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The knife glides smoothly into the third intercostal space. Clark watches it slice through muscle and pleura, severing bronchi and crushing alveoli beneath its finely honed edge. The blade disappears before Clark can even register the wet sound of blood on metal, and the stench of iron suffuses the air, clinging to Clark’s nostrils. He can hear the slick trickle of blood leaking from capillaries, the halting beat of a heart struggling to pump, a breath strangled by a flooded trachea, blood trickling through bronchial branches.
A choked breath cuts through the haze and all of a sudden Clark comes back to himself with startling awareness, as if he’d been on pause and someone just pressed play. He blurs into motion, hands flying forward to press down on the wound in Bruce’s side, his fingers drowning in scarlet, hot and sticky. He leans his weight on Bruce’s chest, trying to stem the bleeding, but—there’s so much. It’s too much.
“Bruce,” Clark gasps. “Oh, God. Hold on.”
A pained noise falls from Bruce’s mouth, and Clark watches in horror as the color leaches from Bruce’s face. His pulse is weakening, his breaths turning fast and shallow. Clark’s heart leaps, panic rising in his chest, constricting his throat in a vise.
“No, no, please…” His voice is thin and frail, powerless in the tragedy unfolding before him.
Clark needs to do—something. Anything. Cauterize the wound. Fly him to an emergency room. Call for help. Help him. Do anything at all except just sit there, both of his hands holding uselessly at the gaping wound in Bruce’s chest, watching his best friend bleed out.
Except he can’t move. Clark tries, but his body won’t listen. He’s paralyzed, locked in place, muscles seized with pure terror. For every second that passes, Bruce’s blood pressure is dropping, his cells are dying as his heart pumps more and more blood out into the open air, over Clark’s hands. Hands that won’t listen, won’t move. The breath is frozen still in Clark’s chest and he doesn’t need to breathe, but Bruce does.
“Clark,” Bruce whispers. There’s blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. His eyes, locked on Clark’s, are pleading, dulled by pain. He can see his reflection in them; a mirror image in the pale blue. His own face a mask of grief.
“Stay with me,” Clark begs, eyes burning with tears, desperately clinging to the hope that Bruce will make it out of this. He has to. “Stay with me, Bruce. Come on, I got you. I…I—”
The air leaves Bruce’s lungs in a soft, final sigh. Silence falls like a veil on the world, inescapable, suffocating. Clark can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.
Clark blinks, shedding tears that sting as they roll down his cheeks. A gasp rips through his throat, the only sound in the stillness. He’s no longer kneeling on the ground, and his hands are clean, clenched into fists. He can still feel the warmth, clinging to his skin like something sticky.
It’s so quiet. As if the world itself has stopped turning. Rain heavy in the air, moisture trapped in Clark’s lashes, his eyes. The funeral is a small affair for the greatest man Clark has ever known, a dozen familiar faces gathered around the Wayne family plot in Gotham Cemetery. The gravestone is a simple, elegant piece of polished rock.
Here lies Bruce Wayne, the engraving says in silvered letters. Superman could not save him.
Clark’s breath catches in his throat. He blinks, but the words are still there, carved in stone, taunting him. “But I tried,” Clark says. The words are swallowed in the silence. A taste like rot spreads across his tongue, creeping down the back of his mouth, sliding down his throat, threatening to drown him.
When did it get so dark? It was noon a moment ago. Panic wells up in his chest like an approaching storm. Anxiety crawls across his skin, slowly, an incessant itch. “I tried.”
Hadn’t he?
He looks around helplessly, at the blank faces surrounding him. There’s Alfred, and Dick, and all the rest of Bruce’s children. Diana, and Hal, and the other founding League members. They’re quiet, and still, eyes closed in muted mourning. Lois stands by his side, and he turns to her, pleading.
“It wasn’t good enough.” The words are coming from Lois’ mouth, but it’s not her voice; it’s a whisper of darkness, sending a sharp skitter of fear down his spine. His blood runs cold, turning to arctic ice in his veins.
“What—” he tries to say, but the air abruptly leaves his lungs.
As he watches, Lois’ face twists, first into a harsh grimace, then contorting beyond human limits. Her lips stretch across her jaw, eyes collapsing inwards to show the cavity of her skull. The skin melts off of her bones, dripping down the frame of her skeleton, revealing fascia and decomposing muscle.
Oh, God. Dread seizes him at his core and he wants to run, to flee, but he can only watch as Lois withers away in front of him, flesh turning to dust. His mouth falls open in abject horror, eyes burning with helplessness.
“Lois,” he says, throat closing on her name.
She lunges, spindly arms gripping down on his shoulders, tackling him into the ground. Above him, her jaw breaks open into a wordless scream.
The air splits with a crack of noise, and beneath him, the earth starts to swallow him whole. Hands are reaching up through the dirt to pull him downwards, bony fingers shackling around his arms, his legs, his chest, around his throat, over his face—
Before he’s dragged down into the depths, Clark hears a hush of sound as something moves closer to stand above him, soft footfalls in the damp grass. A shadow falls over Clark, and looking through the fingers lashed across his face, where Lois once was there’s now a gruesome apparition leaning over him, hovering inches away from his face.
Bruce.
Or what had once been Bruce. The flesh hangs off his bones by a thread. His eyes are an empty void, home to only shadow and death. A whimper slips it way past Clark’s lips, and the fear strikes down on him like a lightning charge.
“Why didn’t you save me?” he wails, and it reverberates in Clark’s ears, echoing through his head until the sound crowds out all thought and sense. It’s all he can hear, and he shuts his eyes so he doesn’t have to see Bruce’s decayed face, but he can still hear the piercing scream and he prays that the darkness will take him before he loses his mind.
Clark gasps, feeling the grit of dirt between his teeth. It’s quiet again, and he’s alone, laying in a crater covered in soil as if he’d just tumbled from the sky like a fallen star. He claws his way out, into the sharp sunlight of high noon. The air is crisp and clean, bright with birdsong and a gentle breeze that caresses his face. The wheat fields of Kansas are stretching out around him, into the distant horizon.
Home. Clark stumbles to his feet, renewed by the sun draping itself across his skin. He can’t—he can’t quite remember how he got there, can’t remember much past the terrible taste lingering in his mouth, and the slight tremble in his hands.
But he’s home now. He’s home and he’s—he should be safe. Everything should be alright. The farmhouse is just ahead, and he flies towards it like a compass pointing to true north.
His feet settle on the rotten wood of the porch. The wind whistles between old planks, the door halfway off its hinges, clanking against the side of the house. The paint is peeled and worn, the boards weathered, cracked. From the doorway, Clark can see that dust has settled on the floorboards in a thick, undisturbed layer.
“Ma?” Clark calls out, hesitantly. His voice is a thin thread of sound. “Pa?”
He walks through the door, although he already knows he won’t find what he’s looking for. The rooms are empty, devoid of any signs of life. The furniture long gone, the walls dry and bare.
Save for a single, framed picture. A faded photo of him and Ma and Pa, from when Clark was eight or so, hair wild from running through the fields, his mouth wide with a joyful grin. His Ma and Pa standing cheek to cheek, arms around each other and around Clark, their eyes brimming with pride and happiness.
Clark’s chest wrings with misery. The house is silent, and he knows there hasn’t been a living soul in these rooms for years. It’s so quiet. He can hear the wind, and the birds singing, and the rustle of leaves and the water rushing in rivers and the waves of the ocean against the shore.
He can’t hear the traffic of Metropolis, wheels skidding against asphalt, car horns and engines rumbling. Shoes scuffing against the pavement. Voices, loud and quiet and everything in between. Not a single heartbeat, except his own.
It’s just him. It has been, for a long while. Years, decades. Centuries. He’s all alone. Everyone else is—
“No,” Clark whispers. “This isn’t real.”
He knows it’s not real, and yet it feels—it feels so real. But there’s something just slightly off about this world; a sort of glassy, burnished edge, if he looks closely enough. He might be asleep, dreaming. Hallucinating.
“Isn’t it?” a voice says. Clark turns, and meets the cold, hard gaze of Lex Luthor. “It will be. One day, the sun will burn out, and you will be there to watch it die. Just as you will watch everyone you love slowly wither and waste away.”
“You,” Clark says, a familiar anger burning in his throat. “I should’ve known. It’s always you, Luthor.”
“Yes. Someone has to put you in your place. A dog without a master is just a wild animal.” Luthor turns his nose up, regarding Clark with an air of superiority. His eyes are flint, his gaze sharp and arrogant in a way that makes Clark’s stomach turn with unease.
“Stop this,” Clark commands. “It won’t work. Whatever you’re trying to do, you won’t win.”
“Are you sure about that, Superman?” Luthor says, venom dripping from every syllable as he spits out Clark’s moniker. “From where I’m standing, I’ve already won.”
Enough of this. Clark knows there’s no point to it, that Luthor will never listen to him. But he still has to try, despite the futility of it, every time, even if it always ends the same. And when that doesn’t work, he has to resort to more physical means, because Luthor is too dangerous to be left to his own devices.
Clark pulls his fist back, reining in his strength just enough to only knock Luthor out. He doesn’t enjoy this part; he just knows it has to be done. Time slows down as his hand shoots through the air, but before the punch can connect, Luthor’s own hand comes up and stops it. His fingers close around Clark’s fist, bones creaking under the force of his grip.
Clark stares at him, eyes wide with shock. Luthor looks back, impassive, as if stopping a hit from Superman is no effort at all.
A wince twists Clark’s face, and a gasp slips past his lips as Luthor tightens his grip, pushing Clark to his knees with the force of it.
“Unimpressive. I thought you were better than this, Superman.”
Luthor’s voice crawls into his ears, an unpleasant hum of sound that makes his teeth itch. A hand closes around his throat and he’s pushed down to the floorboards, Luthor looming above him.
“You think you’re doing humanity a favor, with your little acts of interventions. When will you see that you’re nothing more than a pest?”
The hand on his throat shifts, drawing a distressed noise from Clark, a small gasp of air. Luthor’s malicious smile grows wider, teeth gleaming in the muted light. The hand splayed across his chest grows heavier, bearing down with crushing pressure. Clark can’t move, trapped underneath Luthor’s violent hold, pushing fruitlessly against the ruthless hand that pins him down without effort. His presence is inescapable, engulfing Clark on all sides, so large that it makes Clark feel tiny and insignificant.
He only realizes that the feeling isn’t just in his head, when fingers taller than he is wrap around him—tight, crushing. His arms are trapped against his sides, and he’s being lifted into the air by a hand larger than his entire body. Luthor glares at him with familiar bitter animosity, but Clark has never quite felt this powerless in his literal clutches, held in front of his massive face. Luthor towers like a giant, and Clark struggles uselessly in his grip.
“We would be better off without you,” Luthor’s voice booms around him, shaking the air like thunder. “But perhaps there might be some use to you, as long as you’re kept on a tight leash,” Luthor says, and Clark can’t breathe over the horror rising in his throat. The words slither into his mind, burrowing into his cortex, like planted seeds. He can feel the pure wrongness of it, the sensation of something that doesn’t belong trying to carve out a space for itself where there is none.
Before he can further dwell on the terrible process taking place in his brain, Luthor hand shifts around him. The fingers loosen loosen their grip, and Clark slips from the hand, tumbling downwards through the air. He swallows down a scream as he rapidly hurtles through the pitch black darkness, gravity refusing to obey when he makes an attempt at flight. He’s dead weight, clutching uselessly at the air as it rushes past him.
He lands with enough force to knock the air out of his lungs. Concrete crumbles under his fingers when he tries to push himself up to his feet, and he lifts his gaze to take in his surroundings.
Metropolis opens up around him, its familiar streets and skyscrapers a welcome sight to Clark’s frayed senses. The reassuring drone of traffic and human crowds, the smell of coffee and hot oil from the food carts. It takes him a moment to realize the scale is vastly wrong; his eyeline level with the highrises, despite him still kneeling.
He’s dizzy with the sudden shift in perspective, and wavers on his feet when he finally manages to stand up. He’s slightly taller than the Daily Planet building across town, his massive size taking up the entire street. His brain is still trying to play catch-up, a splitting headache making it hard for him to remember where he’d been just before this. This must be some sort of trick, some illusion or—
Clark barely manages to lift his arms in time to block the hit that flies towards his face.
The force of it pushes him back, and he crashes into the side of the Metropolis Grand Hotel. At his size, it nearly topples beneath his weight, and the screams that erupt from the impact pierce the air.
God, the screams.
Every step he takes wreaks havoc, every movement threatens ruin. Without meaning to, he’s become a force of destruction, and despite his care, he’s demolishing everything in his path. A wave of nausea rises in the back of his throat, despair clawing its way through his chest. People are hurting, dying, and he needs to help them—
Clark shifts on his feet, fighting gravity with his immense mass, and avoids another swipe from the monster ahead of him. It’s about his size, with a tough, scaly hide and blank, monstrous eyes. A long, spiny tail sweeps out behind the creature, crushing cars and people in its path. In the moment that follows, Clark hears some of the screams being abruptly silenced, snuffed from existence just like that. Clark barely had the time to blink. He couldn’t stop it.
“No!” Clark shouts, his voice a deafening roar of sound. He rushes forward, throwing himself at the creature. Moving feels like wading through molasses. He’s not quite sure he’s able to fly at this size, but he has to get it away from the city, from the people. He has to—
Kill it, a voice whispers in his ear. Its tone sends a shiver across his skin; a familiar poisonous cadence that leaves a foul taste in his mouth. His muscles tremble with the effort of staying upright. The creature gives a resounding roar as Clark’s hands start to reach for it, despite Clark’s efforts to control them.
“What—” Clark gasps, feeling a rush of static in his head. A current of dread courses through his veins as he realizes his limbs are moving without his permission, as if commanded.
Do it now, the voice continues, its words piercing him to his core with razor-sharp precision. Luthor speaks as if his voice is beamed straight into Clark’s brain. Kill it.
Like strings on a puppet, Clark’s hands are pulled into motion and they close around the creature’s throat in an unbreakable grip. With gnashing teeth and thrashing limbs, the creature fights to free itself. It rears its head to the side and one of its eyes stares right at Clark, dark and wild and desperate.
Kill it.
Clark’s fist bursts through hot, fragile flesh with a sickening sound. He looks down at his hand, sunk through the creature’s chest.
Oh, God. What has he done? He just—he killed it. He murdered it. Blood, glistening red and nauseatingly warm, soaks his hands. The creature’s eyes are lifeless, and dull, and full of despair. Clark’s heart flutters against his ribs, and his lungs tighten in horror. He didn’t—he didn’t mean to. He didn’t tell his hand to move, he didn’t tell his fingers to clench into a fist, he didn’t tell his arm to pull back for the punch. It was as if his body moved on its own, commanded by that voice burrowed deep into his mind.
Clark closes his eyes, his legs giving out beneath him as he crumples, knees hitting the ground. The voice in his head is gone, leaving him alone with his own roiling emotions; remorse so sharp and intense he can feel it on the back of his tongue. A cold, hard pit opens in his stomach, and he bows his head to the ground, trying and failing to shut out the screams and the smell of copper and the acrid taste burning in his throat. Heat mounts at the back of his eyelids, searing the water from his eyes. It builds, and builds, and he fears it’ll be too much, that he’ll implode with the sheer force of it, and take half the city with him.
A choked gasp forces its way out of his chest. It’s—red, a deep crimson, not his heat vision but something else he realizes when he opens his eyes again. He can hear the hum of the solar generator, and the air smells of antiseptic. He feels a chilled, hard surface underneath his back, and out of the corner of his eye he senses a dark, familiar presence.
“Bruce,” Clark exclaims with relief. He’s wearing the cowl, face unreadable as always. The edge of his cape flutters as he steps towards Clark. “You’re okay. You’re…where am I?”
It’s not a room Clark recognizes. He turns his head, taking in the plain, clinical space. On his left, he can see the gleam of a metal table, with the tools laid out on top of its clean, dull surface. His confusion grows as he realizes his wrists and ankles are shackled fast to the table, his skin laid bare to the stale air of the foreign room, save for a thin, white sheet across his hips.
Bruce tilts his head. “You don’t remember?” Bruce says, and the hairs on the back of Clark’s neck stand up, a shiver working its way down his spine at the pure wrongness of Bruce’s voice. It’s too distant, too uncanny, wrapped in mist and smoke.
“Remember what?” Clark reaches for his memories, trying to recall where he was just before this, but he only finds a gaping void, filled with terror and dread.
“Perhaps it’s for the best,” Bruce says, and here Clark can hear a familiar note of sympathy in the tone of his voice. Clark’s mind reels, wavering between the terrible suspicion that this isn’t Bruce, and the desperate hope that it is.
“What’s going on, what—what are you doing?” Clark asks with quickly growing apprehension as Bruce places a hand on Clark’s bare sternum, the textured surface of his glove harsh against Clark’s naked skin, scraping against his nerves. His fingers feel out the shape of his breastbone, trailing over his ribs, as if mapping out territory.
“You’re too dangerous, Clark,” he says, and hearing those words suck all the air out of Clark’s lungs. “All that power, and no one to keep it in check.”
Clark wants to argue, wants to tell Bruce that’s not true, he’s worked so hard on his control his entire life, Bruce can trust him, but his throat twists in on itself, and he can’t get the words out. He can only listen to Bruce’s cold and detached voice.
“But I can fix that. I will. Your species is remarkable, your biology is extraordinary. Your anatomy holds secrets that will help humanity. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Bruce’s words cut sharper than any scalpel, but Clark still writhes in protest at the sight of the bright, sharp knife in Bruce’s hand, its edge radiating a green glow.
“No—” Clark gasps. Immediately, he feels the sickening effect of the kryptonite as the green poison sinks into his skin, pouring into his bloodstream. His cells are tearing themselves apart, disassembling at the molecular level as the tip of the scalpel lowers to press against the skin of Clark’s chest.
“Kryptonian metabolism burns through anesthetics too fast for them to have any effect. This will hurt,” Bruce says, remorseless. The hand not wielding the scalpel settles firmly on the flat of Clark’s abdomen. “Stay still.”
The first cut is clean and vivid pain. Clark bites down on a groan, trembling with the combined agony of the knife’s sharp incision and the kryptonite’s toxic presence. The second is excruciating, and Clark’s spine arches clean off the table, his chest splitting open with a choked cry.
“Stay still,” Bruce says again, unbothered, and lowers the scalpel to Clark’s skin once more. The blade weaves a tapestry of pain that sears into Clark’s core, impossibly intense and incandescent in its brilliance. There’s no pause or reprieve between the cuts, just pain that builds upon itself and spreads across every inch of skin, burning through his nervous system with terrifying ease. Panic and helpless desperation make him thrash in a futile effort to escape the pain, but there’s no escape. All he achieves is bruises on his wrists and his ankles from the metal that digs into his skin as he tries in vain to tear himself free from his bonds.
“Stop!” Clark shouts, the word scraping in his throat. “Stop, please—”
His pleas crumble into wordless sounds of pain, then into screams of agony that tear at his throat. It’s too much; the pain in his chest, the betrayal of it, the trust and loyalty that he thought he would carry until his last breath. That Bruce is the one to do this, taking him apart, deconstructing him piece by piece as if Clark is nothing more than a specimen to study. A slow, methodical dismantling of both Clark’s body and the decade long friendship with the man Clark would trust with his life.
He doesn’t stop.
Eventually, Clark forgets that he’s screaming.
When Clark awakes, it’s with a strangled gasp and panic burning through his veins. The glow of the red solar lamps is the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes, and for a long, terrifying moment, he’s convinced he’s still in the nightmare with his chest cracked wide open. Maybe he is.
He twists in the sheets, the texture against his skin soft and somehow yet too rough for his frayed nerves. A miserable noise breaks in his throat, and he feels the stale taste of fear and horror decaying on his tongue. His heart pounds in his chest, rattling against his ribcage. The red solar light burns through his closed eyelids.
Something moves above him, and Clark blinks his eyes open. He chokes on a breath as Bruce’s face leans over him, and Clark flinches away.
“Clark,” Bruce says, voice pitched low and soft as he takes a step backwards. “You’re okay. It wasn’t real, what you saw wasn’t real. But you’re awake now.”
Clark’s breath comes in harsh bursts, and he shakes his head. A moment later, the red light switches off, replaced by a sheer white glow. It gets a little easier to breathe, and more so when Clark realizes he’s not restrained to the table. To the bed, he’s on a bed. He’s in the cave, in the med bay. Clark’s pulse ratchets up another notch before his mind tries to ground itself in this reality. He’s still not quite sure whether this is real.
“Clark,” Bruce says again, low and soft and devastatingly careful. Just his name, and nothing else.
It takes a minute for Clark’s body to settle into something that resembles composure. He doesn’t look away from Bruce, not for a single second. Bruce sits still as a statue on the chair next to his bed, shoulders hunched, body language patient and non-threatening. Waiting, letting Clark take his time.
“Did I hurt anyone?” Clark croaks, once he’s collected himself enough to speak. He swallows, his throat dry and scratchy as if he’s been screaming.
Bruce’s expression doesn’t waver. “No,” he says firmly, and relief floods through Clark’s chest. “You were dosed with a kryptonite fear toxin compound. It was potent enough to incapacitate you.”
Clark swallows, or tries to. “Fear toxin.” It wasn’t real, any of it. It’s easy now to look back on it and know: there’s a sort of tarnished edge to the false visions, a synthetic tinge to the memories.
“Yes. You’ve been unconscious for almost three hours. We tried to give you an antidote when we found you, but the combination of kryptonite and your metabolism…”
Clark feels a rush of cold in his veins. He has to close his eyes and will away the image of the cold, white lab and the kryptonite scalpel against his skin. Bruce’s voice is warmer, softer, nothing like the one from Clark’s hallucination.
“It took us a while to synthesize an antidote that worked. That was an hour ago. You’ve been asleep since then.”
“Oh,” Clark says, a small sound that barely reaches the air. “I don’t remember.”
It’s hard to reach past the swirling pool of horrifying visions lurking in his memory. He remembers hearing a scream, and going to find it, and then—fear. Hard, unyielding fear.
“That’s normal. How do you feel?”
Like he’s just lived his worst nightmares. There’s a bone deep exhaustion, as if his limbs are made of lead, and there’s still traces of adrenaline lingering in his system, slowly making its way out.
“I thought you were gone,” Clark whispers before he can stop himself. He recalls the gravestone in vivid detail, every groove and carved line of its polished surface. Of all the gruesome things he saw, that’s what sticks out the most, because he knows one day that will be real.
A hand closes around his wrist, fingers pressing into his skin. Bruce’s thumb settles on his pulse point. “I’m right here,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Bruce extends an arm towards the side table, telegraphing every movement carefully, moving slowly and surely as he reaches for a cup of water and holds it out to Clark, straw first. As he shifts, the light catches the side of Bruce’s face and the lurid, hot red of a blooming bruise there.
“Jesus Christ,” Clark says, eyes locked on the ugly contusion. It’s a miracle it didn’t fracture his jaw or his skull, but he must be in pain. “What happened to you?”
There’s a flicker of hesitation, so brief Clark couldn’t have caught it without years of experience reading Bruce’s microexpressions. “Before we secured you, I had to clear out the Intergang members that you were fighting—who are no longer in possession of kryptonite or fear toxin. We incinerated all of it.”
It’s a brilliant deflection, but not enough to fool Clark. Clark’s stomach turns violently as the realization sinks in. “No,” he says, pleading, and shakes off Bruce’s hand, recoiling from his touch. Bruce wouldn’t lie to him, and he didn’t, but Clark can hear the words he’s not saying just as well. “Bruce—God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
His expression shutters. He shakes his head once, firmly. “It wasn’t your fault, Clark.”
Of course it was. Bruce must’ve tried to hold him down, and probably used the shard of kryptonite in the lead-lined pouch of his belt to do so, or else Clark would’ve caved in his skull as he flailed against him in his fear toxin induced haze. From what Clark can see—and God, he can’t stop looking—Clark’s fist caught him at just the right angle to not dislocate or break anything, but there’s still damage. Burst blood vessels, blood pooling in the tissues underneath his skin. Bruce could probably see it coming; he just couldn’t twist out of the way while also holding Clark down.
Remorse and shame burn in his chest, stinging in his eyes. Bruce watches his composure crumble, and leans in to place his hand on Clark’s wrist again, but Clark cringes away from the touch, shaking his head.
“Clark,” Bruce says quietly, patiently. “You won’t hurt me.”
His throat constricts. “I—”
I already have, he tries to say, but he can’t get the words past the tears welling up in his throat.
The hand that lands on his face is warmer and softer than he could’ve hoped for, gentler than he deserves. Bruce’s eyes are fierce and determined, incandescent in the low light with an intensity that Clark can’t look away from.
“Do you trust me?” Bruce says, low and firm.
He does. God, he does. But his voice is too brittle and Clark fears he’ll break apart if he opens his mouth, so he can only manage a shaky nod.
“Then listen to me when I tell you, it’s not your fault.”
Something in his chest shatters, and he wants to shake his head again and tell him that’s not true, but Bruce’s hand is there, sure and safe, holding him together.
“You’ll be okay,” Bruce says, in that tone that Clark knows there’s no point arguing with.
Clark swallows down the lingering taste of fear clinging to his tongue. The guilt remains. He nods and turns his face into Bruce’s hand, inhaling the scent of his skin—the traces of soap and sweat—soaking in the comforting warmth. He knows that Bruce has already forgiven him, that he would argue that there’s nothing to forgive in the first place—but Clark needs time to accept it. And to forgive himself.
“Okay,” Clark murmurs, and closes his eyes. The nightmares are still there, in the darkness, but so is Bruce, and Clark clings to his presence like a lifeline, a shining beacon to lead him out of the dark.
“Okay.”