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The Watchtower monitor room was silent, save for the soft hum of the computers and the occasional pinging alert flagging the latest disaster needing attention. It was a Tuesday, which meant it was Bruce's shift, which meant the room was very quiet and very organized and the alerts were being triaged with the focused efficiency of a man who had long since decided that the world's problems were best approached as a list.
Clark came in at half past nine and sat in the chair beside him without being invited, which was what Clark always did, and Bruce did not comment on it, which was what Bruce always did, and for a few minutes they sat in the particular companionable quiet of two people who had stopped needing to fill silences with each other.
Then Clark said: "I proposed to Lois."
Bruce paused what he was doing on his tablet. A fraction of a second — barely measurable, certainly not measurable by anyone without Clark's specific and inconvenient set of sensory advantages. He resumed.
"She said yes," Clark continued.
"Congratulations," Bruce said. His voice came out even, which was the correct outcome and which he noted with the detached satisfaction of a system performing as intended. He did not look up from the tablet. Looking up would be a tell.
He heard Clark shift in the chair — that particular adjustment, weight redistributing, the prelude to something. Bruce had catalogued Clark's physical vocabulary over six years without meaning to, and he knew, from the sound of it, that Clark was about to say something he considered important.
"I want you to be my best man."
Bruce's heart did something it was not supposed to do. A single, traitorous beat off the rhythm — brief, a flicker, the kind of weakness he had not permitted himself in years. He was aware, with the cold certainty of a man who had made a study of Clark Kent's capabilities, that Clark had heard it.
He set the tablet down.
He looked at Clark, who was watching him with that expression — the open, serious one, the one that had nothing performative in it, that was simply Clark being entirely himself in a way that very few people ever got to see and that Bruce had spent six years trying not to read too much into.
"I can't think of anyone else I'd rather have it be," Clark said. "You've been there for me in ways no one else has. It wouldn't feel right without you standing by my side."
Bruce took a slow breath. His mind ran the calculation — fast, automatic, the same way it ran all calculations — and arrived, as it always arrived, at the same answer.
"I'll be there," he said. His voice was low and steady and betrayed nothing. He was very good at betraying nothing. "Of course I'll do it. That's not even a question."
Clark smiled.
Bruce had never successfully catalogued Clark's smile in any way that felt sufficient. He'd tried — in the early years, when trying had still seemed like something other than self-destruction — and had arrived only at the conclusion that it was warm, and it was genuine, and it was the kind of thing that made the people in its vicinity feel, briefly, like they were the only person in the room. He was aware that this was not a unique observation. He was aware that Lois Lane had probably arrived at the same conclusion, and had then done something about it.
"Thank you," Clark said, and rested a hand at the base of Bruce's shoulder, briefly, warm even through the layers. "It means more than you know."
He returned to watching the screens.
Bruce remained where he was for a moment, his mind a very organized whirlwind, every feeling filed into its correct location with the practiced efficiency of a man who had been doing this for a long time and had gotten, not good at it, but at least functional.
His chance, he thought, was gone.
He had not, he reminded himself, ever had a chance to lose. This was an important distinction. He opened his tablet and resumed triage.
The alerts continued to come in, steady and small.
He was in the middle of rerouting a dam failure in Maharashtra when he understood, fully and without remaining ambiguity, that he was going to spend the next eight months planning a wedding for the man he was in love with, and then stand at the altar while he married someone else, and then give a speech about it.
He rerouted the dam failure.
He started a new document titled Kent-Lane.
He began to make a list.
The suit was Bruce's idea, in the end.
Clark had arrived at the Watchtower three weeks before the wedding in a slightly harried state, carrying a garment bag over one arm, and had shown Bruce what he was planning to wear, and Bruce had looked at it for a long moment with the expression of a man encountering structural damage.
"Clark," he said.
"I know."
"That suit is two sizes too large."
"It was on short notice."
"Your wedding is not on short notice. You have had eight months."
Clark had the expression of a man who has had eight months and has spent them doing other things. "I've been busy. There was the thing with Brainiac in April, and then the— look, it's fine, it fits well enough—"
"It does not fit well enough," Bruce said, and took the garment bag from him. He looked at the suit inside with the focused displeasure of a man for whom well enough was not a category that existed. "Sit down."
Clark sat.
Bruce called his tailor from the Watchtower, which his tailor received with the equanimity of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by Bruce Wayne. He gave the measurements from memory — Clark's measurements, which he knew in the way he knew most things about Clark, which was without having been asked and without being able to fully account for when he'd started knowing. The tailor did not comment on this. Bruce's tailors did not comment on things.
He spent two weeks on the fabric.
He did not think about why he spent two weeks on the fabric. There was a list — twenty items, organized by relevance, which he had drafted at three in the morning six months ago and had not needed to look at since because he had memorized it — and item five was it is enough to do things well and item six was the fact that you want to give him this does not make giving it to him wrong and item eight was stop reading the list and go to sleep.
He went to sleep. He thought about fabric.
He handed off the completed brief to his tailor and did not, under any circumstances, allow himself to think about what Clark would look like wearing a suit Bruce had spent two weeks designing to his exact measurements and preferences. This was item twelve. He was very good at item twelve.
The morning of the wedding, Clark couldn't do his cufflinks.
Bruce heard him from the corridor — not the swearing, which was minimal and in Kryptonian, but the particular quality of silence around it, the pressurized kind, the sound of a man holding himself together by a steadily narrowing margin. He pushed open the door without knocking.
Clark was in his shirtsleeves, one cufflink in, one in his palm, his hands doing something that Bruce had never seen Clark's hands do before, which was fumble. His fingers moved over the small disc of silver and it slipped and he reached to catch it and Bruce was there first, one hand out, the cufflink dropping neatly into his palm.
"Careful," Bruce said.
Clark laughed — one short, helpless sound that had no humor in it. "Rao, I can't do this." He sat down heavily on the edge of the dressing table, which was not a chair but held his weight regardless. "I'm going to drop the ring, or step on her train, or say the wrong name — is that a thing? Does that happen? I'm going to say the wrong name."
"You're not going to say the wrong name."
"I might—"
"Clark." Bruce crossed to him and handed back the cufflink. "Take a breath."
Clark took a breath.
"In an hour," Bruce said, "Lois is going to walk through those doors and she's going to be extraordinary, which she always is, and your wedding is going to be perfect, because you've planned it carefully and the people who love you are here and nothing is going to go wrong."
"And if it does?"
"If it does, you're still marrying Lois Lane. Who has survived Lex Luthor, three kidnappings I know about personally, and four years of your secret identity. If Luthor blasts the roof off the building today, she'll be annoyed about her dress." He handed Clark the second cufflink. "She'll be fine. You'll be fine."
Clark looked at him. Something in his face had settled, slightly — the edges of the panic receding, the competent, steady person Bruce knew assembling itself from underneath the chaos.
"Thank you," Clark said, which he said to Bruce a great deal and which Bruce had learned to receive without incident.
"Don't thank me yet," Bruce said, and then he caught sight of Clark's tie.
He looked at it for a moment.
The knot was lopsided. Not badly, not visibly so to the untrained eye, but Bruce did not have the untrained eye. He had the eye of a man who had been tying his own ties since he was four years old and had learned, in the intervening decades, that a Windsor knot done incorrectly was not a Windsor knot. It was something else. It was incorrect.
"For Christ's sake, Clark," Bruce said.
Clark looked down at his tie. "What?"
"Did nobody ever teach you how to do a Windsor knot?"
"I did do a Windsor knot."
"You did something in the approximate vicinity of a Windsor knot." Bruce stepped forward. "Let me."
He reached for the tie. Clark went still — that particular stillness, the one that meant he was paying attention, was receiving something with care — and Bruce undid the knot and started again. Over and through. The half-Windsor came first, reflexive, and he moved past it to the full: under, across, up and through, the familiar sequence requiring nothing from him, which meant his attention had nowhere to go except the fact that he was standing very close to Clark Kent on the morning of Clark Kent's wedding, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off him even through the wool of the suit Bruce had spent two weeks on, and was straightening his tie.
He pulled the knot snug.
He looked at it.
He looked, very briefly, at Clark's face, which was close and looking back at him with an expression he did not catalogue.
"There," he said, and stepped back.
Clark turned to the mirror. Something in his reflection shifted — a smile, small and private, the kind Bruce occasionally caught on Clark's face when Clark thought no one was watching.
"It looks good," Clark said.
"It's a Windsor knot," Bruce said. "They always look good. That's the point."
Clark laughed, properly this time, and Bruce turned away and straightened his own jacket and was very focused on the room in general and on nothing in particular.
The church seated two hundred, which meant the aisle was long, which meant the processional was a full, extended affair. Bruce stood in the correct position at the correct time and performed, without apparent effort, the calm composure that was the primary thing he'd been recruited to provide.
Jimmy Olsen took his place at the front of the opposite line — Man of Honor, in a suit that was very slightly too enthusiastic about its own lapels — and caught Bruce's eye and grinned.
"Hell of a day," Jimmy said, at the volume appropriate to a pre-ceremony church, which was low and carried regardless.
"It is," Bruce agreed.
"Couldn't be anyone else up here," Jimmy said. His voice did something slightly complicated on it — affectionate, slightly emotional, entirely genuine. "You know? For either of us. Couldn't be anyone else."
Bruce looked at him.
Jimmy meant it as warmth. He meant it as a shared recognition, a mutual understanding between two people who loved Clark Kent in the uncomplicated way that most people loved Clark Kent: freely, without subtext, grateful to be in proximity to it. He was beaming. He was entirely sincere.
"No," Bruce agreed. "Couldn't be anyone else."
He faced forward.
He breathed.
He did not cry when Lois came through the doors.
He had not been intending to cry — it was not something he did, in public, at all — but the thought arrived anyway as a kind of preemptive inventory, a check of available responses, and was noted and set aside. He had other things to manage. He was managing them.
What he had not been prepared for was Lois.
Not because she was beautiful, which she was — extraordinarily so, the kind of beauty that had nothing to do with the dress and everything to do with the way she walked, the particular set of her chin, the expression on her face that managed to be simultaneously radiant and fierce, as though she were accepting an accolade that was also a challenge. He had known Lois Lane for six years and he had always known she was extraordinary, and none of that was a surprise.
What he had not been prepared for was the way it clarified something.
He looked at Lois Lane walking down the aisle of this small church in her father's arm, and he thought, with a kind of flat and incontrovertible certainty: of course. Of course it was her. Of course it had always been her, had been moving toward her since before Bruce had ever entered the picture, had never been a story in which the ending was uncertain. He looked at Lois and understood Clark's choice in the way that he had always understood it intellectually — Clark loves her, Clark has always loved her — but now felt it, the full and specific shape of it, the inevitability of it.
The grief, which had been his companion for long enough that he'd stopped noticing it most of the time, sharpened briefly and then settled.
He looked at Clark.
Clark was not looking at Lois yet in the way he would look at her in a moment. He was simply seeing her, the first sight of her, and his whole body had done something Bruce had never seen it do before — had simply stopped, had gone fully and completely still, not the trained stillness of Kal-El and not the careful composure of Clark Kent but something that was neither and both and entirely its own thing, the stillness of a man who has just seen the only person he was looking for.
Bruce watched this happen.
He watched Clark's hands stop their faint trembling. He watched the last of the morning's panic drain away, replaced with something clearer and calmer and larger than either of them. He watched Clark's mouth do something that wasn't quite a smile yet — was the moment before the smile, the intake of breath before the word — and he watched Lois find Clark's face from halfway down the aisle and watched her own face answer it.
He held what he was feeling with both hands and he did not drop it.
The officiant had the voice of a man who had done this many times and had never stopped finding it worth doing.
He spoke about commitment. He spoke about the choice, made daily, to remain. The room was very quiet, and the soft light came through the stained glass in colored panels across the floor, and Bruce stood at Clark's shoulder and listened and was aware, underneath all of it, of the specific weight of where he was standing and why.
If anyone present, the officiant said, his voice carrying without effort through the hush, knows of any reason these two should not be joined in marriage—
Bruce breathed.
—let them speak now, or forever hold their peace.
The silence opened.
In the silence, Bruce allowed himself — briefly, precisely, with the clinical detachment of a man reviewing evidence — to imagine it.
He imagined stepping forward. The sound his shoe would make on the stone floor, the way the room would turn, the two hundred faces finding him. Clark turning. He imagined Clark's face in that moment — the confusion first, the searching, the way it would move through several things before arriving at understanding — and he imagined saying the thing he had never said, had never intended to say, had not said in the Watchtower eight months ago or in the dressing room this morning or across a thousand rooftops over six years of Tuesday nights and small disasters.
He held the image in his mind for the duration of one breath.
And then he released it.
It went cleanly, the way well-practiced things went. He had been releasing this particular image, in various forms, for long enough that he knew the shape of the motion. The grip and then the letting go. The understanding that it was never going to exist outside this room, this moment, his own head.
The thing about choosing to hold your peace was that it was, in fact, a choice. That was the part nobody told you. They phrased it as a last resort, as a silence of resignation, but Bruce had found, standing in this particular silence, that it required the full force of something deliberate. You did not hold your peace by accident. You chose it. You chose it the way you chose anything that cost you something: with your eyes open, with the full knowledge of the cost, and with the understanding that some costs were what they were and the paying of them was not the same as loss.
He had chosen this eight months ago in the Watchtower, and he chose it again now.
He smiled.
It was not the Bruce Wayne smile — the magazine-worthy one, the one that was assembled from its component parts. It was something smaller and more honest, and the room was not looking at him and would not have recognized it if they had been.
You may now kiss the bride.
The room erupted.
Clark kissed Lois with the specific reverence of a man who had been waiting his whole life for permission, and Lois kissed him back with the specific certainty of a woman who had not needed it, and the violins climbed, and Bruce stood at Clark's shoulder and looked at them and felt the gladness and the grief as one indistinguishable thing — felt them fully, felt them completely, let them move through him without resistance — and did not look away.
He smiled, and the room did not see it, and it was not for the room.
J'onn found him at the edge of the reception, an hour into the dancing.
He arrived in his human form — John Jones, unremarkable in a dark suit, a glass of something amber in one hand — and came to stand beside Bruce with the unhurried ease of someone who was in no particular rush and had something to say and had decided to take his time about it.
Bruce was watching the floor. Clark was dancing with Lois, and they were doing it badly, the charming badly of two people who were absorbed in each other and had allocated no attention to actual footwork, and the room loved them for it.
J'onn said nothing.
This was, Bruce thought, the particular cruelty of J'onn's company. He never asked. He never pried. He simply arrived and stood beside you with the quiet patience of someone who was already aware of everything and had decided that the most respectful thing he could offer was the knowledge that you didn't have to say it.
Bruce looked at his glass of sparkling water.
"Don't," he said quietly.
"I haven't said anything," J'onn said.
"You were about to say something," Bruce said. "Something kind."
J'onn considered this. "You don't want kind."
"I want," Bruce said, "to watch the dancing and then give my speech and then go back to Gotham."
J'onn was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was so even that it took the sting out of it entirely. "You're carrying it very well."
Bruce said nothing.
"For what it's worth," J'onn said, "what I feel from you is not only grief." He paused. "There's a great deal of the other thing as well. The gladness."
"I know," Bruce said.
"He's happy."
"I know." Bruce looked at the floor — at Clark spinning Lois out and then back in, at the ridiculous warmth of them, at the way Clark laughed when she stepped on his foot. "That was always going to be enough. That was the deal I made with myself. I'm not renegotiating."
J'onn inclined his head slightly. It was not an argument. It was not, Bruce realized, meant to be anything other than exactly what it was — witness. The acknowledgement of another person paying attention to something you were carrying, not to take it from you, but simply so you would know you were not carrying it entirely alone.
"You're a good friend to him," J'onn said.
"I know that too," Bruce said.
He finished his sparkling water. He straightened his jacket.
"Excuse me," he said. "I believe I'm being called upon to dance."
Diana appeared at his elbow approximately on cue, which Bruce strongly suspected was coordinated — she was watching J'onn with an expression of serene plausible deniability — and extended a hand toward Bruce with the easy grace of a woman who was aware that refusing her was a theoretical option and not a practical one.
He took her hand.
They found the floor, and Diana was, of course, an extraordinary dancer — had been dancing at court for centuries before the concept of a waltz had been invented — and moved through the music with an effortless precision that made Bruce, who was not a poor dancer himself, feel appropriately outclassed.
"How are you?" she asked. She said it the way Diana said everything: directly, without softening, with the full force of her attention behind it.
"Perfectly fine," Bruce said.
Diana looked at him.
"Whelmed," he offered. "Neither over- nor under-."
A ghost of a smile. "You gave a very beautiful speech."
"I give beautiful speeches. It's a skill I've developed."
"You meant it."
"I mean most of what I say," Bruce said, which was true in ways Diana would interpret correctly and in ways she wouldn't, which was the appropriate balance.
She turned him through a figure and he followed, and for a few bars he let himself simply be here — in the music, in the motion, in the lit room with the flowers and the voices and the ordinary good warmth of people celebrating something that deserved to be celebrated. Diana was warm too, in the way that all people with a pulse were warm, though less so than Clark, though everyone was less so than Clark, though Bruce was not going to think about that now.
He was thinking about it anyway.
Over Diana's shoulder, Clark was dancing with his mother — Clark bent toward her, Martha's hand at his face, their heads together with the ease of something that had never needed to be built. And Bruce watched and thought, with the specific and useless clarity that arrived uninvited at the end of long days, that it would have been something, to dance with him. Just the once. Just to know the exact weight of his hand and the warmth of him at that distance, and the way he would have looked looking back.
He was aware this was not a useful line of thought.
Someone tapped his arm.
He turned, already recalibrating, and found Tim at his elbow — civilian clothes, the suit that fit him well, the expression of a young man who had been watching something for a while and had decided to intervene with the careful precision that was Tim's specific mode of caring about things.
"Can I cut in?" Tim said. He said it to Diana, politely, which was the correct order of operations.
Diana looked at him. Then at Bruce. Something moved across her face — understanding, and the grace not to name it — and she inclined her head and stepped back and was absorbed into the room with the unhurried ease of a woman who had been making graceful exits for centuries.
Tim stepped into her place.
He was not nearly as tall as Diana, which meant Bruce was looking slightly down at him, which meant he had a direct view of Tim's face doing the thing it did when Tim was being careful with him — the watchful quality, the assessment running quietly behind the eyes.
"You were gone," Tim said.
"I was here," Bruce said. "I was dancing."
"You were somewhere else." He said it without accusation, the flat statement of a man reporting observed data. "I know what that looks like."
Bruce said nothing.
"I just wanted you to know," Tim said, with the careful precision of someone who had rehearsed the register if not the words, "that we see it. Me and Cass and Damian, even if Damian won't say it. You do things that cost you things and you don't tell anyone, and I'm not saying you have to, I just—" He looked at Bruce's face and whatever he found there made him stop. "Okay. Right. Too much."
"It's not too much," Bruce said.
Tim looked at him.
"It's not too much," Bruce repeated, quietly. "I hear you."
They moved through the music for a moment without speaking. Around them the room continued its warm end-of-evening business, entirely indifferent to the specific conversation happening in the middle of the dance floor, which was the correct and appropriate response.
"Lois has been trying to recruit you," Bruce said, eventually. "Since the rehearsal dinner, I believe."
"I think I'm her backup investigative journalist now," Tim said, with the tone of a man who has accepted his fate.
"You could do worse."
Tim almost smiled. "Yeah," he said. "I know."
He found a quiet moment near the end, when the crowd had thinned and the music had slowed, and he stood at the edge of the room with a glass of sparkling water — someone kept handing him sparkling water, he had begun to suspect Diana — and watched the last of the evening settle into itself.
Clark was across the room, deep in conversation with Martha, one arm around her shoulders. He had taken off his jacket hours ago, loosened his tie — but the knot, Bruce noticed, was still straight. Still the Windsor Bruce had tied this morning. He had not adjusted it.
The room did its warm end-of-evening thing. Tables half-cleared, chairs pushed back, the loose gathering of people who were in no hurry for a good night to be over.
Clark looked up.
Across the room, through the soft light and the remaining guests, he found Bruce immediately — the way he always did, which Bruce had catalogued and still could not entirely account for — and held his gaze for a moment.
He did not smile. He just looked, with the specific, unhurried quality of a man who was accounting for something, making sure it was there.
Bruce looked back.
He raised his glass, very slightly. Not a toast. Just an acknowledgement.
Clark dipped his chin in return.
Then Martha said something and Clark turned back to her, and the moment closed, and Bruce lowered his glass and looked at the room — at the flowers and the lights and the last of the dancing and the particular quality of this specific evening, which was almost over and which had cost him something he did not regret.
He was making his peace with it. Not had made — the past tense of a completed process was not available to him, might not ever be. But was making, present tense, ongoing, the quiet work of a particular kind of day that asked you to carry something heavy and smile and mean the smile, and he had done it, and he had meant it, and it was enough.
He finished his sparkling water and found his coat and went home to Gotham, where he belonged, and where the work was waiting, and where the night asked nothing of him except everything — which was, of all the things asked of him today, the most manageable.