Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Gotham was quiet tonight. Not peaceful, Gotham never offered that, but the kind of quiet that settled in after the worst had already happened. The sirens were distant, muted by fog that hung low across the horizon. Batman stood on the ledge of a half-collapsed building overlooking Robinson Park, cloaked in shadow, listening.

The wind carried the usual scents of diesel fuel, rain-soaked concrete, the lingering bite of cordite from a gun discharged hours ago. He filtered them out with practiced ease. Below, a mugger decided against his third attempt of the evening. Batman didn’t move. The man would run. He always did. He adjusted the cowl slightly, its inner interface flickering briefly to life before he shut it down again. There were no alerts, and no emergencies demanding his attention. Good. It gave him time to think.

Tonight his mind had wandered again, tracing the same well-worn edges it always did when things got too quiet. He thought about his own strength and the things he still couldn’t explain. There were limits to what training could achieve for a human, limits he’d surpassed a long time ago. He remembered breaking a kid’s arm cleanly at age fourteen with only light pressure. The boy had been older, taller, a cruel fixture at a prep school Bruce only stayed in for six weeks. He hadn’t meant to cause permanent damage, but the crack of bone had echoed loudly enough for him to know he had. That had been the first time Alfred looked at him differently. 

He didn’t need scientific confirmation of what he was, he didn’t even need a mystical vision or prophecy. He’d pieced it together slowly over years through archeological notes left behind by Lucius, scroll fragments recovered during League work, and obscure myths cross-referenced against family histories long buried beneath Wayne money. The signs were always there. He had an unnatural recovery rate, his injuries healed in hours, sometimes minutes. He had an affinity for combat, an instinct that felt blood-deep. He didn’t enjoy violence, but it came easily to him. Even now, standing still above the city, he could feel that part of him resting just below the surface, watchful. Waiting.

He’d found the shrine on Myrina Ridge in his early twenties, during the year he vanished from the public eye. It had been buried beneath a landslide, untouched by time. His blood had activated something there, an inscription lit by unnatural fire, a sword that burned hot when his fingers brushed the hilt, as though it hadn’t dulled in centuries. It had welcomed him as if it recognized him, but he’d left it behind. That life belonged to someone else. Bruce Wayne and Batman were enough. The city didn’t need a god.

His comm crackled once. “East End is completely silent. No movement,” came Nightingale’s voice. “You going to stand on that ledge all night or actually come play?”

Bruce didn’t answer. The comm cut again, mercifully. He turned from the ledge, cape billowing behind him, and descended into the dark without a sound. A god might have razed the city, he thought. He chose to save it instead, and the fire in his blood—his father’s legacy—remained exactly where he kept it. Buried.

Bruce crossed the city in silence, gliding above rooftops like a shadow. The wind tore at his cape, sharp with the metallic chill of oncoming rain. Below, the lights of Gotham blurred in shifting gold and steel, alive in the way that only cities trying to survive could be. Nightingale was already there, perched atop the roof of the Monarch Theater, one knee bent, arms resting loosely over his legs, he looked like something cut from old myth and repurposed in Kevlar and grace. His suit was sleeker than Batman’s, feathered in the way a bird of prey might dream of becoming human. Blue lined the shoulders like plumage, barely subtle enough to blend into the dark. Bruce landed beside him without a word. He didn’t need to announce himself. Nightingale had likely heard his approach five rooftops ago.

“Warehouse on Culver’s gone cold,” Nightingale said, gaze never leaving the street. “They moved whatever was in it. I found tire tracks heading south. Weight distribution’s off. Could be a decoy convoy.”

Batman nodded once. “We’ll split the grid.”

He allowed himself a glance sideways. Nightingale looked young tonight. He was still growing into the frame that would one day surpass Bruce’s. The eyes beneath the domino mask were sharp but steady, always watching. Bruce had trained him that way, but some of it had been there long before the lessons began. He still remembered the first time he saw those eyes.

Greece – seven years ago

The temple had been buried beneath an olive grove, half-swallowed by time and war. No path led to it, at least not one that modern maps cared to mark. The local village spoke of the place in hushed tones, avoiding it entirely. Superstition , Bruce had thought. Until he found the boy alone and barefoot in the ruins of a forgotten god. His skin streaked with dirt, knuckles bloodied from fighting something far too large. He had no parents, no ID, and no name. Bruce had reached for his comm to call for extraction.

The boy had looked up then and he looked like a child who had already survived something unspeakable, and who, when asked his name, had given none. So Bruce gave him one: Nightingale. A nod to the temple’s mosaic, nearly intact behind him: a black-winged figure carrying a dying god on its back, head tilted toward the stars. A bird that sang not to warn, but to keep the night from going silent. He never explained the reference, and the boy never asked. His civilian identity was named Richard Wayne, the cover story was that he was an orphan rescued from another country.

----------

Bruce folded his arms, watching the city from their vantage point. “What do you make of the convoy?”

“Too clean. Someone wants us following it.”

Bruce allowed himself a slight breath of approval. 

“They’re testing our response time,” Dick added. “Measuring how fast we move, how far we separate.”

“Then we don’t.”

“Thought you’d say that.”

The storm was close now, Bruce could feel it in the pressure of the air and in the static along his jaw. Maybe it wasn’t the weather, maybe something else was coming, something not of Gotham. His fingers curled loosely at his side. The blood in his veins felt too warm. He glanced at Nightingale once more. The boy—no, the man now—was watching the sky as if he could feel it too. 

Nightingale swept down the fire escape behind Bruce, boots landing without a sound. The last sweep of the East End turned up nothing but a stolen truck and two college kids who couldn’t read “No Trespassing.” Bruce had handled the chase. Dick had handled the warning. They worked in rhythm now. The Batmobile waited in the alley, cloaked in matte black and waiting with its engine on low idle. They moved like clockwork, Batman jumped behind the wheel, and Nightingale slid into the passenger side, buckling in before the first turn. The city blurred past them in streaks.

Neither spoke, they rarely did after patrol. Words took energy they preferred to save for combat or consequence, and truthfully, there was nothing left to say. The job had been done and the city was still standing. That was enough. The manor emerged from the trees, tall and dark, stately against the cliffs, the windows lit only in one corner where Alfred had left a lamp burning out of habit. Bruce parked in silence. The garage doors sighed closed behind them.

Dick was the first to strip out of his armor, pulling the gauntlets free with small, practiced motions. He unlatched the segmented chestplate and hung it on the reinforced wall rack, exhaling quietly once the weight was off. Bruce worked beside him with mechanical precision, peeling away the armor layer by layer until only the undersuit clung to the sweat at the small of his back. There were no injuries tonight. Not serious ones.

“Hydration. Protein,” Bruce said without looking, already heading toward the lift.

Dick followed, hair damp against his neck from the heat of the suit. “Alfred’s going to try and make us eat. You know that, right?”

“I’ll pretend to be asleep.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I trained you.”

Dick snorted, and Bruce caught the corner of his mouth tilt upward for half a second before it vanished again. The elevator rose through the house with a soft hum, bringing them back into the stillness of the manor’s upper floors. The hallway was dim, lit only by wall sconces and moonlight bleeding through tall windows. The storm hadn’t broken yet, but the air felt heavier now. Bruce paused outside Dick’s door.

“You need sleep,” he said.

“You need it more,” Dick replied.

Bruce didn’t answer. He stepped into the shadows of the hall and disappeared into his own room before Dick could try again. Dick stood in the doorway for a moment, fingers brushing the frame. The manor was full of ghosts. He could feel it sometimes when the night was too still, the weight of something ancient watching the man who wore a cowl not to hide, but to hold something back. He didn’t know all of Bruce’s secrets, not yet, but he knew this much: whatever Bruce had come from, whatever god or curse or war lived in his bones, it hadn’t broken him, it had made him choose. And every night, Bruce chose the mission, the fight, the quiet hours between dusk and dawn.

Dick stepped inside his room and shut the door. Sleep came easier in the manor. The family was home, and the storm, for now, had stayed at bay.

Chapter Text

The sky split open before dawn. No one noticed it at first. A few early truckers crossing the Kansas state line noted a strange shimmer in the upper atmosphere. One woman pulled over and took a photo of the streak of silver arching across the clouds, trailing light like a comet, and the signal dropped just after. By the time it reached Earth’s lower orbit, radar systems in NORAD scrambled. It wasn’t a satellite or debris. It wasn’t anything in their database. 

For some reason, it was slowing down. That was the part they didn’t know how to explain. Objects falling through gravity didn’t slow down, they accelerated. This one came to a stop and slowly descended. It passed through cloud cover just after 5:00 a.m., silent as breath. No heat signature, just light, pale blue and flickering, like the reflection of stars on water. The craft made no attempt to conceal itself, but it didn’t announce itself either. It simply was, shimmering and quiet, floating above a wheat field on the outskirts of a long-forgotten farm.

It hovered in the air, metal that wasn’t quite metal, smooth and curved with veins of crystal pulsing faintly at the seams. It gave the impression of something alive. Like it had grown this way, or evolved. Like it had chosen to look like a ship, for the benefit of those watching. The hull shifted once, then peeled open with a sound like wind through glass. A figure stepped out. It was human-shaped and broad-shouldered, dressed in what looked like ceremonial armor fused with something organic. There were lines of silver carved into blue, faintly glowing in rhythm with his pulse. He touched the earth with bare feet. The wheat around him bent slightly, but didn’t burn. 

He blinked at the sunrise, expression unreadable, like he was trying to determine if it was real. Kal-El had arrived on Earth intact, body honed by Krypton’s ancient genetic programming, heart still shaped by the last words of dying parents who told him Earth would be a second chance. He didn’t know the language. He didn’t know the culture, but he knew he was alone. The stars behind him were gone. Krypton had vanished into silence, and this strange, heavy planet, wrapped in noise and life and chaos, was all that remained. The wind caught at his cloak, and for a moment he didn’t breathe.

Back in Gotham, Bruce’s eyes snapped open in the dark. The house was still, but the air was wrong. Something new had entered the world, and he could feel it moving.

—--------

The planet was louder than he expected. The soil hummed faintly beneath his feet, full of energy and decay. The trees bent in the wind, as if reaching for something unseen. Insects droned in clusters along the edges of the field where his ship had landed, their wings a constant static against the open sky. Everything on this planet moved. He stayed where he was for an hour, just listening.

Krypton’s memory still clung to him, his body bore the evidence of its science, grown in line with ancient genomic coding, trained by simulation. But there had been no wind on Krypton, and no smell of wet leaves, no sound of birds waking in the trees. Earth felt alive in ways Krypton never had and it terrified him.

He began walking just after sunrise. The armor adjusted to the temperature automatically, nanoweave contracting to keep him warm against the morning chill. His cape brushed the tips of wild grass as he moved through the field, barefoot still, quiet enough that small animals watched him pass without fleeing. He didn’t know where to go. The language was unfamiliar. His ship had uploaded fragments of Earth’s major dialects into his neural interface, but they were incomplete.

The first human he saw was driving a tractor. Kal watched from a distance as he hopped off. The man wore gloves, sweat already darkening the collar of his shirt. He didn’t see Kal, just leaned against the engine, talking into a phone, sipping from a plastic cup. The ease of him was striking, he was just… a man. Living. Kal stayed in the trees until the man left.

He stole clothes from a laundry line farther south, denim, worn cotton, a canvas jacket several sizes too small in the shoulders. He didn’t mean to steal, not exactly. He left the crystal insignia from his belt behind on the porch, a faintly glowing shard no human could identify. An apology in the only currency he had. The shoes didn’t fit, but he walked anyway. By noon he reached a roadside diner. He didn’t go in, just watched from the treeline again, observing how people moved, how they gesture when speaking, how they leaned into each other’s laughter or stepped back when arguments began. It was strange how much of the communication was unspoken. Even without understanding the words, he could read tension in their muscles, joy in their eyes.

He didn’t try to speak their language, not yet. He wanted to understand this world before he touched it too deeply. Earth’s sun warmed his skin in a way Krypton’s never had. He could feel it curling into his bones, strengthening him. The more time he spent outside, the more his senses sharpened, his vision focused farther, and his hearing deepened past walls and miles and heartbeats. He knelt in a clearing as evening fell, hand pressed against the dirt. He felt life, everywhere. It was wild, messy, and uncontrolled, but something about it called to him.

He wasn’t ready to be seen. Not yet. The people here seemed fragile and unaware of the scale of the universe they stood inside. If he revealed himself too quickly, it would end badly. So he watched, waited, and wandered.

The library sat between a post office and an abandoned antique store, its brick facade faded to a shade of soft rust. A flag out front moved slowly in the wind, its edges frayed. The door was open, and inside there were books, thousands of them. He stepped through quietly. No one looked up. The building smelled like paper and dust, filtered through weak air conditioning and warm wood paneling. Two elderly women were talking in hushed voices near the genealogy section. A teenager sat at a computer, chewing on a pen cap and half-listening to music through cheap earbuds.

Kal moved toward the shelves. His fingers brushed the spines as he passed, feeling soft leather, stiff cardboard, some titles embossed in gold, others faded by time. There were encyclopedias, atlases, books on world history, physics, fiction and everything in between. He took five books down at once, then grabbed ten more. At first, he tried to read at a human pace. He sat at an empty table in the back corner, folded into the chair as best he could, a tattered copy of A Brief History of Time open in front of him. The words pulled him into the wonderful human theories of black holes, relativity, time as a dimension. Familiar concepts, but explained through Earth’s lens. It felt primitive, but it was brilliant and beautiful in its ambition.

His fingers turned the pages faster. Soon he had three books open at once, then six. His eyes moved faster than they should have. The neurons in his brain adapted without resistance. Each paragraph locked into memory with perfect clarity, woven into the ever-expanding web of information forming behind his eyes. He read The Republic and To Kill a Mockingbird. He read about Hiroshima and the moon landing. He read about slavery, suffrage, revolutions and renaissances, kings and tyrants and civil rights. He read poetry. He read laws. He read fiction that felt more honest than any manifesto. The contradictions stunned him. A species capable of war on a global scale still wrote lullabies, committed genocide, yet created symphonies. Humans seemed to have hope, in spite of everything.

He sat there until night fell. No one disturbed him. The teenager at the computer left. The librarians turned off half the lights. No one asked why a stranger with strange eyes sat hunched over a stack of books in the dark, still turning pages, still hungry for more. Kal didn’t notice the time. He was trying to understand Earth the only way he knew how: all at once. By the time he stood, his mind felt full, heavy with the sheer volume of who these people were. He couldn’t carry all of it. He slipped Leaves of Grass into the pocket of his borrowed coat, then he stepped back out into the dark.

The stars overhead were dim compared to the sun that had lit his bones. But still, he looked up toward the constellations he didn’t recognize, the galaxies too far to hear, and whispered something in Kryptonian. A promise, maybe. Or a goodbye.

—-------

He didn’t dream, not in the way humans did. His mind didn’t slip into unconsciousness, it recalibrated, ran diagnostics, sorted sensory overload into ordered patterns. But sometimes, in the quiet hours just before dawn, when even the wind stilled, he remembered Krypton.

He sat now at the edge of a highway overpass, knees bent, watching the lights of a city named Metropolis pulse in the distance. He hadn’t entered it yet, he didn’t know if he should. Something about it felt loud in a different way, as if it were performing its own survival. The planet had already shown him what it was capable of. He’d watched a man slap a woman in the parking lot of a gas station two hours ago. No one intervened. She’d cried without sound, folding herself back into the driver’s seat of a car with one red taillight and driven away. 

He’d let her go, because he didn’t know what stepping in would do. He could break the man in half effortlessly. But should he? And if so—what next? Krypton would have had a protocol, an enforced response. There would have been sensors and tribunals. Justice, rendered without hesitation. 

Earth was full of imperfect, scared, and angry people, and some of them, he was beginning to realize, were trying to hold back the tide with their bare hands. He’d read about them, scattered mentions in underground blogs and conspiracy forums. Unconfirmed sightings. Whispers in the books he pulled late at night from corner shelves in cities that pretended not to notice him. A man in Gotham, cloaked in black, moving like a shadow across the rooftops. A woman who could tear tanks apart with her hands, seen once in France and then not again for decades. A boy who ran faster than the eye could follow. None of them operated publicly, not like Kryptonian protectors would have. These weren’t gods descending from high towers, they were hiding, and yet, they were fighting anyway.

Why? What drove someone to step between danger and a stranger without assurance of survival? He didn’t know, but he wanted to. The alien part of him, what remained untouched by Earth’s pull, told him he should find them to understand their motives. They were variables in a new equation, but something else had begun to take root inside him. Something that had nothing to do with Krypton’s logic or programming: curiosity. He felt a desire to belong, and deep in his chest, still warming under Earth’s yellow sun, was the knowledge that he could shape this world.

—---------

He arrived at the landing site under cover of predawn haze, flying low in a stealth drone configured to scramble civilian radar. By the time his boots touched Kansas soil, the locals had already been cleared out by a fabricated FEMA sweep. No photos had been leaked and there were no eyewitnesses with real credibility. The few video clips that had made it online had been scrubbed by the time he checked the feed.

The earth here was pressed down in a perfect radius, wheat stalks flattened in a pattern too symmetrical to be accidental. It looked like energy, condensed and directed outward. The landing hadn’t been a crash. He knelt, gloved fingers skimming the soil. Still warm. His lenses scanned the site in infrared, ultraviolet, and half a dozen spectrums that didn’t exist publicly yet. There was trace radiation, but not from anything terrestrial, it was gamma dispersion laced with solar absorption. Something that had absorbed a star’s worth of power and was still running cool.

Alien. That much, he had suspected. What disturbed him wasn’t the ship or the technology, it was the footprints. He followed them across the field, back straight, every movement measured. The prints were deep, then they were gone. His eyes narrowed as he stood. The strange part wasn’t that something had arrived. He had long since stopped believing humanity was alone. The strange part was how little damage it had caused and how precisely it had landed.

He tapped the side of his cowl. “Upload atmospheric data and trace all off-grid surveillance within fifty miles,” he said. The A.I. responded with a quiet ping, already pulling from satellites and civilian devices alike.

He saw a series of blurred motion captures, barely perceptible distortions in video feeds from rural roads, small towns, and municipal cameras. It was a shape that didn’t move like it should have. The heat signature was inconsistent, like the body was adjusting to Earth’s conditions in real time. One image caught him. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in worn denim and canvas. He had his hood drawn up and his face turned just enough for the camera to catch something unnatural in the eyes. The footage cut out two seconds later. Bruce stared at the still frame. The figure wasn’t frightened, he was simply watching. Observing the world, the way predators did… or pilgrims. Bruce straightened, gaze cutting across the fields to the horizon. He could feel it now, but it was not divine. Not like the blood in his own veins. This was something else entirely.

—--------

The roof of the Gotham Police Department wasn’t particularly high, but it gave just enough vantage over the eastern quarter of the city. Below, the streets pulsed in flickers of neon and shadow, the eternal hum of Gotham’s unrest woven into the bones of the buildings. Bruce waited there, cape still, eyes narrowed behind the cowl. He hadn’t told Nightingale, not yet. The sensor grid in his gauntlet pulsed once. He’s here.

He turned as Kal landed without sound. The figure stood ten feet away, tall, quiet, unmistakably alien. He had changed into a sleek suit of deep blue edged in lightless silver, the fabric shifting like it breathed. His boots made no sound on the concrete. For several long seconds, they just watched each other. 

Kal tilted his head slightly, a curious motion. The gesture was subtle, almost human. “You’ve been following me,” he said at last.

His voice was smoother than Bruce expected and accented in a way Bruce couldn’t place, like every language Kal had ever studied was hovering just behind the words.

“You left a trail,” Bruce replied, tone clipped. “Not a very subtle one.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle.”

“That much was obvious.”

Kal took a small step forward. “You’re the one they whisper about.”

Bruce didn’t move. “I’m not interested in stories.”

“Neither am I.” Kal looked out over the city, as if trying to decide whether Gotham was beautiful or broken. His eyes scanned rooftops, traffic, bodies—every life below registered in perfect stillness behind his expression. Like he was learning how the world worked in real time.

Bruce watched him carefully. He didn’t sense deceit or malice, but there was something restrained. He recognized it.

Kal turned to face him fully. “I didn’t come to harm this planet.”

“I don’t trust people who announce their intentions up front.”

“That’s fair.” A pause. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“You landed on my planet.”

That made something flicker in Kal’s eyes, it looked like sadness. “I didn’t choose Earth,” he said. “It was the last option.”

Bruce said nothing. He could see it now. The lines of grief carved just beneath the alien stillness. The discipline that masked it, not unlike his own. Kal stepped closer, no longer pretending to keep distance. The light of the city glinted faintly against the emblem on his chest.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be here,” Kal said.

“Then don’t be anything yet,” Bruce said, voice even. “Just listen.”

Kal studied him for a long moment. Then, quietly: “You’re not human either.”

Bruce’s jaw clenched. “Careful,” he said, voice quiet as the wind.

Kal’s gaze didn’t waver. It was the closest thing to understanding they’d reached yet. “I’m staying,” Kal said. “For now.”

“I’ll be watching.”

“I hope so,” he lifted from the roof in a single movement.

Bruce watched him go, the cape curling around his frame like smoke. He stood there, long after Kal vanished into the clouds, with something tight and unfamiliar pressing beneath his ribs.

Chapter Text

Bruce was seated in the study, still in the undersuit of the cowl, the armor stripped off. The fire in the hearth burned low. Outside, wind moved through the trees. Alfred stepped inside without announcing himself.

“You’re not reading,” he observed mildly. “That usually means you’re brooding.”

“I’m working.”

“Of course. Silently. In a dark room. With no terminal active and your tea getting cold.”

Bruce didn’t answer. His fingers were pressed together under his chin, elbows resting on the arms of the chair. He hadn’t moved in almost ten minutes. Alfred crossed the floor and set the tea closer.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s he done?”

Bruce’s eyes shifted toward him. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

Alfred arched an eyebrow. “He didn’t level the city. He didn’t declare himself emperor. He didn’t explode. And this disappoints you?”

Bruce’s silence said enough. Alfred exhaled through his nose and folded his arms. “You don’t know what to do with someone who isn’t hostile.”

“He doesn’t lie,” Bruce said after a moment. “He doesn’t posture or show off, but I know he’s watching. I can feel it.”

Alfred studied him. “Feel it… how?”

Bruce frowned, leaning forward slightly. “It’s like pressure,” he said. “Somewhere just behind my ribs. It’s not visual or auditory, it’s just there. Every time he’s nearby.”

“Like a sixth sense.”

“Or a mirror.” He stood then, moving toward the fireplace. The flames cast shadows across his jaw. “I’ve spent a lifetime detecting movement in darkness,” Bruce murmured. “I’ve tracked gods, monsters, demigods with blood hotter than mine. I know how people hide. I know how they watch, but he’s different.”

Alfred was quiet.

Bruce’s hands curled slightly at his sides. “When he looks at me, I feel like I’m being—” he stopped himself.

“Seen?” Alfred offered quietly.

Bruce didn’t respond. They listened to the manor creaking gently as wind moved past the windows in their silence. After a moment, Alfred said, “What are you going to do, then?”

“I’m going to teach him,” he said. “Before someone else does.”

“Then let’s hope he’s a willing student.”

Bruce’s gaze turned back to the window. “He will be,” he murmured. “He came to learn.”

Somewhere far above Gotham, Kal floated, watching a single window in a sea of city lights and feeling the same pull in his chest.

—--------

The second meeting wasn’t on a rooftop. Bruce brought him to an abandoned building deep in the Narrows, four stories of forgotten brick and iron with no street lights or cameras. It smelled of rust and old fire. Kal stood in the center of the empty floor as Bruce circled him slowly, scanning his figure with an expression that was equal parts analyst and soldier.

“You’ll need a name,” Bruce said flatly. “Something ordinary.”

“I have a name.”

“You have an origin. That’s not the same.”

Kal didn’t reply at first. He watched Bruce move and noticed that every gesture was layered with purpose. It reminded him of Kryptonian tacticians, but where theirs was inherited discipline, Bruce’s restraint felt hard-earned.

Bruce finally stopped in front of him. “You want to move through this world without causing panic,” he said. “That means becoming unremarkable. No alien suit, no flying, nothing that says ‘other.’”

Kal raised an eyebrow. “So I should… act?”

“You should blend. You learn their rhythms and expectations. You give them what they understand.”

“You don’t do that.”

“I wear a mask.”

Kal’s lips curled faintly. “I thought the point of a mask was to conceal.”

Bruce didn’t smile. “It is.”

Kal let that linger. He had begun to notice that Bruce never said more than he needed to. “I don’t understand how you live like this,” Kal admitted. “Constant hiding, and so many… layers.”

Bruce turned and picked up a black bag from the ground. He unzipped it and pulled out a set of folded clothes—dark jeans, worn boots, a plain black henley. “Put these on.”

Kal looked down at the suit he wore, the high-collared Kryptonian weave that shimmered faintly even in the dark. Then back at Bruce. “Why these?”

“Because no one will look at you twice when you’re wearing them.”

Kal accepted the clothes wordlessly. He changed in the corner, though modesty wasn’t his reason. He sensed Bruce needed distance. Not because of discomfort, but because closeness wasn’t something Bruce offered easily. When he turned around again, Kal looked smaller. He was still tall and unmistakably powerful, but looked ordinary now. His hair fell slightly into his eyes. The shirt clung to his frame, unassuming.

Bruce studied him, nodding once. “We’ll need to build a history for you with a paper trail. Something believable.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“Enough times.”

Kal paused. “What name did you start with?”

Bruce didn’t answer. Instead, he walked past Kal, toward the broken window, gaze scanning the city below like it belonged to him. “You’ll need to learn restraint,” Bruce said quietly. “You need to master human emotion, empathy, and civility.”

Kal stepped up beside him. “And who taught you that?”

Bruce’s voice was low. “I’m still learning.”

The name they settled on was Clark Kent, it seemed plain and Kal could pronounce it easily. Bruce crafted the backstory with the same efficiency he used for shell corporations and cover identities; he made fake birth records, forged school transcripts, and rented a dead-end apartment in Metropolis. He didn’t ask if Kal wanted to choose for himself. Names, Bruce knew, weren’t about desire. Kal didn’t resist. He simply listened, watched, and learned. For weeks, Bruce kept him off the grid, no digital trail, no appearances in public, no contact with Nightingale or the League. Kal moved through Gotham’s underbelly as a phantom in borrowed clothes, tracing steps Bruce laid out.

Bruce observed everything: how he responded to crowds, to noise, to hunger, to cold. Kal didn’t flinch from any of it, but he didn’t seem entirely at ease, either. There was still something alien in the way he moved, like the weight of his body hadn’t quite become familiar. It felt like he was always holding back. So Bruce pushed him; not with strength, that was pointless. Kal’s power dwarfed anything Bruce could measure, but discipline and restraint, that could be taught.

“Again,” Bruce said one night, in the middle of an abandoned warehouse turned training ground.

Kal stood at the center of the ring, shirtless. Bruce circled him, wooden staff in hand. “You keep watching my body instead of the angle of attack.”

Kal wiped a trickle of blood from his lip. “Your body is the attack.”

“Then learn to predict it.”

Bruce struck again. Kal blocked, barely. The staff cracked against his forearm, leaving a line of red. He didn’t wince or retaliate. Good. Bruce reset the stance. “You’ll be in situations where you can’t afford to hit back. Where the act of defending yourself could level a building.”

Kal straightened, hands at his sides. “Then maybe I shouldn’t be around people.”

Bruce’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not the answer.”

“Then what is?”

He lowered the staff, stepping in close enough to see the tension in Kal’s shoulders, the invisible coil of energy always hiding under his skin. “You learn to care,” Bruce said, voice low. “To care enough to control it. No matter what they do to you.”

Kal’s expression didn’t change. Later, when they sat in silence near the cracked skylight, Bruce handed him a phone. “A basic model,” he said. “Preloaded with your alias. Try not to break it.”

Kal turned it in his hands like it was an artifact. “Clark Kent,” he said aloud, slowly, testing the sound.

“It fits,” Bruce replied.

“Why?”

Bruce paused. His voice was quieter than usual when he finally said, “Because he sounds like someone who wants to be good.”

Kal looked at him and smiled brightly, as if Bruce had given him the best compliment in the world.

—-------

The restaurant Bruce chose wasn’t flashy. It was tucked away on the corner of a side street. A place where ordinary people too other ordinary people. Bruce didn’t look at him as they stepped through the door.

“Rule one,” he said under his breath. “Don’t hover. No scanning the room with your x-ray vision. Just be present.”

Clark nodded, adjusting the collar of his coat. The maître d’ barely glanced at them before leading them to a booth near the back, away from the windows. The table was small, lit by a single overhead pendant lamp. “Two?” the host asked, and Bruce answered with a simple nod.

Clark slid into the booth first. Bruce followed a beat later, moving with the same exacting stillness he carried everywhere. A young waiter approached, barely older than twenty, carrying a notepad and an easy smile.

“Water to start?” he offered.

“Yes,” Bruce said.

“Absolutely,” Clark echoed, then blinked as Bruce shot him a look. “Too enthusiastic?” he asked once the waiter left.

Bruce exhaled softly. “You sounded like someone reading a line for the first time.”

“I am.”

The waiter returned moments later and smiled as he set down the glasses. “I’ll give you a minute,” he said, then added with a casual wink, “I’ll bring over a candle too, might as well make it romantic, right?”

Clark blinked. The waiter moved on before either could respond. Clark turned back to Bruce, brows slightly lifted. “Romantic,” he said slowly. “As in…?”

Bruce closed the menu. “Affection. People use it to describe a particular kind of relationship, usually monogamous and emotional. Often sexual.”

Clark studied him. “Do we seem like that to him?”

“We’re alone. We aren’t speaking much. The lighting’s dim. That’s usually enough.”

Clark looked around the restaurant. “And the candle?”

“Ambiance. It’s symbolic. Most people don’t think about why. They just associate it with intimacy.”

Clark nodded, processing. “So, this is how humans test each other’s compatibility?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you?”

Bruce didn’t look up. “I don’t date.”

Clark tilted his head, eyes narrowing slightly. “Because of the mission?”

“Because I don’t trust easily. Or often.”

There was no heat in the answer. Clark seemed to consider that for a long moment. Then he leaned back slightly in the booth, watching Bruce carefully. “I don’t think the waiter was wrong.”

Bruce’s gaze lifted at that. “I am trying to understand you and our compatibility,” Clark said matter of factly.

Bruce’s jaw tensed slightly, but he chose to stay silent because he knew Clark didn’t understand the implications. The candle arrived a moment later, small and flickering. Neither of them touched it.

—-------

The apartment was small and contained sparse furniture, two windows, and a view of an alley. Bruce had chosen it carefully, just one of a thousand near-identical units spread across the city. A place no one would look at twice. Clark didn’t mind. The walls were solid and the floors creaked like they had stories to tell. He liked that.

The only decorations were the books Bruce had given him and a short stack of DVDs placed carefully beside a small screen. A post-it note on top, in Bruce’s handwriting, read: “Cultural immersion. These will tell you more than facts.”

The first disc was Dead Poets Society. Clark sat cross-legged on the floor, hands in his lap as the screen lit up. For the first hour, he was still, his eyes barely blinking, breath soft and steady. But when Neil opened the drawer and pulled out the revolver, Clark reached out instinctively, as if he could stop it. A second later, he flinched. 

He stayed sitting long after the credits rolled, arms wrapped around his knees. One tear slipped down his cheek, then another. He didn’t wipe them away. He just whispered, “O Captain…” and sat in silence.

The next film was The Imitation Game. He watched carefully, but he kept getting confused; not at the war, not at the math, but at the moments in between. At the closeness between men, the gentleness between boys, the way something unspoken could still be seen. He didn’t understand the courtroom scene. Or why no one stopped them.

“They’re punishing him?” he said aloud, frowning at the screen. “For who he loves?”

His voice sounded too loud in the quiet. He looked down at the notepad Bruce had left on the table and scrawled:

Why do humans hurt people for loving differently?

Who decides what kind of love is acceptable?

Why did no one stop it? Why was silence the answer?

The last film was The Breakfast Club. Clark tilted his head through the opening scenes, watching the teenagers posture and clash and slowly, miraculously, reveal themselves. By the end, he was smiling, just a little, though he didn’t understand why it made his chest feel so heavy. He wrote again.

Why are humans so afraid of being known?

What happens after the letter? Do they stay friends?

Why does everyone seem so alone?

By the time he turned off the screen, it was past midnight. He lay back on the floor, the notepad on his chest, eyes fixed on the ceiling, thinking of revolvers in drawers and boys who loved wrong and strangers learning how not to be. And in the dark, he whispered something he didn’t understand. A word he’d heard in all three films. Love .

Chapter Text

Bruce had been slipping, albeit subtly. Dick noticed the hesitations between words, the shifts in patrol timing, the way he looked back over his shoulder like he had something else pulling at him. Dick had known him long enough to notice, and to know when Bruce was hiding something. So tonight, he didn’t go home after patrol. He stayed in the shadows as Bruce moved across the rooftops of Burnley, silent and precise, like always. Except his route was wrong. There was no strategic advantage in heading toward the industrial flats, no high-level threats, no alarms. Just a dense stretch of aging apartments and empty loading bays.

Which meant Bruce wasn’t chasing something, he was visiting. Dick moved higher along the ridge of an old ventilation shaft, watching Bruce scale the edge of a narrow brick building. Four stories, three lit windows, one side entrance. Bruce entered through the fire escape. Dick waited five minutes before dropping down to the ledge across the street. He pulled out his binoculars, set the scope, and focused on the fourth-floor window.

Bruce was inside. He wasn’t even hiding in the shadows, just standing in the middle of a living room with his cowl pulled back and the tension in his shoulders softened just enough to be noticeable. Across from him was a tall man, he was dressed simply, but he was off, like he didn’t quite belong to gravity the same way everyone else did. He was looking at Bruce. Dick couldn’t hear them, but the body language spoke volumes, they trusted each other. That was the most unsettling part.

Dick pulled back from the ledge, breathing out slowly. He crouched in the shadows, mind racing. He’d never seen Bruce let anyone in that easily. He stayed there for another beat before retreating into the dark, heart pounding.

—-------

Dick had always trusted Bruce, that was the problem. Dick had learned the hard way that even the strongest men kept secrets that could burn down everything around them. So the next morning, he started digging. The apartment Bruce had entered the night before was listed under the name Clark Kent, who had no digital footprint prior to last week to the trained eye. There was no social media and no driver’s license. The lease was clean, paid in full. First and last month’s rent, wired in from a shell account registered to a Metropolis firm with no online presence and no phone number. Classic Bat-playbook.

It wasn’t the cover that disturbed Dick, it was how intact it was. Someone had gone to great lengths to make sure this man could disappear into the world unnoticed. Which meant Bruce wasn’t watching him, he was protecting him. Dick leaned back in his chair in the Cave’s secondary terminal, one leg propped on the desk. The screen glowed in front of him, maps and financial trails lit in icy blue. Clark Kent didn’t exist six days ago. And now Bruce was visiting him in the dead of night, unarmed, unmasked. So who was he? A quick search through city surveillance, what little remained unfiltered by Oracle, showed a man matching Clark’s height and build browsing a used bookstore on 7th Avenue.

The man’s posture was off, every movement was too perfectly balanced. He watched the footage again, eyes narrowing. It was subtle, but once you saw it, it was impossible to unsee. Clark Kent moved like gravity wasn’t entirely in charge of him. Was he an alien? Meta? Weapon? Dick didn’t know, but he knew the way Bruce looked at him, the way he had softened in that tiny apartment. That scared him more than any power set, because Bruce didn’t do personal, not unless it was dangerous. Dick shut the feed, fingers tightening slightly around the edge of the console. He’d wait, but if this stranger became a threat, Bruce wouldn’t be the one to see it. Dick would.

—--------

Dick planned the encounter with care. He had been watching Clark’s movements for three days. Every morning around 10:00 a.m., he walked three blocks from his apartment to a secondhand bookstore on 7th Avenue. He stayed for forty-five minutes, always left without buying anything, and then wandered the city without a clear pattern. He arrived at the bookstore ten minutes early and chose a bench in the back, near the poetry shelf. He wore jeans, a navy hoodie, and a pair of glasses that did just enough to disrupt facial recognition. 

He pulled a weathered copy of Leaves of Grass off the shelf and pretended to read it. He chose it because Bruce had left a marked-up version in the manor study a week earlier. Clark had likely seen the same copy. The bell above the bookstore door rang exactly at 10:03. Dick didn’t look up immediately. He heard footsteps approaching and the sound of someone stopping mid-aisle. He could feel the gaze before he saw it. Clark was watching him. When Dick finally looked up, Clark stood about six feet away, tall and broad-shouldered, wearing the same neutral clothes he always did, hands in his pockets. Dick offered a polite, casual smile.

“This one always hits differently when it’s raining,” he said, holding up the book.

Clark tilted his head slightly. “I haven’t read it yet,” he said. His voice was gentle, but grounded. “Is it about nature?”

Dick closed the book and rested it on his knee. “It’s about a lot of things. Nature, sure. Also identity, the body, death, grief, longing. Whitman doesn’t stick to one lane.”

Clark stepped a little closer, scanning the nearby shelves. “Do you read a lot of poetry?”

“Enough to fake a conversation in a bookstore.”

That made Clark smile, it softened his entire face. Dick leaned back slightly, keeping his tone light but intentional. “You new in the neighborhood?”

Clark hesitated, just for a breath. “Yeah,” Clark said. “Just moved in.”

“Welcome to the city,” Dick said easily. “Try not to take it personally if no one smiles at you on the street.”

“I haven’t,” Clark replied. “But I noticed it.”

Dick nodded, pretending to go back to the book. “It’s not unfriendliness, it’s just carefulness. You get used to it.”

Clark didn’t respond at first. Instead, he turned slightly, as if about to walk away, then paused. “Can I ask something?” he said.

Dick looked up again. “Sure.”

“Did you choose that book because you knew someone might be watching you?”

Dick’s grip on the pages tightened slightly. “Depends,” he said after a moment. “Are you someone who watches people?”

Clark’s expression didn’t shift. “Only when they feel familiar.”

Dick closed the book completely and stood. “Enjoy your morning, Mr. Kent.”

Clark’s eyebrows lifted a fraction, but he stepped back, letting Dick pass. As Dick walked toward the exit, he felt Clark’s gaze stay on him. 

—--------

The second the door to the apartment shut behind him, Clark locked it. He moved to the window, pulling the curtain back just enough to scan the street below. There was no sign of pursuit. Still, something sat heavy in his chest. He took out the phone Bruce had given him. A simple, untraceable device with one number programmed in.

The line picked up on the second ring. “Clark?”

“I think someone just made me,” Clark said, his words coming fast. “At the bookstore. He knew my name.”

“What exactly happened?”

Clark stepped away from the window, crossing the small room in three quick strides. “He sat near me, started a conversation. And then, when I left, he called me Mr. Kent.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” Clark’s hand tightened around the phone. “Bruce, no one should know that name. I haven’t told anyone. There’s no paper trail, no connection—”

“He’s not a threat.”

That brought Clark up short. “What?”

Bruce’s voice was low. “His name is Nightingale. He works with me.”

Clark sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, processing. “He’s protective,” Bruce said. “And observant. He doesn’t like surprises, and you… you’re a surprise.”

Clark exhaled. Some of the tension in his shoulders bled away. “He didn’t say anything threatening,” he said. “But it felt like he was testing me. Like he wanted to see how I’d respond under pressure.”

“He was.”

Clark glanced at the notepad on his table, still filled with questions from the movies he’d watched. “So he doesn’t trust me?”

“Not yet.”

Clark nodded slowly. “Do you?”

“Yes,” Bruce said. “I do.” The words settled in Clark’s chest like heat.

“I want to meet him again,” Clark said. “Without pretending.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Bruce said. “But take a breath, no one else has discovered you.”

Clark looked down at his hands. “Okay,” he said softly. “Thank you.”

Bruce didn’t say goodbye. Just ended the call with the quiet certainty that they’d speak again soon. Clark stared at the phone for a long moment, then set it aside. He felt like someone new seeing him made him just a little more real.

—---------

Bruce chose the meeting location with care, he picked a rooftop garden on a decommissioned museum because it was private, secure, and exposed just enough. He arrived first. Clark landed softly five minutes later, descending with that effortless silence that still defied physics. He wore plain clothes. Dick arrived a minute after that, vaulting over the ledge like it was second nature. He wore his suit, and looked Clark up and down with scrutiny. The three of them stood in a loose triangle, Gotham’s skyline dark behind them.

Bruce stepped forward first. “Thank you both for coming.”

Clark nodded politely, though his eyes stayed on Dick. “He’s fast,” he said.

Dick tilted his head slightly. “You’re not exactly slow either.”

Bruce held up a hand before the rhythm could shift into confrontation. “Let’s get one thing clear: this isn’t an interrogation. It’s a conversation.”

Dick crossed his arms but said nothing. Bruce turned slightly toward Clark. “You wanted a proper introduction. This is it.”

Clark took a step forward. “My name is Clark,” he said. “Clark Kent. I wasn’t born here. I’m still learning how to be part of this world.”

He didn’t offer a hand. He knew better than to expect that kind of trust this soon. Dick watched him carefully. “You’re not human.”

“No,” Clark admitted. “But I want to understand humans. I want to live like one. That’s why Bruce is helping me.”

“And what are you in the meantime?” Dick asked. 

Clark didn’t flinch. “I’m someone who could be dangerous, but chooses not to be.”

Dick nodded slowly. “Fair answer.”

They stood there in silence for a beat, then Clark pulled something from his coat pocket. A folded list—creased, smudged at the edges. “These are questions I had,” he said, holding it out to Dick. “About Earth, people, and how you’re supposed to live here.”

Dick took it, scanned a few lines. The questions were strange and earnest.

Why do people lie to protect someone they love? Is grief a weakness or a strength? What does ‘romantic tension’ mean, and why does it make people act irrationally?

Dick’s eyes flicked back up. “You got these from movies?”

Clark nodded once. “Bruce said it would help.”

Dick studied him. Finally, he folded the paper again and tucked it into his belt. “I’ll answer some of these,” he said. “But I want to know who you are without Bruce standing between us.”

“I’d like that,” Clark said quietly.

Bruce watched them both, feeling relieved that he didn’t need to control the conversation anymore. After a long pause, Dick finally cracked a small, reluctant smile. “Alright, Clark Kent. Let’s see what you’re really made of.”

“Thank you,” Clark said.

The wind moved softly around them, brushing the edge of Clark’s coat and lifting a strand of hair from Dick’s forehead. Dick broke the silence first. “You watched Dead Poets Society?”

Clark nodded. “It made me cry.”

Dick’s eyebrows lifted. “Dead Poets got you?”

“The others vexed me,” Clark said. “Dead Poets Society just made me… ache.”

There was something in the way he said it that felt vulnerable. Dick’s posture shifted to something less defensive. “You really are learning to be human,” he said.

Clark tilted his head. “Does that mean you’ll stop following me?”

Dick didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he stepped closer and met Clark’s gaze head-on. “It means I’ll be watching differently, to see if you’re staying.” 

Clark blinked, taken slightly off-guard by the honesty. “I plan to.”

“Good.” Dick’s voice dropped. “Then start acting like someone who plans to stay.”

Before Clark could respond, Bruce’s voice cut in, “Enough for one night.”

They both turned toward him. Bruce stepped forward, glancing between the two of them. “This isn’t a test either of you can pass in one conversation. Trust takes time.”

Clark nodded slowly. “I’m willing to wait.”

Dick shrugged. “I’m willing to keep showing up.”

Bruce’s eyes warmed, just slightly. “Then we’re on the right track.”

He stepped past them, toward the rooftop stairwell. “I’ll leave you two to talk if you want. Don’t stay too long, looks like a storm’s moving in.”

Clark looked up at the sky as Bruce disappeared through the door. Thunder rolled far in the distance, low and distant. Dick turned to him again, this time with a bit more curiosity than suspicion.

“So,” he said, hooking his thumbs into his belt. “Do you know how to play chess, or is that another human skill Bruce hasn’t downloaded into your brain yet?”

Clark smiled. “I know the rules.”

“Then let’s see if you know how to lose.”

—---------

BONUS SCENE: THE CHESS GAME

Dick pulled a compact chessboard from one of the side compartments of his belt and snapped it open on a concrete ledge.

Clark watched him with quiet amusement. “You carry a chessboard around?”

Dick shrugged as he set the board between them and began arranging the pieces. “You’d be surprised how many rooftop stakeouts get boring.”

Clark lowered himself into a crouch across from him, careful not to crack the ledge. He watched as Dick slid a white pawn forward two spaces.

“Pawn to E4,” Dick said. “Your move.”

Clark studied the board. “Do you normally go first?”

Dick looked up. “I figured I’d offer you the advantage.”

Clark considered that for a moment, then moved his knight. “I don’t need it.”

Dick grinned. “Good. I hate easy wins.”

They played in silence for several moves, the sound of plastic against stone punctuating the quiet. Rain misted lightly over the city around them, but neither of them moved to leave. “You move like someone who’s used to combat,” Dick said after a while, watching Clark’s eyes trace the board. 

Clark kept his attention on the rook he was repositioning. “My father, he programmed learning modules into the ship that brought me here. History, science, tactical analysis. I absorbed it all before I ever set foot on Earth.”

“Did it teach you how to lie?”

Clark paused, then looked up. “Not directly.”

“But you know how.”

“Yes,” Clark said evenly. “I just don’t like doing it.”

Dick leaned back, arms resting loosely on his knees. “You’re lucky. Most of us had to learn by doing.”

Clark studied him for a moment, then moved his queen into position. “Check.”

Dick’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Clever.”

Clark didn’t smile, but his gaze held a flicker of satisfaction. “I’m trying.”

They kept playing, and the conversation softened with the edges of the game. “Bruce told me you were alone,” Clark said eventually. “Before he found you.”

Dick’s hands froze briefly over a pawn. Then he moved. “He found me in temple ruins when I was little.”

Clark nodded. “I’ve been reading about demigods.”

Dick’s voice was quieter now. “You think we’re alike?”

“I think you survived something that should’ve broken you,” Clark said. “And you chose to become someone better.”

Dick didn’t respond right away. He stared at the board, then looked up with something unreadable in his expression. “Bruce never says things like that,” he said.

Clark met his gaze. “He thinks them.”

Dick pushed his final pawn forward, took Clark’s bishop, and leaned back.

“It’s not checkmate,” Clark said.

“No,” Dick replied, standing and stretching his arms. “But it’s close enough for tonight.”

Clark folded the board as Dick holstered it back into his belt. “I didn’t win,” Clark said.

“You didn’t lose either,” Dick replied. “That’s better than most people manage their first game with me.”

Clark stood too, his frame relaxed now in a way it hadn’t been earlier. “Do you think Bruce will be upset we’re getting along?”

Dick smirked. “He’ll pretend not to care. Then he’ll tell Alfred and ask for a second pot of coffee.”

Clark laughed at that. They walked to the edge of the roof together, pausing just before the drop.

“See you around, Clark,” Dick said, already pulling out a grapple.

“You will,” Clark promised.

Then, with a blur of movement, he lifted into the sky and disappeared into the clouds. Dick stayed a moment longer, watching the dark stretch of sky. Then he fired the line and vanished into the night.

Chapter Text

The stars look so much closer from Earth. Clark lay back on the roof of his building, arms folded behind his head, and watched the night sky with eyes that could pierce through the layers of atmosphere, past the blur of satellites, into the stretch of empty black where Krypton used to be. He didn’t breathe often, he didn’t need oxygen, but tonight, the silence felt wrong without the rise and fall of lungs trying to hold something in. Tonight, he felt the hollow ache of stillness, and the unbearable fact that he was the only one who’d made it. Why me? The question had no satisfying answer. It never would. He closed his eyes, and memory rose up fast.

—

The light had turned red. The sky over Krypton had taken on that strange, furious hue, a color Jor-El said was a symptom of the planet’s core destabilizing. By then, evacuation had become a theory, not a solid plan. The final days came fast. Kal remembered the way Lara’s hands had cupped his face, trembling.

“You have to go,” she’d said. “You have the strength. You can survive the gravity. You can find a place to live. A place to start again.”

“I’m not leaving you.” His voice had cracked, even as his jaw stayed set. He was an adult, not a child. He was trained, capable. He should have been able to fix this. Stop it. Bear it. But his father had already made the decision for him. The launchpad was hidden beneath their estate, cloaked by shielding that didn’t register on planetary scans. Jor-El had finished the vessel in secret. It was only built for one.

“You lied to me,” Kal had whispered, the betrayal sharp enough to make his stomach twist.

“I didn’t lie,” Jor-El said. “I protected the only future we have left.”

“I could save someone else—”

“You can’t.” Jor-El’s voice didn’t rise.  “Kal, we are out of time. If you stay, you die with us.”

He’d fought. Not with fists, but with words. With desperate, pleading logic. It hadn’t mattered. In the end, his mother had kissed his forehead, and his father had pressed something into his palm, a ring engraved with their family crest, and when Kal had blinked, the room had filled with light.

Jor-El had triggered the launch manually, locked the system, and sent him away. He had seen their faces one last time through the glass of the pod. Lara, with tears shining but unfallen. Jor-El, standing straight, resolute. The kind of strength Kal had spent his life trying to live up to. Then the ship had surged forward, and Krypton had begun to crack beneath him.

—

Back on the rooftop, Clark exhaled slowly, the ghost of that memory still gripping his chest. He pressed a hand to his sternum. Something in him still longed for that last touch. That last second where his parents had been real. He had been so angry with them at first. For giving up, for not building more ships, for choosing him. It had taken months of drifting through space, of trying to contact debris fields and dead satellites, to realize what it meant: that they hadn’t sent him to escape. They’d sent him to endure and to carry the memory of Krypton.

And now, here he was. On a planet full of complicated, fragile, impossibly beautiful life. Trying to figure out how to belong without erasing who he’d been. Trying to be both Clark and Kal-El. Trying to be enough. A breeze stirred his hair, and the stars he kept looking to for answers stayed silent. He closed his eyes again. Tomorrow, he’d ask Bruce more questions. He’d train harder. He’d try to earn the life that had been given to him.

—-------

The Cave was quiet, save for the soft hum of the computer’s systems and the occasional chirp of the bats that roosted in the stone above. Bruce sat in front of the central monitor, but he wasn’t reading the intelligence feeds or typing commands. He could feel Clark again, faintly. Not like a noise or a presence exactly, it was subtler than that, like a shift in pressure. When Kal was near, it was as though something in Bruce’s own blood reacted. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Memory bled in without permission.

—

His mother had been twenty when the doctors told her the pregnancy would fail. The child would never make it to term, and if he did, he’d die before he took his first breath. His father was gone by then, another casualty of the streets of Gotham. Martha had gone to a temple in Greece as a last resort. It was a ruin, barely standing, with a statue no one worshipped anymore. She had fallen to her knees on the cold stone floor and begged. Just one word, over and over. Please .

He had answered. He stepped out of the shadows like he had always been there. A man dressed in dark armor that shimmered with impossible heat. A voice that echoed without rising. Eyes that saw every future at once. He looked at her and said, “I will make him live.”

She tried to offer something in return, but he silenced her with a single look. “I do not need your vow. He is mine already.”

Then he was gone. She never told anyone, and had died during childbirth. Bruce was born stronger than the doctors expected, quiet and alert in ways no child should have been. Bruce found out when he was fifteen. He’d been hunting a smuggler through Athens, chasing stolen relics across rooftops older than Gotham itself. The final confrontation ended in the temple where his mother had once knelt. And when the statue of Ares shattered in the fight, something beneath the stone called to him.

He touched the broken altar and felt fire crawl up his spine, it felt as if he was being forged. Every strike he had ever thrown, every calculated risk, every refusal to bend, it all made sense in a single blinding moment. He wasn’t just angry, he was made for war. Ares had passed him a spark. It explained the things he didn’t talk about. Why he healed faster, why he could sense when violence was coming, and why no weapon had ever felt like enough.

—

Bruce opened his eyes and stared at the screens without seeing them. He was still trying to put together why he could sense Kal, there didn’t seem to be a connection between their heritage. He hadn’t told Clark, not yet, because once that truth was spoken, it couldn’t be taken back. He needed to figure it out before he could even begin to explain it. At least, that’s what he told himself. The truth was that he had spent his whole life pretending to be human, and that he wasn’t ready to admit otherwise to anyone but Alfred. 

—---------

The city blurred beneath his boots as Nightingale moved across the rooftops, light on his feet, heavier in thought. The silence was comfortable, almost. Gotham always had a way of muting its noise just enough to let bad memories slip through. He hated quiet lately. He dropped into a crouch beside a crumbling gargoyle, staring down at the flickering neon of the block below. His patrol was technically over. Bruce had dismissed him an hour ago. Clark was probably watching something heartbreaking or awkward in that tiny apartment of his, still learning how to feel all the things humans carried like skin. And Dick was alone. His gloves tightened over the edge of the ledge. His breathing slowed. 

—

They said he was cursed. He didn’t remember their faces, not clearly, just flashes of weathered skin and harsh voices. They took him in when he was small. Said he had been found on the steps of a long-dead temple, alone and screaming, wrapped in blood-stained cloth and nothing else. At first, they fed him, taught him words, and put him to work. Then the powers began.

He was eight when it started. When his hands caught fire without heat. When he moved faster than his body should allow. When he bled silver once, and the man who beat him couldn’t stop shaking afterward. They said the gods had marked him. That he was an omen. And they punished him for it with isolation, whispered curses, and backhanded slaps for speaking out of turn. He remembered hands that gripped too tight in the dark. He learned to hide his strength and speed, he made himself small. Until one day, they decided small wasn’t enough.

He was ten when they tried to cast him out. Said the ground itself would reject him. Said no god wanted him. That he was a mistake. They dragged him to the temple ruins at the edge of the forest and left him there with no food, not even a name. Just a child on his knees in the dust, surrounded by crumbling pillars and silence. He should have died. Instead, Bruce found him.

—

Dick blinked, dragged out of the memory by the flicker of a searchlight far below. He stood up slowly, eyes adjusting to the now. He still didn’t know where he came from. The only thing he had was the temple and the feeling that there had been power in him long before he learned to fight. It scared him, even now. Was he like Bruce? Half of something divine? Or was he just the product of abandonment? He didn’t have an answer, maybe he never would, but when Bruce had looked at him that night—bloodied, starving, eyes sunken in a face too young to look that hard—he hadn’t looked away.

He’d said, “You’re not broken. You’re not alone.”

That had been enough to keep living for. Still was. Dick turned away from the edge and pulled his hood back up. There was nothing to find in the past tonight.

The manor was quiet by the time Dick slipped through the upper balcony window. He didn’t use the front door anymore and hadn’t for years. Bruce never said anything, but Dick figured he appreciated the instinct, old habits, after all, die with effort, and both of them were shaped by back doors and shadowed entryways. He moved silently through the dark corridor, not bothering to take off his gear just yet. His boots made no sound on the polished wood floors, and he passed the old grandfather clock without triggering the Cave’s access. 

Dick paused near the stairs. A low glow flickered from the kitchen, he knew it must be Alfred. Dick’s stomach tightened with an emotion he didn’t name. He made his way quietly down the steps, the tension between his shoulders releasing slightly with each one. When he stepped into the kitchen, Alfred was already turning around, holding a mug of tea with a knowing expression.

“You always did show up when the kettle boiled,” Alfred said, offering him the cup without question.

Dick took it wordlessly. He held it for a long moment before sitting down at the table, the chair creaking beneath him. Alfred didn’t press. He poured a second mug for himself, sat opposite, and sipped. For a while, that was enough.

Then Dick finally spoke. “Do you think… people are born wrong?”

Alfred looked up from his cup, his expression shifting only slightly. “No.”

Dick stared at the surface of his tea. “Even if there’s something in them that doesn’t make sense? Something unnatural?”

“Unnatural is a word created by frightened people to name things they don’t understand,” Alfred said gently. “You’re not unnatural, Master Richard. You never have been.”

Dick’s jaw tightened. “I wasn’t supposed to survive, you know. The people who raised me, they thought I was cursed.”

Alfred didn’t flinch. “Then their ignorance is their burden to bear. Not yours.”

“I still don’t know who I am,” Dick whispered. 

Alfred set his cup down and folded his hands. “You are kind. You are loyal. You are clever. You are strong. You are loved. Those are the truths that matter.”

“I think I might be like him,” he said softly. “Like Bruce. I think… whatever’s in him, whatever made him different… it’s in me too.”

Alfred didn’t deny it. Instead, he reached across the table and placed a hand gently over Dick’s. “Then perhaps the two of you were meant to find each other.”

Dick didn’t speak. He just nodded, eyes fixed on the steam curling off his tea. Outside, the wind howled softly against the windows.

—--------

Bruce didn’t look up when the Cave lights flickered in response to his biometric signature. The computer interface projected data across the glass, scrolling slowly with the schematics of Clark’s ship, atmospheric scans, old S.T.A.R. Labs files with corrupted metadata, but his eyes weren’t tracking the numbers. He was thinking about Dick. He always knew this would happen eventually. You can only hide the truth for so long, especially from someone trained to see patterns. Dick had been asking questions lately. Bruce stood and walked across the stone floor to the edge of the cave wall. The waterfall outside masked Gotham’s distant thunder, but he still heard every drop of rain.

He remembered the boy he had pulled out of that ruined temple years ago, wild around the eyes like something feral had tried to climb into his chest and take over. Bruce had seen something in him. A spark that doesn’t come from blood, but from the kind of origin that doesn’t make sense on paper. He didn’t need proof. The moment he touched Dick’s shoulder that night, he knew he was touched by something ancient. Bruce had never discussed it with him, and he was beginning to feel guilt over it, even though he never directly lied.

Alfred had warned him. “He’s going to need the truth one day, Master Bruce. He deserves to choose what to do with it.”

Bruce clenched his jaw. He hated how right Alfred always was. Footsteps echoed faintly from above. Dick was back, probably talking to Alfred in that tired, low voice he used when he didn’t want to admit he was hurting. Bruce looked up at the giant screen, then slowly powered it down. The truth was coming, and if he wanted Dick to keep trusting him—not just as a leader, or a father, or a partner in the mission—but as someone who had seen the worst in the world and chosen to stay, then he would need to be honest.

Chapter Text

She noticed him first because he looked lost, but not in the way tourists did, where they clutched phones, stopped in doorways, and spun in slow circles. This man stood still on the edge of the plaza like someone trying to remember a dream they’d woken up from too fast. She paused halfway through sipping her coffee. He was tall. That was the first thing that caught her eye. He was perfectly symmetrical, like every part of him had been carved to match the rest, down to the width of his shoulders. He wore glasses, and his hair had a slight wave, neatly combed but soft at the edges. And his eyes… She couldn’t quite describe them. Not brown, not green, not anything common. More like stormlight behind glass. She found herself staring.

She’d seen handsome men before. Beautiful ones, even, but this one made her heart lurch in her chest without asking permission. He was holding a paper map in one hand, an actual map, and studying it thoroughly. She watched him hesitate, then carefully fold it and place it in his coat pocket. He looked up at the buildings around him like he was counting every window. When he smiled at a pigeon that landed near his foot, it was so soft it startled her. Then he started walking again, long strides, posture straight. People passed him without noticing, but she stayed frozen. She didn’t know why she suddenly wanted to speak to him, ask if he needed help, offer him directions or a drink or her name.

She wasn’t the type to do that, but there was something pulling in her chest. Some irrational certainty that if she let him disappear into the crowd, she would regret it. Before she could think better of it, she stepped off the curb. “Hey,” she called out. “Are you, do you need help with the map?”

He turned. His eyes landed on her with a kind of quiet focus, like he was surprised someone had seen him at all. He blinked once and offered a slow, grateful smile. “Oh,” he said, “Yes, actually. That would be very kind of you.”

She smiled, caught off guard by how polite he sounded. She stepped closer, nodding toward the corner of his map that stuck out from his coat pocket. “Where are you trying to go?”

He pulled it out carefully, unfolding it with a reverence that made her grin. “I was hoping to find a good library. One with real books. Not just terminals.”

Her grin widened. “You’re definitely not from around here.”

“I’m… not,” he said, sheepish.

“There’s one about six blocks east,” she said. “Carnegie-Miller Library. Tall stone building, copper roof, always smells like old wood.”

He tilted his head, studying her like she’d just said something profound. “Thank you,” he said softly. “That sounds perfect.”

She hesitated. “I could walk you there, if you want. It’s on my way.”

He looked down, clearly considering the offer with more seriousness than the question required. Then, slowly, he nodded. “I’d like that,” he said.

So they walked together. The Carnegie-Miller Library had a  stone facade, towering windows framed with bronze scrollwork, and heavy double doors that creaked. Clark paused as he stepped through, head tilting back slightly to take it all in. His senses adjusted automatically to the filtered warmth of aged paper, the faint hum of the electrical wiring, the low shuffle of footsteps across distant aisles. He liked it immediately.

The woman was already ahead of him, her jacket slung over her arm, greeting the man behind the front desk with a two-finger salute. “Marvin,” she said lightly, “you give away my favorite chair and I swear I’ll reorganize your entire nonfiction section just to spite you.”

“You do that every month anyway,” Marvin replied without looking up. “Don’t touch my war history again.”

Clark smiled. It was the one of the first times since landing that he’d seen people speak with such ease. She turned back to him, gesturing toward the east wing. “Best light is over there, near the philosophy stacks. Don’t let the ‘existential dread’ signage scare you. It’s just a running joke.”

Clark followed her past the carved busts of scholars he didn’t recognize, trying to absorb everything at once, the way the building seemed to breathe around them, the echoes of whispered thought. He took in every texture: the worn leather on the armchairs, the polished banisters, and the oil-rubbed bronze light fixtures overhead. They reached a quiet alcove with a long window bench. She dropped her bag in one corner and leaned against the frame, arms crossed.

“So,” she said, tilting her head at him. “Are you going to tell me your name, or do I have to guess?”

Clark blinked, startled. “Oh, yes. I mean. Of course. I’m Clark.”

She raised a brow. “Just Clark?”

He hesitated a beat too long. “…Kent,” he added, almost too softly. “Clark Kent.”

Her eyes flicked over him again, sharper this time. He could tell she was filing the name away with more focus than she let on. “Well, Clark Kent,” she said, drawing the name out like a test drive, “I’m Lois. Lois Lane. And you are definitely not from here.”

He smiled faintly, unsure whether she meant the city or the planet. “No. I’m not.”

Lois narrowed her gaze slightly but didn’t push. “I like a man who reads paper maps. It’s retro, and a little endearing.”

Clark tried to follow the shift in tone. Her voice was different now. Was this part of a human ritual? A form of casual praise?

“I thought it would make me blend in,” he said honestly. “I didn’t realize it was outdated.”

“That’s the funny part,” Lois said. “You’re not blending in at all. But in a good way.”

He tilted his head. “Is that… a compliment?”

Lois grinned. “Yeah, Clark. That’s a compliment.”

She leaned closer now, resting one elbow on the windowsill. “So. Since you’re new in town, and I happen to know all the best coffee spots that don’t taste like regret, how about I take you out sometime? You know, show you around, buy you something warm. Maybe call it a date.”

Clark’s breath caught in confusion, and startled wheels turning behind his eyes as he tried to process her words. She wanted to… spend more time with him. Alone. In a romantic context. He thought back to Bruce’s list of customs, the folders labeled “Social Cues,” the conversation in the restaurant where Bruce had explained what the candlelight meant. Then he thought of Bruce’s eyes.

Clark blinked twice. Then blurted, far louder than he meant to, “I’m gay.”

Lois froze for a second, then laughed. Not mockingly, just bright, startled laughter that cracked the tension. “Okay,” she said, grinning. “Good to know. That clears up so much.”

Clark looked stricken. “I didn’t mean to yell.”

“You didn’t,” she assured him, still smiling. “You just panic-announced your sexuality like you were afraid I’d combust.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I just didn’t want to mislead you.”

“You didn’t,” she said. “And for what it’s worth? That’s the best rejection I’ve had all year.”

Clark smiled a little. “Thank you. For understanding.”

Lois waved him off. “Relax, Clark. You’re cute, not a criminal. Now, what do you know about T.S. Eliot?”

“Very little.”

“Perfect, I can tell you more.” And just like that, she dropped into the bench and handed him a book like nothing awkward had happened at all. Clark sat down beside her, heart still racing. For the first time since landing, the world didn’t feel so alien.

—--------

The manor was quiet when Clark arrived. He landed behind the treeline, just like Bruce had taught him. He could already hear Bruce in the cave by the low hum of the computers and the flick and clatter of batarangs being calibrated one by one. Clark stepped lightly across the polished floors until he reached the hidden passage. He descended the stone steps slower than usual, still turning the earlier conversation over in his mind. Bruce didn’t look up when he entered. His back was to him, hands busy dismantling something long and sleek on the worktable.

“You were followed,” Bruce said calmly. “By a stray cat. You lost it by the east wall.”

Clark blinked. “I… what?”

Bruce finally looked at him. “You’re getting better at landings, but you scuffed the moss with your boots and left a pattern.”

Clark stared for a moment. “That wasn’t what I was going to tell you.”

“I figured.” Bruce set down a tool and turned fully toward him now, studying him. “But you’re visibly unsettled, which means either you broke something, or someone tried to kiss you.”

Clark made a noise halfway between a breath and a cough. Bruce raised an eyebrow. “It was the second one.”

“She didn’t try to kiss me,” Clark said quickly. “She offered to. Sort of.”

Bruce’s mouth twitched like he was fighting back a smirk. “I see.”

Clark ran a hand through his hair. “I was at the library. She introduced herself, and she was kind and smart. Then she asked if I wanted to get coffee, said it could be a date. And I… I told her I was gay.”

Bruce nodded once. “And you’re upset by that?”

“No. Not upset,” Clark said, shifting his weight. “Just surprised. It was the first time someone’s asked me something like that. I didn’t even think. I just reacted.”

Bruce didn’t speak right away. He walked slowly toward the computer monitor and keyed in a command, bringing up satellite overlays. Clark wasn’t sure if it was a distraction or just habit. “You did the right thing,” Bruce said finally. “You aren’t ready to date, and that’s a gentle way to let someone down.”

“It felt so loud,” Clark said. “Like I’d shouted it across the room.”

“You probably did.”

Clark huffed a small laugh. “She laughed. In a good way. Then we read poetry.”

Bruce looked over at him. “That could’ve gone much worse.”

“She was nice. And I liked talking to her. But the moment she leaned toward me like that, I felt—” He hesitated. “Like I was doing something wrong.”

Bruce’s expression shifted, fractionally. “You’re not.”

Clark met his eyes. “Then why do I keep feeling like I don’t fit in?”

“Because you’re not here to fit,” Bruce said. “You’re here to change the shape of the world around you, and you will.”

Clark swallowed. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

Bruce gave the faintest nod. “We’ll keep working on your people skills. Try not to panic every time someone flirts with you.”

“I wasn’t panicking,” Clark muttered.

“You were glowing.”

Clark froze. “What?”

Bruce turned back toward the console, smug. “Mild bioluminescent pulse in your skin. You do it when you’re overwhelmed emotionally. You might want to work on that.”

Clark stared, horrified. “Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?”

“I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice. Plus, regular human eyes don’t pick up on it.”

Clark buried his face in his hands, and Bruce, unseen behind the screens, actually allowed himself a smile.

—--------

Dinner at the manor was a quiet ritual. Clark sat stiff-backed at the end of the table like he was afraid to wrinkle the linen. Dick slouched diagonally across from him, elbow on the table despite the glare Alfred had given him earlier. Bruce sat at the head, silent and still, carving into his food with the same clinical precision he used for everything. Clark had tried to help set the table. Alfred had politely refused, of course. Dick twirled his fork idly, watching Clark like he was waiting for the right moment.

“So,” Dick said casually, spearing a piece of asparagus, “anything interesting happen at the library today?”

Clark looked up, surprised. “Yes, actually. Lois took me, I liked it there. She—”

“Oh, I’m sure she was,” Dick said, lips twitching. “Very welcoming, maybe a little forward.”

Bruce didn’t react, but there was a stilt to his posture now that Clark had learned to recognize as amusement.

Clark blinked. “You know her?”

“Not personally,” Dick said. “But I might’ve seen some footage. You know. Of you declaring your orientation at full volume to the nonfiction section.”

Clark’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t declare it. I just said it. So she wouldn’t think I—”

“Oh, it was definitely a declaration,” Dick said, grinning. “You lit up like a Christmas tree. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to signal low-orbit satellites.”

Clark looked between them. “Wait. Footage?”

Bruce set down his knife. “You think we don’t have access to security cameras?”

Clark narrowed his eyes. “You were watching me?”

“We were watching the city,” Bruce said evenly. “You were in it.”

Dick snorted into his water.

Clark folded his arms. “Well, next time I’m about to be emotionally compromised, I’ll make sure to do it underground.”

“I don’t think that’ll help,” Dick said cheerfully. “Not if you glow.”

Clark groaned and covered his face. There was a brief silence, broken only by the quiet clink of cutlery.

Then Dick leaned forward slightly. “So… you’re gay?”

Clark glanced at Bruce instinctively, who raised an eyebrow but said nothing. “Yes,” Clark said. “I believe I am based on my understanding of human sexuality.”

Dick nodded like he was checking a box. “Cool. You just have ‘small-town disaster bisexual’ energy, so I wasn’t sure.”

Clark made a face. “What does that even mean?”

“It means,” Bruce said, standing to refill his glass, “he’s trying to figure out how to categorize you so he can mock you more efficiently.”

Dick grinned and leaned back in his chair, clearly satisfied. “I like him. He’s fun.”

Clark glanced down at his plate, cheeks still warm, but a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Thanks,” he said softly. “I’m trying.”

—-------

Dinner had ended with Alfred excusing himself to the kitchen, and Dick vanishing to the gym under the pretense of “burning off the starch,” which mostly meant acrobatics until midnight. Bruce had stayed at the table, unmoving, eyes on the empty place settings like he was mapping out a puzzle only he could see. Clark lingered, he was learning the rhythm. Bruce liked quiet. He respected patience. He didn’t ask for company, but he didn’t push it away either.

Clark took a slow breath. “Is this what it’s like?” he asked quietly. “To try and be part of something? To make mistakes and laugh and figure yourself out with people watching?”

“Sometimes. If you’re lucky.”

Clark watched him. “Do you think I’m doing this wrong?”

Bruce’s gaze finally met his. “No.”

Clark tilted his head. “You hesitated.”

“I was deciding whether to lie.”

Clark laughed softly, caught off guard. Bruce stood then, gathering the empty glasses, moving with fluid, economical ease.

“You’re not doing it wrong,” Bruce said. “You’re just not used to being seen.”

Clark looked down, thoughtful. “I think I wanted to be.”

Clark followed him out of the dining room and toward the library. “Bruce,” he said quietly. “Can I ask you something?”

Bruce glanced over his shoulder and nodded. They reached the library and paused at the threshold. The fire was already lit, clearly Alfred’s quiet magic at work.

“How do you deal with it? Do you have others you can confide in?”

Bruce looked at him then. “You’re the only person I’ve met who sees me as more than what I do. I’ve never really thought about how to deal with it.”

Clark’s breath caught in his chest. “I see you,” he said softly.

Bruce nodded once. Then turned into the firelight and sat, almost as if to say stay if you want . Clark sat too. He began to reach for Bruce’s shoulder, realizing the two hadn’t touched yet. Bruce’s head snapped toward him, eyes wide. He looked scared, and Clark instantly backed away. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. 

The other man scoffed, “Scared? Why would I ever be scared of someone who cried at Dead Poets Society?”

There was a giggle from the hallway. Clark pulled his hand back fully and rested it in his lap, unsure whether to laugh or apologize again. Then the sound came again.

Bruce’s jaw flexed. “Dick.”

The giggle turned into a full laugh now, half-choked as Dick appeared leaning in the doorframe. “Sorry,” Dick said, not sounding sorry at all. “I was just coming to say goodnight, and then,” he waved vaguely at them, “whatever this was happened.”

Clark flushed red. “We were talking,” he said, trying to sound composed and mostly failing.

“Sure,” Dick grinned. “That’s why you were reaching for him like it was a slow-burn romance novel and you just realized your feelings under the moonlight.”

Bruce shot him a warning glare. “Dick.”

Dick threw up his hands in surrender. “Alright, alright. I’ll leave the emotionally constipated men to their bonding moment.”

He turned to go, then paused and looked back, grinning wider now. “Oh and Clark? If you cry during The Notebook, I’m uploading it to the League mainframe.”

“I won’t be watching The Notebook,” Clark said firmly.

“That’s what they all say,” Dick called over his shoulder, disappearing into the hallway.

Silence settled again, but the tension had lightened, just a little. Bruce leaned back in the chair, exhaled through his nose. “He thinks he’s funny,” he muttered.

Clark smiled softly. “He kind of is.”

—--------

Dick padded barefoot down the west hall, hair still damp from his shower. He didn’t bother turning on any lights. He was grinning to himself, but not mockingly, just—God, they were so bad at this. Bruce was tense as a coiled blade in a scabbard, and Clark was all raw earnestness and puppy-heart eyes, trying so hard not to say the wrong thing that he missed what he was already giving away. They were ridiculous, and sweet. Something that made Dick’s chest ache in a way he hadn’t expected.

He reached the railing on the upper floor and leaned over it, watching the light flicker in the library below. Clark had reached for him, Bruce had flinched, but not in fear, not of Clark, at least. No, Dick knew that look. Bruce was scared of what it might mean to let that happen. To be touched, to be known, to be seen in a way that wasn’t covered by cape or the mission. Dick had seen that exact fear in the mirror once, years ago, back when the powers had started and the priests called him unnatural. He’d covered it with grace and confidence. If he kept flipping fast enough through the air, no one could pin him down long enough to say monster .

Bruce had covered it with control, but Clark hadn’t covered it at all. He’d just offered his hand. Dick sighed, letting his arms rest on the railing, forehead dropping to the wood. Maybe it wasn’t any of his business, but it felt like it was. Like he was watching a door open that had been bolted shut for years, and the draft coming through was something gentle. Something he didn’t want Bruce to slam shut again out of fear. He didn’t want to be the nosy little brother. He also didn’t want to watch Bruce sabotage the one person who might actually get him without needing an explanation first.

So, fine. Maybe he’d help. Quietly, subtly, and with class, or… you know, with sarcasm. Whatever worked. Dick pushed off the railing and headed for his room. As he passed the east window, he glanced once at the stars above the trees, faint and cold and impossibly far away and smiled.

“Come on, Kent,” he murmured. “Don’t give up on him yet.”

Chapter Text

The cave’s light was dim, bathed in the cold blue hue of the interface he had hardwired into the Kryptonian vessel. Bruce stood in front of the ship, hands clasped behind his back, posture precise. The metal hull still radiated residual energy, and Bruce had finally found out why. There was a layered encryption system encoded in a language older than any Earth dialect. He respected the architecture even as he dismantled it, piece by piece. Finally, the ship responded. A small crystalline node at its core glowed white, and an AI activated.

A figure emerged, it was humanoid, taller than average, and had dark hair and robes that shimmered with sigils unfamiliar to any Earth culture. The figure opened its eyes. “You are not Kal-El.”

“No.”

The projection took a moment to scan him. Its expression was neutral, but the intelligence behind the eyes was obvious. “State your identity.”

Bruce kept his voice even. “Bruce Wayne.”

There was a pause. “You are the one my son has chosen to trust.”

That caught him off guard. “He told you that?”

“No. But I have monitored his neural signatures since his arrival. You are the only individual his physiology reacts to with consistent dilation of the pupils and an elevated heartbeat that does not signal distress.”

Bruce blinked once. “You’re measuring his attraction.”

“I am measuring attachment. Kryptonians do not bond lightly, Mr. Wayne.” The construct tilted its head. “I am Jor-El, former Science Councilor of Krypton. I am a preserved consciousness, an interactive intelligence encoded within the memory crystal you accessed.”

Bruce stepped closer to the projection. “You’re… sentient?”

“Within parameters,” Jor-El said. “I am an echo.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Your world is unstable and violent. Your people are capable of both profound kindness and calculated cruelty. My son will need guidance if he is to survive your contradictions.”

“He’s adapting,” Bruce said. “Faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

“You are skeptical,” he said. “But you are not dismissive. That is rare in your species.”

“I find it difficult to dismiss an alien landing on my planet,” Bruce said. 

“He wishes to understand you,” Jor-El said. “He seeks a place to belong. I chose Earth because of the similar atmosphere and yellow sun, and from what I have seen… he is choosing you on his own.”

Bruce tried not to show it, but the words landed deep, under the armor, beneath the caution. Jor-El saw it too. “My son was sent here to carry on the memory of Krypton, and to live a full life. Do not let him forget that.”

Bruce’s jaw clenched slightly. “I won’t.”

The ship hummed again and Jor-El’s projection began to fade, the crystal dimming. “You may return when you wish. I will answer what I can. You will not always understand him, but you are one of the few who might try.”

And then he was gone. Bruce stood alone in the cave again, face bathed in pale light. He didn’t move for a long time. Upstairs, he could hear the echo of Clark’s footsteps, probably pacing. Bruce knew now that he had to keep Clark safe, he was the legacy of a civilization gone and he could help Earth in unimaginable ways. For reasons Bruce didn’t fully understand yet, he had placed his trust in him. Bruce turned back to the console and slid his gloved hand over the crystal interface, locking it down.

—--------

Bruce found Clark on the balcony. It was late, past midnight, but Clark stood as still as a statue, arms folded against the rail, gaze fixed upward. He didn’t turn when Bruce stepped into the doorway, but Bruce knew he’d already heard him. The stars hung clear in the sky tonight, a rare sight for Gotham. For a moment, Bruce just watched him in silence. The light from the moon made Clark’s silhouette seem less human.

“I found something,” Bruce said quietly.

Clark’s head turned slightly. “In the ship?” he asked.

Bruce nodded once. “Your father. Or, at least, the imprint of him. He’s still active inside.”

Clark turned fully now and his eyes had gone wide. “He—he’s alive?”

“No,” Bruce said carefully. “It’s not consciousness, not really, it's artificial intelligence. Your father encoded himself into a crystalline neural matrix. It’s very advanced. Beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”

Clark blinked. “So he can speak to me.”

Bruce stepped closer. “I talked to him already.”

Clark’s breath caught. “Why would he—?”

“Because I was the one decrypting the core,” Bruce said. 

Clark dropped his gaze, fingers curling around the edge of the railing. “What did he say?”

Bruce didn’t answer right away. He studied Clark’s profile, the tight line of his jaw, the way he held his shoulders as though waiting to be told something devastating. “He said that you were sent here not just to survive, but to live a real life. That Earth would be difficult, but worth it.”

Clark nodded slowly, eyes still low. “That sounds like him.”

There was a beat of silence. Then Bruce added, “I’ll show you the interface,” he said. “You can speak to him yourself.”

Slowly, he nodded. “I’d like that.”

Bruce gave a short nod and disappeared into the manor. Clark remained on the balcony, eyes once again on the stars.

—-------

The hallway to the cave was dim. Clark walked slowly, barefoot, wearing the clothes Bruce had given him. He reached the end of the hall and paused at the top of the stairs, his hand resting on the wall, eyes lowered. He could feel the ship below before he saw it, could hear the subtle rhythm of its systems humming, like a distant heartbeat calling him down. He took a breath as flashes of his childhood ran through his mind.

His mother laughing as she chased him through the sunlit atrium of their home, the silvery leaves of the garden trembling in the breeze beyond the skylight. The warmth of her arms around him as she pulled him close and pressed a kiss to his brow. Her voice, melodic and low, reading from a crystal book that shimmered with holograms of sea-creatures that danced above his bed.

His father’s deep voice explaining how stars were born. The way he’d scoop Clark up with ease, lifting him onto his shoulders and pointing to constellations through the translucent ceiling panels of their observatory. “Every one of them,” Jor-El had said, “has a purpose. Even if it doesn’t know it yet.”

The sharp, clean scent of their home. The curve of the corridors that always led him back to familiar arms. The way his parents looked at each other when they thought he wasn’t watching, like time itself paused to make room for their love. Clark sat now at the edge of the cave’s lower level, just before the threshold where the ship’s glow began. He rested his elbows on his knees and let his eyes drift shut.

“I didn’t want to leave,” he whispered. “You told me to trust you, that I’d understand someday, but I never got to say goodbye.”

The hum of the vessel answered softly. Clark swallowed hard and stood. He approached the interface slowly. The crystal in the center of the vessel responded to his presence, pulsing once, then blooming outward into a lattice of light. The AI sensed him, and a figure began to form. Clark held his breath. The light solidified into an image of his father.

“Kal-El,” Jor-El said. “My son.”

Clark felt something in his chest fracture. “I’m here,” he said softly.

Jor-El stepped forward, and though he was only hard light and encoded consciousness, there was a strange gentleness in his motion. “You have grown in the time it took you to get to Earth,” he said.

Clark exhaled, “I thought I’d lost everything. I’ve tried not to think about you, or about her, because it hurt too much to remember.”

“You are not wrong to feel that pain,” Jor-El said. “Your mother felt it too. As we sealed the vessel, she wept.”

Clark looked down, hands fisting at his sides. “I was awake,” he said quietly. “Inside the ship. I had time to think, time to wonder if it had all been a dream, if I’d just imagined life on Krypton.”

“You did not,” Jor-El said. “You were born of us, and you are the culmination of what we hoped Krypton could still be.”

Clark swallowed. “I’m not just Kryptonian anymore, Earth has changed me. Its people… they have already taught me so much. And I—I don’t know if I’ve honored you.” His voice cracked, “I don’t even know if I’m Kryptonian enough anymore.”

“You were never meant to be only Kryptonian,” he said. “You were meant to be a good, kind soul, and if you can achieve that on Earth, or beyond, I will always be proud.”

Clark’s eyes stung. He didn’t wipe them. “You sent me here to live.”

“I sent you here,” Jor-El corrected, “to feel life. We lost that on Krypton, we became precise, cold, and too focused on ourselves. Without your mother’s heart, I may have never realized that. She saw something in you.”

Clark’s voice was heavy with tears. “I wish I could have saved her.”

“You did,” Jor-El said. “Every day you survive, every day you speak with kindness, and every time you use your strength for good. You carry her with you.”

Clark stepped forward. “Is this really you? Are you really here?”

“I am a ghost,” Jor-El said, “but I will remain, Kal-El. As long as the crystal endures, I will answer. I never wanted to leave you, I just didn’t want you to die before you had a chance to really live.”

Clark nodded slowly. “Thank you.”

Jor-El inclined his head, then added, “There is another thing.”

Clark frowned.

“The ‘human’ who accessed this vessel before you,” Jor-El said. “Bruce Wayne. You have placed your trust in him.”

Clark’s brow furrowed. “I have.”

Jor-El’s face was serious. “He is not what he seems. There is something old in him.”

“You mean his abilities—?”

“Not quite. I can tell he is a son of conflict, and that he is dangerous.”

Clark looked down, then back up. “I trust him.”

“Then I will trust your judgment,” Jor-El said. “As your mother did mine.”

The light began to dim again, folding inward like the close of a book. “Goodbye, Father,” Clark whispered.

“Not goodbye,” Jor-El said gently. “You are never truly alone, Kal-El. Not while you remember.”

Chapter Text

The rooftops of Gotham were painted gold at the edges, the dying sun burning orange behind the skyline. For a few rare minutes, the city almost looked like it belonged in another world. Nightingale crouched at the edge of a rusted fire escape, his gloved fingers drumming once against the steel railing before going still.

“You’ve got eyes on the northeast quadrant?” came Batman’s voice, low and even in his comm.

Nightingale scanned the block below. The warehouse was quiet, he didn’t see any late shift trucks, or dock workers smoking by the gates. That was suspicious.

“Confirmed,” Dick murmured. “No movement yet, they’re waiting for something.”

“Or someone,” Batman replied. Dick heard a rustle of static, then silence again.

Dick adjusted the scope on his HUD. His posture was relaxed, but his mind wasn’t. He could feel it in Bruce, even through the calm tone and sharp instructions. He hadn’t been the same since the ship talked to him, not that Bruce would ever admit that aloud, but Dick didn’t need him to. He saw it in the way Bruce drifted mid-thought, or caught himself looking toward the sky when he thought no one noticed.

“You ever going to talk about it?” Dick asked over the comm.

“Talk about what?” came the predictable reply.

Dick smirked and tapped his earpiece. “You know what.”

There was a long pause. “Focus, Nightingale.”

Another classic dodge. Dick almost laughed, but it faded as the comm line crackled softly again. “Movement at the west lot,” Batman said suddenly. “Two figures, armed. No visible insignia. Possible mercenaries.”

“I see them,” Dick said. He dropped silently onto a lower ledge, melted into the lengthening shadow of the building, and waited. 

The takedown went well at first. They moved like they always did, Bruce flowed through the shadows, while Dick swept the flanks, blade angled to disarm before harm. They had taken three guards down, then an alert triggered too soon, and the rest of the warehouse lit up like a hornet’s nest.

“They had backup,” Bruce muttered, crouched behind a stack of crates. “More than intel predicted.”

Dick vaulted across a support beam, landed in a crouch beside him. “You say that like we didn’t expect the intel to be wrong.”

Bruce gave him a look. “You’re bleeding.”

“Not enough to ruin the night.”

The warehouse doors burst open at the far end. Floodlights snapped on. Half a dozen mercs poured in with Kevlar and assault rifles, the kind that could chew through body armor. Dick’s jaw tightened. 

“I’ll draw fire,” Bruce said. “You take high ground and come around behind—” He never finished. A sniper’s glint flashed across the warehouse, just for a split-second, and Dick’s heart dropped. The shot rang out.

“BATMAN!”

All Dick could feel was rage in that moment, raw and protective. It burned through his chest like lightning striking dry pine, and something answered. The sun had just set beyond the city skyline, but in the shattered second between the bullet and impact, light returned. 

Dick’s body exploded with radiant heat. Blinding gold roared through his skin, and it caught the bullet mid-air, stopped it, and scattered it into dust before it could reach Bruce. The warehouse flooded with light. Every merc dropped their weapons, screaming, eyes burned by brilliance they couldn’t comprehend. Some dropped to their knees. One cried out in a language Dick didn’t know. Bruce turned, stunned, but froze when he saw Dick, floating three inches off the ground, pupils burning like twin flares.

The light pulsed once more and then collapsed in on itself. Dick dropped to his knees, panting hard, the warehouse dim again. Smoke curled from his shoulders. His eyes were wide and his hands trembled as he looked down on them in awe.

“B,” he whispered, “what just happened?”

He stepped forward and knelt beside Nightingale. The shadows clung to his cape, but even in the dark, Dick could see something rare in his expression, sympathy. 

“You called the sun,” Bruce said quietly.

Dick blinked, still stunned. “I what?”

“You moved it, really, you commanded it.”

Dick swallowed hard. “Is that—Is that supposed to be possible?”

Bruce shook his head. “Not for mortals.”

They stared at each other for a long time, then Bruce slowly reached out and placed a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “Get up,” he said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

—--------

The sensation reached Clark in a way that bypassed thought entirely. One moment, he was gliding above Gotham’s skyline, his thoughts drifting through the noise and rhythm of the city. The next, something gripped him, a radiant pressure blooming across the atmosphere. It was not heat in any physical sense, nor was it merely a shift in light. It felt deeper, as though the Earth had momentarily exhaled something from beneath its surface. The feeling was unmistakably solar, but it did not come from the sun.

He pivoted in midair and accelerated toward the source. He had expected destruction. For an energy surge that potent, there should have been chaos, fire, debris, even structural damage. Instead, what he found was silence. The warehouse stood undisturbed, perfectly intact, the windows unbroken and the doors loosely ajar as if someone had stepped out only moments before. Clark touched down quietly, scanning for heat signatures, movement, or threat. He found none of the above. The atmosphere inside still hummed faintly with residual energy. He stepped through the threshold and immediately saw them.

Bruce and Dick were standing near the center of the open floor, not speaking or moving. Bruce’s hand rested firmly on Dick’s shoulder. Clark slowed his approach and stopped a few paces away. He looked between them carefully, noting the flush in Dick’s face and the faint sheen of sweat at his temples. There were no visible injuries.

Bruce spoke first. “You felt it.”

Clark nodded. “Yes. It reached me like a signal. I thought it was the sun at first.”

Dick glanced at him then, his expression clouded with confusion. “It was me,” he said. “Or something in me. I didn’t mean to do it.”

Bruce gave Dick’s shoulder a light squeeze. “Someone raised a weapon against me,” he explained. “Dick reacted before I even saw it.”

Clark furrowed his brow, trying to piece it together. 

“I’ve always known something was different,” Bruce said. “When I found him, he was alone in a forgotten temple outside Thessaly. The sky shifted when I carried him out. I saw it, but I buried it. I thought the bloodline might be dormant, or broken.”

Dick turned to him slowly. “You never told me.”

“I wanted you to grow up as yourself,” Bruce said, not meeting his eyes directly. “I didn’t want you defined by gods before you could choose what you wanted to be.”

Dick exhaled wearily. “And now?”

Bruce looked at Clark, then back at Dick. “Now it’s time you knew what you are.”

Clark took a step forward, his voice calm and gentle. “You channeled solar energy,” he said. “It came from within you.”

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” Dick said. “I just saw Bruce in danger, and something in me said, no . And then the light answered.”

Clark studied him for a moment, then extended his hand. “You’re not alone in this,” he said. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

Dick looked down at Clark’s hand. For a long moment, he didn’t move. Then he looked to Bruce again, and whatever passed between them didn’t need to be said aloud. Slowly, he reached forward and took Clark’s hand.

—--------

Outside the manor, the last blue of twilight clung to the windows. Inside, the fire burned low, casting long shadows across the walls of the library. Dick sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees, a blanket draped loosely around his shoulders. He hadn’t spoken much since they came back. There was something different now, like an energy humming under his skin. It wasn’t outwardly visible, but Clark could feel it in the air like static. Bruce stood at the hearth, watching the fire with his arms folded across his chest. His presence was as solid as ever. Clark started thinking about the demigods he had come across. Bruce’s power was not loud or luminous like Dick’s. It sat low in his chest, always present. His blood carried something more violent, the signature of Ares did not burn like fire, it smoldered like iron left in flame for too long.

Clark sat across from them in one of the high-backed chairs, an old leather-bound volume open in his lap. He had pulled it from the dusty shelves in the back, and noticed it was annotated with Bruce’s own meticulous notes. The book was heavy with names and symbols, and its language shifted from Greek to Latin to something even older. Clark read slowly, so he could take it all in.

“I don’t think what happened was just a coincidence,” Clark said after a long silence. “The light was precise. It was almost… graceful.”

Dick didn’t look up at first, but Clark could see his fingers tighten slightly around the blanket. “It didn’t feel like mine,” Dick said quietly. “It felt like someone else’s hand moving through mine.”

Bruce finally turned away from the fire and approached, standing beside the chair but not sitting. “When I found him, there were already signs,” Bruce said. “The priests claimed the temple had awakened when the child was brought in. They said the sun stayed longer on the mountain that day. I told myself it was superstition, or coincidence. I told myself I didn’t want to burden him with something he couldn’t yet understand.”

Dick looked up at that. “But you knew.”

Bruce’s gaze didn’t waver. “I suspected.”

Clark turned a page and pointed to a passage marked by a hand-drawn sunburst. “Apollo,” he said. “God of the sun, prophecy, medicine, and music.”

Dick raised an eyebrow. “So that’s your guess? He’s my father?”

“I can’t be certain,” Clark said. “But I’ve felt a lot of kinds of power. And what surged through that warehouse wasn’t random solar energy. It harmonized with me.”

“He shone with light,” Bruce said. “But the building didn’t burn. The people inside weren’t harmed. He willed the light to protect me and it obeyed him.”

Clark closed the book gently and looked between the two of them. Sitting with them like this, the full weight of what he had been feeling since his arrival on Earth was impossible to ignore. There were moments when he felt something like resonance. It was strongest around Bruce, but it had expanded since meeting Dick. When they were both near, the air felt denser.

“I think I’m connected to both of you,” Clark said slowly. “It feels almost like gravity.”

Dick frowned. “That sounds intense.”

Clark smiled faintly. “It is. I think my body recognized you both before my mind did. I responded to Bruce’s presence the way I would to a planetary alignment when I first landed.”

“We were never going to be normal,” Bruce said at last. “Not you. Not me. And now, not Dick.”

“Maybe not,” Clark agreed. “Maybe we weren’t meant to be. Maybe we’re meant to be something together that no one else can be.”

Dick met his eyes. “What does that mean?”

Clark looked down at the closed book. “I don’t know yet, but I think it started a long time ago. Before Earth and Krypton.”

—--------

The lift hummed softly as it descended into the lower levels of the manor, the warm light of the upper floors fading into the cool, muted blue of the cave. The air grew colder. Machines blinked to life in the dark. Clark stood at the front, his arms crossed, eyes fixed forward. Bruce stood beside him with his cowl off. Dick was a step behind them, still wrapped in the same hoodie and soft pants he had pulled on after the incident. He looked more like a college student than a demigod, but the faint hum of power around him made that illusion thin. The console waited at the far end of the platform. Kryptonian crystal met human engineering in its curved surface and suspended glyphs. When they approached, it flickered to life, light chasing across its edges like water sliding over glass.

Clark stepped forward and placed his hand on the central input crystal. “Jor-El,” he said clearly. “I need to speak with you.”

The air shimmered. “My son,” he said, inclining his head. “You have questions.”

Clark nodded. “Yes.”

Jor-El’s eyes moved over the three of them, pausing slightly on Bruce. “We need to understand something,” Clark said. “Since I arrived, I’ve been drawn to them. Especially to Bruce at first, but now also to Dick. I can feel them.”

Bruce shifted slightly beside him. “We’ve all noticed it.”

Jor-El’s expression grew thoughtful. “This connection was expected. Though perhaps not this soon.”

Clark’s brow furrowed. “Expected? Why?”

“Because Krypton was not as alone in the stars as our records once believed,” Jor-El said. “Before the rise of the Science Council, long before our dependence on logic alone, our people explored other realms. Domains ruled not by laws of matter, but by will. One such domain was Earth.”

Dick leaned forward slightly. “You’re saying Krypton knew about Earth’s gods?”

Jor-El nodded. “There were attempts to make contact. Their power was not unlike our own, only freer. Kryptonians evolved under a red sun, and under those conditions, we were grounded, but under Earth’s yellow sun, Kal-El… your physiology awakens. And in proximity to divine blood, it harmonizes.”

Clark’s mouth parted slightly. “So I was built to react to them.”

“You were built to resonate with them,” Jor-El corrected. “The Earth gods were a living pantheon bound to human memory and light itself.”

Bruce’s voice was low. “Why now? Why did his power awaken tonight?”

“Perhaps,” Jor-El said, “because the three of you were finally close enough, and because Dick’s soul made a choice to protect. That moment of choice brought the divine blood into alignment.”

“We’re bound,” Clark said quietly. “The three of us.”

Jor-El’s image began to dim. “In more ways than you understand.”

The console darkened. Bruce stepped away first. “We should prepare. If Dick’s powers are waking, others might notice.”

Dick met his gaze. “So what now?”

“Now we figure out who you are.”

—--------

Dick had gone upstairs hours ago, his footsteps fading softly past the west wing, his thoughts clearly too tangled for more conversation. Bruce had disappeared into the Batcave without a word, and Clark, after standing alone in the library for what felt like too long, had followed. He found Bruce in the lower level, standing by the railing that overlooked the darker stretch of the cave where the water ran, quiet and deep. The only light came from the subtle glow of the workstation’s monitors behind them. Clark approached slowly, but Bruce didn’t turn. He just kept staring down into the dark like it might offer answers if he watched it long enough. For a while, neither of them spoke.

Clark leaned his weight against the railing beside him. His arms were crossed loosely, his expression unreadable. Inside, though, the storm hadn’t quieted. Not since the warehouse. He couldn’t stop thinking about it—feeling it. He had been drawn to Bruce from the moment he landed on Earth. Drawn in a way that felt magnetic and irrational, at first, he had told himself it was instinct, or admiration, or the kind of curiosity one warrior felt toward another. But then it had grown, snd now, after everything Jor-El had said he didn’t know what was real anymore.

Clark stared ahead and asked quietly, “Have you ever been in love?”

Bruce didn’t move at first. The pause stretched long enough that Clark almost regretted speaking at all. But then Bruce said, “Once.”

“Was it… hard?” he asked.

Bruce exhaled through his nose. “Yes. It didn’t last. Not because there wasn’t something there, but because I wasn’t ready to let anyone know me. Not completely.”

Clark’s brow furrowed. “And now?”

Bruce didn’t look at him. “Now I know how to let people see parts of me.”

Clark looked back out over the cave. He didn’t know what answer he’d been hoping for, only that the tightness in his chest hadn’t gone away. Part of him had wanted Bruce to say he’d never felt something real before. That what Clark was feeling could be new, even if it wasn’t entirely his choice. That their connection could be more than some divine design written into his bones. He didn’t say any of that.

Clark asked, “Do you believe in fate?”

Bruce finally turned to look at him. “Not in the way people usually mean it.”

“Then how?” 

“I believe in choice,” Bruce said. “Even when the path is laid in front of you, the steps are still yours.”

Clark was quiet again. He nodded once, almost to himself, and tightened his arms slightly. “I don’t know if what I feel is real,” he admitted, voice low. 

“Real things are often complicated. Doesn’t make them false.”

Clark breathed in slowly. The quiet water below caught the faint blue glow of the console screens. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Yes.”

Clark clenched and unclenched his hands. “What does romance mean to you? I mean… as a human.”

That made Bruce shift slightly, a movement so subtle it might have gone unnoticed to anyone else. “I think it’s different for everyone, but at its core, it’s about choosing someone. Not just once, but over and over, even when things are easy, or when they’re not. It’s being known, and still wanted.”

“That’s not how it works on Krypton,” he said. “Romance wasn’t emotional. At least not in the way you describe it, it was rational. Compatibility was determined genetically and socially. Houses arranged pairings for lineage or balance. Affection wasn’t forbidden, but it wasn’t expected.”

Bruce watched him now, studying his profile. “So love wasn’t part of it?”

“Not the way you mean,” Clark replied. “Partnerships were about function. If feelings developed, that was incidental. The priority was always the survival of the House and the advancement of knowledge. I didn’t understand what falling in love meant until I came here. And even now, I don’t think I’ve experienced it. Sometimes I think I might be starting to, and then I wonder if it’s real or if it’s just what my body was taught to want.”

Bruce turned his eyes back to the darkness below. “You’ve only just arrived on this planet, Clark. You’re carrying the weight of two civilizations, you’re allowed to be uncertain.”

“I know,” Clark said. “But it’s more than that. I want to make my own choices. I want to know that what I feel for someone isn’t written in my blood. I want to know that I see them, not just what my instincts say they are.”

“Then ask yourself this: if I had no divine blood, if there was nothing in me for your body to recognize, would you still be drawn to me?”

Clark didn’t answer, because the answer had already formed, clear and full in his chest. He would be. He knew now that it was useless to pursue Bruce, however, so he was content to be his friend.

Chapter Text

Metropolis was louder than Gotham and it seemed to pulse with optimism. The buildings shone brighter, the people walked faster, and everything seemed to breathe with upward motion, even on overcast days. Clark had started coming here more often, partly to learn, partly to feel what it was like to walk among crowds who didn’t see him as anything but another man in jeans and glasses. He liked the anonymity. It gave him space to think.

Today, he had decided to take a detour from his usual library haunt and wandered into the park, a patch of late spring greening that softened the edges of downtown. He bought a pretzel from a vendor he didn’t know the name of and sat on the rim of a dry fountain. The sun pressed gently against his shoulders. It should have been a calm day. That was when the shadow passed overhead.

“That’s either the world’s oldest copy of Moby Dick or you’re pretending to read it so people won’t talk to you.”

Clark looked up. The man standing a few feet away was around his age, maybe a bit older. Tall, tan, hair wind-tousled. He wore a flight jacket and aviator sunglasses, which he pulled off casually as he smiled.

Clark blinked, caught off-guard by the interruption. “I’m sorry?” 

The man nodded toward the book in Clark’s lap. “Just a guess. You don’t look like you’re reading it. You look like you’re staring through it and re-evaluating your life choices.”

Clark felt a startled laugh break out of him before he could stop it. “Maybe I am,” he said.

The man smiled wider. “Then I’m in the right place. Hi. I’m Hal.”

Clark hesitated, then held out his hand. “Clark.”

Their hands met briefly. Hal’s grip was warm. Clark felt something, not the hum he felt around Bruce or Dick, but a kind of static, like Hal brought his own gravity without trying.

“You from around here?” Hal asked, sitting down beside him without waiting for permission.

Clark nodded. “Sort of. I just moved here.”

“Well, welcome to the city,” Hal said. “Where the coffee’s overpriced, the pigeons will fight you, and half the good restaurants have terrible lighting.”

Clark tilted his head, curious despite himself. “Do you live here?”

“Sometimes,” Hal said, evasive but smooth. “Work keeps me moving.” Hal stretched his legs out in front of him, glancing sidelong with a grin. “You’ve got the look of someone trying to figure out if saying yes to something would be a mistake.”

Clark glanced back, arching an eyebrow. “What am I supposedly saying yes to?”

Hal gestured with a lazy sweep of his hand. “Coffee, or a drink, later. You don’t seem like the dive bar type, but I clean up well.”

Clark’s mouth twitched into a smile. “You don’t even know me.”

“Maybe,” Hal said. “But I’m trying to.”

Clark looked at him, really looked at him. There was no rush behind Hal’s charm, no predatory edge. Clark should have said no. He didn’t want to mislead him. He wasn’t even sure what he was doing, but the part of him that wanted to learn—to try, to practice—overrode the voice that said it was unfair.

“Okay,” Clark said. “Coffee sounds fine.”

Hal’s grin deepened. “Good. There’s a place two blocks over. It’s got terrible lighting. You’ll love it.”

Clark followed him, pretending he didn’t feel the hollow ache still sitting behind his ribs.

The coffee shop Hal had picked was a narrow corner café tucked between a bookstore and a bike shop, full of reclaimed wood. It smelled like espresso and cinnamon, and the barista wore suspenders without irony. Clark sat at a small table near the window, nursing a cappuccino he didn’t really need, while Hal worked his way through a second americano like it was an Olympic sport. They had been talking for almost an hour. Or, more accurately, Hal had been talking. Clark mostly listened, his responses careful and brief, shaped to encourage the conversation without letting too much of himself spill forward. He found that Hal didn’t seem to mind. The man had stories, flight school antics, half-true travel disasters, a theory about every constellation in the sky, and a quick grin that made it easy to fall into the rhythm of his voice.

Clark told himself this was good, harmless even, but the longer it went on, the more aware he became of Hal’s intent.

“So,” Hal said at last, leaning back in his chair and spinning his mug in a lazy half-circle. “What’s the verdict? Am I boring you, or are you just the quiet type?”

Clark looked up, startled, then gave a faint smile. “No. You’re not boring.”

“Then I’ll take that as a win.”

Outside, the daylight had started to fade, and the streetlamps had flickered on. Clark glanced at the time on his phone and stood slowly, brushing nonexistent lint from his shirt. “I should head back soon,” he said. “I wasn’t planning to stay in the city tonight.”

Hal stood with him, casual as ever, hands in his jacket pockets. “Where’s home?”

“Gotham,” Clark replied.

Hal raised an eyebrow. “You commute from Gotham to Metropolis to read in parks and drink bad coffee?”

Clark hesitated. “It’s complicated.”

Hal gave a low, amused whistle. “You’re either incredibly committed to introspection, or you’ve got a secret double life you’re not telling me about.”

Clark didn’t respond. He reached for his wallet, but Hal waved him off. “Nope,” he said. “I asked you out, I cover the tab.”

Clark let him. He stepped back outside into the dusk, the air cooler now. Hal followed, glancing up at the sky. “You need a ride back?” he asked.

Clark blinked. “Back to Gotham?”

“Sure. I’ve got a car parked a couple blocks from here. It’s nothing flashy, but it drives, and I’m not doing anything tonight.”

“You’d really drive that far?”

Hal shrugged. “Why not? Gives me an excuse to keep talking to you. Or not talk, if you prefer silence. I’m a great chauffeur.”

Clark hesitated. He could fly home in minutes. He didn’t need this. But something in him, some strange combination of curiosity, guilt, and the need to understand why this wasn’t working, said, “All right. As long as I can pick the playlist.”

Hal laughed. “Only if it’s not just movie soundtracks.”

Clark gave a smile. “No promises.”

They started walking, side by side. For a little while, Clark tried to pretend this was just a date. That the hollow space behind his ribs wasn’t shaped like someone who knew what he really was.

—--------

The staff had gone for the night, the cave was dormant, and Dick had vanished into the east wing. Bruce had been in the study when the alert chimed, one of the outer perimeter sensors noting a vehicle approaching. He glanced at the monitor, surprised to find it was Clark. Or rather, Clark in the passenger seat of a nondescript, civilian vehicle. Bruce narrowed his eyes. It didn’t belong to anyone in the manor. He stood slowly and moved to the tall window that overlooked the drive. The car came into view beneath the tree line. The engine rumbled gently as it coasted to a stop in front of the manor’s main steps. Clark stepped out first. The man who followed stepped out with easy grace. Bruce knew him even without the Green Lantern uniform, Hal Jordan. 

The two of them lingered by the car, speaking too quietly for the mic to catch. Bruce watched without moving, every line of his body still, except for the way his hand curled slowly around the edge of the curtain. Hal laughed, low and easy, and reached out to touch Clark’s arm. Clark didn’t pull away. Hal said something else, then leaned in and pressed a kiss to Clark’s cheek. Clark blinked and went bright red. Though he didn’t return it, Bruce felt it like a blade between ribs. He let the curtain fall and stepped away from the window before he could see what their goodbye would look like. 

He didn’t know why it bothered him. Clark was free to do what he wanted. Bruce had given no signals, other than silence and mission reports and a quiet conversation about fate and love. He’d stood beside Clark at the edge of the cave, answered his questions with measured honesty, and watched him leave without asking where he was going. Because he had no right to ask.

Bruce made his way down the hall toward the cave. His breath was steady, but his heartbeat, for once, was not. The ache that settled in his chest wasn’t jealousy, not exactly, but it felt like something that could have been his was now a little farther away.

The Batcave greeted him with the usual chill. Bruce crossed the platform, gloves already tugged on, cowl set aside. He activated the primary terminal, let the familiar light cut against the dark, and pulled up the training logs so he could focus on variables he could control, not emotions. Not the image of Hal Jordan’s hand resting too easily on Clark’s arm. Or the way Clark hadn’t stepped back. Bruce’s jaw tightened as he pulled up the surveillance footage from earlier patrols. Dick’s latest rooftop sparring routine. His own response time measured down to the millisecond. He tried to let it pull him in, but it didn’t hold.

He paused the screen. The frame caught him mid-strike, elbow driving into the ribs of a street enforcer, and the motion felt hollow. Like a ritual that had stopped meaning something the moment Clark had stepped out of that car. Bruce pulled off the gloves and braced both hands against the console edge. His fingers were steady, but his chest was tight.

You had your chance. He had known, even from the beginning, that Clark was drawn to him. He had never acknowledged it aloud, because the acknowledgment would have been a crack in the armor. And cracks had consequences. Then Clark had asked him about love and looked at him like he was waiting for permission to feel something real. Bruce hadn’t given it. Now someone else had stepped in.

Bruce exhaled through his nose and opened a new report, eyes scanning without seeing. The text blurred at the edges. His mind kept replaying the moment by the car, not the kiss itself, but the ease of it and how natural it had looked. How unguarded Clark had been, even if only for a second.

A soft chime echoed from the console, indicating that someone was approaching the cave entrance. Clark. Bruce didn’t look up yet, he needed a few seconds more to lock the feeling down and seal it where no one could see. Like he always did.

—--------

The Watchtower’s main conference chamber gleamed under artificial daylight. Transparent screens flickered with planetary readouts and off-world transmissions. The table was already occupied. Diana sat near the head, graceful and still, reviewing a treaty draft from Themyscira. Arthur leaned back in his chair, fingers tapping against a water canister. Hal sat with one boot up on the edge of the table, rotating a stylus between his fingers with that same relaxed arrogance Bruce had never liked.

“Bats,” Hal greeted as Bruce entered, without looking up. “Good to see you in a mood, as always.”

Bruce said nothing at first. He moved to his seat at the far end of the table and pulled up a field report from the Andean fault zone. His gloves tapped crisply against the touchscreen. He didn’t bother making eye contact.

Hal glanced up. “Something bite you, or did I miss the memo about today being glower-and-sulk day?”

Diana looked up sharply. “Green Lantern.”

Bruce didn’t flinch. “If you’re done wasting oxygen, we can begin.”

There was a beat of silence. Arthur raised an eyebrow. Hal stilled, blinked once, and leaned back. “Wow. You know, most people ask how your week’s been.”

Bruce didn’t answer. He turned the central display on, flooding the chamber with a holographic map of South Asia that showed seismic clusters and disturbance patterns. 

“Five tremors in seventy-two hours,” he said flatly, pointing to the faultline. “Metahuman interference likely. We need coordinated satellite coverage and two field teams ready to respond if the pattern holds.”

Hal leaned forward. “We’re just skipping pleasantries now, huh?”

Bruce looked at him then, gaze sharp as razors. “If you’re more interested in banter than action, I can assign you to monitor duty.”

Hal’s smile didn’t falter, but the light behind it shifted.

Diana cut in gently. “Let’s stay on task. The faultline is the priority.”

Hal’s hands came up, half in surrender. “Of course. Just trying to lighten the mood. Some of us had a good weekend.”

Bruce’s jaw ticked. His attention returned to the map, but his posture sharpened. Hal didn’t know what Bruce had seen. Didn’t know what that kiss had looked like from behind glass. Didn’t know that Bruce had rewound the security footage. Twice.

The meeting continued. Diana gave her field report. Arthur offered to run a perimeter sweep. Bruce kept his comments clipped, efficient, professional. When it was Hal’s turn to speak, Bruce didn’t interrupt, but he didn’t respond either. When the meeting ended, Bruce didn’t stay to debrief, he walked out without waiting.

“Hey,” Hal called. “You got a second?”

“No,” Bruce said without slowing.

Hal kept pace. “Wow. You’re really committing to the cold-shoulder bit.”

Bruce stopped. They stood in the corridor’s half-light, the flicker of distant docking lights pulsing like a heartbeat against the floor. Bruce turned his head, just enough to meet Hal’s gaze. “Do you need something?”

Hal crossed his arms, eyes narrowing slightly. “You’ve been snapping since the moment I walked in. What gives? You pissed I showed up late? Forgot to shine your Bat-signal?”

“I don’t have time for theatrics,” Bruce said.

“Then stop making everything feel like a stage,” Hal replied.

The words hung in the air. Bruce’s eyes sharpened, but Hal didn’t flinch. Instead, he took a step closer, misreading the silence as a cue to continue. “Look, I don’t know what kind of long night you had before this, but if you’ve got a problem with me, I’d rather hear it than guess.”

Bruce stared at him for a long, measured moment. Then he said, “I don’t have a problem with you, Lantern.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“I’m not here to be charmed. I’m here to keep this world standing.”

Hal raised both hands in a half-shrug. “Hey, I didn’t flirt with you. Not my type.”

That almost got a reaction, but not enough to break through the mask. Bruce’s tone stayed neutral. “Then maybe focus on strategy next time instead of turning the meeting into your personal stand-up routine.”

Hal’s smile thinned. “Right. Because God forbid someone on this team have a personality.”

“You think personality makes you irreplaceable,” Bruce said, voice low. “It doesn’t. Reliability does. Discipline does. Knowing when to keep your mouth shut does.”

Hal’s grin faded completely now. “You know, for someone who hides behind a mask, you’ve got a lot of opinions about people being themselves.”

Bruce stepped forward once, into Hal’s space, just enough to remind him that whatever this was, it wasn’t mutual recognition.

Hal blinked, startled for half a second. “Right,” he said. “Noted.”

Bruce turned and walked away, cloak sweeping behind him like the closing of a curtain. He didn’t look back. Hal watched him go, frowning slightly. There was something he was missing. A thread of tension that hadn’t started in that room. Someone, somewhere, had gotten under the Bat’s armor, and he didn’t know why he was the punching bag.

—-------

The early evening light slipped in through the high windows in long, golden lines that softened the stone outside the manor when Clark walked in. Alfred had nodded politely from the far hall but hadn’t asked where Clark had been. Clark appreciated that. His mind was already too crowded. He passed the study, the tall grandfather clock that masked the entrance to the Batcave, and paused. Bruce wasn’t back. Or if he was, he wasn’t making his presence known. Clark glanced once at the closed door to Bruce’s private office, then kept walking. He had just reached the guest room he’d been given when his phone buzzed.

He answered, cautiously. “Hello?”

“Clark?” Hal’s voice was warm. “Hey. It’s Hal. Jordan.”

Clark blinked and sat slowly on the edge of the bed. “Oh. Hi.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I didn’t give you my number.”

“You didn’t,” Hal said, and Clark could hear the grin in his voice. “But I’m persistent, and I’ve got friends in high places.”

Clark smiled despite himself. “You tracked my number.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not a stalker. Just a well-connected guy with a healthy respect for curiosity.”

Clark leaned back against the headboard. “What’s up?”

“I was calling to say thanks. For the coffee and the company. I know you’re not the easiest read, but I mean it—you’ve got good gravity.”

Clark hesitated. “Thanks. I think.”

“Well, since I clearly didn’t scare you off,” Hal continued, “I figured I’d push my luck. Want to come by tomorrow night? I’ve got a place near the river with a rooftop view. I make a mean Old Fashioned too.”

Clark didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

Hal paused, surprised by the ease. Then he laughed softly. “Well, damn. I was ready for a polite brush-off. Now I’ve got to clean the balcony.”

“I’ll be there,” Clark said. “Text me the address.”

“Will do,” Hal replied, still smiling. “See you soon, Kent.”

The line went dead. Clark set the phone down on the nightstand, then rose and crossed to the window. 

—-------

The next day, Clark knocked on the frame of the open doorway. The room beyond was comfortably messy—books in haphazard stacks, a half-zipped duffel slumped at the foot of the bed, and a single rack of civilian clothes that looked far too curated for someone who claimed not to care what he wore.

Dick looked up from where he was sitting on the windowsill, tying his shoe. “Kent,” he said with a grin. “You lost?”

“Not exactly.”

Dick raised an eyebrow. “Okay, then. You need something?”

Clark rubbed the back of his neck. “I, um… I have plans tonight. A sort of casual outing. With someone.”

Dick’s grin widened, but he didn’t interrupt. He waited, arms crossed, letting Clark squirm.

“It’s not serious,” Clark added quickly. “But I want to… I don’t know. Do it right.”

Dick stood, brushing his palms on his jeans. “You’re asking for fashion advice?”

“I guess I am,” Clark said, sheepish. “I’ve never been on a human date before.”

“Oh, I know,” he said, moving past him toward the armoire. “Let’s do this right, then. You don’t want to look like you’re trying to impress, but you do want to look like you know how to be around people.”

Clark gave an amused huff. “That’s not very reassuring.”

Dick flipped through hangers, pulling out a light blue button-down and a slim charcoal jacket. “Wear this. Roll the sleeves a little. And please, for the love of Gotham, do not wear your ripped jeans.”

Clark looked at the items with mild confusion. “Are these yours?”

“Bruce’s,” Dick said. “You’re close enough in size. You’re taller, but this’ll work if you don’t breathe too hard.”

Clark accepted the bundle, then glanced back at him. “You really think this matters?”

“Of course it matters,” Dick said, leaning against the dresser. “It’s not about the clothes. It’s about showing you care enough to put thought into what you wear.”

Clark’s expression shifted. 

Dick studied him a moment longer, then asked, “Is this date about figuring out what you want, or proving that you don’t want someone else?”

Clark didn’t answer. Dick didn’t press. He just offered a half-smile and said, “Text me if he sucks.”

Clark returned it with a nod. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” Dick said. “Now go shower, alien boy.”

—--------

Clark arrived at the address just after sunset. The building was modest by Metropolis standards, it was a converted warehouse with clean lines and soft brickwork still holding the day’s warmth. String lights blinked across the rooftop, and the street below was quiet. He checked the number again and knocked. 

Hal opened the door with his usual grin. He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, one brow raised. “Well, damn,” he said. “I was expecting flannel again.”

Clark flushed. “I had help.”

“Remind me to thank that help.” Hal stepped back, letting him in. “Come on. You hungry?”

Clark took in the apartment as he moved inside. The space was open, it had maps on the walls, a scattering of flight manuals, and he could smell something delicious coming from the kitchen. 

Hal headed toward the stove. “I made pasta. No promises, but I didn’t burn it. Wine’s breathing, because I heard that’s a thing, and if I did everything right, the sunset should hit the balcony in about five minutes.”

Clark followed him in, accepting the offered glass. “This is nice. I didn’t expect all this.”

Hal shrugged. “I’ve got style.”

They sat down on the balcony a few minutes later, plates in their laps, the skyline unfurling ahead of them in gold and blush. The sun had already dipped below the taller towers, but the afterglow was sharp. Clark watched it with quiet interest, chewing slowly. Hal watched him.

“You always this quiet?” he asked, nudging Clark’s foot gently under the table.

Clark looked over, thoughtful. “No. Not always.”

“Just taking it all in?”

Clark nodded. “I’m not used to this kind of company.”

“Is it the charm?” Hal smirked. “Because I can tone it down. Or crank it up.”

Clark shook his head. “No, you’re… easy to be around.”

That earned him a softer look. For the first time, Hal didn’t joke. “Well,” Hal said, “if that’s all this turns out to be, I’m good with it. Not every night has to be fireworks.”

Clark looked back out at the city. “Sometimes the quiet is enough.”

“Exactly.” Hal raised his glass. “To a quiet night.”

Clark clinked his gently in return. “To quiet.”

They talked a little longer about planes, about books Clark had read and Hal hadn’t, about city noise and bad diner coffee. He didn’t feel a spark, but he was starting to accept that he wouldn’t with anyone other than Bruce. He could get used to it.

—------

Bruce stood in the cave, the monitor light casting thin shadows against his face. Clark hadn’t come back yet. Bruce had heard the front gate open earlier that afternoon and he’d heard footsteps leaving. He hadn’t asked where Clark was going, he had just listened. And now, hours later, Clark hadn’t returned. The monitors reflected back his stone-cut expression. Alfred had passed him earlier with a knowing glance, one that Bruce hadn’t returned. He leaned forward slightly, entering a search command. The surveillance satellite swept across the Gotham skyline, then paused, automatically pinging the transponder Bruce had installed in Clark’s coat. Location: Metropolis. Still.

Bruce locked the screen and stood. He told himself it didn’t matter. Clark was not accountable to him. He wasn’t a soldier, or a partner. He was—what? A visitor? A question that hadn’t answered itself? Or someone Bruce had trained and protected, someone who had looked at him with steady, sun-bright eyes and asked what it meant to be human?

Now he was with someone else, trying to answer that without Bruce. Bruce walked across the cave and stood at the edge of the stone platform overlooking the underground lake. He didn’t wonder if Clark was kissing him. He didn’t wonder if he liked it. He wondered why it hurt. Bruce exhaled slowly, eyes narrowing in the dark. He would not interfere, but if Clark came back changed, if that light in his eyes shifted, Bruce would know, and he would get over it.

Chapter Text

Dick padded into the kitchen barefoot wearing a Gotham U t-shirt and sweats that didn’t quite match. Alfred was nowhere to be seen, likely respecting the mood. Bruce sat at the long table, coffee cooling at his elbow, a screen open in front of him. His jaw was set tight. 

Dick crossed the tile slowly and poured himself a cup before speaking. “Didn’t sleep again?”

Bruce didn’t answer. Dick glanced over his shoulder to see Green Lantern’s profile pulled up. “Clark didn’t come home last night.”

Bruce’s silence remained. Dick leaned against the counter, watching him. “Didn’t realize Hal Jordan was in the city.”

Still nothing. “Guy’s got charm,” Dick said mildly. “Not really your type.”

“I don’t have a type,” Bruce said, flat.

Dick sipped his coffee. “Right.”

There was a long pause. Bruce still hadn’t looked up.

“You know he wasn’t trying to hurt you. Clark, I mean. He’s still figuring things out.”

Bruce set his mug down forcefully. “He doesn’t owe me anything.”

“That’s not what I said.” Dick stepped closer. “You trained him and gave him shelter and food. Let him see you without the mask. That’s not nothing.”

Bruce’s hands flexed slightly against the table’s edge. “It wasn’t a claim.”

“No,” Dick said, “but it was an invitation.”

His eyes dropped back to the screen. Dick sighed and set his mug down. “You’ve been alone a long time,” he said. “But don’t let that convince you you’re better off without someone who sees you. He came to you first for a reason.”

Bruce didn’t lift his gaze again and Dick didn’t wait for a response. He just left the room with the air of someone who’d said what needed to be said and knew that, with Bruce, silence would do the rest.

—-------

The front door creaked open at 8:42 a.m. Clark stepped into the manor with a lightness that felt unfamiliar. He hadn’t stayed long at Hal’s. Just enough to eat, talk, watch the skyline fade from gold to twilight. They hadn’t touched, not more than the occasional brush of hands when passing the wine. Clark spent the rest of the night exploring Metropolis in the dark.

Clark shut the door behind him and moved through the main hall. He passed the study, glancing once at the empty fireplace. He didn’t see or hear any sign of Dick or Bruce in the cave. He made his way to where he heard a heartbeat in the kitchen. Bruce sat at the table, his back to the door. A fresh pot of coffee steamed on the counter.

Clark hesitated in the doorway. “Morning.”

Bruce didn’t turn. “Morning.”

Clark stepped further in. “Did you have a good night?”

All he heard was silence. Clark moved to the cabinet, pulled down a mug, and poured some coffee. “I didn’t stay late at Hal’s,” Clark offered, voice gentle. “Just talked for a while.”

Bruce set the tablet down. “You don’t need to explain.”

“I wasn’t trying to hide anything.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

Bruce met his eyes only briefly, and he saw a flicker, just long enough, that said everything. The wall was already halfway built between them again.

Clark’s chest tightened. “Bruce—”

“I have a League report to finish,” Bruce said, rising. “Alfred made breakfast. You should eat.”

He moved past him before Clark could stop him, footsteps vanishing into the main hall like a closing door. Clark stood alone in the kitchen, holding the mug, still full. For the first time since arriving on Earth, Clark felt like he’d broken something he didn’t know how to fix.

—-------

Clark moved carefully through the cave, like a guest in sacred ground. His boots clicked against the metal stairs, then softened as he crossed onto the main platform. The long, polished worktable was scattered with blueprints and field reports. Alfred emerged from the far alcove with a datapad in one hand and a pressed handkerchief folded in the other, as if he had expected company.

“Master Kent,” he greeted, tone mild. “You’re up early, considering you were out late.”

Clark smiled faintly. “News travels fast.”

Alfred set the handkerchief down on a tray and walked over to a console. “In this house, very little remains unknown for long.”

Clark paused near the edge of the platform. “Is Bruce angry with me?”

Alfred adjusted something on the display. “He’s not angry,” Alfred said eventually. “He doesn’t waste time on anger unless he believes it can change something.”

Clark frowned. “Then what’s wrong?”

Alfred turned to face him. “You left,” Alfred said. “Without saying why. And in your absence, someone else saw you in a way Bruce hadn’t yet allowed himself to.”

Clark’s throat tightened. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I know,” Alfred interrupted gently. “Neither did he.”

Clark folded his arms, uncertain. “He never said anything. Nothing was… defined.”

Alfred gave a soft breath of a laugh. “Master Bruce doesn’t define things until he is certain about them.”

Clark looked up.

“He doesn’t show his pain like others,” Alfred said. “But that doesn’t make it smaller.” 

Clark looked toward the dark corner of the cave where Bruce usually stood. “He was here when I came in,” Alfred said, reading the glance. “He left shortly before you arrived.”

“Where?”

“I imagine he didn’t know himself.” Alfred placed the datapad down. “Some wounds walk themselves out.”

Clark exhaled slowly. “Do you think I should leave him alone?” he asked.

“No,” he said. “I think you should find him.” He stepped past Clark and gently squeezed his arm.

—-------

The wind moved gently through the trees as Clark followed the narrow trail that wound behind the manor, past the low stone fence and into the older part of the grounds. Clark sensed him and when he rounded the rise, he saw him. Bruce stood near the edge of the bluff, facing the horizon. 

Clark stepped carefully, not wanting to startle him. “Bruce.”

Bruce didn’t turn. “Hello, Clark.”

Clark came to stand beside him, leaving space between them. “I was going to come back last night.”

“But you didn’t.”

Clark looked down. “No. I didn’t.”

“I ended up exploring Metropolis,” Clark said. “I just thought I should understand more.”

Bruce’s gaze stayed on the horizon. “Did you?”

“I’m not sure.”

They stood there, the wind moving around them, the morning sun just beginning to burn off the last of the fog. Clark opened his mouth to say more, but a faint chime cut through the air. 

Bruce’s hand was already at his hip, fingers brushing the League communicator hidden inside the lining of his coat. He tapped once, listening. “Three-alarm detonation at a port in Manhattan. Aquaman already dispatched. Diana’s en route.”

He glanced at Clark for the first time, “I have to go.”

Clark’s heart sank. “Of course.”

Bruce hesitated. For just a second, something flickered in his eyes. Then he turned, already slipping back into the persona the world knew. Clark watched him go. The wind rose, and Bruce was gone.

—--------

Smoke coiled up from the cratered asphalt as Bruce dove low behind a container wall, one gloved hand pressed against his ribs. He didn’t grimace or curse, he’d trained himself past both habits years ago. The impact from the blast had caught him off-center, and something deep within his side throbbed with every breath. He ignored it. Across the wreckage, Diana swept through falling beams, her shield catching the debris before it could bury the trapped workers below. Aquaman was shouting orders in Atlantean across the comms, coordinating flood control from the lower pier. The tide was pulling fast, drawn by the shock of the explosion, but not fast enough to erase the fire.

Bruce glanced up at the catwalks, or, what was left of them. The source of the blast had already been identified. He moved before he could think better of it, rising from cover and grappling upward to the support beams above. The steel trembled under his boots, and his ribs screamed in protest, but he pushed forward. He needed answers. 

That was when the green glow flared behind him. “Bats,” Hal called out, floating up to meet him. “You’re bleeding.”

Bruce didn’t stop. “It’s handled.”

“I saw the hit. You’re off balance.” Hal’s construct light shifted around him, wrapping into a protective shield. “Let me cover you while you—”

“I said it’s handled.”

Hal floated in front of him, trying to block his path. “Come on. You’re not a machine.”

“I don’t need you playing nurse.”

“It’s not about ego,” Hal said, keeping his tone calm. “It’s about not passing out twenty feet in the air.”

Bruce stepped around him.

“God, you are exhausting,” Hal muttered, following anyway. “Is it physically painful to accept help, or just a lifestyle choice?”

Bruce finally stopped, his voice a low, cold edge. “You want to help me? Stay out of my way.”

Hal recoiled slightly. “This isn’t about the mission, is it?”

Bruce didn’t answer. He turned again, continuing toward the next platform. Hal didn’t follow this time. Behind the mask, Bruce’s teeth clenched against the pain in his ribs. Blood pooled thick inside the suit. Bruce moved through the wreckage half-hunched, half-aware that Hal was circling above trying not to make it obvious. Diana had the southern pier under control. Arthur was waist-deep in floodwater rerouting the surge. It should have been simple.

It wasn’t.

The second charge had been buried in the crane’s foundation, hidden beneath two tons of reinforced steel. Bruce was the only one who could get close without attracting attention. He’d warned them it might be rigged. He went in anyway, only to have the platform give way. It didn’t collapse so much as vanish beneath him, a ghost of structure that split down the center. There was no time for a second grapple. He fell hard. Pain shot through him like a blade. By the time he hit the lower deck, the world was narrowing at the edges. His HUD was flickering. The medical alerts were screaming.

“Batman, respond,” Diana’s voice crackled in his ear. “Batman?”

He tapped his comm once and found it to be useless. He could still move, barely. He pulled himself behind a rusted bulkhead, tried to reorient. His vision stuttered sideways.

“Jesus, B,” Hal said, dropping low beside him. “You’re bleeding all over the goddamn pier.”

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Yeah? You need a spine replacement at this rate.”

Bruce pushed himself up, one hand braced against the crate. His breath caught and held. Hal reached to stabilize him and—

“Don’t,” Bruce snapped.

Hal froze.

Bruce turned, just enough to glare. “I said don’t.”

Hal straightened. “You don’t have to do it all alone, you know.”

Bruce ignored him. All the sudden, the air around him grew lighter. He looked up just as Clark landed in civilian clothes, shirt scorched from flight. He didn’t speak right away, just looked down at him, eyes wide and earnest and afraid. Bruce’s ribs ached again.

“Clark,” he said, quieter than he meant to.

Clark dropped to one knee. “You need help.”

“I told them—”

“I’m not them.”

Bruce opened his mouth to argue and found no words. He let Clark lift him. Bruce didn’t struggle. His body was failing him in small, invisible ways: his pulse was shallow and pain bloomed in deep internal rhythms. Clark rose into the air with practiced grace. Below them, the docks were still in chaos. Diana was stabilizing a support beam. Arthur was shouting to one of the flood teams. The fire crackled along the edge of a shipping line, held at bay by an Atlantean wall of water. 

Above it all, Hal hovered in the smoke. His construct blinked out as he turned to track the shape rising from the wreckage—Clark, holding Bruce like something fragile and irreplaceable. Hal’s mouth opened. “What the hell?”

Bruce exhaled slowly. “Don’t engage.”

Clark didn’t, he kept rising. Hal shouted again, somewhere behind them. “Clark? What… wait. Since when can you fly?!”

The clouds swallowed them before he got an answer. The sky wrapped around them like gauze, silver clouds stretched thin, wind soft as breath. 

Bruce shifted slightly, ribs flaring hot. “You’re not supposed to fly.”

Clark didn’t answer.

“I’m serious,” Bruce muttered. “You’re not a cape. You’re—”

“I’m not letting you die on a dock because I wasn’t wearing a symbol.”

Bruce went quiet again. He felt the pull of gravity ease as Clark adjusted his grip. There was one hand beneath his shoulders, and the other braced across the backs of his knees. It should’ve felt ridiculous, infantilizing, even, but it didn’t. He tried to catalogue the pain instead. The break in his side was stable and the suit was still holding compression. The bleeding had slowed. Clark’s heartbeat sounded louder than his own.

“Hal saw you,” Bruce said after a moment.

“I know.”

“He’s going to ask questions.”

Clark’s jaw tightened. “Let him.”

Bruce studied his face from below, the shadow of it cut against the clouds. “You didn’t have to come.”

Clark’s gaze flicked down. “I did.”

Bruce exhaled slowly. “You’re not supposed to be in this part of my life.”

They passed through the low clouds, mist collecting against Bruce’s jaw like dew. When Clark finally spoke, it was soft. “Then why can I feel when you’re hurt?”

Bruce had no answer for that. Clark didn’t ask again. He just carried him the rest of the way down, through the trees, through the quiet, and into the house.

—-------

The next time Bruce woke, it was to the scent of antiseptic, linen, and Earl Grey. Breathing still pulled too tight in his ribs, but the weight of pressure had eased. He blinked, vision adjusting to the soft gold of the bedside lamp.

“Ah,” came a voice beside him. “There you are.”

Bruce turned his head slowly. Alfred sat at his left, sleeves rolled up, the small silver suture kit open beside him on the nightstand. His expression was composed but unmistakably strained at the edges. 

Bruce tried to speak, but his throat was raw. “Clark—?”

“Gone for the moment,” Alfred replied. 

Bruce glanced down at his side. A neat dressing had been wrapped tight across his torso, and the armor was nowhere in sight.

Alfred’s hands moved smoothly, finishing the last few adjustments. “Two cracked ribs, one hairline fracture, and a partially separated shoulder. You’re lucky you didn’t puncture a lung. Again.”

Bruce let his head sink back into the pillow. “It wasn’t luck.”

“No,” Alfred said dryly. “It was idiocy.”

Bruce didn’t argue. Alfred dipped the cloth in antiseptic, dabbing gently at a cut along his collarbone. “You know, when Master Kent carried you through the front doors like a romantic lead in a silent film, I half expected a declaration of love right there in the foyer.”

Bruce shut his eyes. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say it was his declaration,” Alfred added.

“He knew I was hurt,” Bruce said.

“Yes,” Alfred murmured. “He did.”

Bruce opened his eyes again, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know what that means.”

“I do,” Alfred said. “It means you’re not as alone as you thought.” Alfred’s hand paused on his shoulder. “You can let him stay, you know.”

—-------

The room had quieted. Alfred had gone, muttering something about tea and a sedative Bruce would ignore. The fireplace was burning low now, throwing soft amber light across the edges of the quilt. Bruce shifted slightly, shoulder aching but manageable. The pain was no longer his primary concern. Something sat on the nightstand that hadn’t been there earlier. A notebook. Bruce reached for it carefully, his fingers brushing the corner. He opened it. The first page was blank. The second, almost blank, just a few words, scrawled in blocky, careful handwriting that didn’t look natural yet. For Bruce. If you want to read it.

He turned the page. Then another and another. Each filled with ink. Some lines scratched out. Some words underlined twice, like Clark had gone back and argued with himself. Bruce read in silence.

What does it mean when a character dies in a movie and it hurts even if I don’t know them?

Why would a person smile and lie at the same time?

Is shame always learned, or can you be born knowing it?

If you save someone but it costs you something invisible, how do you explain that loss to anyone else?

Why do humans hold each other’s hands when they’re afraid? Does it work? Does it help?

When you said ‘being human is messy,’ did you mean it’s not worth it?

Bruce closed the notebook. The questions were open wounds dressed up as curiosity, some wide-eyed, some heartbreakingly specific. Some he recognized not from books, but from experience. He’d seen those same questions in mirrors. And Clark had left them here, like he believed Bruce might know. Like he trusted him enough to understand. The quiet of the room felt louder now. Bruce sat with it. 

—--------

Hal’s boots hit the floor of his Coast City apartment with a satisfying thud. The blast dust still clung to the cuffs of his jacket. His hair looked like it had been styled with C4. He dropped his ring on the counter, kicked off one boot and then the other with an aim that would’ve disappointed his old soccer coach, and immediately beelined for the fridge. He found one can of lime seltzer, one slice of pizza older than this week’s tabloids, and not a single answer to what the hell had just happened. He opened the fridge again. Still no answers. He let the door fall shut with a sigh and flopped back onto the couch, letting gravity do most of the work. His back cracked. Then he reached for his phone.

“Alright,” Hal muttered to himself, scrolling through contacts. “Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

He tapped Clark’s number, listened to it ring until voicemail came, and leaned back with a dramatic groan. The beep sounded. Hal went in.

“Hey, Kent. So… not to freak you out or anything, but I saw you flying. Like. Actually flying. No wires or anything.” He paused. Then added, “Which, first of all, rude. You have cheekbones and gravity-defying powers? Save some for the rest of us.”

In the background, his fridge made a wheezing sound. Hal ignored it.

“Second of all, are we doing a ‘mysterious backstory’ thing? Because I feel like I deserve a heads-up before someone I flirted with turns out to be secretly faster than my jet and capable of carrying Batman like a ragdoll.” He snorted. “Seriously, man, you dipped out of the scene like Cinderella. I’m not mad. I’m just impressed. And maybe slightly betrayed. Call me back, flyboy.”

He hung up and laughed to himself for a solid ten seconds. Then he groaned, face-down into the cushions, and muttered, “What the hell is happening in Gotham?”

Chapter Text

Lois Lane did not believe in accidents. Coincidences, sure, weather patterns, missed trains, running into your ex at a rooftop gala because Gotham hates her personally. But accidents? No. There was always a reason, and Clark Kent was starting to look like a very interesting reason. She was at her desk, one shoe off, hair twisted up in a pencil she didn’t remember putting there, and seven windows open on her laptop, none of them related to the article Perry had actually asked for. She should’ve let it go. He was just a guy. A soft-voiced, oddly formal, tragically handsome guy who’d admitted to being gay in the middle of her asking him out, then disappeared like she’d thrown a smoke bomb at his feet.

Except, he hadn’t disappeared. He’d shown up again, twice. First at a park cleanup. Then walking into the Metropolis library carrying a stack of sociology books like he was trying to cram for the final exam of humanity. She couldn’t find a job, a rental history, or a solid paper trail. The only thing certain about him was just a name: Clark Kent. There was a birth certificate from Kansas, but not much on his supposed parents. Lois narrowed her eyes at the screen. She pulled up the emergency response logs from the night of the port explosion. There it was, an unidentified flying object over the bay. Civilian witnesses described a man carrying Batman into the clouds. She clicked open a blank document, titled it Alien? Superhero? Secret boyfriend?, and began to type.

By 3:47 p.m., Lois had exhausted the public record and most of the coffee in the building. Clark Kent had no credit score, no bank activity older than six months, and exactly one emergency contact: a voicemail inbox registered under “Bruce Wayne Enterprises – Field Assets.” That was a red flag, a brick wall, and a dangling carrot all at once. She leaned back in her chair, letting the office noise blur into white static. Was he a corporate plant? A security detail gone rogue? A reclusive heir trying to LARP his way through the middle class? Or, and this was the thought that made her fingers still for the first time in hours, was he something else entirely? Because Lois had seen plenty of cover stories, hell, she’d written a few herself. But Clark’s story didn’t felt incomplete. Like someone had built the scaffolding and forgotten to finish the walls. S he stood.

“I’m going to Gotham,” she said to no one in particular. Then, louder, to Perry White’s open office door: “I’m taking two days. Personal time. Probably going to be weird.”

Perry grunted something that sounded vaguely approving, or resigned. It was hard to tell at his age. Lois grabbed her coat, a backup recorder, and her smallest camera. If Clark Kent didn’t want to be found, he shouldn’t have told her his real name.

—--------

Lois  had learned to spot the unusual in a crowd. It came from years of watching body language, listening to what wasn’t said, and cataloguing what people thought they were hiding. So when she stepped into the coffee shop on 7th and Knoll—a small, dim place with too many Edison bulbs and indie music—she knew immediately something was off. That’s when she saw him. Clark Kent, sitting at a two-top by the window looking painfully human with his elbows tucked in and hands curled around a mug too small for them. Across from him sat Bruce Wayne. Bruce freaking Wayne. Lois froze mid-step for exactly half a second.

Then she walked up to the counter, ordered a black coffee she wouldn’t drink, and casually angled herself behind the ficus next to their table. The barista barely looked at her. Clark and Bruce were deep in conversation. She only had to listen for ten seconds to know this wasn’t a business meeting.

Clark’s voice: “—still don’t understand why that movie hurt so much.”

Bruce replied, “Because it was about vulnerability. And you’re still learning what that feels like.”

Clark gave a small laugh. “That’s a polite way of saying I cried at The Breakfast Club.”

“Twice,” Bruce replied.

Lois stepped forward. “Wow,” she said, “I disappear for a week and you get a billionaire mentor and emotional growth? You’ve been busy, Clark.”

Clark jerked his head toward her so fast he nearly knocked his glasses off. “Lois?!”

Bruce tensed instantly, shoulders sharp, gaze narrowing, a flicker of something dangerous behind his otherwise unreadable expression.

Lois just smiled. “Relax, Gotham,” she said, sliding into the empty chair between them without asking. “I’m not here to break a story. Yet.”

Clark still looked stunned. “How did you—?”

“Find you? I’m me.”

She turned to Bruce. “So. Is this a real thing?”

Bruce sipped his coffee. “Do I know you?”

Lois grinned. “No, but I know you. And I know when something is happening under my nose.”

Clark began to open his mouth, but decided against it and looked helplessly at Bruce.

“He cried at Dead Poets Society, too,” Bruce added unhelpfully.

Clark groaned into his hands.

Lois raised both eyebrows. “Okay. I definitely missed something.”

“We’re dating,” Clark improvised quickly.

Lois blinked mid-sip of her coffee. Her eyes flicked between the two of them. Bruce looked over at Clark, and he braced himself for a quiet, razor-edged correction. Instead, Bruce gave the smallest nod imaginable. “It’s new.”

Lois blinked again. Her expression didn’t falter, she was too good for that, but Clark could see her brain rearranging its furniture.

“Oh,” she said. “Huh.” She sat back in her seat and looked at them like she was redoing the math with a new variable. Clark resisted the urge to squirm.

“I mean,” Lois said, nonchalantly stirring her coffee, “that does explain the café of choice. Very… warm lighting, and a shared muffin.”

Clark looked down. There was only one muffin on the table. Bruce casually took a bite from it, like he did this every morning.

Lois tilted her head. “You’re a surprisingly good liar, Clark.”

Clark smiled, a little tight. “I’m not lying.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow at that, but said nothing.

“Right,” Lois said, lips twitching. “Of course not.”

There was a long beat where no one spoke. Then Lois stood, dusted off her coat, and slung her bag over her shoulder like she hadn’t just dropped a grenade. “Well,” she said brightly, “enjoy the rest of your date. Tell the rest of Bruce’s family I said hi.”

Clark froze. “Wait—how did you—?”

She grinned. “You’re cute, Clark. You’re not subtle.”

Then she gave them a two-finger salute and walked out into the drizzle, humming something that sounded suspiciously like the Friends theme song. Clark stared after her.

“I panicked,” he muttered.

“I noticed,” Bruce said, deadpan.

“Why did you go along with it?”

Bruce sipped his coffee. “Because denying it would have looked suspicious.”

Clark opened his mouth to respond, but realized Bruce wasn’t looking at him. He was watching the rain through the window as if nothing had changed.

The rain had eased by the time they stepped outside, though not enough to justify skipping the umbrella Alfred had packed in Bruce’s coat pocket. Clark walked beside him, unusually quiet, which meant he was thinking. Bruce could feel it, the way his gaze kept flicking toward Bruce like he wanted to ask something. They were halfway to the manor before either of them spoke.

“I didn’t mean to lie,” Clark said, voice low. “It just came out.”

Bruce didn’t stop walking. “You could have walked it back.”

Clark huffed. “You know I’m a terrible liar.”

Bruce didn’t look over, but there was the hint of a smile in the corner of his mouth. “That’s what made it convincing.”

A pause stretched between them. The rain picked up, causing Bruce to lift the umbrella over Clark, allowing his own shoulder to be soaked. Somewhere in the trees, a bird called once and fell silent again.

Clark tried again. “I didn’t mean to drag you into something uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t,” Bruce said, simply.

Clark looked at him. Bruce’s hands were in his coat pockets, his shoulders loose, and jaw relaxed. He looked thoughtful more than anything.

“You went along with it,” Clark said again, though not a question this time.

Bruce nodded once. “It was easier than correcting you.”

“That’s not the same as agreeing.”

Bruce stopped walking, and Clark did too. Bruce stared out over the ridge where the trees opened up, offering a slivered view of the city’s edge. Then he turned his head slightly, just enough to glance at Clark from the corner of his eye.

“Would it really be so unbelievable?” he asked.

Clark’s throat tightened. “I—” He swallowed. “No. Not unbelievable.”

“It’s just a story,” Bruce said quietly.

Clark looked at him, rain catching in the edges of his hair, fog clinging to his glasses.

“I didn’t want it to be a lie,” he said.

Bruce didn’t respond to that aloud. He just stepped forward, close enough that Clark could feel the warmth of him in the cool air, and placed a hand briefly on his arm. Then he kept walking.

—--------

Wayne Manor was even more irritating in person than it looked in aerial surveillance photos. Lois adjusted the camera lens again, crouched low behind the cover of a half-dead hedge on the far ridge. Her rental car was parked at a safe, untraceable distance, and she’d made sure to enter the property from the east side where she saw fewer cameras. Not that she hadn’t counted at least three hidden turrets disguised as owl boxes. Paranoia and wealth: a Gotham love story, she mused.

She lay flat on her stomach, elbows braced in the damp dirt, watching the lights in the manor flicker from room to room. Occasionally, she caught the shape of a figure through the windows that was unmistakable Clark. She narrowed her eyes behind the viewfinder. Lois clicked back through the high-res stills on her camera screen. Most were fuzzy silhouettes in rain, but she had enough. Clark entering the gate with Bruce, and a photo of the butler at the front steps, holding what was clearly a second mug of coffee. She sighed and sat back on her heels. This wasn’t just a lead, it was a spiral, a beautiful, emotionally loaded spiral with a jawline you could land a drone on. She checked her recorder’s battery, and leaned back into the grass to think. She needed someone who would talk.

—---------

The training room felt too small. The lights were too harsh, and the walls felt too close. Every movement echoed off the steel like it was mocking him. Dick’s breath came in short bursts, misting faintly in the cool air, the collar of his undersuit damp with sweat. Again . He threw a punch, and the air around his fist shimmered with the heat of it, and the practice dummy burst into flame before the strike even landed. He swore and backed off, shaking out his hands. Smoke curled from the dummy’s chest. Great, another ruined mannequin. That made three this week.

“Stupid,” he muttered, pacing. “Control. Come on. Control.”

But the harder he tried to focus, the harder it was to feel anything but the pressure building in his chest. It buzzed under his skin, it was just too much. He exhaled shakily and peeled off his gloves. His fingertips were glowing faintly again. Dick rubbed at his jaw, staring at the floor. He turned and shoved the doors open, leaving the cave and the heat and the failures behind him. Outside, the air bit at his face. The sky was painted steel blue with clouds stacked over the horizon like sleeping titans. Dick crossed the gravel quietly, the tension in his chest didn’t ease, but it settled like it always did under open sky. He reached the old stone garden wall behind the manor and climbed up without thinking, perching there like he had when he was a kid. One leg bent, the other dangling over the edge. The world felt big again.

He didn’t notice the faint rustle in the hedge line behind the far trees until he caught a flicker of camera glass. His eyes narrowed. Dick dropped down from the stone wall without a sound. He kept low as he slipped through the brush, the faint trail of ozone clinging to his skin from earlier. The camera glinted again. He slipped between the hedgerow and the outer tree line, circled wide, and came up behind the figure crouched with a telephoto lens.

He moved silently until he was less than three feet away, then leaned in and said, “You know, most people knock.”

The woman jumped, spun, nearly fell over her own recorder. “Jesus—!”

“Close,” Dick said, straightening. “But not quite.”

“Let me guess,” she said, rising to her feet. “You’re the one who threw out the practice dummy this morning.”

Dick tilted his head. “You’ve been watching that long?”

“I’m a journalist. I watch longer than I should.”

“I’m not going to ask how you found this place,” he said, stepping closer. “But I am going to ask why you’re pointing that lens at people who’ve already been through enough.”

“I’m not here to expose him,” she said. “I’m here to protect him.”

Dick raised an eyebrow. “By hiding in the hedges?”

Lois shrugged. “I learned from the best.”

He huffed. “You’re not going to print this.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” she replied. “Yet.”

He gave her a look. She gave him one back.

Then he stepped aside. “Come inside. Before you catch a cold. Or Bruce spots you and releases the hounds.”

Lois blinked. “He has hounds?”

“No,” Dick said, smirking. “Just me.”

—---------

Wayne Manor was absurdly clean for a building its size. Lois walked beside Dick down the long central hallway, trying not to look impressed by the art—originals, of course—or the vaulted ceilings. Her boots echoed on the polished floor. Ahead, the light from a low fire flickered against wood-paneled walls. Alfred was already waiting when they reached the drawing room. He stood beside a tray of tea that had clearly been prepared for exactly this kind of intrusion. His posture, as always, was perfect.

“Master Dick, and Ms…,” Alfred trailed off, 

“Lane. Lois Lane,” she held out her hand. 

Alfred carefully sidestepped her, “How lovely to meet you. Will you be staying long, or just long enough to cause a stir?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Lois said, smiling sweetly. “That depends on what’s for tea.”

Alfred inclined his head. “Cinnamon scones and Earl Grey. There’s also whiskey in the bottom drawer should the conversation turn theatrical.”

Lois’s grin widened. “You already know me.”

Footsteps sounded from the hallway behind them. Lois turned just in time to see Clark step into the room, face full of guilt and hesitation. Bruce followed, jaw tight, wearing a black henley and the look of a man about to argue with God.

“Oh good,” Lois said, clapping once. “Everyone’s here.”

Bruce gave Dick a sideways look. Dick, naturally, said nothing, he just gave Bruce a casual shrug .

Clark cleared his throat. “Lois. Uh. I didn’t expect—”

“To be caught in a very obvious lie?” she offered, brows raised.

Clark laughed nervously.

Bruce stepped beside him and said, in a completely even tone, “We were just about to sit down. Would you care to join us?”

Lois arched an eyebrow. Clark, catching the cue, sat carefully on the settee. Bruce sat beside him, deliberately brushing shoulders.

“Very couple-y,” she said, biting back a grin.

Bruce glanced at her. “Should we be holding hands for authenticity?”

Clark made a small, startled noise in his throat. Dick choked on a laugh and sank onto the armrest. Alfred, the picture of dignity, poured tea without comment.

“Don’t tempt me,” Lois said. 

Bruce didn’t miss a beat. He turned toward Clark, raised one brow in silent question, then lifted his arm and draped it across the back of the couch, his fingers brushing the nape of Clark’s neck. Clark, to his credit, didn't freeze this time. He leaned into the contact, head tilted slightly toward Bruce's shoulder, like it was the most natural thing in the world. 

Lois sipped her tea. “Wow. That was fast.”

Clark gave her a sheepish smile. Bruce nodded solemnly. 

Dick, now halfway lying sideways across the armrest, muttered, “We need popcorn.”

Clark shot him a look, then turned back to Lois. “We’re happy. That’s all you really need to know.”

“That,” Lois said, pointing with her teacup, “is exactly what people say when there’s something else going on.”

“There is,” Bruce said calmly. “We’re also trying to see if we can survive each other’s morning routines.”

Clark coughed to cover a laugh.

Lois narrowed her eyes again. “That’s not what I meant.”

Bruce offered a ghost of a smile, tilting his head toward Clark. “He insists on making breakfast. Every day. Even when he burns the toast.”

Clark rolled his eyes. “I don’t burn it, it’s just firm.”

“Charcoal,” Dick said from the side. “It crunches like gravel.”

Lois watched the exchange quietly, her grin fading into thoughtful contemplation, because this didn’t feel like a performance anymore. “Alright,” she said, sitting back. “I’ll buy it.”

Clark blinked. “You will?”

Lois nodded slowly. “You’re either dating or rehearsing for an off-Broadway psychological drama. And if that’s the case, I want tickets.”

Bruce didn’t so much as blink. “Black box theater. Very exclusive.”

“Mm.” Lois leaned forward. “Still doesn’t explain the meteoric reading speed, the vanishing, or why my best lead in weeks smells faintly like ozone.”

Clark stiffened slightly. Bruce answered before he could. “Clark has... abilities. Not ones he wants exploited. Not ones I’ll let anyone exploit.”

There it was, the warning. Lois didn’t push. Instead, she nodded. “I’m not here to expose him. I’m here to understand what the hell I’m seeing.”

Bruce inclined his head once. “Then you’re welcome to stay for dinner.”

Clark turned, startled. “She is?”

“She’ll keep digging either way,” Bruce murmured. “Might as well keep her close.”

Lois smiled slowly, almost affectionately. “Flattering,” she said. “Also deeply unsettling.”

“You’re in Gotham,” Alfred said as he placed a fresh plate of scones on the coffee table. “That’s rather the brand.”

—-------

Dinner at Wayne Manor was exactly what Lois expected: elegant, moody, and well-timed. The lighting was low, the fire in the corner hearth crackled, and the roast was, of course, impeccable. Clark sat beside Bruce, elbows brushing. Lois made a note of it without comment. Alfred refilled her glass without asking. She liked him.

“Do you always eat this well?” she asked, spearing a carrot.

Clark smiled. “Only when Alfred’s trying to keep me from accidentally exploding the microwave.”

“I warned you about the aluminum foil,” Alfred muttered from the sideboard.

Bruce hid a smile behind his wine glass. Lois caught it, and watched the way his knee brushed Clark’s under the table. Something was real here, even though something else was still missing. Before she could probe, her phone buzzed. She glanced down at the screen, brow lifting.

“Crime ring just imploded two blocks from the Planet,” she said, standing and grabbing her coat. “Looks like someone left a ledger in a pizza box. I need to be the first one to ask why . ”

Clark stood too. “I’ll walk you out.”

Bruce didn’t rise, but he gave her a small nod. Alfred appeared at the door with her bag. “Do come again, Miss Lane.”

She took it with a grin. “Count on it.”

Her eyes lingered on Bruce and Clark one last time. Their hands were close on the table, and Clark’s thumb had just grazed Bruce’s knuckle. She shook her head slightly, silently vowing to figure those two out.

Chapter Text

The Watchtower’s upper observation deck was empty, which felt like a luxury. He watched as Earth turned slowly below in the cradle of black sky. He stood at the glass with his cowl pushed back and arms crossed, the curve of the planet washing light across his jaw. Earth was a beautiful world, albeit a fragile one. One he felt he was supposed to protect. It had been easier before Clark. Bruce exhaled through his nose and closed his eyes. He could still feel it, that flicker of divine heat, buried deep in his bone marrow. Ares didn’t grant his blessed wisdom or patience, just strength and wrath. The kind that felt hot with pain, injustice, and the sick thrill of blood spilling in a fight.

A blessing, the god had said. Bruce knew better, it was a leash. A chain around his ribs, forged from every moment of rage he’d ever swallowed down in front of a casket, a crime scene, or a mirror. He opened his eyes again. Clark would never understand it, though he had fallen through the stars, he still managed to land with gentleness. There was a kindness in him that didn’t bend under pressure. He chose goodness constantly. Clark moved through the world like he believed in it, Bruce moved through it like it owed him a reckoning.

But Clark had looked at him like he was a person, even someone worth knowing. It terrified Bruce more than battle ever had. He dropped his gaze to his hands. They didn’t look like a god’s hands. They looked human, and scarred. Sometimes he felt like he was built entirely out of restraint. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he failed.

Clark deserved someone soft, and someone good. Not the product of a god of bloodshed pretending he knew how to be human. Clark stayed anyway for some reason. Bruce didn’t understand it and didn’t think he deserved it, but he wanted it with a hunger that scared him more than Ares ever had. There were moments, rare and cruel, when he let himself imagine what it would be like to reach for that softness, to take Clark’s hand , and to let himself be known.

He turned slightly, glancing over his shoulder toward the hallway, it was empty and quiet, but he could feel Clark on Earth . The tether was always there now. Bruce pressed his palms to the glass, fingers splayed, Earth hovering just beyond his reach. If Ares had truly marked him with the gnawing ache of endless fight—then why did he feel it quiet so deeply when Clark was near? Why did it make him feel more like a man? He knew what happened to the sons of war who tried to love. Their stories always ended in ruin. He couldn’t do that to Clark, he wouldn’t, but every day it got harder to hold that line. Clark made things bloom inside him, things Bruce had buried a long time ago, like hope and trust. The most dangerous part of all was that he just wanted to be enough.

—-------

Clark sat cross-legged on the floor of his apartment, surrounded by stacks of books and half-folded laundry, the kind of domestic clutter that made him feel grounded. He hadn’t been to the apartment in awhile, but distance felt necessary at the moment. There was a cup of tea cooling on the windowsill and a notebook in his lap. He opened it to a blank page, but ended up just staring at it. He could crush the journal in one hand, or fly to the stratosphere and write in the clouds if he wanted, but none of that felt as human as the scratch of pen against paper in his living room.

He clicked the pen once, then wrote: What does it mean to love someone who’s afraid to be loved?

Bruce was a fortress, and Clark could see the way Bruce held back from the world, as if he believed every part of him should be hidden. Clark hadn’t felt that kind of fear before. On Earth, things were messier. People used words for things they didn’t mean and avoided the words that mattered most. Romance was built on confusion and charm and dinners that blurred into something more. It made him ache.

He thought about Bruce’s eyes when he was focused, about the rare nights Bruce slept soundlessly beside him in the cave, the tension bleeding away only after he believed the world wouldn’t crumble without him for a few hours. He thought about the way Bruce always stood between others and danger, not because he thought he couldn’t be hurt, but because he didn’t care if he was. Clark’s grip tightened on the pen. He didn’t want that kind of selflessness from Bruce. He wanted the version of him that stayed in bed for five extra minutes, or the one that made dry remarks under his breath over breakfast. He closed the notebook gently and pressed a hand to the cover.

Clark’s head snapped up at the sound of grating metal. Something massive had just landed two blocks over, maybe less. He heard cars skidding and screams beginning to ripple like aftershocks. In one motion, he rose, snatched a dark flannel off the back of a chair, and twisted it in his hands. He wrapped it high around the lower half of his face, knotting it fast beneath his chin. It wouldn’t fool anyone who looked too closely, but it would be enough for now. Then, with a glance in the hallway mirror, he ran his hands through his hair to change the shape and tossed his glasses aside. He threw open the window and stepped onto the fire escape. The street below was chaos already, he spotted a crater smoking in the middle of the intersection, pavement peeled like a blister. From it rose a hulking figure.  

Clark launched himself into the air. Wind tore past his ears until he landed hard in front of the crater. Some pedestrians started screaming louder, while others took their phones out. The creature turned toward him with a guttural hiss. Its weaponized arms shifted like plated insect limbs.

He raised his voice. “You don’t belong here.”

The creature lunged. Clark caught the blow, feet digging into asphalt. A shockwave of heat pulsed from his chest outward. The knot of the shirt held across his face. His body burned with the urge to finish this fast, but brutality wasn’t the answer in the middle of so many people and buildings. The second blow came faster. He ducked, pivoted, and slammed a palm into the creature’s side, enough to send it skidding halfway down the block, tearing up concrete and denting a parked car. He launched after it.

—--------

The Cave was quiet when Dick dropped in. The weight of the evening still clung to his shoulders, a faint hum of tension vibrating in his fingertips from a fight. He peeled off his gloves, dropped them on the edge of the console, and rolled his neck. The Batcomputer was already cycling through news feeds, incident reports, and League chatter. Dick tapped a key, half-listening.

The audio crackled. “—an unknown figure in Midtown is fighting a creature, he’s moving faster than a speeding— oh my god, he just threw it into a bus stop! ”

Dick’s head snapped up. The live feed expanded across the screen, it was a wide-angle shot from someone’s phone, filmed shakily from behind a storefront. The image showed a crater in the street and a man standing between civilians and a towering alien creature, smoke curling around his boots like a stage curtain and arms braced in front of him. Dick’s pulse skipped.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Clark.”

He leaned forward to watch as the creature lunged. Clark deflected with one arm. His other hand cupped gently around a falling piece of concrete, setting it down before it hit the sidewalk. Clark knocked the creature through a stoplight, flinching when he saw it crumple like paper. He looked toward the crowd afterward to check that no one had been hurt.

He stood and pulled out his communicator, he needed to make sure someone got there before the press did. Dick turned away from the screen, fingers moving fast across the frequency wheel until he locked onto the channel he needed. 

“B?” His voice was low, steady. “You there?”

“I’m listening,” came Bruce’s voice.

“There’s a fight happening in Midtown,” Dick said. “It’s live.”

He could practically hear Bruce's pulse spike on the other end. “I’m watching the feed now,” Bruce said quietly. 

Dick swallowed. “He’s improvising.”

On the screen, Clark landed another hit, sending the creature sprawling against the far sidewalk. Cheers erupted behind the camera. Someone shouted, “ He saved them !”

Dick turned away from the feed. “He’s doing it the only way he knows how, B.”

“He could be exposed.”

“He already is.” Dick leaned on the console. “But they’re calling him a hero.”

Bruce didn’t answer, so Dick sighed and put his gloves and mask back on. “Headed out again, Alfie!”

—--------

The creature groaned once, then slumped into unconsciousness, its armored frame flickering and warping as whatever tech powered it sputtered and died. Clark stepped back, breathing hard. The crowd stayed behind the barricades, a miracle in itself. A few people were clapping. Someone shouted, “Thank you!” Others just stared, phones still filming, faces still stretched between awe and suspicion.

Clark’s hands shook as he turned down a side alley, footsteps fast but unsteady. He tugged the makeshift mask from his face and shoved it into his back pocket. He shouldn’t have done it. He should’ve waited for Bruce. A soft thud behind him made him spin.

“Clark,” came a voice.

He blinked. Dick stepped out of the shadows, hands raised.

Clark swallowed. “How did you—?”

“I was watching the feeds,” Dick said. “So was the whole damn world.”

Clark looked away. “I didn’t mean to…” His voice cracked. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“I know,” Dick said, coming closer. “You saved people. You helped . That’s what we do.”

“I’m not one of you yet,” Clark muttered. “I don’t even have a name or a suit. I tied a shirt around my face like a kid playing hero—”

“You didn’t look like a kid.” Dick’s voice was gentle. “You looked like someone who cared about doing the right thing.”

Clark let out a breath, shaky and low. Dick offered a small smile. “I brought you something.”

From his jacket, he pulled a charcoal hoodie. Soft, thick, and blessedly normal. Clark took it with a grateful nod, tugging it on with shaking hands. “I wasn’t sure if I could stop it,” he admitted. 

“You did. That’s the part that matters.”

Clark opened his mouth to respond, but stopped when he felt a tug. He didn’t hear him land, didn’t even see him at first. Bruce stepped from the far end of the alley, cape trailing behind him, cowl up, silence wrapped around him like armor. His eyes locked on Clark’s immediately. He said nothing at first. Clark’s chest tightened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

Bruce stepped forward slowly. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Clark blinked. “But—”

“You reacted and you protected people. You made it home.” Bruce’s voice was low. 

Dick took a quiet step back, giving them space.

Clark studied Bruce’s face. “You’re not mad?”

Bruce looked like he was still catching up to the moment. His jaw worked once, then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m scared.”

Clark froze. “Of me?”

Bruce stepped closer. “No,” he repeated. “For you.”

Bruce reached out tentatively and brushed a hand against Clark’s shoulder. “Let’s go home.”

—-------

Clark stood on the small raised platform in one of the manor’s spare rooms, his arms held out stiffly as Alfred moved around him with a measuring tape and a pin cushion.

“I don’t think I need a suit,” Clark said for the third time.

“Nonsense,” Alfred replied briskly, wrapping the tape around his bicep. “You appeared on seven livestreams and were described as a ‘mysterious, masked demigod.’ The world is already drawing conclusions. Best to present them with a shape you control.”

Clark blinked. “Seven?”

“Trending across three continents,” came Dick’s voice from the doorway. “# HotHoodieHero is currently neck and neck with # DemigodVigilante. ”

Clark flushed. “That’s worse.”

“Oh, it gets better,” Dick said, strolling in with a phone in hand. “There’s already fan art. Someone gave you a cape made of fire.”

Alfred clicked his tongue and gently repositioned Clark’s shoulder. “A cape made of fire sounds impractical. Do let me know if you’d prefer something more breathable.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready for any of this,” Clark murmured. He glanced toward the window, where he could see the distant lights of Gotham. “I thought I could just help when I needed to.”

“Responsibility is often thrust upon those who show the world something worth believing in.”

Clark looked down. “What if I can’t live up to it?”

Dick sat on the arm of the nearest chair. “You already did, bud. That thing would’ve killed people, and while you fought, you kept the damage minimal. And,” he held up the phone again, “you even managed to look good doing it.”

Clark gave him a helpless look. “I wrapped a shirt around my face.”

Alfred stepped back, nodding once in satisfaction. “I’ll draft a few designs for you to review tomorrow.”

Clark stepped down from the platform. “Thank you, both of you.”

Dick stood, tossing the phone onto the couch. “You don’t have to thank us. You’re one of us now.”

Clark hesitated. “I don’t even have a name.”

Dick raised a brow. “You might want to pick one before the internet gives you something terrible. Like Midtown Meteor Man or, god forbid, Shirtmask . ”

Clark groaned in order to hide his laugh.

—-------

The newspaper hit the table with a satisfying thump. Bruce glanced up from his coffee, one brow arching as Dick slid the folded Daily Planet across the long stretch of polished oak. Clark entered from the hallway a moment later, his hair damp from a shower, hoodie sleeves still pushed to his elbows. He paused when he saw their faces.

“What?”

Bruce just tilted the paper toward him. Clark stepped closer, rubbing the back of his neck as he read the headline.

"Who Is the Superman?"
By Lois Lane

Below the headline, a blurred still from one of the livestreams had been cleaned up and sharpened. It showed him midair, half-turned toward the camera, with the makeshift shirt-mask clung to his jaw . Clark blinked.

Dick let out a low whistle. “She named you.”

Clark sat slowly in the chair nearest him, the newspaper still in hand. His thumb ran over the ink of his own face and the name someone had given him. Superman. He wasn’t sure how it felt yet, except that it seemed to big of a name for him.

“She called me a ‘symbol of impossible hope’,” Clark murmured, reading aloud now. “She says I ‘stepped out of the smoke and broke gravity’s rules and humanity’s expectations.’”

“She likes you.”

“I think she’s scared of what I might be,” Clark admitted.

Bruce took a sip of his coffee. “That’s how you know it’s a good name. It makes people wonder. Fear and awe walk hand-in-hand.”

Clark looked up. “Do you think I should keep it?”

Bruce looked at Clark, “I think it already belongs to you.”

Chapter Text

Clark stood at the far end of the cave’s auxiliary workshop, facing the reinforced armor stand where his new suit hung. The lights overhead had been dimmed, casting deep shadows across the polished floor. He took a breath and stepped forward. It was different than he expected. Alfred and Bruce had worked in tandem to create it, and it was reminiscent of the styles that Bruce and Dick wore. The base was deep navy, matte and seamless, and the chest bore the crest of El in silvered steel, almost looking like it had been forged instead of printed. Worn by time. It shimmered faintly, catching light only when Clark moved around it. The cape was shorter than traditional heroes. It was more like a tactical cloak, designed to wrap or retract, with magnetic seams hidden along the collar. It was a burnt maroon that reminded him of aged leather. Armored greaves rose from knee to ankle, silver-trimmed and fitted precisely to his gait. Clark reached up and touched the crest. It was cool beneath his fingers.

He used his superspeed to change into the new garment. The suit sealed to his frame and it felt like the material adapted to his weight, his height, and his posture. The tech was discreet, courtesy of Bruce and some Lightshield micro-weave taken from a defunct WayneTech prototype. Clark stared at his reflection in the darkened glass of the lab wall. He didn’t recognize himself at first.

The soft creak of a door behind him broke his trance. Bruce crossed the room slowly, boots quiet against the stone, stopping a few feet behind Clark.

“You added the crest,” Clark said quietly.

Bruce nodded.

Clark met his eyes in the glass. “Thank you.”

“You earned it,” he said.

Clark smiled. “It’s heavier than I expected.”

“It always is.”

—-------

“Your comm is active,” Nightingale said, tapping the side of his own mask. “Channel three is private. Channel one’s open League-wide, but don’t use it unless the planet is about to be vaporized.”

Clark gave a nervous smile. “Noted.”

They stood on the edge of a high-rise rooftop in downtown Gotham, wind dragging clouds across the sky. The city below was restless. Nightingale leaned forward, eyes scanning the district below. He was dressed head to toe in his signature black-blue armor, and the only thing sharper than the suit was his focus. Clark adjusted his stance, boots soundless on the gravel rooftop. The new suit moved with him perfectly. There was no cape billowing behind him tonight, Bruce had advised against it for stealth missions, until he could learn to control his movements. Clark agreed, though he missed the way it had felt in flight.

“What's the situation?” he asked.

Nightingale tossed a compact tablet his way. “There’s an arms deal going down in the eastern district. There are no metas that we know of, but the supplier’s paranoid. He’s using thermal jammers, sonic dampeners, and cloaking rigs.”

Clark scanned the layout, mentally mapping the warehouse locations. “I can go in from above. My vision should cut through their dampeners.”

“Yeah,” Dick said. “You go vertical, I’ll go in the normal way.”

Clark chuckled. “Let’s hope they’re too stunned to shoot.”

“They always are.” Nightingale turned toward him, finally pausing. “You sure you’re good?”

Clark looked down at the city and took a moment to listen to the heartbeats, arguments, and laughter. “Yeah, I want to help.”

Dick nodded once. “Then let’s go.”

They leapt together and Clark felt like the city made room for them instinctively, the air folding back as they passed. Clark landed lightly on the roof of the warehouse, hearing the subtle clicks of weapons inside, the whispered tension of the men below.

Nightingale’s voice crackled in his ear. “Upper floor, counted seven armed and two on watch.”

Clark narrowed his eyes, heat vision slicing through concrete in a flash. He could see the crates of illicit tech stacked up. He dropped in and landed hard, intentionally loud. The goons shouted and turned their guns at him. Nightingale was already inside, flipping into view with a pair of stun discs in each hand.

Clark raised his voice. “You’re surrounded. You might want to put those down.”

One man screamed and opened fire. Clark put his hands up to intercept the bullets, he didn’t want to test if his new suit could withstand them quite yet. Nightingale took the others down in less than twelve seconds. When the smoke cleared, Superman stood in the center of the room, bullets falling from his palm like rain off a rooftop. Nightingale landed beside him.

“Not bad for your first night,” Dick said, grinning behind his mask.

Clark tilted his head. “Do I get a grade?”

Dick chuckled. “I’ll let Bruce decide that.”

Clark looked around, heart steady. He felt confident now. This is what he was sent to Earth for, to help.

—-------

The clock in the cave ticked past 2:00 a.m. Bruce hadn’t moved in over an hour. He sat at the Batcomputer, gloved fingers steepled in front of his mouth, eyes locked on the blinking trackers marked NIGHTINGALE and SUPERMAN, watching the data flow. The mission report had come in through Dick’s comm fifteen minutes ago, the warehouse neutralized, the smugglers were detained, and there were zero civilian casualties. Still, Bruce didn’t relax until he heard the soft hum of the manor’s perimeter alert. They were home. He pushed back from the console and stood. The echo of boots on stone reached him before their voices did.

Bruce crossed the platform just as the elevator doors slid open. They stepped out side by side. Clark’s eyes scanned the cave instinctively before landing on Bruce. Dick was already pulling off his gauntlets.

“Told you we wouldn’t die,” he said.

“You cut it close,” Bruce replied, though his tone lacked bite.

Clark stepped forward, brushing a strand of hair out of his face. “I think it went ok.”

“Just fine,” Bruce added, nodding toward him.

“Did I do it right?”

Bruce looked at him the way he always did, almost like he was searching for what wasn’t being said. “Yes.”

Dick glanced between them, smiled, and made a show of stretching. “Well, I’m off to cbed. Call me if anyone needs saving again before noon.”

He vanished up the stairs, steps echoing in retreat. Clark turned back to Bruce.

“I saw the footage,” he said quietly. “You were steady.”

Clark’s throat tightened. “I didn’t feel like it. I felt scared to hurt them even though I knew they were the bad guys.”

“Then you did it exactly right.”

—--------

They moved side by side through the hall, and Bruce pushed open the heavy door to the study. Warm lamplight spilled across shelves lined with books and old case files. Clark’s eyes drifted to the small table beside the armchair. A squat bottle of amber liquid sat there, glass catching the glow. Two low tumblers waited beside it, one already half-filled.

“What is that?” Clark asked.

“Bourbon,” Bruce said, shrugging off his cape and tossing it over the back of the chair. “A good one.”

Clark raised a brow. “Good as in…?”

“As in older than both of us.”

“I’ve never had alcohol before.”

Bruce glanced at him, faintly amused. “Never?”

“I didn’t think it would do anything.”

Bruce’s mouth quirked. “There’s one way to find out.”

Clark hesitated as Bruce poured two fingers into the second glass and handed it over. The scent hit Clark , it was sharp and woody, with a sweetness that curled at the edges. He took a sip. His face contorted instantly. “That’s gross.”

Bruce smirked. “That means it’s good.”

“I don’t think that’s how taste works,” Clark said, wiping his mouth.

Bruce took his own slow sip, eyes watching Clark over the rim of the glass. “Try again.”

“Why?”

“To see if it affects you.” 

Clark rolled his eyes and took a larger swallow this time. The burn was immediate, blooming down his throat, but it dulled faster than he expected. The warmth lingered without any real haze in his head.

“Nothing,” he admitted. “Not even a tingle.”

Bruce leaned back in his chair, taking another measured drink. “Figures.”

They kept talking about the mission, about the way Nightingale worked with him, and the bourbon level in Bruce’s glass began to dip. Clark noticed the slight change in his voice first. His words weren’t slurred, but there was a looseness to them, a rare uncoiling.

“You’re… relaxed,” Clark observed.

Bruce gave him a pointed look. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s just different.”

Bruce set his glass down. “Don’t get used to it.”

Clark smiled faintly, “I don’t think I mind it.”

Bruce leaned back further in his chair, eyes half-lidded, and for the first time all night, he looked almost at ease. The study was quieter than the rest of the manor, the only sounds were the low crackle from the fireplace and the soft clink of ice shifting in Bruce’s nearly-empty glass. Clark sat across from him, elbows on his knees, watching the way the firelight carved gold into the sharp planes of Bruce’s face. He didn’t know if it was the bourbon or the aftermath of the mission, but Bruce’s gaze kept holding his longer than usual.

Bruce set his glass aside, leaning forward slowly. “Clark,” he said.

Clark tilted his head, waiting for the rest. Instead, Bruce reached out. His gloved hand closed over Clark’s bare one, firm and deliberate. Clark felt his chest tighten as something skipped in his chest.

“Bruce…”

Clark leaned forward before he could think about it, before he could remind himself of all the reasons this was a bad idea. The firelight blurred at the edges, and all he could see was the man in front of him. He kissed him. It wasn’t long, just enough for the warmth of it to sink into his lips before his mind caught up to what his body had done.

Clark jerked back, and the look on Bruce’s face was unreadable to him.

“I—I’m sorry,” Clark stammered, standing so fast his chair shifted back an inch. “I shouldn’t have—”

Bruce started to speak, but Clark was already gone. The door creaked open, then shut behind him, the sound of retreating footsteps swallowed quickly by the hall. By the time Bruce stood, the echo of flight through the open night was all that remained. 

Clark didn’t stop until the skyline of Gotham was behind him and the familiar outline of his apartment came into view. He landed on the balcony with a shaky breath, heart hammering in his ears. He didn’t even bother turning on the lights. He just pressed his back to the wall, slid down until he was sitting on the floor, and buried his face in his hands.

The heat of the kiss still lingered, but so did the twisting question in his mind: What have I just done?

Chapter Text

Clark had been staring into his coffee for so long, the surface had gone cold. He was in the back corner of the small Gotham café, slouched in the chair, trying to fold himself out of sight. The smell of fresh espresso clung to the air, but he couldn’t taste much past the knot in his throat. He’d replayed the kiss too many times, now the memory felt less like a moment and more like a weight pressing on him. He was in the middle of telling himself he’d imagined the way Bruce’s fingers had lingered when a shadow fell across the table.

“Well, if it isn’t Gotham’s tallest citizen,” came the familiar, easy drawl.

Clark blinked up into the grinning face of Hal Jordan, a paper cup in one hand, his jacket slung over his shoulder like he’d just walked out of an ad campaign.

“Hal,” Clark said, managing a thin smile. “What are you doing here?”

“Passing through. Thought I’d grab some caffeine before I hit the air again,” Hal replied, already pulling out the chair opposite him. “And then I see you sitting here, looking like someone just stole your puppy. Figured I’d be a good Samaritan.”

Clark’s mouth twitched. “I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh.” Hal dropped into the seat across from him, leaning back with the casual arrogance of someone who never questioned whether they belonged. “Except for the part where you look like a man whose goldfish just committed suicide.”

Clark gave him a flat look. “Goldfish don’t—”

“You get the point,” Hal said, taking a long sip from his cup. “So, where’ve you been? Last I saw you, you agreed to a third date, then poof . You know, that’s not very heroic behavior, Kent.”

Clark looked away, “Things… got complicated.”

Hal narrowed his eyes. “Complicated like you’re secretly married? Or complicated like you’re secretly a guy who can fly?”

Clark stilled. The coffee shop noise seemed to fade, every clink of mugs and hiss of the espresso machine pushed to the edge of hearing.

Hal leaned in. “I was there, Kent. I saw you carry Batman away.”

Clark turned his coffee cup in his hands. “You saw someone.”

“I saw you,” Hal said. “And I’ve been wondering ever since if you’re the new hero everyone’s whispering about.”

Clark tried for a polite, neutral tone. “I’m not a hero.”

“You sure about that? ‘Cause you fly, you pull Batman out of trouble, and you’ve got the whole mysterious newcomer thing down pat.” He took a slow sip from his coffee, eyes never leaving Clark’s. “If that’s not the start of a hero résumé, I don’t know what is.”

Clark shifted in his seat, wishing the conversation would move anywhere else. “I’m just trying to help when I can.”

Hal’s grin softened into something more genuine. “Then maybe you’re already halfway there, Kent. Just don’t disappear on me next time, huh?”

Clark let out a slow breath. “I owe you an apology, Hal. I shouldn’t have disappeared like that. You didn’t deserve to be ignored.”

Hal arched a brow but stayed quiet.

“It wasn’t about you,” Clark continued. “Things in my life have been different lately, complicated, and I didn’t want to drag you into all of that before I even knew how to explain it.”

Hal leaned forward on his elbows, studying him. “You could’ve just said you weren’t interested.”

Clark shook his head. “That’s not it. I do like you, genuinely. You’re easy to talk to, and you’ve been nothing but kind.” He hesitated, searching for the right phrasing. “But with everything going on, I think it would be better if we stayed friends.”

“Friends, huh? Guess that means I can’t buy you dinner and call it a date anymore.”

“You can still buy me dinner, just… as friends.”

Hal gave a mock salute. “Alright, Kent. Friends it is. Now that we’ve cleared that up, you want to tell me what’s really going on?”

“It’s complicated,” he repeated.

“Yeah, you said that already,” Hal replied. “I’m a pilot, Kent. I can handle turbulence. Try me.”

He weighed his words carefully. “There’s someone in my life, but I don’t think they see me the way I…” He stopped himself before finishing. “And there’s a lot about them that I can’t tell anyone. For their safety.”

Hal arched a brow. “This someone a civilian?”

Clark gave a short, humorless laugh. “Not exactly.”

“Alright,” Hal said slowly, reading between lines. “Sounds like they’re either dangerous or the kind of person who attracts danger.”

Clark met his gaze. “Both.”

Hal let out a low whistle. “Well, if they’re worth all this trouble, I hope they know it. And if they don’t, I’m always right here.”

Hal winked at him and Clark felt himself flush. “I’m joking, Clark.”

Even though the conversation was uncomfortable, it did make Clark feel better. Maybe he was ready to go back. 

—---------

Last Night

The manor was silent after Clark left. Bruce stayed where he was for a moment, standing in the middle of the study, frozen. He could still feel the way Clark had grimaced right before he’d pulled back. The echo of that moment itched under Bruce’s skin. He told himself it didn’t matter. Clark was an adult. He could make his own choices. If one of those choices was leaving before Bruce could say anything, then maybe that was for the best. Except it didn’t feel like the best.

He turned toward the desk, sinking into the chair with more weight than he’d meant to. The decanter of bourbon was still out. A bit of the glass he’d been drinking from had gone untouched. He considered pouring the rest down the sink, but instead he took the rest in a gulp. His gaze drifted to the far wall, to the shadowed spot where Clark had been standing only minutes ago. Ares had blessed him—or cursed him, depending on the day—with strength, reflexes, and endurance no human should have. Yet for all that, Bruce had never been able to stop certain people from leaving. His parents, Selina, even Dick, before he’d found his way back. And now Clark. 

He hated how much that hurt. The grandfather clock ticked, the sound steady and precise, utterly at odds with the noise in his head. He wondered where Clark had gone and if he was regretting the moment just as much as Bruce was. He set the glass down, the crystal making a muted thud against the desk before he straightened his shoulders, and forced himself back into motion. There was work to do. There was always work to do. When he passed the window on his way out of the study, he looked up at the sky.

—-------

The next morning, he sat at the edge of the bed for a moment, hands resting on his knees, letting the familiar stiffness in his shoulders ground him. His dreams had been shallow, filled with fragments of flight and half-heard voices. Always ending with Clark turning away, too far to reach.

Alfred had already set the morning tray in the Batcave when Bruce came down, steam curling from the black coffee. He drank it without sugar, the bitterness exactly what he needed. The Batcomputer hummed softly from across the room, feeds still open from the night’s patrols. He tried to focus on them, but his eyes kept skimming past the reports, catching instead on any flicker of movement in the Gotham sky. It was stupid, but he kept listening for the sound of wind breaking around a figure flying. A news ticker scrolled across one of the smaller screens, showing Metropolis chatter, political noise, and an update on rebuilding efforts near the docks. 

Footsteps echoed lightly against the stone before Alfred emerged from the shadows. He set a plate beside the coffee, filled with sliced fruit, toast, and a small bowl of scrambled eggs. Bruce didn’t touch it. Alfred didn’t push it, instead, the older man adjusted the cuff of his sleeve, surveyed the room, and left as quietly as he’d come. He had seen Bruce like this before and knew better than to press.

Bruce leaned back in the chair, letting his eyes close. The Batcave was vast. It was built to hold an army’s worth of vehicles, weapons, and technology, all ready for war. Yet in that moment, surrounded by the tools of his victories, Bruce had never felt more aware of what he could not hold onto. He stayed there until the food had gone completely cold. Eventually, the stillness became too much to bear. Bruce pushed back from the console and stood, the quiet scrape of the chair legs on the platform sounding unnaturally loud. 

He ascended the long stone steps into the manor, his footsteps echoing faintly in the corridor. Light filtered weakly through the tall windows, muted by the overcast sky outside. The city was moving out there, carrying on in the way cities did, unaware and indifferent to its citizens. He told himself it was just another day, that he had no reason to expect anything different, but his path through the manor seemed to bend on its own toward the side door that led to one of the quieter streets.

The air outside was damp, carrying the smell of rain that hadn’t yet fallen. Bruce’s eyes scanned the flow of pedestrians automatically. He caught sight of Clark suddenly, seated inside a coffee shop. Across from him sat a man Bruce recognized instantly. The pilot leaned forward, saying something with that cocky half-smile that seemed to be his default. Clark’s mouth curved into a grin, genuine and unguarded. 

Bruce stayed in the shadow of a recessed doorway, watching the easy back-and-forth, the way Hal’s hand brushed Clark’s forearm in passing. Something ugly and sharp curled in Bruce’s chest. He stayed where he was, half-shielded in the recessed doorway, letting the flow of pedestrians disguise his stillness. Years of training kept his breathing steady. He tracked every flicker of movement between them.

Clark’s head tilted slightly, that unerring Kryptonian awareness brushing against the edges of Bruce’s presence. His eyes narrowed, scanning the street. Bruce knew that look, Clark had felt him. Bruce lingered just a fraction too long. Clark’s gaze found him. For half a second, neither of them moved. Bruce saw the flicker of recognition in Clark’s face, so he stepped back into the alley without breaking eye contact, letting the shadows swallow him. The grapple hook was in his hand before Clark could stand, the familiar hiss and metallic bite of the line embedding in the brick above. In one fluid motion, he was gone.

—-------

Hal didn’t miss much. Years of flying and of reading split-second shifts in an opponent’s body language, it made it hard for subtle changes to slip by him. So when Clark’s posture shifted, his eyes flicking toward the street with that sharpened, faraway look, Hal felt it immediately. The easy rhythm of their conversation stuttered. Clark wasn’t hearing him anymore. His attention had locked onto something else.

Hal leaned back slightly in his chair, following Clark’s gaze toward the crowded sidewalk. He saw a dark figure, already half-swallowed by the shadow of a narrow side street, retreating. Hal’s brows knit together, his mouth quirking in suspicion. Whoever it was, they didn’t turn back. When he glanced back at Clark, the man was already half out of his seat, like he might give chase. Hal instinctively reached out and caught his forearm.

“Hey, whoa, what’s going on?” Hal asked.

Clark hesitated. The easy, relaxed expression from a minute ago was gone, replaced with  one tense around the edges. “Nothing,” he said quickly.

“Nothing doesn’t make you look like you’re about to sprint down the street.” He tilted his head toward the alley where the shadowed figure had vanished. “Who was that?”

Clark’s gaze flicked toward the empty street, then back to Hal. He sat down again. “I don’t know,” he said finally, though Hal could tell by the way he avoided eye contact that he knew exactly who it was.

“Right,” Hal said slowly, not buying it for a second.

Clark’s jaw flexed. He clearly wasn’t going to give anything up, and Hal knew better than to push too hard right here. Still, it didn’t stop the little twist of curiosity in his gut. Hal leaned back in his chair, arms folding loosely across his chest as he studied Clark. The guy’s head was clearly somewhere else, eyes still flicking toward that alley.

“You know, if something’s bugging you this bad, maybe you should go deal with it.”

Clark blinked, caught off guard. “What?”

“I mean, I’m not gonna pretend I’m not curious,” Hal went on, “But I also know that look. You’re not gonna be here in this conversation until you’ve handled whatever that was. So… go do what you need to.”

Clark gave him a wary look. “It’s not that simple.”

“Sure it is,” Hal said, grinning faintly. “You walk over there, figure it out, and maybe stop looking like someone stole your lunch money. Trust me, Kent, you’ll feel better.”

Clark stood, smoothing a hand over his hair. “I’ll… I’ll see you later.”

“Count on it,” Hal replied.

—-------

Bruce’s boots hit the manor’s back steps with more force than necessary. He’d taken the long way back, skirting rooftops and alleys until he was certain Clark wouldn’t follow. Bruce knew if Clark caught up to him, he might not have the discipline to keep his expression neutral. Inside, Alfred was nowhere in sight, and Bruce was grateful for the absence.

When he reached the gym, he stripped off the jacket and tie he’d worn out in the city, trading them for training gear. He wrapped his hands quickly, tested the gloves, and stepped into the ring. The first punch against the heavy bag landed with a dull, satisfying thud. The rhythm of his hits were relentless, the sound filling the space until it drowned out the echo of his own thoughts. The bag swayed harder under his strikes, the chain above creaking with the force. Sweat gathered along his spine, his breath coming heavier now, but he didn’t slow down. The god-blood in his veins made endurance almost endless, but it didn’t make the knot in his chest any looser. He wasn’t jealous, he told himself. The knowledge that he couldn’t afford to want what Clark might be offering was the real issue. Bruce’s fists kept moving, every impact a futile attempt to work the feeling out of his system. It didn’t work. The bag rocked hard under another blow, the sound echoing through the manor’s training room. Bruce was deep in the rhythm—footwork, strike, pivot, strike—when the faint creak of the door cut through the cadence.

“Y’know,” Dick’s voice carried from the threshold, “most people don’t try to break the bag.”

Bruce didn’t turn. “You’re supposed to be at the east docks,” he said, landing another pair of sharp punches.

“Finished early,” Dick replied, stepping inside. He was still in his Nightingale gear, mask pushed up onto his forehead. “And Alfred said you came back from ‘a walk’ in a mood, which is his polite way of saying I should probably check you’re not about to put a dent in the foundation.”

Bruce ignored the jab, letting his own hit the bag instead. The bag swung wide under the force, and Dick caught it with one gloved hand before it could snap back.

“Okay,” Dick said, meeting his eyes now. “Talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Bruce replied, pulling the bag free from his grip.

“That’s funny,” Dick said, “because you only get this keyed up when there’s definitely something to talk about. So unless you’ve suddenly decided to train to be a boxer, I’m guessing this is about a certain alien.”

Bruce’s fists stilled against the leather.

Dick raised an eyebrow. “Look, you don’t have to tell me everything, but you’re not exactly subtle when something’s eating at you.”

Bruce’s fingers tightened on the chain above the bag. He didn’t look at Dick when he said, “I saw him today. With Hal.”

There was no need to clarify who “him” was.

Dick’s expression shifted in an instant. “Clark?”

Bruce gave a short nod. “They were having coffee. 

Dick leaned his hip against the bag stand. “And this… bothered you?”

Bruce’s jaw worked. “It’s not about me.”

“Right,” Dick said, drawing the word out just enough to make the disbelief clear. “You’ve got no opinion about Clark spending time with a cocky flyboy who flirts with anything that moves.”

“I’m saying,” Bruce corrected, “it’s not my place to have one.”

“Maybe,” Dick allowed, though his tone said otherwise. 

Bruce didn’t respond. The bag swayed between them in slow, uneven arcs.

“Look,” Dick said, “I don’t know what’s going on between you two. But if you want something with him, you should probably decide before somebody else does.”

The words landed heavier than Dick probably intended, and Bruce found himself looking past him toward the far wall, anywhere but meeting the knowing look in his protégé’s eyes. He stepped away from the bag and into Bruce’s line of sight, forcing him to meet his gaze.

“You can keep pretending this is about training or stress or whatever excuse you want to throw out,” Dick said, crossing his arms. “But I’ve been around you long enough to know when something actually bothers you.”

Bruce exhaled slowly through his nose. “You’re making assumptions.”

“I’m making observations,” Dick corrected. “And here’s what I see: you’ve been different since Clark showed up.”

Bruce’s hand flexed at his side, “Even if you were right—”

“I am right,” Dick cut in smoothly.

“—that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,” Bruce finished, ignoring the interruption.

“Because of you,” Dick said.

Bruce’s silence was confirmation enough.

“You think you’re too much of… whatever you think you are for him, but maybe you’re exactly what he needs. You ever think about that?”

Bruce’s mouth tightened.

“Talk to him,” Dick urged. “Worst thing that happens? You figure out you were wrong. Best thing? You stop ruining our gear.”

For a moment, Bruce just stood there, the faint hum of the gym’s overhead lights filling the pause. Finally, he reached for the towel hanging over the ropes, dragging it across his face. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

For Dick, that was as close to a victory as he was going to get.

Chapter Text

Bruce was in the study, the low glow of the desk lamp painting his hands in gold as he worked through the last of the night’s reports. The quiet was broken only by the faintest thud of boots against stone. His eyes flicked to the balcony doors. Clark stood there, coat collar turned up against the night air. Moonlight caught in his hair, and he didn’t move for a moment, as though making sure Bruce saw him before stepping inside.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Clark said. “I’ve been thinking about everything.” His gaze flicked away, settling somewhere over Bruce’s shoulder. “And I get it, I know I misread things.”

Bruce straightened, but didn’t speak.

Clark’s jaw tightened just slightly. “So I’ll back off. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I just need some time away.”

“That’s not what this is.”

Clark’s eyes searched his face. “Then what is it?”

“It’s not that I don’t want you,” he said, the words clipped but deliberate. “It’s that I do. Too much, that’s the problem.”

Clark’s brow furrowed. “How is that a problem?”

Bruce turned toward the balcony doors and back. “Because people around me get hurt. They’re targeted and used. And that’s before you factor in the fact that I’m not…” he hesitated, “…good at this.”

Clark took a step closer. “You think I don’t know what risk is? I’m not made of glass, Bruce.”

“It’s not just a risk.” Bruce’s gaze dropped. “You think I don’t see it? That weight you carry, the pressure to do the right thing, to protect people. I’ve got that too. But mine’s… different. I was gifted by the god of war. I’ve spent my entire life making sure I don’t become exactly what he wanted.”

The words settled heavy between them, and for a moment Clark didn’t speak. The moonlight through the glass seemed to cut the room into two halves, Bruce in shadow, Clark in the pale silver glow.

“You think that makes you dangerous to me,” Clark said quietly.

“I know it does,” Bruce said. “And I’m not going to be the reason you get dragged into something dangerous.”

Clark’s jaw tightened. He’d listened long enough, and he was done letting Bruce decide what he should or shouldn’t feel.

In two strides he was across the study. Bruce instinctively stiffened as Clark stepped into his space, but he didn’t move away. Clark’s hand caught his wrist. “Stop doing this,” Clark said, “stop making my choices for me.”

Bruce’s breath caught, though he masked it quickly behind that same hardened stare. “You don’t understand what it means to be near me.”

Clark didn’t let go. His other hand came up, resting against Bruce’s chest, palm splayed over the faint thrum of his heartbeat. “I understand enough. I understand that you’re afraid of yourself, not me, and I’m not afraid of you.”

For once, Bruce didn’t have an immediate reply. His eyes flicked down to where Clark’s hand pressed against him. The room felt charged, the space between them shrinking to nothing.

“Clark—” Bruce started, warning or plea, he wasn’t sure.

Clark silenced him by leaning in, closing the distance Bruce had kept so carefully. Their mouths met, gentler than the first time, and more certain. Bruce’s free hand came up halfway, as though to push him back, but stopped there, hovering at Clark’s shoulder. The war inside him was written in every tense line of his body.

When Clark finally pulled back, he said, “I choose this. I choose you. No matter what you think I should do.”

Bruce closed his eyes, as if it might help him hold back what had been clawing at him for weeks, and when he opened them, Clark was still there. The hand that had hovered uncertainly finally settled, gripping Clark’s shoulder with more strength than he intended. He pulled him closer.

“I’ve tried,” Bruce said, his voice rougher than he wanted it to be. “I’ve tried to bury this. To convince myself it's a weakness. I’ve told myself you’d be safer without me. That you deserve better.”

Hope flickered across Clark’s face like sunrise breaking through storm clouds.

“I want you. More than I’ve let myself want anything in years.” The admission felt like stepping off a ledge.

Clark’s grip on his wrist tightened, grounding him. “Then stop fighting it.”

He closed the last inch between them, kissing Clark back this time with the certainty of someone who had been starving and finally allowed to eat. It was fierce and sloppy, and he was reminded of how long it had been since he let anyone close enough for this.

When they broke apart, Bruce rested his forehead against Clark’s. His voice was a whisper, almost reverent. “You terrify me.”

Clark smiled faintly, his thumb brushing over Bruce’s hand. “You don’t scare me at all.”

—--------

The manor’s study had become a war room by the next day. The table that usually held case files and maps of Gotham was instead occupied by three stubborn figures. Bruce stood with his arms crossed, shoulders squared in that immovable way that meant he’d already made up his mind. Across from him, Clark and Dick stood shoulder to shoulder, united in their frustration, their voices echoing against the shelves of old books and portraits.

“You can’t keep us out of it forever,” Dick snapped. “We’ve both proven we can handle ourselves. Clark just dismantled a weapons ring without even breaking a sweat, and I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. We’re ready.”

Clark nodded firmly, his voice calmer than Dick’s. “He’s right. The League is where we can do the most good. I can help in ways no one else can, and Dick already knows how to work with a team better than half the members you’ve got now.”

Bruce’s jaw tightened, but his reply was measured. “This isn’t a patrol through Gotham back alleys. The League operates on a global scale, with stakes that spiral out of control in seconds. It’s not just about skill or power, it’s about trust, strategy, and discipline.”

“That’s rich,” Dick shot back. “Considering I’ve been under your boot camp since I was twelve.”

Clark placed a steadying hand on Dick’s shoulder before stepping forward. “You don’t have to protect us from everything. You think I don’t understand the stakes? I left my home world knowing I’d never see it again. I know what it means to stand between people and danger. What I don’t understand is why you’re so certain that standing with you would hurt more than it would help.”

Bruce looked between them, the truth was written in his eyes even if he refused to say it aloud: it wasn’t their ability he doubted, it was his own ability to keep them safe.

“You’re not ready,” he said finally.

The words dropped like lead into the room.

Dick’s eyes flashed with frustration. “You always say that. You’ve always said that. No matter how much I train, no matter how much I prove myself, it’s never enough for you, is it?”

Bruce’s silence was its own answer.

“Fine.” Dick shoved his chair back. “If you’re not going to trust me after all these years, then maybe I should stop asking for your permission.”

He was gone before Bruce could reply, footsteps echoing up the stairs, leaving the study thick with the weight of unspoken things. Clark stayed behind, watching the door for a moment before turning back to Bruce. 

“You know he’s right,” Clark said gently. “He’s ready. We both are. What you’re really saying is that you’re not ready to let us in.”

Bruce’s silence stayed as solid as a wall. Clark sighed, then stepped closer, bridging the space between them. He wrapped his arms around Bruce’s shoulders in a hug that left no room for retreat.

“You don’t have to be afraid of this,” Clark murmured against his ear. “You don’t have to be afraid of us.”

Bruce stayed stiff, but Clark pressed on, scattering small kisses across his temple, his cheek, the line of his jaw. Each one was accompanied by another word, another plea.

“Let us stand with you.” Another kiss.  “Let us fight beside you.”  Another brush of lips against his skin. “Please, Bruce.”

For a moment, Bruce’s resolve wavered. His eyes closed, but the fortress inside him held. His hands came up, gripping Clark’s arms, not to pull him closer, but to steady him as he said, low and unyielding: “No.”

Clark pulled back just far enough to search his face, frustration and hurt mixing in his expression. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t,” Bruce said, voice like stone. “Because I won’t risk you like that.”

“I’m sorry Bruce, I can’t accept that.” Clark cradled his face gently and gave him one last kiss before pulling away. “I understand your stance, but I think Dick and I will need to find our own way.”

With that, he stepped out of the room, leaving Bruce alone with his thoughts.

—--------

Clark had barely landed on Dick’s balcony before his friend was climbing onto his back, arms wrapping tight around his shoulders.

“You’re insane,” Dick muttered as Clark lifted them both into the air. “You realize that, right?”

“Maybe,” Clark said, the night wind cutting through his words. “But if we go to the Watchtower, Bruce will know before we even open our mouths. This way, we at least get Hal on our side first.”

Dick sighed, though Clark could hear the grin underneath it. “Fine. Just don’t drop me. I’m not bulletproof like you.”

The city gave way beneath them, Gotham’s lights fading into the scattered glow of coastlines and highways. Hal Jordan’s apartment was on the twelfth floor of a glass-walled building not far from the airfield. Clark hovered just outside the balcony, tapping lightly against the sliding door. Inside, Hal was sprawled across his couch, still in half of his flight suit, TV flickering with muted sports highlights. When he turned, his jaw dropped.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” He pushed the door open, squinting at the pair of them. “Kent? Bird boy? You seriously just flew yourselves to my balcony in the middle of the night?”

Clark set Dick down, brushing a hand through his hair. “We need your help.”

Hal arched a brow. “This better be good, because if my landlord complains about caped weirdos on the twelfth floor, I’m sending them straight to you.”

Dick stepped forward. “We want entry into the League and you’re going to nominate us.”

Hal broke into a slow grin. “Oh, this is going to piss off Batman so bad.”

Clark folded his arms. “That’s not the point.”

Hal leaned against the doorframe, “No, but it is a perk.”

Hal left the balcony door open behind them and dropped back onto his couch. “Alright. You’ve got five minutes before I decide this was just a social call. Convince me.”

Clark and Dick exchanged a glance, then Dick stepped forward. “You know what I can do. I’ve been trained by Batman since I was a kid. I’ve gone up against mob bosses, assassins, and metahumans. I’ve taken hits that should have killed me and I’ve come back standing every time. If this League is supposed to be the best of the best, I’ve earned the right to stand in that room.”

Hal raised his brows but didn’t argue. His eyes flicked to Clark. “And you?”

Clark squared his shoulders. “The yellow sun gives me powers beyond what most Leaguers could even dream of, but that’s not the only reason. I left everything I knew behind to be here, and I don’t want to spend my life hiding when I could be helping. The League needs people who believe in what it’s supposed to stand for.”

Hal leaned back, considering them both. “You realize what you’re asking me to do, right? Batman’s not exactly gonna send me a fruit basket if I push this through. He’ll glare at me across the table for the next six months and possibly let an alien squash me in an invasion.”

“Then let him,” Dick said flatly. “He’s not the only one who gets to decide who belongs on this team.”

“We’re not asking for shortcuts. We’re asking for a chance to stand beside you, to prove ourselves. If the League votes no, fine. But at least give us the chance to stand in that room.”

Hal let out a laugh, shaking his head. “You know what? I like it. You’ve got guts. Fine. I’ll sponsor you. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, when Batman blows a gasket, I’m pointing him straight at the two of you.”

“Deal,” Dick said instantly.

Clark let out a small breath of relief, offering Hal a nod. “Thank you.”

“This is gonna be so much fun.”

—---------

The Watchtower’s briefing chamber hummed with tension. The great circular table gleamed under overhead lights, and every chair was filled, Wonder Woman, Flash, Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Green Lantern, and, of course, Batman, who sat in his usual seat with arms crossed and eyes sharp as blades.

Hal cleared his throat, clearly enjoying himself more than he should. “Before we dive into agenda items, I’d like to bring up a nomination.”

Bruce’s head turned sharply. “Hal.”

Hal grinned. “Relax, Bats. You’ll love this.” He gestured toward the doors. “Come on in, rookies.”

The doors hissed open, and Clark stepped in first, tall and steady in his new suit. Beside him, Dick moved with practiced confidence, his own armor catching the light like feathered steel.

A ripple of surprise ran around the table. Flash’s brows shot up behind the mask. “Whoa. Didn’t expect that . ”

Aquaman leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. “At least this meeting will be interesting.”

Wonder Woman’s gaze was steady and measuring. “They seek inclusion?”

Hal leaned forward on the table. “I nominate both of them for League membership. They’ve got the skill, the power, and the drive. And frankly, they’ve been operating parallel to us already. About time they get a seat at this table.”

Batman’s voice cut in coldly. “Absolutely not.”

“Then put it to a vote,” Dick said before Hal could. His voice carried across the chamber with defiance. “You always taught me that leadership isn’t about fear, it’s about trust. Well, trust us. Or at least let the League decide if we belong here.”

For a moment, the chamber fell into silence. Then Martian Manhunter inclined his head. “It is customary, when a nomination is brought forth, to allow discussion.”

Bruce’s hands curled into fists on the table, but he said nothing.

Clark stepped forward, his voice calm but resolute. “I’m not asking to rush into something I don’t understand. I’m asking for the chance to stand with you when it matters.”

It was Barry who spoke first. “Look, I’ve seen what both of them can do. If Nightingale’s half as good as Batman says he is, and Superman—well, Superman just lifted a collapsing building last week—then yeah, I say give them the chance.”

Arthur shrugged. “I’m in.”

Diana nodded. “I support their nomination.”

J’onn folded his hands. “Agreed. Their intentions are clear.”

All eyes turned toward Bruce, but he didn’t speak.

“Guess that’s four yeses,” Hal said, grinning. “Which means…”

“Enough,” Bruce growled, rising to his feet. “If this is what the League wants, fine.” His cape snapped behind him as he left the chamber, the doors sliding shut with a hiss.

Clark stood tall, though his chest tightened at the cold exit. He fought the urge to chase after Bruce as best he could.

Hal just leaned back, satisfied. “Welcome to the big leagues, boys.”

—--------

Bruce’s cape billowed as he strode down the Watchtower’s corridor, every line of his body taut with fury. He didn’t slow when Clark called after him, didn’t acknowledge the heavy footsteps gaining on him.

“Bruce,” Clark said, voice echoing off the metal walls. “Stop.”

Bruce didn’t. He hit the lift control, the doors hissing open. Clark stepped inside after him before they closed, crowding the small space with silence. Bruce refused to look at him, eyes fixed on the glowing panel ahead. When the doors slid open onto the docking bay, Bruce kept walking. His boots hit the floor with sharp precision. His ship waited just ahead.

Clark cut him off, stepping into his path. “You can’t just walk away from this.”

“I already did,” Bruce said flatly, moving to the side.

Clark’s jaw tightened. He didn’t want to do it, but Bruce left him no choice. He reached forward, hands catching the edge of the man’s utility belt and lifting him clean off the ground before Bruce could react. Clark grabbed a helmet and shoved it onto Bruce’s head.

“Clark—” Bruce snapped, fists clenching as his feet left the deck.

Clark’s expression was grim. “If you won’t talk to me up here, then you’ll talk to me down there.”

Before Bruce could twist free, they were airborne, out of the hangar, past the curve of the Watchtower’s hull, plunging down toward Earth. The atmosphere burned bright around them for a split second before Clark leveled out, the wind tearing at Bruce’s cape. He didn’t stop until they were high above Metropolis, landing them on the edge of a glass-and-steel tower that glittered with reflected starlight. Clark set him down firmly on the ledge, holding his ground when Bruce immediately tried to step past him.

“Your gear doesn’t work as well here, so unless you plan on risking jumping, you’re stuck here until we talk.”

Bruce’s glare could have cut steel. “That’s a dangerous game to play with me.”

Clark folded his arms. “You’ve played more dangerous ones with me every day since we met. This is about you running every time I get close. You don’t get to do that anymore.”

The city sprawled out below them, alive and restless. Bruce had nowhere to go, no shadow to vanish into. The wind tore past them, carrying the distant sounds of Metropolis—horns, sirens, the murmur of a thousand lives below. Bruce stood rigid at the edge of the rooftop, the city lights painting sharp angles across his face. 

Clark’s voice seemed to drop by a few decibels. “You’re not going to scare me away, so stop trying.”

Bruce’s mask finally cracked. His shoulders sagged and his jaw clenched. “I don’t know how to do this,” Bruce said, the confession raw. “Every time I let someone close, I lose them. Or I fail them. I don’t want you anywhere near it.”

Clark’s chest ached at the words, and he closed the space between them, gently catching Bruce’s hand in his own. “You don’t get to decide that for me. I’ve seen war too. I’ve lost people too. And through all of it, the only thing that makes any of it bearable is connection. You’re the one I want.”

Bruce finally looked at him, really looked, and the fight in his eyes flickered with something else, longing, the kind he’d buried for far too long. “You’ll regret it,” Bruce murmured.

Clark shook his head, stepping closer until their foreheads almost touched. “I won’t. Because I love you. Every stubborn, maddening, brilliant part of you.”

The words hit Bruce harder than any blow. His throat tightened, his defenses cracking wide. He closed his eyes, exhaling a breath. When he spoke, it felt like surrender. “I love you too. And it terrifies me.”

Clark smiled faintly, brushing his thumb over Bruce’s knuckles. “Good. Then we’re even.”

He leaned in, and this time their kiss wasn’t desperate, it was a vow carried in the press of lips and the warmth of two lives colliding. Above them, the city lights burned like stars. They stayed on the rooftop for what felt like hours, holding each other.

Chapter Text

The Watchtower floated in orbit, its windows framing Earth like a jewel against the dark. Inside, the League’s day had fallen into something more boring than usual: maintenance, monitoring, and a generous helping of banter. Barry zipped through the hangar, hauling supply crates from the shuttle to the storage bay in a blur of red and gold. He skidded to a stop near Hal, who was casually leaning against a wall, arms crossed, the glow of his ring humming faintly as he adjusted a set of constructs.

“You, uh, need help with that?” Barry asked, brushing imaginary dust off his gloves even though he hadn’t slowed down long enough to actually get dirty.

Hal glanced at the glowing green framework of a fighter jet he was piecing together. “Got it handled. Thanks, though.”

Barry lingered anyway, eyes flicking to Hal’s jawline, then away so fast it looked like he might have whiplash. “Yeah, totally. Looks good. Really good. The, uh, jet. The jet looks good.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow from across the hangar, cracking open a supply crate. “You planning on staring at him all day, or you gonna help with the heavy stuff?”

Barry zipped past him in a rush of air, cheeks pink. “Helping! Definitely helping!” He reappeared at Hal’s side a moment later with a grin that was just a little too eager. “See? Totally helping.”

Hal smirked, not even looking up from his work. “Careful, dude. You keep running circles like that, you’ll burn through the floor.”

“I could—uh, yeah, sure. Totally careful,” Barry muttered, shoving his hands in his belt like they might keep him from fidgeting.

Up on the command deck, J’onn monitored transmissions while Diana stepped in to take a call from Themyscira. Her eyes flicked to the hangar, catching sight of Barry practically orbiting Hal like a second moon. She hid her smile behind her hand before turning back to the comms.

“Adorable,” she murmured.

“Distracting,” J’onn corrected evenly, though the slight curve of his lips betrayed amusement.

Hal finally dismissed the construct with a flick of his wrist, green light vanishing into the ring. Barry blinked at the sudden absence, as though someone had just turned out the sun.

“Jet’s gone,” Barry said lamely.

“Yeah, well,” Hal said, stretching, “I only keep it around when it’s useful.” He clapped Barry on the shoulder before heading toward the observation deck. “C’mon. Let’s see if there’s anything worth flying to.”

Barry tripped over his own boots before speeding to catch up, trying (and failing) to hide the grin spreading across his face.

Arthur snorted into the crate he was unpacking. “Pathetic.”

“Sweet,” Diana corrected from above.

The Watchtower hummed on, full of chatter, sparring, and orbiting heroes, some more literally than others.

Hal had just started leading Barry toward the observation deck when the overhead klaxons cut through the Watchtower. The chatter and laughter died instantly, the lights along the ceiling flickering red as the comms channel flared to life.

J’onn’s voice rang out in their minds. “Priority alert, multiple anomalies detected, coordinates: South Pacific. Energy readings are unstable.”

Arthur was already at the console, leaning over J’onn’s shoulder. “That’s near the Trench territory. If it’s weapons fire, it’ll stir them up.”

Diana re-entered from her call, sword already strapped to her back. “The readings are not consistent with conventional arms.”

Hal dropped his boots from the edge of the chair and pushed himself upright, ring flaring green. “Guess playtime’s over.”

Barry swallowed hard. “Deploying in teams?” He glanced at Hal without meaning to, then quickly back at the screen.

J’onn nodded. “Arthur and I will move to intercept beneath the surface. Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash—you will investigate from above.”

Hal turned toward Barry with a grin that was just a little too cocky. “Ready to keep up, kid?”

Barry smirked, though his heart thudded faster than it should. “I’ll try not to leave you in the dust.”

The Watchtower vibrated faintly as the teleportation sequence began to prime. The casual warmth of a few minutes ago was gone, replaced with the sharp focus of a team moving into battle.

The world blurred into light as the Watchtower’s teleporters locked onto coordinates. In an instant, the League was gone from orbit, reappearing above the storm-churned waters of the South Pacific. Waves heaved against the horizon, lightning flashing in jagged arcs. Energy signatures spiked on the team’s HUDs, erratic pulses glowing sickly red just beneath the water’s surface. Arthur and J’onn vanished below with a splash, leaving the skies to Diana, Hal, and Barry.

Hal’s ring snapped a shimmering construct around them, an emerald jet that cut through the air above the storm. “Hop in, boys. Diana, you want wing or co-pilot?”

“I prefer my own flight,” she said, drawing her sword before veering alongside the construct. 

Barry slid into the seat beside Hal, strapping himself in too fast, trying not to notice how close their shoulders brushed. “Nice ride,” he said, almost too casually.

Hal grinned, hands on the glowing controls. “Made it myself. You like it?”

Barry caught himself smiling before he looked out at the storm. “Yeah. It’s… pretty great.”

The jet cut lower, skimming the waves until the first anomaly came into view, black metal pylons jutting from the sea like teeth, glowing with unstable energy. The water around them boiled.

“Someone’s testing weapons tech they shouldn’t even have,” Hal muttered. “Figures.”

Barry leaned forward, scanning the readouts. “Those spikes are building toward a chain reaction. If they go, it won’t just be the Trench that gets stirred up, it’ll take out half the Pacific’s shipping lanes.”

“Then we pull the plug.” Hal’s ring flared, forming massive clamps to rip the pylons out of the ocean floor.

The moment the construct touched metal, the sea erupted. Figures broke the surface. It was the Trench-born, their eyes glowing pale blue, shrieking as they swarmed the pylons to defend them.

Diana dove straight into the chaos, sword flashing. “Flash! Keep them off GL while he dismantles the weapons!”

Barry zipped across the construct jet and into the air, running along the ocean as if it was solid. He plucked creatures off the pylons in a blur, tossing them back into the waves. One leapt for Hal’s flank, jaws wide, but Barry grabbed it midair, twisting it away in the blink of an eye.

Hal shot him a grin. “Not bad, kid.”

Barry’s cheeks heated despite the rain. “Just focus on the pylons.”

—--------

The team reappeared in the docking bay, rain still clinging to their armor and clothes. The storm and the Trench-born were behind them, the ocean left calmer than they found it. Arthur and J’onn were already filing mission reports at the console, Diana quietly scrunching the seawater from her hair.

Hal stretched with a groan, rolling his shoulders like the fight had been more inconvenience than threat. His ring flickered faintly as it powered down. “Well, that was fun. Remind me to bill whoever designed those pylons for hazardous duty pay.”

Barry, still catching his breath despite his speedster metabolism, shot him a grin. “You’re welcome, by the way. Saved your flank about four times out there.”

Hal turned toward him, “Four? Kid, you’re overselling it. I counted maybe two. Tops.”

Barry flushed, tugging his cowl down like it might hide his expression. “It was four.”

“Uh-huh.” Hal clapped him on the shoulder with enough weight to nearly knock him off balance. “Don’t worry, Allen. You’ll get the hang of exaggerating your heroics in the debrief. Just needs practice.”

Barry sputtered, then laughed despite himself, cheeks red. “I wasn’t exaggerating.”

“Sure you weren’t.” Hal winked, then sauntered toward the showers, tossing over his shoulder, “Good work out there, kid.”

Barry stood frozen for a beat too long, staring after him before snapping back to the present when Diana cleared her throat delicately.

“You run faster than light,” she said with the faintest smile, “yet somehow you trip over yourself when he’s in the room.”

Barry groaned, dragging a hand down his face. “Great. Now everyone’s noticed.”

J’onn’s voice drifted from the console, “We noticed weeks ago.”

Chapter Text

The manor’s east windows glowed with pale morning light, the first streaks of dawn cutting long golden slats across the bedroom floor. Bruce stirred first, his body waking from habit long before his mind caught up. The weight pressed into his side shocked him at first, and he started to take in his surroundings. It was Clark, still half-asleep, hair tousled, lips parted just slightly. Bruce just watched him for a while. He wasn’t used to this, waking up to someone else, it was… disorienting, but not unwelcome.

Clark blinked awake slowly, his eyes soft and unfocused before settling on Bruce. A sleepy smile tugged at his mouth. “Morning.”

Bruce made a low sound that could’ve been a greeting or just a rumble of acknowledgement. “You snore.”

Clark chuckled, rubbing a hand over his face. “No I don’t.”

“You do,” Bruce countered, but the corner of his mouth betrayed his amusement.

They lay there a moment longer, Clark shifting so his head rested against Bruce’s shoulder. “You know,” he said quietly, “I’ve never woken up like this. I like it.”

Bruce’s hand lifted, almost without thought, brushing lightly through Clark’s hair. It was the closest thing to an admission Clark could’ve asked for. The door banged open.

“Bruce, we need to—” Dick’s voice cut into the quiet as he stepped into the room, half in uniform, mask pulled back. He froze mid-step, eyes widening as the scene in front of him registered.

Bruce sitting up in bed, shirtless, Clark tangled comfortably in the sheets beside him.

“Oh my god,” Dick blurted, voice pitching up. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Clark sat up straighter, startled, a flush creeping up his neck. Bruce just pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand, sighing like this was the inevitable punishment for letting himself have one morning of peace.

“Dick—” Bruce started.

“Nope,” Dick said, already backing toward the door with his hands raised. “Nope, nope, nope. Not having this conversation without coffee.” He turned on his heel, muttering, “Explains so much, though…” as he disappeared into the hall.

The silence that followed was thick until Clark let out a helpless laugh, dropping his head against Bruce’s shoulder.

Bruce groaned. “This is going to be unbearable.”

Clark grinned, unrepentant. “I think it’s kind of perfect.”

—-------

By the time Bruce and Clark finally came downstairs, the smell of fresh coffee and toast had filled the manor’s kitchen. Alfred, as always, had everything laid out with precision, eggs, fruit, tea, and a steaming pot of coffee that might save Bruce from murdering his ward before the morning was over. Dick was already at the table, suit abandoned, hair sticking up from a rushed shower. He grinned the second they entered, spoon poised over his cereal.

“Well, look who finally made it out of bed,” he drawled. “Must’ve been a long night.”

Clark froze, cheeks pink, while Bruce’s jaw set with all the subtlety of stone cracking. “Dick,” Bruce said warningly.

Dick leaned back in his chair, hands raised in mock innocence. “Hey, I’m impressed. Took you long enough.”

Before Bruce could respond, Alfred entered with a tray of fresh tea and set it down with deliberate care. He gave Dick a pointed look over the rims of his glasses.

“Master Richard,” Alfred said smoothly, “mockery over breakfast is hardly befitting of a young man raised in this household. If you’ve finished your performance, perhaps you might try behaving as though you have manners.”

Dick flushed, shrinking slightly into his chair. “I wasn’t—” He caught Alfred’s expression and sighed. “Fine. Sorry.”

Alfred poured tea for Clark, tone as calm as ever. “We are all entitled to our private lives, even in this house. It would be wise to remember that.”

Bruce hid his smirk behind the rim of his coffee cup. Clark ducked his head, though his lips twitched in a barely-contained smile.

Dick stabbed at his cereal with unnecessary force. “Great. Now I’m the bad guy.”

“You always are,” Alfred said mildly, setting down the teapot.

For a few minutes, the kitchen was filled with nothing but the clink of silverware and the low hum of Alfred moving quietly about. Bruce had settled into his usual silence, Clark doing his best to  tamp down his blush, and Dick still wearing the faint sulk of someone who’d been scolded.

Finally, Dick cleared his throat. “Okay,” he said, a little sharper than necessary, “before I walked in on that, I actually came down here to tell you something important.”

Bruce glanced at him over his coffee. “Go on.”

Dick set his spoon down and leaned forward, the easy humor gone from his face. “One of our informants at the Narrows dockyard just reached out. The weapons smugglers we hit last month? They’ve regrouped in bigger numbers this time. They’re planning another transfer in forty-eight hours.”

Clark frowned, setting his fork down. “What kind of weapons?”

“Not standard guns,” Dick said grimly. “It’s experimental tech. Stuff I don’t recognize. If it moves out of the city, we’re looking at serious escalation.”

Bruce pushed his plate aside, already cataloging strategies in his head. “Did they say where the transfer’s happening?”

Dick nodded. “In the old shipyard, at the south docks at midnight. Word is they’re bringing in muscle too.”

Clark leaned forward. “We can stop it before it gets out of Gotham.”

—-------

After the mission…

The Batcave hummed with quiet machinery, the glow from the monitors cutting sharp reflections across the polished stone. The night’s mission lingered in the air, each could feel the adrenaline, the smoke, and the sting of mistakes that hadn’t quite tipped into disaster. Bruce stood at the console, cape draped over one shoulder, cowl pushed back. His posture was taut, hands braced on the edge of the desk as the mission feed replayed in fragments: smugglers scattering, experimental weapons firing erratically, Clark intercepting a blast before it could hit a civilian, Dick sweeping in with a disarm that had been just a half-second too late.

“You were sloppy,” Bruce said without looking at either of them. 

Clark, still in the suit Alfred had mended more than once already, stepped forward. “We stopped them. The weapons are in storage and no civilians were hurt. That’s a win.”

“You both rely too much on instinct. Instinct will fail you the second the enemy knows how to exploit it,” Bruce countered.

Dick bristled. “Instinct’s also what kept us alive tonight.”

“Barely,” Bruce said, replaying a frame that showed Clark’s cape catching fire before he doused it mid-flight. “You still think I was wrong to question whether you’re ready?”

The silence stretched. Dick’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t fire back this time. Clark’s eyes stayed locked on Bruce’s.

“We learned,” Clark said finally. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

Bruce turned to face them fully. “The point is that learning has consequences. Out there, people die when you hesitate. And I’m not prepared to lose either of you to arrogance or inexperience.”

Dick muttered under his breath, “Funny, coming from the guy who trained us to throw ourselves into impossible fights.”

Bruce ignored it, pulling off his gauntlets and setting them down on the console. “Debrief’s over, go get some rest. We’ll review tactical corrections in the morning.”

Clark lingered as Dick stormed up the stairs, frustration echoing in his footsteps. He stepped closer to Bruce. “You don’t have to protect us by tearing us down.”

Bruce’s eyes flicked to him. “Yes. I do.”

The sound of Dick’s boots faded up the staircase until only the hum of the Batcomputer and the low drip of water echoed in the cavern. Clark stayed rooted to the stone floor, cape still charred at the edges.

“You should get some rest too,” Bruce said flatly. “You’ll need it.”

Clark didn’t move. “That’s all you’re going to say?”

Bruce’s shoulders stiffened. “What else do you expect?”

“Anything,” Clark shot back, stepping closer. “You watch us try our best to fight beside you, but all you ever give us is silence or lectures. I can handle criticism, Bruce. What I can’t handle is you acting like we’ll never be enough for you.”

Bruce turned then, eyes sharp under the harsh cave light. “Because you’re not.”

The words cut sharper than he meant them to, and Bruce knew it the second they left his mouth. But he pressed on, because retreat was harder than attack. “You’re not ready. Neither of you. You make mistakes, you hesitate, and you gamble with variables you don’t even see. Out there, that gets people killed. It gets you killed. I won’t bury you, Clark. Or him.”

Clark closed the space between them until Bruce could feel the heat radiating off him, the faint smell of scorched fabric clinging to his suit. 

“You think keeping us out will protect us,” Clark said quietly, “but it won’t. You can’t lock us away from the world. We’re already in it, with or without your permission.” Clark’s hand came up, catching Bruce’s wrist. “You don’t have to carry the fear for us. Let us carry it with you.”

The words slipped into the cracks Bruce had fought to keep sealed. “I don’t know if I can.”

Clark’s expression softened. “Then let me help you learn.”

The cavern fell quiet again, save for the slow hum of machines and the faint sound of water. Neither of them moved to step away.

—--------

Dick stormed down the hall and into the kitchen, muttering under his breath as he yanked open a cabinet for a glass. He was furious.

Alfred appeared in the doorway moments later, his expression calm as ever. “I assume Master Bruce has once again managed to aggravate you?”

Dick slammed the glass down on the counter. “Aggravate? Try infuriate.” He filled it with water, gulped it down, then leaned back against the counter with a scowl. “It doesn’t matter what I do or how many times I prove myself. He’ll never see me as ready. Not for anything that matters.”

Alfred crossed the room slowly, moving with the deliberate calm that had outlasted years of Wayne tempers. “Your frustration is justified, of course, but perhaps you might consider that Master Bruce’s doubts have less to do with your abilities, and more to do with his own fears.”

Dick shook his head, laughing bitterly. “Yeah, I get it. He’s afraid of losing people. He’s always afraid, it’s exhausting. I don’t need protecting anymore, Alfred. I need him to trust me.”

Alfred set a hand on the counter near Dick. “He does trust you, Master Richard. He simply fears what comes next when he admits it aloud. That fear does not diminish your worth, it only reveals how much you mean to him.”

“Then he needs to start showing it. Because right now? It feels like he’ll never let me grow past the shadow he keeps me in.”

“And perhaps that is precisely the shadow you will one day step out of, to show him what he has built. Until then, patience is your best weapon.”

Dick huffed a laugh despite himself, rubbing the back of his neck. “You always know how to make it sound so simple.”

“That is my job,” Alfred said smoothly, pouring tea into a cup and sliding it across the counter. “Now sit. Fuming accomplishes nothing on an empty stomach.”

Dick sank into the chair, muttering, “Still doesn’t mean he’s right.”

“No,” Alfred agreed. “But he is still Bruce Wayne. Which means he will need reminding, by both of you, that being right is not always the point.”

Dick stirred his tea absently, still simmering from the argument, when Alfred decided to redirect the conversation. “I might remind you, Master Richard, that your frustrations, however justified, do not excuse you from household responsibilities. The south wing light fixture remains unrepaired.”

Dick blinked at him, thrown. “The chandelier? I thought you were calling in an electrician for that.”

“I did,” Alfred said crisply. “And the gentleman took one look at the wiring and decided he valued his life too much to attempt it.”

Dick laughed despite himself. “That sounds about right. Anything in this house is probably a fire hazard.”

Alfred lifted a brow. “Which is why I suggested you see to it, as you are both nimble and, allegedly, capable with a toolbox.”

“Allegedly?” Dick echoed, feigning offense.

“Your last attempt at repairing the upstairs shower left the bathroom resembling a small indoor lagoon,” Alfred reminded him dryly.

Dick chuckled, shaking his head. “Okay, fair, but that was years ago. I’m better now. Probably.”

Alfred sighed, pouring himself a cup of tea as well. “If one can dodge bullets on rooftops, one should, in theory, manage to tighten a few bolts. I would appreciate your proving the theory correct before the chandelier collapses on an unsuspecting dinner guest.”

“Fine, fine,” Dick said, grinning now. “I’ll take a look at it after patrol. No promises about not electrocuting myself, though.”

“I will keep the first aid kit close,” Alfred replied, settling into a chair with a ghost of a smile.

Chapter Text

The south wing chandelier groaned above him, wires stubborn and ancient, and Dick muttered a curse under his breath as he balanced on the top rung of the ladder. Alfred had been right, half the wiring in the manor was a fire hazard waiting to happen.

“Should’ve just let it collapse on someone,” he grumbled, carefully twisting the stripped wire back into place. “Would’ve been less dangerous than this deathtrap.”

The faint beep from his League communicator interrupted his thoughts. He froze, listening to the double-pulse signal that meant priority level, not routine chatter. He climbed down, tugging the device from his belt. The message scrolled across the tiny display: Requesting immediate assistance. Coordinates attached.

Dick shoved the communicator into his pocket and jogged toward the cave entrance, calling out as he moved. “Bruce?”

The cave was quiet, the glow of the monitors cast long shadows across the cavern, and there, slumped in the chair at the console, was Bruce. He was out cold, still in his undersuit, his cowl set aside on the desk. Even from a distance, Dick could see how deep the lines of exhaustion cut across his face.

“Bruce.” Dick tried again. He stepped closer, but Bruce didn’t stir. Dick chewed the inside of his cheek. “Figures. The one time you take a nap, it’s during an actual call-out.”

He looked around, half-expecting Clark to materialize out of nowhere, but the cave was empty. Clark was gone, Bruce was down, and the signal was still pulsing in his pocket. Dick tightened his gloves and exhaled sharply through his nose. “Fine. Guess it’s just me.”

He crossed to the racks, pulling his Nightingale suit down from its stand. He clipped his weapons belt into place, eyes flicking once more to Bruce’s sleeping form. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring it back in one piece,” Dick muttered, even though Bruce couldn’t hear him.

Then he keyed the coordinates into the Batwing and powered it up, the roar of the engines swallowing the silence. He shot out over Gotham, the League beacon guiding him toward the unknown.

—--------

The coordinates led him far beyond Gotham, across a stretch of dark water that glittered faintly with city light. His HUD lit up red as he approached the site. When he dropped low, the scene unfolded below him. A League strike team was already in the thick of it. Diana stood at the center of the chaos, bracers flashing as she deflected searing bolts of light from strange, insectile machines crawling out of a half-buried vessel. Arthur fought beside her, trident sweeping arcs of saltwater to shove enemies back toward the surf. In the sky, Hal was being swarmed, his constructs straining under the press of drones that adapted faster than his ring could shift forms. His voice cut through the comms, sharp with frustration. “Where the hell is backup? J’onn, tell me you’ve got eyes on this!”

J’onn’s voice came. “The interference is disrupting my link. These machines are designed to resist psychic intrusion.”

Dick’s hands tightened on the controls. This wasn’t a fight they could sustain for long. Bruce should have been here. Clark should have been here. Instead, it was him.

He pushed the Batwing into a steep dive, opening the weapons bay. The jet screamed over the battlefield, letting loose a spread of EMP charges that lit the sand in a crackling grid. The first wave of machines seized, their lights dying as they collapsed into the surf. Heads turned upward. Diana’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second. “Nightingale?”

Dick banked hard, bringing the Batwing around for another pass. “Yeah,” he said grimly. “Surprise.”

Diana glanced up again, her shield raised, and called over the comms, “Hold the line, he’s buying us time!”

Dick pulled the Batwing into a steep climb before cutting hard back down. His hands moved fast over the controls, years of instinct guiding him through maneuvers that would’ve spun a lesser pilot into the sea. On the ground, Arthur swung his trident in a wide arc, forcing back two of the insectile drones. A third slipped past, its mandibles snapping as it lunged toward him. Dick angled the Batwing to send a precision missile. The drone disintegrated in a fireball that scattered sparks across the tide.

“Saved your ass!” Dick shouted over the channel.

Arthur grunted. “Don’t make a habit of bragging.”

Above them, Hal’s construct flickered as drones slammed into it. One tore through the wing of his jet, sending it spiraling.

“Lantern!” Diana barked.

Dick triggered the Batwing’s grapples, twin steel cables snapping out and catching the failing construct. The added drag steadied Hal long enough for him to reassert control, slamming the drones back with a blast of emerald light.

Hal’s voice came over the comms. “Not bad, kid. Not bad at all.”

Dick didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on the shoreline where J’onn was pinned, energy nets sparking against his form. The Martian’s telepathic abilities were useless against the machines, his body convulsing as the weapons drained at his strength.

Dick angled in low, flipping the Batwing’s belly hatch. “Hang on, J’onn!” He ejected a shockwave charge, detonating it just above the sand. The pulse rippled outward, frying the nets’ circuits and dropping the drones flat. J’onn staggered free, his form flickering as he shifted back to full strength. “You have my gratitude,” J’onn said.

The tide of machines began to falter. Diana and Arthur surged forward, cutting down the last of the wave with steel and trident. Hal threw up a barrier to block a final burst of unstable energy, while Dick lined up the Batwing’s cannons and obliterated the remaining pylons. The light drained from the machines, leaving only husks scattered across the beach as silence fell.

Dick circled the Batwing once before landing it on the sand. He climbed out, cape trailing. Diana approached first, her sword lowered. “That was reckless,” she said. Then, she added, “And necessary. You fought with courage and precision. You saved lives.”

Hal smirked, clapping Dick on the shoulder as he stepped up beside him. “Not bad for Batman’s kid. You just earned yourself some respect.”

Dick exhaled, the adrenaline finally bleeding out of him. He glanced back toward the horizon where the Batwing still smoked faintly, then at the League standing solid around him. He felt so much pride in that moment, that he couldn’t wait to tell Bruce. 

—--------

The Batwing’s engines rumbled low as it descended into the cavern, steam hissing in the cool air. Dick popped the canopy and climbed out, armor still carrying the scorched marks of the fight. Clark was waiting at the base of the platform, arms crossed tight, his cape casting a long shadow across the stone. The second Dick’s boots hit the ground, Clark was on him.

“You didn’t call.” His voice was edged with worry he couldn’t mask. “You didn’t check in, didn’t wait for backup, didn’t even—”

“I handled it,” Dick interrupted, tugging off his gloves.

“That’s not the point!” Clark snapped. “Do you have any idea what could’ve happened out there? You could’ve—”

“Clark.” The word came from the shadows behind them. Bruce was there, still in the undersuit he’d slept in earlier, but his eyes seemed sharper than the cowl would’ve made them. He stepped forward, laying a hand on Clark’s arm. “Enough.”

Clark turned, frustrated. “He went out there alone!”

“And he came back,” Bruce said, not raising his voice. His gaze locked on Dick. “He did what needed to be done.”

Dick blinked, caught off guard. He’d expected fury, another lecture, or even a list of mistakes. Instead, there was acknowledgment. 

“You doubted me,” Dick said carefully.

“I underestimated you.” It was as close to an apology as Bruce Wayne ever gave.

Clark exhaled, shoulders relaxing though his frown lingered. “I just want a heads up.”

Dick gave him a tired smile. “Can do.”

Bruce turned back to the console and Dick finally let the exhaustion pull at his bones. “I’m done,” Dick muttered, tugging off the rest of his armor and tossing it onto the rack. His body protested every movement, adrenaline could only hold so long before the weight of the night came crashing down.

Bruce gave him a nod, but it was enough. Dick trudged upstairs, boots heavy against the stone steps. The manor’s halls were dark and still, the silence wrapping around him like a blanket. He barely made it into his room before collapsing onto the bed, not bothering to change or even pull the covers up. Sleep took him instantly and for once there were no tossing or restless thoughts, just the kind of deep, dreamless rest only total exhaustion could bring.

—---------

The Watchtower’s briefing chamber was quiet when Dick walked in, his boots echoing against the polished floor. Sunlight cut sharp through the panoramic windows, the Earth hanging blue and bright against the void beyond. He’d expected to feel small here as usual, but after last night, he felt more like he belonged. The others were already gathered. J’onn’s eyes followed him calmly as he moved to sit down.

Diana began. “The mission was not without risk, but the objective was achieved. The pylons are destroyed, and their source will be investigated. We owe thanks to every member present.” She turned her gaze to Dick. “Including Nightingale.”

Hal let out a low whistle. “Kid swoops in out of nowhere and saves three of us in one night. Not bad. Not bad at all.”

Arthur grunted. “He nearly cooked himself pulling that EMP stunt.”

J’onn’s gave Arthur a sour look. “The actions he took were dangerous, but they were also decisive. He turned the tide of the battle.”

Dick allowed himself a faint smile, tension bleeding from his shoulders. He’d already been given a place here, but now it felt real. Now he didn’t feel like a shadow of Batman, or the boy people assumed he still was. He was Nightingale, and he belonged.

—-------

Dinner at the manor was not usually loud. Tonight, however, was different. Dick filled the dining room with his voice, words tumbling over each other as he recounted every moment of the mission: how Diana had cut through the swarm, how J’onn nearly got pinned down, and how the pylons sparked like they were going to blow sky-high. He gestured with his fork wildly his grin breaking wider each time Alfred gave a polite nod of acknowledgment.

“And then Hal looked at me like I had saved his skin. Which, by the way, I totally did. Twice.” Dick leaned back, balancing his chair on two legs. “You should’ve seen their faces. I don’t think anyone expected me to pull it off.”

Across the table, Clark smiled, eyes bright with pride. “Sounds like you showed them exactly who you are.”

Bruce watched Dick with a prideful gaze, his knife cutting neatly through the steak on his plate, though he didn’t voice his thoughts. Clark caught it. He glanced sideways at Bruce, their eyes meeting for a moment over the flicker of candlelight. There was the faintest curve at the corner of Bruce’s mouth, gone in an instant. Clark’s answering smile was warm and fond. Dick kept talking, not noticing the shared look across the table. By the time Alfred brought out dessert, Dick was still talking, and both Bruce and Clark were still listening.

Chapter Text

The swamp was alive with fury. Vines whipped through the air like snapping whips, roots cracked pavement as if it were glass, and a wall of green rose higher with every passing second.

Dick ducked low, rolling beneath a tangle of thorn-covered tendrils as they lashed out at him. He hit the mud in a crouch, escrima sticks sparking with current as he slammed them into the roots trying to pin him down. “Ivy’s in a mood,” he called over comms, breath sharp. “And I’m not loving the guest star!”

Ahead, Swamp Thing loomed like a living mountain, moss dripping from his shoulders, eyes glowing an otherworldly amber. His voice rumbled deep as the earth itself: “You threaten the Green. You bring fire and steel to its heart. We will not allow it.”

Clark blurred past and slammed into a knot of vines encircling Bruce, snapping them apart with a flex of strength. “We’re not here to destroy anything!” he shouted, voice carrying over the chaos. “There’s something else poisoning the swamp, we’re trying to help!”

Ivy stepped from the shadows, her hair gleaming like copper flame. “You expect us to believe that? After everything mankind has done to burn and strip the earth?” With a flick of her wrist an entire tree bent low, its branches crashing down where Clark had been standing seconds before.

Bruce broke free from the last vine, his cowl smeared with mud. “Enough! This isn’t us against you. Something else is driving the corruption here, and if you keep fighting us, you’ll never see it until it’s too late.”

The ground shook as Swamp Thing advanced, his bulk blotting out the moonlight. “Prove it.”

Roots surged upward again, forcing Bruce, Dick, and Clark into defensive positions. Clark surged forward and planted himself squarely in front of Swamp Thing, muscles coiled against the press of living roots. Branches splintered against his shoulders, thorns tore at his suit, but he held firm. His voice boomed across the clearing. “Stop! If you want proof, then give us the chance to find it.”

Swamp Thing roared, every inch of his hulking form radiating ancient fury. His vines strained harder, wrapping around Clark’s arms, his chest, his legs, but Clark didn’t let go. He bent his knees, dug into the muck, and pushed back with all the weight of Krypton behind him.

“I’m not your enemy,” he gritted out, branches cracking beneath his grip. “You can crush me to the ground, but it won’t change the truth.”

For a moment, the swamp itself seemed to hold its breath. Behind them, Bruce seized the opening. His eyes tracked the patterns of decay creeping through the wetlands and spotted black veins spreading outward from a single point deeper in the marsh. He tapped his comm. “Nightingale, head to the south quadrant, about seventy meters. There’s something feeding the corruption.”

“On it!” Dick vaulted from a tangle of roots, his escrima sticks sparking as he cut through the vines blocking his path.

Ivy hissed, her fury briefly faltering as she caught sight of the dark streaks staining her plants. “What—what is that?”

Bruce turned. “Not us. Something else is poisoning the Green.”

Clark stood tall, chest heaving, eyes locked on Swamp Thing. “Let him prove it. Just let us try.”

The massive creature glared down at him, amber eyes burning. Then, with a low rumble like thunder retreating across the sky, the vines pulled back. Swamp Thing’s voice rolled deep. “Find the source. If you are false, the swamp will consume you.”

The swamp quieted, though it was tense and restless. Clark stayed planted in the muck, his arms still braced and ready should the vines surge again. His presence alone held Swamp Thing’s fury in check, but the peace was fragile at best. Bruce moved quickly, his boots sinking into the mud as he followed the blackened veins winding through the foliage. Ivy fell into step with him, her expression distrustful.

“You saw it too,” Bruce said without looking at her. 

She folded her arms, nails gleaming green. “I didn’t want to believe it.” She reached down, brushing her fingers against a leaf spotted black with rot. The plant shuddered under her touch, curling back as if it wanted nothing to do with her. 

Bruce crouched, pulling a vial from his belt. He scraped a sample into it, careful not to touch the substance directly. His mind was already racing ahead to possible chemical composition, origin, and distribution methods. “Engineered,” he muttered. “Designed to mimic blight and accelerate it.”

Ivy knelt beside him, glaring. “Then it’s humans again”

For a moment they were quiet, the only sound the hum of Clark’s voice in the distance, still holding Swamp Thing in conversation. Ivy watched Bruce as he capped the vial and slipped it away. “You really think you can stop this?” she asked softly.

Bruce finally met her eyes. “I don’t think. I will.”

“You’re either the most arrogant man alive… or the one stubborn enough to save us.”

“Both,” he said flatly, standing. Bruce sealed the vial of decay into a case on his belt just as Dick emerged from the southern edge of the marsh. His armor was streaked with mud, his hair damp from humidity. He held a broken piece of metal in his hand, jagged and faintly glowing with that same sickly black-green rot.

“Found your source,” Dick called, tossing it onto the ground between them. The fragment hit the mud with a metallic clank.

Bruce crouched instantly, scanning it with a small handheld device from his belt. Ivy crouched too, eyes narrowing as she brushed back the surrounding grass to see the veins of corruption spiderwebbing outward from the shard.

“It’s not a bioweapon, it’s just tech,” Dick said firmly. “Someone buried these nodes out here. The roots are feeding off it like it’s fertilizer.”

Bruce’s scanner beeped, the results flashing across its screen. “It’s detecting synthetic compounds and high-grade alloys. Someone engineered this to spread, fast and wide.” He looked up at Clark, who still stood braced against Swamp Thing’s shifting bulk. 

Ivy’s eyes flicked between the men, fury blooming hot. “Then someone’s declared war on my children.” Vines rose again at her back, not at Bruce or Clark this time, but toward the dark horizon beyond the swamp.

Swamp Thing’s amber gaze shifted from Clark to the fragment at their feet. “Find who dares corrupt the Green and bring them to us.”

Bruce’s cape shifted as he stood, the fragment clutched in his gauntlet. “We will.”

Dick stepped closer, mud squelching under his boots. “And when we do, they’ll regret ever setting foot in your swamp.”

—-------

The fragment sat beneath the harsh white glow of the Batcave’s lab lights, its surface pitted and warped. Bruce leaned over it as he worked the scanner across the jagged metal. The computer hummed, building lines of data across the monitors above him. Dick stood nearby, arms crossed as he watched the readouts scroll. 

“The alloy’s familiar, but the structure has been corrupted with organic elements that read as spores and other fungal matter.” He clicked open a side panel, revealing veins of dark material laced through the fragment like petrified roots.

Clark frowned. “So it was engineered to mimic the swamp’s own growth, but twisted to destroy it.”

Bruce nodded. “Exactly. Which means someone wanted Ivy and Swamp Thing to believe the Green was turning against itself. That way, they’d go on the offensive before realizing the truth.”

“Divide and conquer,” Dick muttered.

Bruce’s fingers paused on the scanner. “Whoever’s behind it knew the Green would retaliate, and they wanted the League caught in the middle.”

The monitors pinged, finalizing the analysis. Bruce leaned closer, narrowing his eyes. “There’s a signature in the bonding process.”

Dick tilted forward over his shoulder. “Signature? You mean like initials on a painting?”

“Not exactly,” Bruce said, his fingers moving to expand the readouts. “It’s a coding sequence embedded in the alloy.”

The screen flickered, resolving into a string of data that rearranged into stark letters: LEXCORP.

Clark sighed. “Luthor.”

“Of course, only he really has the tech to create advanced metallurgy fused with biotoxins.”

Dick frowned, tapping the metal fragment with a gloved knuckle. “Why target the Green? He’s played dirty before, but usually it’s about money, power, y’know, tangible gains. What’s he get out of stirring up Swamp Thing and Ivy?”

“Leverage,” Bruce said. “If the Green sees humanity as its enemy, Luthor positions himself as the one who can control the fallout politically and financially. He destabilizes trust, pits allies against each other, and profits while the world burns.”

Dick leaned back against the console. “Well. At least now we know who to punch.”

Clark’s eyes didn’t leave the glowing name on the screen. “If Luthor is this confident he can twist the Green to his will, then we’re already behind. We need to get ahead of him before he poisons more than just the swamp.”

The rest of the long evening was filled with talks of mission plans and stakeouts.

—--------

By the time the computers dimmed to standby and the last of the data finished processing, the hour was late enough that even Alfred had long since retired upstairs. The cave was a low hum of machinery and the fragment from the swamp locked away in containment. Bruce shut down the final screen and stripped the gloves from his hands. His body was stiff from the endless hours hunched over the console. When he turned, Clark was still there, leaning against the stone railing.

“You should rest,” Bruce said.

“So should you,” Clark replied, a small smile tugging at his mouth. “But we both know neither of us will unless the other does.”

Bruce exhaled through his nose. “Manipulation doesn’t suit you.”

Clark pushed off the railing, closing the distance between them. “It’s called compromise.”

They walked the manor halls in silence. Bruce set his watch aside on the dresser, shoulders loosening as he peeled back layers of clothing until there was nothing left but the scarred, exhausted man beneath. Clark joined him at the bed, holding up the edge of the blanket as an invitation. They slid beneath it together. Clark stretched onto his back, one arm draped loosely by his side, the other over Bruce. Clark kissed his forehead gently and held him until he fell into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

Lex Luthor’s office was surrounded by one-way windows, perched high above Metropolis. The city sprawled beneath him, and he reveled in the fact that his top story office in the highest building in the city was a reminder that the world bent to men like him. Or at least, it had. Now there was someone else. Luthor stood at the window, a tumbler of whiskey in one hand. On the table behind him, a dozen monitors flickered with still frames and grainy video of the same man appearing again and again, catching falling debris and holding back threats. The world had already started calling him Superman.

Luthor said the word aloud, “Superman.” He turned sharply, setting the glass down as he approached the central screen. “Alien,” he muttered.

His fingers flew across the console, pulling up footage of Superman tearing through vines in the swamp, halting Swamp Thing with sheer force. Luthor slowed it frame by frame, scrutinizing every detail.

He tapped a command, and schematics filled the other screens of still images of the devices his team had planted. “You’ll come to me,” he murmured. “You’ll stand in front of me eventually, because you can’t resist proving yourself. And when you do,” he leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers, “I’ll know exactly what you are.”

He stood abruptly and made his way to the lower parts of the building. The lab beneath LexCorp Tower was alive with motion. Lex moved through the space while his team kept their distance, knowing to avoid his attention. On one screen, the swamp-node schematics rotated in 3D, the organic-metal fusion highlighted in glowing green. On another, news clips ran in loops—Superman saves civilians, Mysterious figure halts swamp outbreak, Man of Tomorrow? Luthor’s lips tightened at the last headline. He adjusted his tie, eyes narrowing.

He tapped a key, bringing up an overlay that mapped every Superman sighting. Each location connected back in a neat red line to Gotham. His gaze shifted back to the swamp-tech readout. He traced a finger across the air, highlighting spikes of energy recorded from Clark’s fight with Swamp Thing. “He’s faster than human eyes, stronger than any weapon we’ve built. And yet, he rushes to defend the weak. How noble. That’s how I’ll catch him.”

One of the scientists approached hesitantly, holding a tablet. “Sir, shall we prepare a second deployment?”

“Yes, expand it to cities this time, their industrial districts and farmland. Let him chase the fires I set.” He dismissed the scientist with a flick of his hand, returning to the monitors. Lex leaned forward, studying the lines of his face.

—-------

The quiet hum of the computers suddenly broke into a shrill alarm. A new red icon flashed onto the Gotham-adjacent map overlay, blinking in a steady rhythm. Bruce straightened and tapped the command to expand.

“Another spike,” he said. “In the outskirts of Blüdhaven.”

Dick nearly spilled his coffee bounding down the steps. He leaned over Bruce’s shoulder, scanning the data feed. The chemical signature was unmistakable. It spiderwebbed across the industrial district like a disease.

Clark’s eyes narrowed. “He’s escalating. If he plants these in population centers…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

Bruce’s hands moved quickly to pull up satellite feeds. Grainy images showed the shimmer of black veins creeping along the edges of warehouses, faint tendrils already wrapping around old steel beams and cracked pavement. Workers had fled in panic, their abandoned cars scattered at odd angles down the street.

Dick’s fists clenched tight at his sides. “He wants us to confront him. The swamp was a test run, now he’s planting bait closer to us.”

Clark stopped pacing and turned toward them. “He’ll get what he wants, then. We’ll go, stop it before it spreads, and make sure no one else gets hurt.”

Bruce’s mind was already mapping entry points and possible dispersal systems. Finally, he stood, fastening the cowl back into place. “Nightingale, you take point, Clark, containment. Nothing touches the population zone. I’ll handle identifying the deployment nodes.”

The Batwing’s engines roared to life, its lights cutting across the cavern walls. Above, the blinking red icon still pulsed on the map.

—--------

The plane sliced low through the night, its engines barely louder than the wind thanks to Bruce’s adjustments. Below, they could see Blüdhaven’s tall, narrow buildings crowded along industrial canals, their windows dark and streets half-abandoned. The air itself looked wrong, tinted faintly green under the flicker of failing streetlights.

Clark hovered just ahead of the jet, scanning with his vision. “Bruce, I’m seeing energy readings identical to the swamp nodes. Half the district’s soil is contaminated.”

“We’ll contain it,” Bruce’s voice came through the comm. “Nightingale, find ground access. I want visual confirmation of the dispersal sites.”

Dick banked the Batwing toward the waterfront, cutting the engines as he descended. The jet landed quietly between two rusted cranes, its landing struts sinking into damp concrete. Steam hissed up from the ground where corrosion had already begun to eat at the surface. When the hatch opened, the stench of rot hit them. 

Dick pulled his mask into place and stepped out first, boots squelching against the black-green residue coating the street. “This stuff is everywhere,” he muttered. “I thought Blüdhaven smelled bad before.”

Bruce followed, his scanner already out and humming. Clark landed beside them. “There’s movement inside,” he said. “No heartbeats, though. It seems like it’s just machines.”

Bruce crouched beside a corroded drainage grate. “They’re using the stormwater system. Luthor seeded the water lines so every rainfall will carry it farther.”

Dick kicked a loose pipe, sending a splash of infected runoff down the gutter. “So what, he’s poisoning the city just to get our attention?”

Clark’s jaw clenched, “He doesn’t care about the city, he just wanted us to show up.”

“Then he’s probably close,” Bruce said. “He’ll be watching every move we make.”

Dick flicked his escrima stick open, the electric charge crackling faintly. “Then let’s give him a show.”

The three of them moved forward, their silhouettes swallowed by the haze as the sound of hidden machines grew louder. 

—--------

Lex stood before a wall of monitors in his mobile command suite. The images came in from a dozen different drones circling the industrial district, their lenses feeding him every angle of the confrontation. On one screen, Batman could be seen scanning the contaminated ground, on another, Nightingale picked his way through the wreckage for other clues, but it was the center feed that held Lex’s attention. Superman.

Luthor leaned closer, fingers steepled. “You came,” he murmured. “Good.”

His thumb hovered over a control key, and a schematic of the city block appeared on the largest monitor. At its heart, a pulsing ring of sensors marked the trigger point. Lex smiled. “One more step, and we see what the last son of Krypton is really made of.”

He watched as Superman’s cape brushed the edge of the sensor field. When his boot crossed the invisible line, Lex pressed the key. Hidden vents erupted across the street, releasing a plume of faintly green mist that shimmered under the industrial lights. It wasn’t fully formed Kryptonite, not exactly, it was a lot finer, since it had been engineered from trace mineral fragments scavenged from Krypton’s remains and spliced into a chemical compound Luthor had spent months perfecting. Clark staggered, his expression flickering from confusion to pain as the gas spread.

On-screen, Batman shouted something, but Lex muted the feed. He didn’t need to hear weakness, he could see it. The alien’s knees hit the ground, his cape folding around him like a collapsing flag.

“Beautiful,” he whispered.

He turned from the monitors to the secondary terminal, inputting a command sequence. A file opened, displaying a small, near-invisible transmitter’s design that had attached to the cape. Lex traced the schematic with one finger, almost affectionately. “You shouldn’t have turned your back, Superman. You wore my gift for days. You led me right to the Bat’s little cave, to your ship, all I had to do was listen.”

He looked over the captured scan of the Kryptonian vessel once more before turning back to the live feed. The mist on-screen thickened, swallowing Superman and his allies in a pale green fog.

Luthor raised his glass toward the monitor. “Let’s see how long your humanity can save you now.”

—--------

For a second, Bruce didn’t understand what he was seeing. The haze rolled in so fast it was hard to comprehend what was really happening. All of the sudden, Clark staggered. One knee hit the ground. His hand clawed at the pavement as his cape dragged through the toxic fog.

“Clark!” Bruce’s voice tore out raw. He tore the rebreather from his belt and shoved it over his face as he sprinted toward him. The scanner on his wrist spiked violently, readings flashing across the display. “Nightingale, find the source!”

Nightingale’s voice came muffled through the comms. “Working on it! There’s too much of it!”

Bruce dropped to his knees beside Clark, grabbing his shoulders. Even through his gloves, he could feel that Clark’s skin had gone clammy and  his pulse became weak and erratic. “Hold on, it’ll be ok,” Bruce said desperately.

At first, all Bruce could feel was raw panic, a kind he hadn’t felt in years because of his training. Then something else rose behind it. The ground trembled. It started as a shiver, and he looked around for the source, until he realized it was coming from him. His heartbeat thundered, each pulse radiating outward. 

“Br– Batman!” Dick’s voice crackled through the comms.

He didn’t hear him. Everything fell away. There was only the roar in his chest and fury running through him. The power he’d spent his whole life burying surged forward, unstoppable. He rose up into the air, and the street shook. Cracks split through the asphalt around his boots as the earth itself responded to him. The machines hidden beneath the ground rattled and groaned, metal screaming. The air hummed like the moment before lightning strikes. Bruce lifted his head, eyes narrowing on the rows of vents lining the street, finding Luthor’s devices, still hissing out their green poison.

The first strike shattered a pipe like brittle glass. The second sent an entire vent crumpling in on itself. He tore through the street like a force of nature, every movement fueled by anger. When the last of the machines detonated, the shockwave sent ash and smoke rolling skyward. Bruce stood in the center of the destruction, chest heaving, the edges of his armor glowed faintly with heat. The fog thinned, replaced by the smell of burning metal filling the air.

Dick waved his hands in front of him, trying to see through the dust. When it finally cleared, he started towards his mentor, but when Batman finally looked up through the settling dust, his eyes were burning red, and Dick could find nothing human in them at all.