"Clark," he says, hoarse. "Clark, was it—do you—?"
He's suspended there, on the edge of it, no idea which way he might tip. Something about the look on Clark's face—on both of Clark's faces. The way the one Clark had said it, I'm not done yet, and the way the other had answered him: that's not a good idea. We don't deserve it. It adds up, doesn't it? Or is it—is it something Clark doesn't like about himself, that he wants Bruce? Was it only one of them, only a part of himself Clark wishes he were rid of?
But then Clark moves—makes a sudden helpless sound, turns into Bruce's hand on him, and pushes forward, rising halfway off the edge of the cot—kisses him.
"Yeah," he says, against Bruce's mouth, when it's over. "Yes, I—it's—all of me. Every part," and he draws away just far enough to offer Bruce a shaky little smile. "For better or for worse, you could say."
And Bruce can't do anything with that but draw him in again, touch his brows and his cheekbones, the line of his nose, the cut of his jaw—every part, or at least all the ones he can reach right now—and kiss him again.