Archive of Our Own

He’s imagined Clark above him before; hovering over him, close enough that the oxygen between them seems to vanish, leaving them sharing the same heated breath. Clark’s hands are never still in these imaginings of his; they are braced at Bruce’s shoulders, then pinning his wrists, then sliding down to anchor at his hips, as if he is trying to memorize the architecture of Bruce’s body through his palms alone. In these reveries, Clark’s expression always shifts into something unrecognizable—a look Bruce can’t quite put a name to, though he aches to. It is a terrifyingly singular focus, a narrowing of the world until nothing exists beyond the two of them. It’s the kind of gaze that makes Bruce feel painfully and wholly exposed in ways he usually spends his life avoiding.

The thought is never allowed to linger. It gets packed  away quickly, folded into the dark corners of his mind where the shame soon follows, settling heavy and leaden in his chest. Always, before the mental door shuts, the image softens. In those final, flickering moments, Clark’s eyes are impossibly gentle—blue depths devoid of judgment. His smile is a beautiful, warm thing as he traces the line of Bruce’s ribs, his touch featherlight and gentle. 

The version in his head is careful with his weight as it settles over top of him. The real one, as it turns out, is not.

The asphalt gives under Bruce’s back with a low, splintering sound that he feels more than hears, the pavement spiderwebbing outward beneath his shoulders where Clark drove him into it moments ago. His cape has twisted under him, caught somewhere beneath the small of his back, gravel grinding through the armor plates when he shifts even slightly. Above him, Clark kneels in the wreckage of the street like the aftermath of an impact crater, one knee planted hard enough that the ground has collapsed around it, his weight pinning Bruce through the sternum with a force that would pulp something softer than Kevlar.

Bruce exhales carefully through his teeth. Clark’s hands are still on him. He’s not striking yet, but not quite restraining, either. And Bruce is very aware that if Clark tightens his grip even a fraction further the distinction will stop mattering. One hand braces against Bruce’s shoulder, fingers spread too wide across the armor there, the other caught in the fabric of his suit near the collar where the cape fastens. The hold is wrong. Too tight and uncertain, as though Clark had put his hands there in a moment of panic and forgot what they were meant to do next.

Above him, Clark’s breathing sounds ragged. He sounds scared. 

Bruce studies his face. For years now there has been a particular kind of familiarity to this angle—Clark descending from the sky, Clark landing in the field behind the manor, Clark leaning over the console in the cave while Bruce explains something he already understands perfectly well. Bruce has catalogued those expressions with the quiet thoroughness he applies to most things: the small crease that appears between Clark’s brows when he’s thinking, the half-smile he wears when he believes Bruce is being difficult on purpose, the soft, almost embarrassed warmth that flickers across his mouth when Alfred brings them coffee without comment.

Clark’s face now contains none of it. His eyes move too quickly, skittering past Bruce as though searching the empty street for something Bruce cannot see. His head tilts in sharp, abrupt movements that remind Bruce of a radio dial catching and losing signal. His breathing is shallow, uneven.

“Clark,” Bruce says. The name lands somewhere in the space between them. Clark’s gaze snaps back to him with the suddenness of a striking animal. For one strange second Bruce has the distinct impression that Clark hadn’t realized he was there at all, despite Bruce being painfully pinned beneath his body and the crumbling pavement. 

“Clark,” he repeats, slower this time.The street around them is wrecked—the remains of the warehouse raid scattered across the block behind them in a spill of broken glass and bent steel. Somewhere in the distance a siren starts and stops again. Bruce watches Clark carefully. “Clark.” 

Clark flinches. That, at least, confirms the suspicion Bruce had the moment he saw the dispersal rigs in the warehouse. The first rule of dealing with Scarecrow is that he does not repeat himself if he can help it. The original toxin had already failed against Superman more than once—Kryptonian neurochemistry metabolized it too quickly, the compound breaking down before it could meaningfully interfere with Clark’s limbic system. And it seems, he had taken that failure personally.

Which meant the rows of sealed canisters Bruce found tonight had never been intended for Gotham’s usual clientele. They had been specifically meant for Clark. Bruce had recognized the design immediately once the emitters activated. The compound wasn’t meant to be inhaled. It was meant to interact with Clark’s senses. Microscopic particulate suspended in the air—each particle carrying a trace of synthetic kryptonite radiation, not enough to weaken him physically but enough to anchor itself to Kryptonian neural receptors. Once attached, the particles vibrated in response to external sound waves, feeding distorted signals directly into the sensory cortex. Fear toxin that bypassed the bloodstream entirely. A hallucination delivered through Clark’s hearing.

Clark had flown straight through the dispersal field when he arrived, and Bruce had seen the moment it hit him. Clark had landed hard in the middle of the warehouse floor, gone very still, and said Bruce’s name like he had suddenly forgotten what it meant or who it belonged to. Thirty seconds later the first wall came down. Clark’s fingers tighten now where they clutch Bruce’s suit. His head tilts again—sharp, searching, worried. 

Clark isn’t looking at the street. Clark is listening. Which means whatever Scarcrow designed this toxin to do, it’s happening inside the same sensory system Clark uses to map an entire city at once.

Bruce keeps his voice low. “It’s targeting your hearing,” he says, hoping beyond any sense of reason that maybe explaining the situation to Clark could ease the shaking man enough for Bruce to get out from underneath him and think of a counterattack. “Your brain is trying to process too much information at once.” 

Clark shakes his head sharply. “No,” he breathes sharply. Bruce studies him. Clark’s gaze has dropped again. Not to Bruce’s face, but to the center of his chest. The hand fisted in Bruce’s collar tightens, knuckles whitening through the glove. Clark looks horrified, like a rabid animal fighting with itself and losing. 

“Kal,” Bruce tries carefully.

Clark’s voice breaks. “He's gone.” 

Bruce goes still. Who's gone? Clark’s grip shifts—subtle, but decisive. One hand at Bruce’s chest tightens, the other slides lower along his armor, repositioning as though bracing for impact. Bruce feels it then: the change in intent. Whatever Clark is hearing, it has crossed a threshold. The hands around Bruce’s collar slide further up his neck, squeezing. 

Bruce forces his tone to remain even. “There is no secondary trigger,” he says. “There is no city-wide dispersal. You’ve already neutralized the warehouse. Your job is done. You did well.” 

Clark doesn’t respond. His eyes are fixed on Bruce’s chest now with an intensity that makes Bruce’s skin prickle beneath the armor.

“You hurt him.” His gaze isn’t tracking Bruce’s face, isn’t reading expression or movement or any of the micro-signals Clark usually parses faster than anyone alive. It’s fixed lower, sharpened to a single point, like he’s listening past him—through him—cataloguing something Bruce cannot hear. And that’s when it settles, cold and awful: Clark isn’t looking at him. He’s aligning him. Matching outline to threat, voice to interference, heartbeat to a pattern that no longer belongs to Bruce in Clark’s mind. Whatever the toxin is feeding him has overwritten recognition with purpose. Bruce isn’t a person in this moment—he’s a variable. An obstacle. Something to be contained before it can do more damage.

He wonders what Clark is seeing right now; Lex, Scarcrow, some composite horror stitched together from every man Bruce has ever put in the ground and every one Clark has ever failed to save. The toxin wouldn’t need precision—just proximity. Familiar voices, borrowed cadences, the suggestion of a threat where one could plausibly exist. 

Clark inhales sharply, and Bruce feels the shift in pressure as Clark adjusts his weight again. The asphalt groans underneath them.

Clark’s voice drops lower. “Don’t move,” he says carefully. Bruce’s mind runs ahead. If Clark is convinced Bruce is a threat, then any movement could be interpreted as hostile. The toxin would be layering signals—false auditory cues, possibly even overlaying someone else’s voice onto Bruce’s speech. Which would explain Clark’s hesitation. He is still trying to prevent any escalation.

“Clark,” he says quietly. “Look at my face.”

Clark does, and for half a second, something flickers across his expression—confusion trying to surface through the toxin’s interference.

“You already—” he tries again, voice rough with strain, like he’s forcing it through interference. His grip tightens involuntarily at Bruce’s throat, not crushing—not yet—but getting pretty damn close. “I heard it.” 

Clark’s eyes flicker, unfocused for a fraction of a second, then sharpen again with terrible, misplaced clarity. “I heard his heart stop.” Clark swallows hard, jaw tightening as if bracing himself against something already decided. “You don’t get to—” he starts, then falters, breath hitching again. “You don’t get to stand there and—”

His gaze drags over Bruce’s face like he’s trying to reconcile something that won’t resolve. “You’re using his voice,” Clark says, quieter now, horrified in a way that has nothing to do with what’s actually in front of him. “That’s—” He cuts himself off, something like anger flaring up to smother the fear. “It’s not going to work.”

Bruce has spent his life reading bodies in motion, cataloguing the difference between hesitation and commitment, between threat and follow-through. Clark’s posture settles—not tighter, or necessarily more aggressive, but decided. The uncertainty bleeds out of him in increments, replaced by an absolute certainty built on a false premise.

This is what Clark looks like when he believes there is only one correct outcome, and it is not one Bruce will walk away from if he doesn't figure out how to calm Clark down. 

He’s not stupid. For all the training, the planning, the obsessive certainty that most problems can be reduced to variables and solved with enough time, there are limits he has never pretended not to understand. Batman is still built on a human frame—bone that can splinter, organs that can fail, a heart that will stop if enough force is applied in the right place. There is no contingency that changes that fundamental truth. And Clark—Superman, is something else entirely. Not invulnerable, not untouchable, but operating on a scale that renders Bruce’s durability useless by comparison. The hand at his throat isn’t even tightening yet, and it already borders on unbearable; the weight of him is careful, restrained, and still it threatens collapse. There is no armor in the world that evens this equation. No strategy that makes this a fair fight. If Clark decides—truly decides—to apply force without restraint, then this ends exactly one way.

Bruce has seconds, if he’s lucky, so he makes a decision. Slowly—so slowly it cannot be mistaken for aggression—Bruce shifts one hand toward his belt.

Clark notices instantly, his eyes snap down, and his grip on Bruce’s neck tightens. Bruce feels cartilage shift where it meets bone, and the sudden urge to scream is an overwhelming thing. The earlier slam into asphalt blooms back to life across his spine, a deep, spreading ache that radiates outward with every shallow breath. His ribs grind where they’ve already been compromised, each expansion of his lungs catching on something sharp and agonizing. His shoulder protests where it took the brunt of a miscalculated deflection, muscle pulled tight and unresponsive. Even his hands—steady, always steady—throb faintly from where they struck against something stronger than they were built to withstand.

Bruce keeps his movements minimal, transparent. “It’s not a weapon,” he rasps, which may or may not matter, and draws the small containment case from his utility belt. The faint green glow spills across the pavement.

Clark’s eyes flicker, and for the briefest moment, Bruce sees clarity return. Not recognition or understanding just yet, just pure, plain confusion. Bruce doesn’t waste it. With a controlled motion, he removes a calibrated fragment—a small, contained, non-lethal dosage. He rams it into Clark before he can think, the fragment striking Clark’s chest plate and adheres.

The reaction is immediate. Clark inhales sharply, muscles locking as the radiation interacts with his physiology. The toxin’s resonance destabilizes further, caught between external interference and internal overload. He staggers backward, Bruce taking the opportunity to roll to the side as the weight lifts off him.

Dick’s arrival is almost simultaneous—red-yellow-green blur entering from the edge of the street on hurried feet. He takes in the scene in one glance: wrecked pavement, Bruce on the ground, heaving and gasping for breath, Superman illuminated by green light and trembling on unsteady legs. 

“B—what the hell?” Dick demands, already moving.

Clark drops to one knee under the combined interference, blinking rapidly as the hallucination collapses in fragments. Bruce pushes himself upright despite the pain, watching Clark fight himself like a scared animal with its leg caught in a trap. 

Dick steps between them immediately, defensive but cautious, clearly still trying to read the situation and figure out what the hell had just happened. 

Clark’s gaze is unfocused, torn between signals. He sways once, and Bruce starts to mentally prepare himself to have to actually try and fight Superman, but the toxin’s interference and the radiation’s destabilization finally cross a threshold. His eyes roll slightly, and he finally collapses forward.

Dick runs to catch him. Bruce moves despite the protest from his ribs, helping lower Clark safely to the ground rather than letting him fall uncontrolled. He’s is unconscious within seconds. The glow from the kryptonite dims as Bruce retrieves it and seals it back in his pocket.

Silence settles over the street. Dick looks at Bruce, confusion and concern competing in his voice. “Why was he attacking you?”

Bruce exhales slowly. “Scarcrow engineered a sensory-resonance variant,” he says. “Designed specifically for Superman.”

Dick’s jaw tightens. Bruce meets his eyes briefly. “He believed I was someone else,” Bruce adds. 

That earns a pause. “…So he didn’t know?” Dick asks. He sounds almost hopeful, and only then does Bruce realize how terrible it must be for a kid to see his biggest hero with his hands around his fathers neck. 

“No,” Bruce says. He looks down at Clark. His brows are still pinched, face twisted like he’s still living a nightmare even in the depths of sleep. Before he can truly ruminate on the ache in his chest and pounding of his heart, his knees are caving, adrenaline finally giving way to bone deep exhaustion and pain. He hears Dick say something that sounds panicked and frantic, but all he can get out in response is: “Call—Call the league. He’s not safe” and whether he means Superman from the world, or the world from Superman, he doesn't know. 

Bruce wakes to the sound of porcelain. To the faint, little clink of cup against saucer somewhere beyond the door. The manor is quiet in that particular way it only is after something catastrophic has happened: the air scrubbed clean, the world pretending it has not nearly ended. His ribs protest when he tries to inhale, bandages tighten around his torso, binding heat into the bruises beneath. There’s a dull ache along his shoulder where armor gave way to pavement. Someone has removed the suit; he is in cotton, not Kevlar, and that alone tells him how badly things went.

He opens his eyes to a dim room, curtains drawn against morning light. A glass of water waits on the nightstand along with a tray, and four tiny pills in neat rows. Alfred is in the chair near the window, reading something on a tablet. He looks up at Bruce’s disgruntled sound. “You’re awake,” He observes.

Bruce shifts slightly, pain flaring in his side and face, “Clark,” he says immediately, voice hoarse and scratchy. 

Alfred’s eyes lift. “Yes,” Alfred replies. “Master Kent is secure.”

Bruce pushes himself up despite the pull in his ribs. “Is he conscious?” God, speaking hurts. 

“Not at present.”

That is not nearly reassuring enough. Bruce swings his legs toward the edge of the bed. The room tilts faintly as he steadies himself with one hand against the mattress. “The toxin,” he says. “Has it fully metabolized?”

Alfred sets the tablet aside. “It has,” he confirms. “The resonance compound was neutralized with your…intervention. Combined with the kryptonite exposure, the neural interference collapsed entirely. Master Kent’s physiology processed the remainder without complication.”

Bruce absorbs that in silence. “Any lingering effects?”

“None detectable,” Alfred says. “Physically or neurologically. He is, by all medical accounts, quite himself again.”

Bruce exhales slowly. The words should settle something inside him. They do not. “Good,” he says. But his tone betrays him.

Alfred studies him for a long moment, the way one might study a structural fracture rather than the building itself. “You have sustained considerable injury,” Alfred remarks gently.

“Report?”

“A minor skull and laryngeal fracture, two broken ribs, and multiple shattered bones in your right arm and hand. For going head to head with Superman unprepared, it is a miracle you aren't worse.” 

Bruce ignores that. “I need to see him.”

Alfred rises. “Master Bruce.” The warning in the address is quiet but unmistakable.

Bruce’s jaw tightens. “If there are residual psychological artifacts—”

“There are not,” Alfred interrupts calmly. “The toxin’s effects have passed. Master Kent is stable. Resting. And, at present, unwilling to receive visitors.”

Bruce goes still. The room seems to narrow around him. “Unwilling?” he repeats.

Alfred folds his hands neatly in front of him. “When he regained consciousness in the cave, he requested privacy. He asked that you be informed of his condition, and that you not come down.”

Bruce’s pulse shifts, and he feels something heavy and nauseating settle deep in his gut. “He’s awake.”

“Yes.”

“And he’s lucid.”

“Entirely.” Bruce processes that in measured silence. Alfred continues, voice even. “He expressed concern that seeing you might be…difficult.”

Bruce’s eyes sharpen. “Difficult.”

Alfred does not soften it. “He remembers the fight,” he says. “Including the circumstances under which it ended.”

Bruce’s fingers flex once against the mattress. The kryptonite. The restraint. The way Clark looked at him in the street—confused, desperate, convinced Bruce was somebody else, someone who wanted to hurt him. Of course he’s upset. Of course he’s taking what happened personally, blaming Bruce, blaming himself. 

Bruce’s ribs ache as he stands, but he wobbles to his full height anyways.  Alfred steps forward, not to block him, but to steady the tray before it can fall. “You may be concerned,” Alfred says quietly. “But Master Kent is not fragile. He is recovering quite well.”

Bruce meets his gaze. “And emotionally?” he asks.

Alfred hesitates only a fraction. “That,” he says, “will depend largely on how you choose to approach it.” The implication is clear, and Bruce goes very still. Alfred continues, softer now. “He believes he frightened you.”

Bruce’s throat tightens despite himself.

“He did,” Bruce admits. 

He can say it because it is Alfred. Because there has never been any use in posturing here—no tactical advantage in denial, no version of the truth that Alfred has not already accounted for and quietly filed away. Alfred has seen him concussed and shaking, blood-slick and barely standing, sobbing and shaking, has watched him be stitched back together at kitchen tables and cave benches alike; has borne witness to every fracture Bruce has ever tried to pass off as negligible. If there is a place where fear can exist without being weaponized, it is here. And still, the admission sits wrong in his mouth, heavy and ill-fitting, offering no relief in its honesty. 

Because fear, as a category, has never once meaningfully aligned with Clark. Clark—who calibrates his strength down to the smallest increment, who hesitates before contact, who treats Bruce’s body like something that could be damaged simply by being held too tightly. It has, more often than not, been a point of irritation—that carefulness, that relentless gentleness, the way Clark goes out of his way to avoid leaving even the suggestion of harm. Bruce has built entire arguments around it, has pushed back against it, has tried, unsuccessfully, to teach Clark that he is not as fragile as he insists on believing. 

There had been nothing careful in the street. Nothing measured. Pinned beneath him, breath crushed thin in his chest, Bruce had felt the exact measurement f his own limits with a terrifying clarity—had felt cartilage give under pressure, felt the precarious, terrifying shift of his windpipe beneath Clark’s hand. And when he had looked up, there had been no recognition in Clark’s face. No restraint shaped by familiarity, no instinct to pull back. Just terrifyingly inhumane force waiting to be applied. 

There is nothing passive in the way Clark moves through the world, no unthinking gentleness that exists without effort; every softened touch, every recalibrated grip, every moment of hesitation before contact is deliberate, upheld with the kind of constant awareness Bruce knows is exhausting to maintain. Clark does not spare him because he must. He spares him because he chooses to. It leaves something in him split open, raw in a way he does not have the language to contain, because it strips him of the illusion of parity he has spent a lifetime constructing. 

There is no contingency for this, no strategy that evens the scale if Clark ever decides—truly decides—to use his strength without mercy. Nothing Bruce has built, nothing he is, would be enough to stop it. The realization lands somewhere deep, in the same place all the others have lived—the quiet, accumulating evidence that proximity and comfort has never guaranteed safety, that trust has always carried an element of risk he cannot fully mitigate.

He has been here before, in different forms, under different hands—has learned, over and over again, what it means to miscalculate the limits of another person’s restraint. And for all that Bruce has trained himself to accept risk as a constant, to move through it without hesitation, this—this total, undeniable defenselessness—lodges somewhere deeper than fear.

Alfred nods solemnly. “Then perhaps,” he says gently, “it would be prudent to allow him the dignity of processing that without immediate intervention.”

Bruce understands what is being asked. Do not rush in to fix it. Do not treat Clark like a crisis to be solved. 

Finally, Bruce nods. “Where is he?”

Alfred allows a faint, almost imperceptible sigh of approval. “In the guest wing. Resting. Under observation, though he has insisted he does not require it.”

Of course he has. Bruce turns toward the door, a limp in his step. 

Alfred speaks once more. “Master Bruce.” Bruce pauses. “You did what was necessary,” Alfred says simply. “And Master Kent knows that.” Bruce pauses with his hand on the doorframe, the words settling somewhere just shy of useful. Necessary has never been a comfort. He inclines his head once—acknowledgment, not really agreement—and steps into the hall before Alfred can say anything further.

He does not make it three steps. “Bruce—?”

The name hits the space sharp and breathless, followed immediately by the uneven rhythm of hurried footsteps. Dick appears at the far end of the corridor a second later, having clearly abandoned any pretense of composure somewhere between wherever he’d been stationed and here. He’s not in uniform anymore, but the urgency hasn’t left him with it—shirt half-buttoned, hair still damp at the temples, eyes already scanning, assessing, counting. He closes the distance quickly, gaze snagging on every visible point of damage like he’s trying to catalogue it faster than it can get worse.

“You’re up,” Dick says, too fast to be casual, already reaching for him before he seems to consciously decide to. His hands hover first, hesitating, then settle carefully at Bruce’s arm, his side, not restraining but close enough to catch if needed. “Alfred said you weren’t awake yet, I was—” He cuts himself off, jaw tightening as his eyes flick briefly to Bruce’s throat, then lower, to the way he’s holding himself. “You shouldn’t be walking.”

“I’m fine,” Bruce says automatically.

Dick makes a quiet, frustrated sound that doesn’t even attempt to hide what he thinks of that. “Yeah,” he mutters, “you really look it.” His grip adjusts, firmer now—not enough to force, but enough to make it clear he’s not stepping back from this. There’s something else under it, too, something stronger than irritation, harder to file away. “What the hell happened?” he asks, voice lower.

Bruce doesn’t answer immediately, and Dick exhales through his nose, a controlled effort that doesn’t quite succeed. “I saw him,” he adds, quieter now. “Out there. I saw—” His mouth presses into a thin line, the rest of the sentence collapsing under its own weight. His eyes flick up again, searching Bruce’s face with something that is not quite fear, not quite anger, but close enough to both that the distinction stops mattering. “He hurt you.”

It isn’t a question. Bruce meets his gaze. “He wasn’t in control. I’m sorry you saw it happen.”

Dick’s expression shifts, but it doesn’t ease. If anything, it hardens—like he’s trying to fit that explanation into what he saw and finding the edges don’t quite align. “I know that,” he says quickly, like he needs Bruce to understand that much, at least. “I know that.” A beat. “But you were still—” He gestures, abrupt and helpless, like there isn’t a clean word for it. Pinned. Hurt. One second away from—

Bruce’s jaw tightens, just slightly. “I handled it.”

Dick lets out a short, humorless breath. “Yeah,” he says. “You always do.” But there’s no bite in it—just something strained, something pulled too tight to snap but not by much. His hands shift again, more deliberate now, bracing Bruce a fraction closer to upright when he sways almost imperceptibly. “Where are you going?”

Bruce doesn’t look away. “Coffee.”

Dick stills and stares at him for a second like he’s misheard. “…Coffee,” he repeats, flat.

Something in Dick’s expression tightens at Bruce’s lack of reply, the thin thread of restraint finally giving way. “You’re not serious,” he says, and there’s no attempt to soften it now. His grip firms at Bruce’s arm, not enough to stop him outright, but enough to make it clear he’s not letting this slide. “You’re not gonna go confront him?”

Bruce’s gaze flicks to him, sharp but steady. “No.”

Dick lets out a disbelieving breath, a short, humorless sound. “He nearly killed you,” he says, the words landing harder this time, stripped of the earlier hesitation. “And you’re just—what? Pretending it didn't happen?”

“I’m not pretending,” Bruce replies, voice even. “There’s no fight to be had, Dick. I get that you’re upset—“

“Then what do you call it?” Dick shoots back immediately. 

Bruce exhales slowly, the motion careful against his ribs. “He requested to be left alone.”

Dick blinks at him, like that answer is somehow worse. “So?” he demands. “Since when do you just take that at face value? Since when do you not push when something’s wrong?” Bruce doesn’t answer right away. That silence stretches, and Dick’s frustration only sharpens in the space it leaves behind. 

“Bruce,” he presses, lower now but no less intense, “he had his hands around your throat. I saw it. I saw you not fighting back because you couldn’t.” His jaw tightens, something raw slipping through at the edges, and only now does Bruce see the tear stains on his cheeks. “And now you’re just gonna give him space like that fixes–?”

“It’s not about fixing it,” Bruce says.

“Then what is it about?” Dick snaps.

Bruce meets his eyes. “Not making it worse. He doesn’t want to see me, and I'm in no mood to deal with more of Superman’s anger today.” 

That stalls him—just for a second. Dick’s mouth opens, then closes again, like he’s trying to argue with that and can’t quite find the angle. The anger doesn’t disappear, but it falters, thrown off balance. “…You think going down there would make it worse?” he asks, quieter now, but still tight.

Bruce doesn't answer, because Bruce doesn't know. He’s completely out of his depth here. Dick searches his face, like he’s looking for hesitation, for doubt—anything he can push against. There isn’t any. That, more than the answer itself, seems to frustrate him. “So you’re just going to leave him alone with it,” he says. “With the fact that he almost—” He cuts himself off again, breath catching slightly before he forces it back under control. “That he did that to you.”

Bruce’s expression doesn’t shift. “He already knows.”

“That’s not the point,” Dick says, sharper again. “The point is you don’t just—walk it off like it’s nothing.”

“I’m not,” Bruce says.

Dick huffs out a breath, running a hand through his hair, agitation bleeding through every movement. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Bruce doesn’t rise to it, which only seems to make it worse. God, he’s getting tired of the teenage angst.  “You always do this,” Dick continues, voice tighter now, the frustration starting to tip into something more personal. “Something happens, something bad, and you just—compartmentalize it, move on, act like it’s already handled.” His gaze flicks again, involuntarily, to Bruce’s throat before snapping back up. “This isn’t handled, Bruce.” Dick exhales slowly, like he’s trying to pull himself back from the edge of something. When he speaks again, his voice is lower, but it hasn’t softened. “You’re not even a little pissed?” he asks. “Not even a little angry at him?”

Bruce’s gaze shifts, something quieter passing through it. “No. And you shouldn’t be either.” He says. He could be angry at the toxin, at the design, at the deliberate cruelty of something engineered to turn Clark against his own senses—but not at Clark himself. Not at the man who has spent years bending himself, instinct by instinct, into something safe to stand beside. Not at someone whose worst moment still carried hesitation, still fractured under the weight of what he thought he’d done. Bruce is unsettled—deeply, irrevocably so, in ways that will not resolve quickly—but anger doesn’t take root. It never has, not where Clark is concerned. Because even now, with the memory of it still sharp in his body, what lingers isn’t resentment. 

Dick opens and closes his mouth, ready to argue some more, and if Bruce weren’t so focused on trying to keep himself upright, he’d have half the mind to find it sweet that his kid cares enough to feel defensive on his behalf, even towards someone he admires. After a moment, the fight bleeds out of Dick in increments, leaving something more worn in its place. He shakes his head once, short and frustrated.

“Unbelievable,” he mutters, though there’s no real heat left in it—just lingering tension, unresolved and heavy. His grip loosens slightly, but he doesn’t step away. “…You’re still not fine,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, though it carries more weight than anything else he’s said.

“I know,” Bruce replies.

Dick huffs out a breath. “Yeah. Clearly.”

A beat. “Coffee,” he repeats after a moment, and Dick falls into step beside him, tiny arm wrapped around his own.

The headlines are projected in stark white across the League conference wall: “Superman incident under review.” “City block damaged during unconfirmed threat response.” “Calls for oversight increase.” The letters glow cold against the darkened glass, reflected faintly across the polished surface of the conference table until the entire room seems papered in accusation.

Bruce reads them without expression, though the sight of Clark’s name—flattened into incident, into threat response, into something administrative and impersonal—sets something sharp and irritated moving low in his chest. There is a particular kind of cruelty in the way the world insists on translating fear into headlines, trauma into optics, reducing a moment stolen by terror into something digestible enough for public outrage.

Diana stands near the table, arms folded across her chest, posture composed in the way only she can manage—neither defensive nor accusatory, but undeniably braced. Barry is slouched back in his chair with all the restless discomfort of someone forced to sit still inside a situation he cannot outrun. His knee bounces once beneath the table before stilling. Arthur looks unimpressed by the entire concept of media cycles, broad shoulders angled back, mouth set into that familiar line of irritation he reserves for surface politics and human bureaucracy. Victor is quiet, attention split between the room and the data feeds ghosting across the interface at his wrist, information flickering in cool blue against the dimness. Hal is absent, off-world, assigned elsewhere.

And Clark is seated at the far end of the table, uncharacteristically removed from the others, shoulders drawn in, hands folded too neatly in front of him like he is afraid of what they might do if left idle, and he, very pointedly, does not look at Bruce.

For a moment Bruce simply stands there, taking in the room and the silence that has settled over it like dust after a collapse. League meetings are rarely quiet. There is usually noise before the formalities begin—Barry talking too fast, Hal needling Arthur, Diana’s low laughter, Clark’s warm interruptions smoothing over tension before it ever has the chance to sharpen. The Watchtower is built for crisis, yes, but it has always held something like camaraderie within its steel bones. The silence is defeating now, and wholly uncharacteristic. The absence of ease presses against Bruce’s skin.

Diana is the first to break it. “The public narrative is shifting,” she says, voice calm. 

The screen changes, footage flickering across the wall in grainy security resolution: the warehouse interior, fractured by shadow and broken light. Clark moving too fast for the frame to fully hold him. The impact against concrete. The split-second distortion of a body thrown into a wall. Bruce’s body. 

Even expecting it, the sight is jarring. There he is in black and grey, body twisted wrong against the warehouse floor, cape tangled beneath him, Clark above him in a blur of force and panic and something that had not been his.

“The footage from the warehouse incident has been edited and circulated widely,” Diana continues. “It suggests Superman lost control.”

Barry grimaces immediately, face tightening. “That’s not what happened.”

“No,” Victor agrees, voice level, eyes still fixed on the data feed, “but perception often overrides fact.”

Bruce folds his hands in his lap. It is the only stillness available to him. His skin crawls beneath the thinly veiled concern that keeps passing between them all in glances too brief to be called staring but too frequent to be accidental. He can feel it landing on the bruising at his throat, on the fading discoloration beneath his eye, on the knowledge of what the room is too polite to name aloud. The cowl spares him the worst of their scrutiny, concealing the fading discoloration beneath his eye, the exhaustion etched too sharply into the lines of his face, but it does nothing for the bruising that still climbs above the collar of the suit, dark and unmistakable at the line of his throat.

Clark still does not look at him. That, more than the footage, more than the headlines, more than the impossible brightness of the accusations burning across the conference wall, is what begins to grate.

Diana turns slightly toward him. “You were present.”

Bruce lifts his gaze from the footage. That’s certainly one way to put it. “Yes.”

She exhales slowly through her nose. “So what actually happened?”

The room seems to shift around the question, the silence pulling taut in its wake. Every gaze in the room settles on Bruce at once—Barry’s open concern, Victor’s sharp, clinical focus, Arthur’s visible impatience with the entire exercise, Diana’s expectation. Bruce feels something cold and deeply familiar settle beneath his ribs, something old and ironclad, the instinctive bracing that comes with being watched, assessed, and quietly expected to provide order to something already threatening to come apart. 

Bruce keeps his voice even, deliberately stripped. “He was exposed to a sensory-resonance variant of fear toxin,” he says, each word measured, clinical enough to steady the room without flattening the truth of it. “Engineered specifically to bypass Kryptonian physiology. It interfered with auditory processing and introduced false cognitive overlays.” The language lands the way he intends it to: technical, precise, something the League can understand without immediately turning toward guilt or blame. 

Across the table, Barry blinks hard, the horror of it written plainly across his face. “That’s…horrifying.”

“I believe it was intended to create misidentification,” Bruce continues, gaze fixed somewhere just past the reflected headlines on the conference wall, unwilling to let himself look too closely at the footage still frozen there. “He believed I was a threat.”

 A quiet ripple moves through the room at that, the sort of restrained reaction born of people trained not to overreact even when the thing in front of them is monstrous. 

Victor straightens almost imperceptibly, attention sharpening. “So he wasn’t targeting you.” 

Bruce’s jaw tightens beneath the cowl, the memory of concrete at his back and Clark’s hands at his throat rising sharp and unwelcome before he forces it back down. “No,” he says, voice low and certain. “He was attempting to neutralize what he perceived as a danger.”

Arthur leans forward with a faint crease between his brows. “And the kryptonite?”

Bruce’s jaw flexes once—small enough that only someone watching closely would notice, but it tightens all the same, a reflex he does not bother to suppress. “Used as a temporary destabilizer,” he says evenly. “To break the toxin’s interference pattern.” 

“You made the call quickly.”

“Yes.”

At the mention of kryptonite, Clark looks up. It is the first time he has done so since Bruce began speaking. His expression does not change, but the set of his shoulders tighten, and Bruce can see the sideways motion of his jaw, teeth grinding. 

Bruce continues before anyone can speak. “I will state clearly,” he says, tone measured, “that Superman did not act with malicious intent. Under the influence of the compound, he responded proportionally to perceived danger. However,” he adds, “we cannot ignore the reality of his capabilities. If destabilized again, the potential for collateral damage increases exponentially. I recommend contingency protocols.”

Victor nods. “Agreed.”

Diana’s expression remains thoughtful. “What kind of protocols?” she asks.

Bruce doesn’t hesitate. “Multi-layered safeguards. Redundant monitoring. Non-lethal containment options. Kryptonite should remain restricted to emergency response only—not weaponized or distributed casually.”

Arthur folds his arms. “And if he loses control again?”

Bruce meets his eyes. “Then the League must be prepared to intervene.”

Clark finally speaks. “And what form would that intervention take?”

Bruce turns his head slightly toward him. It is the first time they’ve really looked at each other since what happened, and all Bruce can focus on is the bone deep exhaustion etched into every crevice of Clark’s face. How, he wonders, can someone look so deprived of any and all rest only a day out from incident?

“De-escalation first,” he says. “Isolation if necessary. Only as a last resort—physical containment.” Clark holds his gaze, and Bruce continues, quieter now. “You are not a threat, Clark. But you are powerful enough to become one if compromised. The difference matters.”

Diana studies both of them. “So we are discussing a failsafe,” she says.

“Yes,” Bruce replies. “Not because we distrust him. Because we respect the consequences.” That distinction is important. He does not break eye contact with Clark when he says it. “I will not allow fear to dictate policy,” Bruce adds. “Nor will I ignore risk.”

Victor speaks. “Then the protocols should reflect oversight without stigma.”

Barry nods quickly. “Yeah. Like—emergency response guidelines. Not ‘Superman restraint plans.’ That sounds bad.”

Arthur mutters, “It does sound bad.”

A faint flicker of something pained crosses Clark’s expression at that.

He continues, steady. “The League should be prepared for worst-case scenarios for every member,” he says. “Including me.”

Diana nods once. “Agreed.”

Victor begins drafting adjustments on his tablet. Barry relaxes marginally. Arthur grumbles but concedes. The meeting moves forward—logistical details, communication protocols, media strategy. But Bruce is aware of something else. Clark has not spoken again. Not once.

When the meeting concludes, chairs scrape softly against the floor. The others begin to disperse, but Bruce remains seated for a moment longer. Clark stands after they have all left, and they are the last two in the room. For a second, neither moves. Bruce finally speaks, quietly enough that it does not carry beyond them. Clark does not move closer, but he doesn’t leave either. Bruce studies him carefully, searching for signs of resentment—of anger about the kryptonite, about containment, about oversight, about any of it.  Clark is normally an open book beneath his eyes, his palms. This Clark; guarded, hunched in and closed off, is completely uncharted territory for him.

“You’re avoiding me.” He says quietly. 

Clark’s jaw tightens. “I’m not.” He says, though it lacks any real conviction.

Bruce tries not to let the fact that Clark will not look him in the eyes bother him, that in the last few days, the only eye contact they’ve held has been bruce looking up at him through glazed over vision, and clark breifly meeting his eyes to ask about the logistics of being contained should he become dangerous again. 

Bruce wonders if this is what it feels like to be on this side of Clark’s anger, his discomfort. If in his attempt to defend himself, he’s managed to make another enemy out of a friend. ”It was necessary.” He tries to defend himself. “The kryptonite was the only immediate counter message available.”

Clark blinks. For a fraction of a second, confusion crosses his face, and then alarm follows. “Bruce,” he says carefully. “I’m not upset you used the kryptonite."

Bruce pauses, caught off guard. “If you’re concerned about League oversight—“

”I’m not.” Clark says. “Nothing you did or said in the last twenty four hours has—god, you think I'm upset with you?”

Bruce furrows his brows. “I don’t think this is a situation most would be comfortable in.”

”None of what was discussed today bothered me.” Clark shakes his head. 

”Then what is it?” Bruce pushes, taking a step closer to Clark, who promptly takes a step back. ”Alfred told me you requested not to see me.”

”I don’t want to be near you right now.” He says softly, though it does not cushion the blow of his words. “I don’t want you thinking I’m upset about containment or oversight or trust. I’m upset because I failed to protect you.”

Bruce bristles at that. ”I don’t need your protection.” He half snarls. “And you did not fail. You did not choose to hurt me, and you did not lose control in the way you fear. You were defending what you believed was a threat. Like I stated earlier, it was a proportionate reaction.”

“I still hurt you.”

”Yes.” He replies honestly. 

”I don’t want to be someone that can do that to you.”

Bruce frowns. ”You stopped the moment the toxin was removed. I don’t appreciate you treating me like I’m made of glass.”

”That’s not—“ Clark stops himself, eyes squeezed shut as he takes a sharp breath. “For being so intelligent, you can be so incredibly dense sometimes.” 

Bruce scoffs. “Explain it to me like I’m the fragile child you insist on believing I am then.”

”That’s not fair.” 

”Neither is avoiding the fallout your fists caused.” Bruce argues, and he knows it’s a low blow. Clark seems to physically recoil at it like such, shoulders hunching in as he takes another step back. 

”I’m not avoiding you, Bruce.” His voice is so low it borders on a whisper. “I’m just asking for a little space.”

”Why?”

Clark looks so desperate. “Please, Bruce. Please. Don’t push me on this one.”

And Bruce is too tired, too completely and utterly exhausted to give more of himself to this argument than he already has. His throat burns from the effort talking takes, his arm and back on fire from standing too long, and all he can think to say is a sharp and bitter: “Fine.”

A little space, as it turns out, does not apply to hovering over Batman’s shoulder when he returns to patrol (much to the dismay of both Dick and Alfred, who insist, with varying degrees of patience and exasperation, that a week is not nearly enough time to heal injuries of his severity). 

Clark is many things. He is patient in the way the earth is patient—steady and unhurried, willing to endure in silence until the moment calls for him. He is kind like it is something so deeply ingrained within him, and it surfaces in the smallest, most unguarded gestures: the careful modulation of his strength, the instinct to soften his voice around someone frightened, the way his hands always seem to know how to hold without hurting. An optimist to his core, in a way that borders on stubbornness—hope not as naivety, but as a choice he makes over and over again, even when the evidence would suggest otherwise. He is good in a way Bruce has never quite understood, or been able to fathom. 

What Clark is not, is a liar. He tries, Bruce can tell. Tries to give the illusion of space, to hang back a step instead of at Bruce’s side, to let the night stretch between them without filling it insistently with questions like “are you okay?” “how do you feel?” “are you mad at me?” “how do I fix this?” how do I make it up to you?”. But Clark has also never been good at pretending not to care, and concern sits on him as heavy as everything else he feels, visible in every line of his body. It softens nothing. If anything, it makes him sharper—drawn tight with it like a drawstring ready to snap. 

Kal-El the kind. Kal-El the trusting. Kal-El, who does not know how to hide the way his gaze lingers too long, or the way it darkens when Bruce moves wrong—subtle, almost imperceptible, but enough for Bruce to understand. enough to know that whatever distance Clark is trying to give him is measured in inches at best, and even that is an effort. Because Clark, for all that he is many things, has never learned how to look at Bruce and see anything less than something worth protecting. And worse—he has never learned how to pretend otherwise.

“You shouldn't be out.” Clark tells him after a long stretch of silence. 

Bruce doesn’t turn to face him, focused instead of the rooftop view on skyscraping buildings and neon lights. “And you shouldn't be in my city.”

There’s another pause, and Bruce doesn’t need super hearing to hear the hitch in Clark’s breath at his hostility. It’s been a long, long time since Bruce considered “home” two separate things that shouldn’t be allowed to coexist. 

He knows what Clark will make of it.

Clark, who is always the first to blame himself. Who will take Bruce’s hostility and turn it inward—because he hurt him, because he lost control, because that moment still exists between them no matter how carefully Clark is trying to place distance between them and it. Bruce knows he’s making it worse. Knows the annoyance in his voice lands exactly where Clark already expects it to, slots neatly into the guilt he is carrying like something earned. Knows Clark will take it and accept it, will let it reinforce the distance he’s already trying so hard to maintain.

But that isn’t why Bruce does it. It isn’t anger, it’s barely even resentment. It’s the unfamiliar, unwelcome realization of what it feels like to be the one held at arm’s length. To reach, and find nothing meeting him halfway. It’s the skin crawling knowledge that he is being hovered over, being babied and treated as fragile, but not being given the adult courtesy to just talk to Clark, to hash it out with him and find a conclusion together that comforts them both. Clark, in all his self-pitying and guilt, has only succeeded in hurting Bruce twice. 

“You're still hurt.” He sounds so miserable. 

Bruce grunts. “They're artificial injuries, and I am perfectly capable of making my own decisions.” 

Clark does not respond. 

They go on like that for just about a week, until Superman hovering over Batman turns into Clark hovering over Bruce, and Bruce has had enough.  

He wakes with a strangled gasp, the sound tearing out of him before he can stop it—caught halfway between a breath and something closer to a cry, like his body has forgotten the mechanics of breathing and is forcing itself to remember. The dark returns in fragments: the ceiling above him, the low, distant hum of the city pressing faintly through the walls. His hand comes up without thought, pressing hard against his sternum as if to confirm what the rest of him hasn’t quite caught up to yet—he is alive. The nightmare clings anyway. Not in clear images, not in anything he can fully name, but in impressions that refuse to settle: a heavy weight, a force stronger than him, the sound of dick’s wails. 

Every muscle stays tight, coiled under his skin, ready for something that isn’t coming. His breath stutters, then steadies by force, dragged into something slower, quieter, controlled. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Again. Again. He catalogs the room without moving his head, instinct overriding thought: exits, angles, shadows, the absence of threat where his pulse insists there should be one. Safe, his mind supplies, clinical and certain. His body lags behind, slower to concede. When he finally pushes himself upright, the sheets twisting around his legs, damp with sweat he hadn’t noticed until the cool air hits his skin. He sits there for a second too long, breath evening out by degrees, the last remnants of the dream dissolving into something shapeless and unreachable.

”Bruce?” He nearly jumps out of his skin, spinning toward the voice before his mind can catch up. His breath stutters in the aftermath of the nightmare, and for a moment the room tilts, mind dizzy at the sudden kick of adrenaline. Clark stands in the window, tall and uncharacteristically disheveled, framed by the midnight air slipping through the pried-open frame. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” he seethes, shrinking back against the headboard. Every instinct he’s spent years sharpening fires at once—wariness, irritation, the sting of vulnerability—he feels it all under Clark’s frantic gaze, laid bare in the faint moonlight. His chest tightens, his palms pressing against the sheets. 

“I—“ Clark stutters, seemingly trying to find the right words. Bruce has never seen him look like this, come to think of it. His eyes are blown wide, chest rising and falling in fast, frantic little gasps. His clothes half put on and barely buttoned like he’d been in bed or at least headed that way only moments earlier. “I—you’re heartbeat—you—…” 

And suddenly the vulnerability curdling in Bruce’s chest burns off into something sharper, easier to hold and far more familiar: irritation, cold and immediate. Bruce’s expression hardens, the residual tremor in his breath buried beneath the edge in his voice. “So you can stalk me on my patrols and listen to my heartbeat while I sleep, but still can’t be bothered to talk to me.” 

“I thought—“ The words catch in Clark’s throat, frayed thin with panic. Only then does Bruce really look at him—not just the silhouette in the window, not the utterly ridiculous fact of him standing there in the middle of the night, but the man himself. Clark is shaking. “I thought you were hurt.” 

For the briefest moment, Bruce feels the residual ache of his own nightmare collide with the sight of Clark standing there half-dressed and trembling, looking as though the world had nearly ended. Then the sympathy curdles back into irritation. Because of course it does. Because Clark can hear the fracture in Bruce’s breathing from half a city away, can appear at his bedside in seconds at the slightest hitch in his heartbeat, and still has spent the better part of a week refusing to speak to him.

“Do I need to be injured for us to be allowed a conversation now?” His pulse is still not fully steady, and he hates that Clark can probably hear that too. “I was under the impression that my being hurt was the entire reason we weren’t talking, so you’ll have to help me understand. Maybe I’ve missed something in all the brooding you've been doing.” 

Clark’s expression folds in on itself, panic giving way to something more familiar and, somehow, more painful: guilt settling over him like a second skin. His mouth parts, closes, then opens again as though there are too many things fighting to come out at once and none of them can make it past the tightness in his throat. 

“You’re angry.”

Bruce’s jaw tightens. “And you’re behaving like a child. Either take the space you say you so desperately need and stop keeping tabs on me like I’m some helpless invilid, or be a grown up about it.”

“I thought you were hurt.” He repeats again. The words leave him in a rush, breathless and unsteady, like they have been lodged behind his teeth since the moment he tore the window open. For a beat, he remains exactly as he is—rigid, shoulders drawn high with tension, chest rising and falling too fast.

Then the realization seems to begin to settle. Bruce is upright. Speaking. awake enough to be angry, and plenty alive enough to be furious.

Safe.

Bruce watches the exact moment it hits him. The panic does not vanish so much as drain out of him all at once, as if whatever had been holding him upright was never muscle or bone but pure, frantic adrenaline. Clark’s shoulders sag first, the line of his body suddenly losing that tautness. His hand, still braced against the window frame, slips loose, and he falls back with the graceless, exhausted inevitability of someone whose body has finally been told it can stop preparing for catastrophe. His spine meets the wall beside the window with a soft thud, and he lets it bear his weight for a moment, head tipping back, eyes fluttering shut. He slides down until he is seated on the floor, one knee drawn up, the other leg bent awkwardly beneath him, long limbs suddenly looking less like Superman and more like a man who has run out of places to put his fear.

Maybe he has been too softened by comforting Dick after nightmares and all the trivialities of fatherhood, or maybe his anger simply can’t survive the sight of Clark like this—pale in the moonlight, knees drawn up, chest heaving in quiet, desperate gasps. The edge in Bruce’s voice, the hardness that has kept himself at bay all week, begins to fade the moment he sees the man in front of him look more like a frightened child than a man. 

He’s not built for this. He’s a man who measures responses in control, in distance and calculated restraint. Comforting people isn’t something he does gracefully. But the words that usually come sharp and biting—admonitions, barbs, reminders—fail him, and he can’t bring himself to use them here. Not now.

So he kneels beside Clark instead with a heavy sigh, finally letting gravity do what willpower hasn’t. The floor is hard, the night air cool against his skin, and he sits close enough that Clark doesn’t have to lift his eyes, just a presence to meet the panic and the guilt and the overwhelming fear that radiates off him like heat from a fire.

”It was a nightmare, Clark. You know I get those.” Clark doesn’t answer. His hands twist in his lap, fingers flexing nervously, shoulders tight as if he’s bracing for a storm that hasn’t yet arrived. The outside light catches the edge of his jaw, the shadows under his eyes, and the rest of Bruce’s irritation fails him. “The weight of the world’s a heavy thing to carry alone, even for the man of steel.”

Clark bites his bottom lip, a sharp inhale following it. “Hypocrite.” Which isn't totally unfair. “Did I ever even apologize to you? God—I’ve been so—“ His voice breaks on the last word, ragged, trembling.

”Self pitying?” 

“Scared.” Clark’s voice is raw now, almost a whisper, and he shudders, rubbing his palms over his face.  “God, I’m horrified, Bruce. I can’t close my eyes without thinking about it, without seeing you—“ His hands stay half-lifted, as if to ward off the memory. His chest heaves, eyes darting away, unwilling or unable to meet Bruce’s gaze fully. “You looked so afraid of me.” 

And how can Bruce possibly admit to Clark that he was without Clark twisting it into fuel for more self loathing? That feeling his own painfully human fragility frightened him more than he imagined it could; that the knowledge he allowed someone with the power to kill him in seconds this close, every single day, ran counter to everything he had ever stood for, everything he had built himself upon, without Clark hearing regret in every word? Bruce has many e[regrets. So many regrets they could fill a ledger. But Clark, for all his frustrating tendencies and constant challenging of Bruce, could never be one of them. 

“It wasn’t you.” 

”It was my hands.” Clark’s voice cracks around the admission, and the first tear of the night falls. 

Bruce has seen Clark cry before. He has seen it in the aftermath of funerals, in the dim and terrible quiet after a city was saved at too high a cost; in the wake of a failed rescue, long after everyone else had called it unfortunate and inevitable. He has seen tears gather bright and furious in the corners of Clark’s eyes when the weight of being needed by everyone all at once threatened to drag him under, when grief became too large to contain behind the careful kindness he wears like a second skin. 

Once, after a child he’d pulled from the wreckage wrapped trembling arms around his neck and asked if their mother was coming too, Bruce had watched Clark step out onto the roof of the Daily Planet and stand there in the rain long after the storm had passed, shoulders rigid with the kind of sorrow no invulnerability can blunt. 

He has seen it over smaller things too. He tears up at reunion scenes, at dogs finding their way home, at improbable declarations of love shouted in airports, at fathers apologizing to sons, at orchestral swells paired with anything even vaguely redemptive. Once, in the middle of a documentary about migrating whales, Bruce had turned to find him openly sniffling because, ‘Bruce, they travel thousands of miles just to come back to where they started.’ Another time, halfway through some black-and-white Christmas film Dick had insisted they all watch, Clark had cried because an old man got his garden back.

He cries when stories are kind. When people are forgiven. When something lost is returned. That is the thing about Clark: the scale of what moves him has never mattered. A city in flames and a fictional dog finding its owner seem to strike the same tender, overexposed place in him. He feels with a kind of totality Bruce has never fully understood.

And still this is different. Those tears had always been outward-facing—grief for others, relief for strangers, sentiment over things Bruce privately considered ridiculous. This is inward. This is Clark turning all of that feeling against himself.

“I don’t know how you can even bare to look at me.” He mutters, face twisted up and so, so pained. 

Bruce lets out a slow, tired breath. Words feel suddenly useless. Anything he says will be parsed, dissected, and repurposed into fresh ammunition for the merciless way Clark has always judged himself. Bruce knows that look too well: the inward turn, the search for evidence of monstrosity in one’s own hands.

So instead he says: “Give me your hands,” voice low and rough with fatigue. His throat still aches.

Clark’s hands are trembling when Bruce takes them. The sight of them in his own—those soft, large hands that can hold up buildings, cradle children from burning wreckage, brush tears from his face with infuriating gentleness—makes something in Bruce’s chest ache. Then, before Clark can ask, before he can recoil into apology or fear, Bruce lifts them, guiding Clark’s hands upward, slow enough for the meaning to settle, and presses them against the dark bruises still blooming at the line of his throat.

“No—” He feels Clark try to pull back and only tightens his grip in response, holding his wrists there, anchoring Clark’s hands against the bruises at his throat—a cruel mimicry of where they had been only a week prior, fingers locked around his neck, pinning Bruce to rough concrete beneath the wash of Gotham streetlights, only now Bruce is the one holding them in place. 

“I’m not afraid of you.” He says. “No one in their right mind would be. You were under someone else’s thumb and acting in their favor. It wasn’t you. You didn’t hurt me.” 

Clark goes utterly still, and for a moment, all he does is stare.

His gaze drops, helplessly, to where his hands rest against Bruce’s throat, broad palms spanning bruised skin still mottled deep violet beneath the collarbone and along the line of his neck. The sight seems to hollow him out. Bruce can feel the minute tremor that runs through Clark’s fingers, the instinctive horror of the memory rising up in him, and for one awful, breathless second Bruce feels his own pulse beneath those hands and hates how vulnerable it makes him. There is no cowl here. No armor. No distance. Just his skin and the offering of it. 

Bruce has spent a lifetime teaching himself that vulnerability is a thing to be hidden, disguised beneath kevlar and clipped words and the careful geometry of control. And yet here he is, kneeling on the cold floor of his own bedroom, guiding Clark’s hands to the one place another man’s fear could have killed him, asking—not with words, but with his body—to be believed. It feels almost obscene, this nakedness, this trust laid bare in the dark. But if Clark needs proof, then Bruce will give it to him in the only language that seems capable of cutting through the self-loathing.

Clark’s fingers move, another tear streaming down his cheek as he does so. Tentative, almost reverent, his thumbs ghost along the bruises at Bruce’s throat, tracing the dark crescent shadows his own hands had left behind. The touch is so light it barely qualifies as pressure, more a brush of apology than contact, like Clark is trying to map the damage without daring to worsen it. Bruce feels every inch of it—the slow slide of fingertips along tender skin, the slight hitch in Clark’s breath as his eyes follow the path, the unbearable care in the way he touches him now. His gaze is fixed on Bruce’s neck, wide and stricken, as if he is still trying to reconcile the memory with the man kneeling in front of him. Bruce lets him look. Lets him see the evidence and the choice layered over it. 

His hands leave Bruce’s throat only to rise higher, sliding carefully along the line of his jaw before settling, trembling, at his cheeks. Bruce exhales, the sound louder than he intends, and for a moment he cannot quite look away. 

Even crying and grief stricken, Clark is beautiful. 

Clark cups his face with a gentleness so contrasting to the way he last touched him, thumbs brushing the sharp lines beneath Bruce’s eyes. He is looking at him now not with horror, but with the kind of aching care that makes Bruce’s carefully maintained composure feel suddenly, dangerously thin.

“Your face…” Clark thumbs at the worst mark left on Bruce’s face, red-purple bruising just beneath his eye. 

”Will heal.” Bruce says quickly, leaning into Clark's open palm just a fraction before he can think better of it. 

“I did that. I hit you.” 

Bruce can’t hold back a scoff. “I can take a punch.” 

Clark’s face crumbles. “It's different—”

“I know. And I am telling you that having been on the receiving end of pain caused by a friend, or partner's hands, felt nothing like yours.” 

For a moment, something shutters over Clark’s face—recognition, followed almost immediately by a sorrow so strong it seems to hollow him out from the inside. There are conversations between them that still live in the spaces around words, things never said plainly because Bruce had never needed them spoken aloud. A flinch once, too quick and too instinctive when Clark reached for his wrist, or came up behind him too closely and too suddenly. The way Bruce had gone preternaturally still at the sight of fingerprints darkening someone else’s skin in a case file, his expression flattening into something too controlled to be casual. The scar tissue that had not belonged to knives or bullets or the familiar violence of patrol. Clark had pieced it together the way he pieced together most things about Bruce—not from any outright confession, but from enough context clues, from the careful avoidance of certain touches and certain subjects. Bruce had let him know just enough to stop him from asking the wrong questions.

And Clark had looked at him then with the same expression he wears now: that terrible, aching mix of anger and tenderness, the kind reserved for wounds that cannot be bandaged. Bruce remembers the quiet fury that had settled over him when he understood, cold and absolute in the way only Clark’s anger ever is. He had never asked for names, and Bruce had never offered them. It had been enough that Clark knew there had once been hands on him that did not know how to touch without taking. Enough that Clark understood the difference Bruce is trying to give him now: between violence chosen and violence stolen, between cruelty and fear, between someone who wanted to hurt and someone who would sooner break himself apart than risk it.

“That's the last thing I ever wanted you to be forced to compare me to.” He whispers. “I’m not them. I’m not—”

“For having super hearing, your inability to comprehend what I am telling you is astounding.” Bruce cuts in before Clark can send himself into another spiral. “You've known the version of myself that distrusts you, that treats you like a threat. How can you possibly believe I would hold your hands to my neck while feeling that towards you? While believing you are capable of consciously hurting me? How can you possibly believe that I would let you under the same roof as my child if I did not believe you to be someone safe?” 

Clark’s eyes are still watery, face pinched like he’s in physical agony. “I’m so scared I’ll hurt you again.” He admits quietly, voice catching in his throat and hoarse.

”I’d rather take a punch from Superman a hundred times over than ever be ignored by Clark Kent again.” Bruce slides his own hands over Clark’s, covering them completely, anchoring them to his face. The contact is soft, steadying, a silent promise: I am here, and you are not going to break me. “All that power and you still crumble in the hands of a human. How could I ever be afraid of you?”

”I forget that you’re only human sometimes.” So does Bruce, if he’s being honest, and perhaps that is exactly what's terrified them both. “I’m sorry.”

“There are things I have done,” Bruce says quietly, “under mind control, under grief, under rage, that I have spent years trying not to look at too closely.” He shifts, finally pulling Clark's hands away and down, letting them sit intertwined with his own between them. “If I asked to be judged only by the worst thing ever done with my hands, there would be no one left willing to touch me either.”

“You think I’m upset because you hurt me.” Clark’s throat works, and Bruce’s expression hardens into something more honest. “I’m upset because you looked at one moment—one moment stolen from you—and decided it defined you more than everything else I know about you. That’s the part I cannot stand. That you think so little of my judgment that you believe I’d confuse you with what was done to you. That your solution to hurting me, was to push me away.”

“I didn’t think little of your judgment,” Clark says at last, voice low and rough around the edges. “I thought—I thought if you looked at me and saw someone capable of purposefully hurting you for even a second, I wouldn’t survive it.”

Bruce frowns. “You should have been able to trust me enough to let me decide that for myself.”

“I know.” Clark looks away, ashamed. 

“For someone who spends half his life preaching faith in people,” he says dryly, “you are remarkably bad at extending it to yourself. I can survive pain,” he says. “I am, if nothing else, practiced at it.” His voice lowers. “What I am less interested in surviving is you deciding, on my behalf, that I am better off without you.”

Clark’s expression fractures around the edges. “Bruce—”

“No. You don’t get to disappear every time something frightens you about yourself.” Clark swallows. “You once told me hope is a choice.” Clark blinks, caught off guard. Bruce continues, slower. “So is trust. I choose to trust you. I am still choosing it now even in the face of everything. You've scolded me, time and time again, about how sparingly I give that to people, and I am still here giving it to you. A little reciprocation would be appreciated.”

“The only thing I've ever been afraid of happening, happened.” Clark mutters. The fight has mostly drained from him—muscles slackening, shoulders falling, breath finally finding a slower rhythm—but the tension hasn’t fully left his hands, And isn’t that something? Bruce thinks, watching the subtle collapse of someone who can lift buildings and stop disasters with a blink of an eye, the man who faces near world-ending threats weekly, and he can only summon fear for the possibility of hurting the people he loves.

It hits Bruce somewhere low, in his chest, in the space between his ribs. If you were to lift the most perfect, most honorable man from a storybook—flawless in intention, infallible in instinct—he would be sitting right here, half-slouched against the wall, hands still lingering over Bruce’s own, eyes too wide, too earnest, too human to be believed. There is awe there, and something like heartbreak, something Bruce hasn’t named yet but feels with an intensity that presses the back of his knees against the floor.

“You came here,” Bruce says. “You came because you heard me in distress. You have spent a week making yourself miserable because the idea of having caused me pain is unbearable to you.” His mouth twitches, something wry and faintly bitter. “That alone should tell you everything you need to know about the kind of man you are.”

Clark looks at him then with something raw and reverent in his face, as if Bruce has just handed him back a version of himself he thought he had lost. “Bruce,” he says, barely above a whisper. 

Bruce exhales slowly. “No more deciding for me,” he says, and Clark nods immediately.

“No more disappearing.” Another nod. Bruce’s gaze narrows. “And if you ever listen to my heartbeat from Metropolis again instead of simply calling—” A breathless, almost disbelieving laugh escapes Clark.“—I will personally ensure you regret it.” That finally pulls a real laugh from him, shaky and soft and threaded through with relief.

Clark’s voice quiets again, but it isn't quite as miserable as before. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” A beat. “I just need you to stop moping long enough to let me forgive you.” 

Something fragile shifts in Clark’s face then, relief threaded through something softer and more hesitant. His eyes flick up to meet Bruce’s, and for the first time all night, there is no panic in them. 

“I don’t…” Clark swallows. “I don’t really want to leave.” The admission is small, almost embarrassed. “I know i’ve already been so horribly selfish this week, but I just—“ Bruce knows what he means before Clark can force the rest of it past the tightness in his throat. It isn’t selfishness, not really. Not the kind Clark is accusing himself of anyways. It is that same relentless instinct that has had him circling Gotham’s rooftops for a week, listening for every wrong note in Bruce’s breathing, every stumble in his gait, every hitch in his heartbeat that might signal danger. Clark still isn’t convinced the danger has passed simply because Bruce says it has; Bruce can see it in the way his eyes keep returning, helplessly, to the fading bruises at his throat and the dark bloom beneath his eye, in the tension that still lives in the set of his shoulders as though he is braced for Bruce to break apart the moment he looks away. 

It strikes Bruce, not without a dull and private ache, that Clark does not want to stay for his own comfort nearly so much as for Bruce’s safety—for the simple need to be close enough to know, beyond doubt, that Bruce is alive, breathing, and beyond the reach of both nightmares and his own guilt.

“Then stay.” 

Bruce rises first. The movement is careful, a slow unfolding of limbs stiff from too many bruises and too little sleep, and for a moment the room tilts with the familiar protest of a body not yet fully healed. Clark is already half-moving before Bruce can straighten, hand lifting as if to steady him. Bruce catches his wrist before he can.

“I’m fine,” he mutters, more out of habit than any real conviction, and Clark gives him a look that makes it abundantly clear neither of them believes that phrase means anything anymore.

Still, Bruce keeps hold of him. There is something almost absurdly intimate in it, in the simple act of curling his fingers around Clark’s forearm and tugging him gently up from the floor. Clark rises easily, all impossible height and warmth, but there is a strange reluctance in the movement, as though some part of him still thinks he belongs at Bruce’s feet tonight—penitent, watchful, waiting for permission to exist in the same space.

Bruce refuses to indulge that. He steps back toward the bed, the sheets still twisted from the nightmare, and sits down against the headboard with a low exhale. The mattress dips beneath his weight. Clark lingers where he stands, eyes flicking from Bruce to the doorway, then toward the hall beyond.

Bruce stares at him for a beat, incredulity blooming sharp and almost offended beneath the lingering exhaustion. Really? For all Clark’s intelligence, there are moments when he seems determined to become so spectacularly stupid. They have slept in the same bed before—after patrols that ran too late, after League missions that ended with both of them too bruised to argue, after nights in Metropolis hotels and Watchtower quarters where exhaustion had gotten the better of them. There had been no ceremony to it then. No awkwardness. Just the warmth of Clark at his back or Bruce’s shoulder pressed against Clark’s side in the dark.

And tonight, of all nights, Clark thinks he is going to exile himself to the guest bedroom. As though the entire reason he tore open Bruce’s window in the middle of the night was not because he needed visual confirmation that Bruce was alive.

Bruce drags a hand over his face. “Clark…”

Clark pauses in the doorway. “I can take the guest room.”

Bruce lets out a tired breath that borders on exasperation. “That would defeat the purpose, would it not?”

Clark goes still. Bruce fixes him with a look, the sort usually reserved for criminals and the occasional Justice League member making catastrophically poor decisions. “You are here because you’re afraid something will happen if you leave.” His voice softens, only slightly. “So stop being ridiculous and get in the bed.”

For a moment Clark just looks at him, something uncertain and painfully tender passing over his face. Then, reluctantly, he obeys.

He moves with the same care he seems to reserve only for injured things, pulling back the blankets and sliding in beside Bruce as though he still isn’t convinced he has the right. He settles at the edge at first, absurdly distant, one broad shoulder nearly hanging off the mattress.

Bruce turns his head and looks at him flatly. Clark, to his credit, has the decency to look sheepish.

Bruce reaches out, catches the front of his shirt, and gives him a sharp, impatient tug closer. Clark’s breath catches, but he allows himself to be pulled in until the line of his body is a warm, solid presence beside Bruce’s own. Not touching, not quite, but close enough that Bruce can feel the heat of him through the sheets. Close enough that Clark can hear every breath.

Sleep takes him more gently than it had earlier, and when morning comes, it arrives in fragments: pale gold light leaking through the curtains, the distant hum of the city waking beneath the manor’s quiet, the dull ache in his ribs and throat, the weight of Clark behind him. Bruce blinks awake slowly, awareness returning in layers. Clark’s arm is draped securely across his waist, heavy and warm, his other arm curled beneath Bruce’s shoulder, body half-curved around him. He is pressed so, so close behind Bruce, broad chest a steady wall of heat at his back, one leg tangled with Bruce’s beneath the blankets as though sometime in the night Clark’s sleeping mind had decided that proximity was not enough.

He is shielding, even now. Even in sleep, Clark has arranged himself like a barrier between Bruce and anything that could hurt him. Bruce lies still for a moment, caught off guard by the strange, almost painful tenderness of it. For all his strength, for all the world-ending power coiled beneath his skin, Clark’s first instinct has always been this: to protect.

Bruce closes his eyes again, just briefly, and allows himself this one indulgence. He leans back, almost imperceptibly, into the warm certainty of Clark’s arms and lets himself remain there.