Chapter Text
Bruce kicks at a stray ornamental pebble on the paved path and watches it bounce into the rock garden to his right, settling amongst a few thousand others.
Bubbles float by, reflecting rainbows, and laughing children skirt around him like schools of fish parting around a reef. Even the air feels cleaner here, at least in Metropolis proper, where they’ve rebuilt their centralized Go Green Initiative areas after a giant kaiju had wreaked havoc on downtown.
Alfred had shown him the news footage on the drive over, brow raised, and patted him on the shoulder, muttering, “Teamwork solved it, then,” using a tone that would’ve verged on judgmental if it came from anyone else. But Bruce knew better.
The isolation had been difficult for both of them, two lone islands against the world.
Isn’t that what brought you here? Searching for a friend? he thinks, wincing against the bright sunlight, like he was in some idealized world found only in an allergy pill commercial. For fuck’s sake.
More vivid colors here than Gotham ever had to offer with its perpetual clouds, sudden rain squalls, and messy, overly-bureaucratic attempts to fortify itself against different types of terrorism, with varying levels of success.
Metropolis had smiling families that were actually happy, a zero carbon business district, and at least a handful of skyscrapers that partially doubled as affordable housing. And that wasn’t even mentioning their shining beacon of a homegrown hero, he thinks, stopping in front of a bronze statue of Superman that’s a decent likeness but looks more like a hastily drawn caricature than the real thing.
“What a tool,” he imagines Selina saying, scoffing at the statue, maybe defacing it with a bit of nail polish fished out of a small handbag.
A source in Metropolis PD had told Alfred that Selina had been spotted in the vicinity of several high value targets, casing millionaires’ and billionaires’ residences for valuables and any secrets worth a hefty blackmail price.
“I dunno, pal,” the detective had told both of them during a follow-up video call. “Hate to break it to you, but once she takes something or sells it, it’s as good as gone.
“Everyone makes a big stink asking for help initially, but you know, airing big secrets during an official investigation costs a lot. And it’s more than some people are willing to pay.”
“Noted,” Bruce had said, tapping his fingers impatiently on Alfred’s computer desk.
The cop had gotten the hint to move it along.
“Uh, what did you say this chick got from you again?”
“Not important,” Alfred had said. “Just let us know when you spot her next.”
“Wild guess,” the detective says, meaning anything but. “She’ll probably pop up at the LuthorCorp gala in St. Valencia.
“Lex Luthor’s hosting at his personal residence, invitation-only. Last time he brought an event to one of his commercial properties, protestors and unfriendly press showed up, so he made the move to a huge gated community upstate.
“The St. Valencia party’s small since, uh, he’s been dealing with his recent troubles, but he’s probably got a few fifteenth century Ming vases and all that bullshit sitting around somewhere, ripe for the taking.
“Easy money, decent supplemental target pool, plenty of nice places to hide out nearby if she’s got getaway transportation. Just reassure me I’m not gonna hear anything about it if you catch her, get my drift?”
”She’ll be perfectly safe. We just want to talk,” Alfred says, and means it. Luthor on the other hand…
Well, Bruce had a few choice words for Luthor and at least a handful of good sucker punches waiting for him if they ever met.
Bruce had seen the news the day the president had pardoned Luthor of his almost-destruction of Metropolis, the near miss of Bakerline and the rest of the world, and the murder of one of Metropolis’s innocent and most vulnerable residents (well, the one murder that had corroborative eyewitnesses).
Malik Ali, a small businessman with many community ties but no family to his name, had perished in a pocket universe with no one to protect him after kryptonite had rendered Superman weaker than an infant. All in service of one megalomaniac’s uncontrollable ego. Bruce had nearly walked out of the room at the threat of the particular sort of simmering spite—a wounded orphan’s spite—that he had for Luthor boiling over.
But he had stayed, watching the impeding train crash. The president had added something about Luthor being an asset to national security, despite his crimes. That he had executed Malik in service of his country during a military-sanctioned interrogation with no legally applicable terms of engagement, genuinely thinking that Superman was an extraterrestrial terrorist come to doom them all.
Bruce had swallowed down acidic vomit, and reminded himself to establish some sort of trust via Wayne Enterprises’ Metropolis branch under Malik’s name. So he wouldn’t be forgotten. Too many good names in Gotham had gone unsung; too many injustices had, like Luthor’s, gone unchecked and unpunished. If he could make even a little bit of difference—anywhere—he should.
“Better they stand with us than against us”, had been the speech writer’s words about Luthor and a few metahumans and genius-level inmates who had been granted similar leniency. The president had cited Luthor’s more recent efforts to dismantle a rogue AI that had hacked the DOD and almost deployed a host of missiles onto friendly territory and domestic targets alike. The president had looked equal parts stern and reassuring that this decision for Luthor’s release had been the only course of action.
A day later, upon his exodus from prison, Luthor had been engulfed in raucous embraces by a small horde of followers wearing company uniforms as if he hadn’t spent months in two federal penitentiaries meant to house people for life. Nothing more than a rejuvenating vacation away from his irritating board of directors.
Maybe Metropolis isn’t so different after all, Bruce thinks, stooping down to right a handwritten note that’s come off a little clip stuck into the grass at the statue’s foot.
WE LOVE YOU SUPERMAN ♡, it reads, and Bruce snorts, smiling despite himself. The world had been both quick to condemn and then even faster to re-throne its alien savior.
Guess you can’t stay mad at that golden-retriever face for too long, huh.
Bruce is getting to his feet when someone barrels into him from the side, shoulder and hip-checking him hard enough to make him tilt, and Alfred would give him so much shit for not always taking to heart the reams of balance training they’ve done. But sue him, he was Bruce Wayne playing tourist right now and pointedly very much not Batman. He could be fallible, sometimes, like everyone was.
Bruce Wayne had been photographed, in his younger days, drunkenly climbing up the fountain at Gotham General half-naked. Nowadays, even Batman put on his suit one leg at a time.
He puts out a hand to break his fall and is met with a guiding grip along his lower back, supporting him gently and drawing him upwards. He squints into the sun and sees a familiar face hovering above him, a red cape flapping in the breeze. The smells of giant soft pretzels and sugary lemonade waft over from the vendor carts parked nearby.
“Superman,” he says, and realizes belatedly that he can actually stand on his own, needlessly brushing off his suit (black, of course, though no one seemed to really wear true black rather than dark grey around here except limo drivers and the odd banker dressed like an undertaker) just to have something to do.
Superman smiles at him, all blue eyes and curly hair and flashing dimples, some wholesome character from a 50s comic book though he smells, for some reason, like the new Amaffi cologne that’s not even available for public consumption yet. As it stands, Bruce is one of the only people in the country with access to the pre-release.
He has the fleeting and perhaps stupid thought that Superman has perhaps sat across from him at a boardroom table somewhere and that he just hadn’t noticed, too self-absorbed in self-pity and hatred for everyone around him. But no. Despite the name, he didn’t seem to have the overblown ego for it, and that was rare among Bruce’s kind.
“Mr. Wayne,” Superman says, and lets him up, straightening his tie that is the only part of his outfit that had gone askew. “What a nice surprise.”
Bruce blinks, then frowns a bit. “Well, I like to keep under the radar,” he says, noticing the cameras popping out from every corner of the park. Cell phones, fellow tourist Nikons, the odd clunky digital or Polaroid swarming around like flies.
“I noticed that about you. Guess the press like to call you a recluse because it’s less interesting to say you just like your privacy.”
A bicycle cop pulls up, and Bruce swallows whatever else he was going to say, tilting his head towards the handcuffed guy in a chintzy herringbone patterned shirt and running shoes, looking sweaty and defeated as he sulks from his forcibly seated position a few feet away.
“Borrowed your cuffs, sorry, Charlotte,” Superman says, and the cop beams at him, shrugs.
“Makes my job easier,” she says, and Bruce chuckles quietly to himself at the out-of-breath woman who muscles her way through the crowd. Good for her.
“That’ll teach me to blow four paychecks on a damn purse,” she says, taking the proffered item from Superman’s hand. She glares at the handcuffed purse snatcher. If she’d been the one to catch him instead of Superman, Bruce has a feeling the guy would be getting kicked silly by sensible wedge heels right about now.
The woman sighs. “I got two hundred dollars in twenties and some Extra gum in here, you want it?”
Superman replies in the negative.
“Good,” she says, “I still gotta get home, my damn taxi was half an hour late and I hate using my card on Uber, you know how rude my last driver was?!”
Superman regales her with his own story of woe—pulling an Uber driver out of a tree after a car crash, a spin on an old classic. Even after rearranging her schedule (again) to fill out some Metropolis PD paperwork and head to the station for more, the woman leaves smiling, armed with a selfie as irrefutable evidence so the rest of the office would actually believe she’d met Superman today.
Charlotte waves as she and her backup load chintzy shirt into the back of a squad car. Superman waves back.
“You’re really good with that. With people,” Bruce says, unfortunately unable to escape the attention turned on him when the slowly dispersing and now reassembling crowd realizes they’ve caught both Superman and a visiting Gotham billionaire in their snare.
He’d assumed Superman would jet off to another emergency, but he merely sends the rubbernecking crowd off with another jovial wave. He walks with Bruce deeper into the park, smiling and waving again at a new throng of people gathered by the bronze statue that’s supposed to be a life-sized version of him but seems utterly small in comparison to the reality.
“I do my best,” Superman says, as if it is simple as that, and smiles again at Bruce, inhaling quietly as if preparing for a speech. His smile isn’t the blandly warm, public-facing smile from before. It’s personal, it’s disarming, and though Bruce hasn’t been attracted to a man in a very long time, he thinks he understands what people mean when they say he’s someone you either want to be with. Or be. Or both.
“I was debating with myself on whether to bring it up, but I figured I’ve got you now, so…”
Superman clears his throat.
“Someone who was—is! Someone I kn—Someone who’s important to me…was put on a shortlist for a Wayne Medical artificial heart, years ago. The trials at UC Boulder Hospital.”
It takes Bruce a second, but he remembers it. Part of a research trust that his father had set up.
Thomas Wayne was still a sore subject for him, but it was glad to know that not all of the good his father had done in his life had gone to waste. If this story had a happy ending, at least.
“And she’s still going strong! Sixty-three and still kicking. They didn’t think she’d make it to 59.”
Superman’s smile turns almost wistful as he looks out into the faceless horizon behind Metropolis’s sprawling reach.
“I’m not naive enough to think you had a personal hand in everything your company does, but maybe you did have a hand in that research trial. Either way, thank you.”
His expression takes a somber edge, and Bruce has to remind himself not to fall into those eyes as Superman faces him again and he’s fixed in that Arctic blue gaze.
“I also read about you establishing a fund in Mali’s name. He’s gonna be able to help a lot of people, through you.”
Superman sighs. “I worked with someone—Well, I commissioned a few things in Mali’s honor. But it’s nice to know that people all over the country are trying to remember him too.
“I wrote to you, when I saw the news, to say thanks. But your secretary must’ve thought it was a joke, an envelope with no return address claiming to be from Superman.”
“I’m not in the office much,” Bruce says, to lessen the blow, because Superman’s letter probably hadn’t gotten past a skeptical postal service clerk, much less a Wayne Enterprises mailroom.
Superman laughs, a wonderfully rich sound.
“Like I said…Thank you, again. Never thought I’d get a chance to say any of this in person, but this job is funny like that.
“You meet the nicest people,” he says, and Bruce’s heart aches, just a little, thinking, I changed my mind. Selina would love you. Despite her cynicism. Despite herself.
That smile can melt even a cold heart like mine.
“Sure,” Bruce says, and doesn’t ask about who this anonymous special person is to Superman, the one whose heart his father’s medical ambitions had kept beating.
This person is much more amorphous in comparison to Malik Ali, who had been covered in the papers for months after Luthor’s trial, imprisonment, and subsequent release.
Bruce tells himself not to bask in the potential envy that even this Kryptonian god has friends or countless more earth loved ones who are precious to him, precious enough to get him to approach a stranger to thank him for saving their life.
“Alright, I’ll give you that.”
Superman puts his hand out like they’re sealing a business deal, but it’s just a friendly handshake, and Bruce clasps their hands for a brief moment, no posturing. Superman’s hand is warm and dry.
Bruce, however, feels his palm start to sweat a little.
“Thank you for sharing those stories with me,” Bruce says, and Superman grins at him like Bruce is really the one—not just his controversial family name—who just gave the other man a priceless gift. “And thanks for helping me not become a World’s Clumsiest Idiot meme on Twitter.”
“I’m sure you would’ve jumped up in a sec and caught the guy if I wasn’t there,” Superman says, entirely earnest, and not for the first time, Bruce thinks, Is this guy for real?
“Ah, no, all that kind of hero stuff isn’t for me,” Bruce says, trying for the same level of earnestness but probably coming up short.
“Okay, I believe you,” Superman says, only smiling with his eyes.