Chapter Text
“Take me instead.”
Three words.
In the decades since he’s become Batman, Bruce has been afraid of a lot of things. It’s a truth that scant few will believe, and one that he goes to great lengths to hide from the world. To Gotham, to the worst of men, he is vengeance given breath, the thing that goes bump in the night, wielding terror in the way he isn’t in every shadow but may just exist in any. To Gotham, to the richest of men, he is Brucie Wayne, billionaire playboy, with one too many nerves missing in his spine to know what it means to be afraid, the poor thing who never grew out of his parents’ shadows, who chases the adrenaline in extreme sports to fill the hole in his heart left behind by two gunshots, the wound haphazardly stuffed closed with a dozen pearls.
They aren’t wrong, either of them, but Bruce, for all his bravado and play pretend otherwise, is also a man. Bruce feels a distant terror thrumming in his veins every time he leap off his favorite rooftop, in the seconds before his grapple catches (when the deepest parts of him just can’t be sure that it will catch) and he’s falling towards the pavement where the blood of his parents had crusted in the fabric of his pants. Bruce’s heart stops for a beat and sometimes two whenever one of his children jumps into the line of fire, when Dick skirts a little too close to the barrel of a gun, when Cassandra or Duke takes a hit to the head that has them crumbling to the ground, when Damian or Tim or Jason spits out blood from between their teeth and Bruce thinks of a fire and a warehouse and being too late.
Bruce remembers his throat closing up the first time he realized that Clark means something to him that he’s too much of a coward to acknowledge. Bruce ran, for a long time, after the day he looked into Clark’s eyes and labeled that feeling love. Bruce is so scared that he can hardly breathe when he looks at Clark and sees exactly what he has to lose, even now, especially now, when nothing short of a miracle has given him the luxury of waking up in the morning to Clark kissing the corners of his eyes, murmuring an “I love you” so sincere it makes Bruce think he’s dreaming.
Bruce knows fear. He lives in it, molds himself in its image so perfectly because it is the one thing he is so desperately, irreversibly intimate with.
He doesn’t know if he’s ever been more scared than he is now. More terrified than the deep, freezing chasm that three words have opened in his chest.
Clark stands in front of them, shielding the entire Justice League from the most recent interplanetary threat with an undying loyalty in his eyes and a symbol that spells out hope.
This had been a bad one. The League is beaten, and thoroughly, at that.
It’s carnage. The Lanterns are slumped on opposite sides of the battlefield, rings dull and spent. Flash had fallen somewhere in the middle, one of his legs bent at an unnatural angle. Bruce hasn’t seen J’onn since fire swept through the streets, and even Diana lay unmoving, tangled in her own lasso and dark hair filthy with dirt and blood.
Bruce has broken at least three ribs and fractured two more, and he’s just barely managing to stay upright, his spine digging into the jagged wall at his back. Every breath burns terribly on its way in and even worse on its way out, and black keeps pushing in at the edges of his vision.
Clark is the only one of them left standing. Really standing.
His suit is in tatters, ripped across his shoulders and waist, the cape hanging on for dear life, limp against the broad expanse of his back. There’s a large cut across the side of his head that shouldn’t be possible, and he’d taken a punch earlier that rendered one of his eyes unable to open fully. And yet, he stands before the alien creature—large, too large, and shaped so vaguely that it appears nearly eldritch in nature, powerful and unknowable—and offers himself in place of the rest of them.
“You strike an odd bargain, Kryptonian,” the creature says, in a voice that comes from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Bruce feels it buzzing between the creases of his brain, almost reminiscent of J’onn’s telepathy but so much more sinister. “You alone, in exchange for our mercy upon the rest of these heroes? It hardly seems fair.” His knees threaten to buckle, but he keeps himself awake with the sort of stubborn stupidity that Alfred always berates him for. Because he knows where this is going. He knows how this ends and he can’t allow it. Not if it’s Clark.
“It’s fair,” Clark—Superman, right now—says, unwavering, coldly transactional in a way Clark Kent never is. “I am the strongest in ability and power, and if I wanted I could defeat all of them or sway them to my side. I am the only one still standing.”
No, Bruce wants to say, but all he can manage is a sad little exhale of a sound. It’s pathetic. Entirely human in its weakness, but it grabs the intruder’s attention.
“Not yet,” it says, and when Clark turns to look at him too, Bruce feels his terror increase tenfold. He cradles a hand at his chest, clumsily pushing off the wall to sway forward one step, and then another-
He’s on the ground, warm hands pinning his wrists at his back, firm enough to hold him down (not that it takes much, as he is) but carefully angled to spare him of any real discomfort. Clark’s knee is on the small of his back, the pressure so carefully controlled as to be almost calming, confident enough to be a reassurance but gentle enough to be an apology.
“Kal-” he chokes out, soft enough that only Clark would be able to hear. “Don’t.”
Don’t face this alone, whatever this is going to be. Don’t go putting your life on a line that stretches too far for me to see the end of. Don’t volunteer yourself for pain of unimaginable proportions without giving me a way to get you out of it. Don’t, for the love of god, go where I cannot follow.
He can’t find the air to say any of it, but it doesn’t matter. Clark understands. Clark has always been able to take whatever little Bruce is willing to give, then weave it into something that verbalizes his thoughts more eloquently than Bruce can ever hope to be.
“I am now,” Clark says, and whatever the creature sees, it is deemed satisfactory.
The weight on Bruce’s back eases, and immediately he tries to get up, to follow, to do something about the anxiety that’s suffocating him from the inside out.
(Or it could be the collapsed lung. It’s a little difficult to tell.)
He can’t get his body to cooperate. It fails him in the knick of time when he needs it most, like it has done over, and over, and over again. He can only watch (useless, useless, useless) as a black tendril snakes out of the creature’s silhouette and wraps sickeningly around Clark, and most damning of all, when Clark looks back at him, there is nothing in his eyes but a loving sort of confidence. As if he isn’t stepping into an unknown that may very well end in his death. As if he isn’t once again serving up his life and his kindness on a silver platter to a planet and its people to whom he owes nothing. As if Bruce hasn’t failed him.
As if he has never doubted that wherever he is going, Bruce will find him.
He does.
Find him, that is.
Two weeks. 15 days, 13 hours, and 52 minutes.
When Bruce blasts open one more gate and finally, finally sees Clark again, he’s just hit 72 hours of being awake, and later, he will blame that fact for the way he clears the length of that room faster than should have been possible, a frantic tremble in his fingers as he cups Clark’s face through all the evidence of his suffering.
He’s in a disoriented heap on the ground, the bright hues of his suit dulled by blood that looks like a cruel imitation of his cape. There are no chains, Bruce understands vaguely. They hadn’t even bothered to restrain him- God, what had they done? The touch draws a soft, airy groan from him, and Bruce almost flinches away. Gentleness has never been his calling. The Batman was not created to heal or to nurture. He has the skill if it comes to it, yes, lollipops in his belt and loudly patterned bandaids to soothe a crying child, but in touch? In the innate intimacy of the comfort that a soft hand is supposed to offer?
The gauntlets alone siphon away that comfort into nothing but a distant mockery of it.
But, for better or for worse, he can’t bring himself to let go. He tries to remember what it felt like when his mother used to rub a delicate palm up and down his arms, rubbing away aching muscles after a fever, how Alfred sets a warm if weathered hand against his side while he puts him back together, and tries to channel it when he tucks Clark’s hair away from his forehead.
“Kal,” he whispers, and the fact that he gets no reaction, none at all, scares him so badly that when Diana puts a hand on his shoulder, he jumps hard enough to realize that he’s shaking.
He whips around to look at her as she kneels by their side, and the steadfast blue of her eyes calm him a little. It’s not much, but it’s enough. Diana has always been able to keep him grounded. He can hear the others fighting around them, expertly in tune with each other and their enemies as they flawlessly execute the plan he’d whipped up, utilizing the creatures’ newfound weaknesses that the Lanterns had unearthed and, for lack a better way to put it, beating them into a pulp.
“Go,” Diana says, and Bruce doesn’t need to be told twice.
There are realities in which he stays, he knows that. Because Batman hates not being in control. Batman, when he’s trusting the team to follow through with a plan, obsessively confirms that no one is going off script, that everything goes off without a hitch. Batman feels a slow, dreadful confirmation of his inability to keep up crawling up his spine if he doesn’t spend every moment on the battlefield proving- that his skills mean something.
It’s maybe a good thing, then, that Bruce doesn’t feel much like Batman right now.
Bruce carries Clark carefully. Bruce tries to not jostle him any more than necessary. Bruce lays him down in the Javelin and tries to hush away the quiet moans that Clark lets out even though he’s doing his best to keep him comfortable.
(Bruce thinks of a fire and a warehouse and carrying someone else precious in his arms. Bruce thinks of being too late.)
He leaves the medbay just long enough to peel off the batsuit, and then he’s back, running a hand across Clark’s forehead and landing a careful kiss on his eyelids. He’s clean now, at least, the worst of his wounds treated and the rest slowly mending themselves back together. But even J’onn hasn't been able to tell when he’s going to wake up.
If he’s going to wake up.
“Come back,” Bruce whispers, and he can’t find it in himself to be mortified that he’s crying. “Come back.”
I cannot have failed you, too.
He jerks into consciousness all at once at the sensation of fingers atop his own, and it makes him sit up so abruptly that his spine clicks disapprovingly at more than a couple of joints. His head snaps up, and for a moment or two, all he feels is a crushing relief that leaves him weak at the knees because those are- those are Clark’s eyes, shining in that too-blue way of his under the sun lamps that Bruce may have gone a little overboard with.
“Hey,” Clark says. His voice is raspy from disuse, and he’s still a little gray, but he’s alive. He’s here. He’s okay. He will be.
Bruce wants to tell him that. He wants to squeeze the hand laid so gently atop his own and confess to being so heart-stoppingly happy that Clark is here, that there was another too-close call but it wasn’t the end. He blinks, swallows. What comes out is—
“You. You idiot!”
He shoots out of the chair he’d been dozing in, and it clatters to the ground with the force of it. He jabs his free hand into Clark’s sternum, and, fine, it hurts his finger more than it hurts Clark, but he’s trying to make a point.
“What were you thinking?!”
“I-”
“Don’t answer that. You weren’t.”
“Bruce-”
“No. That was a stupid decision. We knew nothing about what they had, where they went, what they even were. The chance that you would have never come back was far too high to warrant making the choice that you did, not even because you would be dead but because they would have traveled to some galaxy too far away for even you to find your way back to m- to Earth.” Clark notices his slip-up, of course he does, but he doesn’t comment on it. He shuffles himself up so he’s sitting, leaning back into the pillows with a small sigh. Bruce hands him the glass of water from the nightstand, and he sips from it obediently before giving it back. God, he looks tired. He should be resting. He shouldn’t be sitting here listening to Bruce lecture him, but he can’t bring himself to stop. He needs Clark to understand how immense of a risk he had taken, how it could have ended in a thousand and one horrible ways for Earth and, most importantly, most selfishly importantly to Bruce, how it had hurt Clark.
Because Clark is good. Clark is so good that the act of hurting him should be a crime. Clark is sunshine on a cloudy day and the first drop of rain amidst a drought, he smiles and feeds stray cats and uses his boundless power to help his father move a tractor, and the sight of him being hurt, the idea of people wanting to hurt him, makes Bruce feel sick.
And Clark doesn’t understand that, is the thing, not in the way that Bruce wishes he would. Clark has an incredible understanding of his place in the world, of his role as a hero and a son and how he is something beautiful and worth fighting for because of it. But instead of letting it guide his self preservation, Clark leverages it in sacrifice. He offers himself to the enemy too damn easily because he knows that in their eyes, the last son of Krypton is a prize much more satisfying than a speedster or even an Amazonian princess—and Bruce doesn’t know how many more times he can lay down and watch that happen before he goes insane.
So he yells. He knows that getting hurt in this line of work is inevitable. He knows that it’s unfair, utterly cruel, to hold Clark away from the front lines because seeing him bleed makes Bruce’s heart tremble behind his ribs. But he needs Clark to know that he is worth too much to lose.
And Clark is… Clark listens. He sits there and watches Bruce with soft eyes while he rambles, and never lets go of his hand. Clark is so patient with him, unwaveringly so, and Bruce doesn’t deserve that. Bruce doesn’t deserve so much of what Clark has given him and continues to give him. This thing between them, whatever they have decided to label it, isn’t fragile, it isn’t even new, but Bruce still wakes up everyday not quite understanding what Clark had seen in him—when he probably could have turned any street corner and found a better man.
“Bruce.”
“What if they’d killed you on the spot? What if they had acted so quickly that we never even got a chance to-” Too emotional. He’s getting too upset. He tries to reel himself back, steer the conversation in a direction that vaguely mimics professionalism. “The team would have fallen apart without you, the Earth left without its strongest protector–” Something shifts in Clark’s face at that, a downturn at the ends of his brows almost like hurt. Bruce knows what it sounds like, that he’s reducing Clark to his usefulness to Earth, his position as someone powerful and not the entirety of the brilliance that encompasses all that he is. Bruce wants to apologize– “There are so many unforeseen circumstances that can result, and consequences that nobody can prepare for. You can’t just do something like that without giving yourself an out-”
“I did.”
“What?”
“Give myself an out.” Clark tugs on their joint hands until Bruce sits down at the edge of the bed, then lifts the other to trail down the curve of his jaw. Bruce does his best to not lean into the touch, but he’s pretty sure he fails.
“You were my out,” Clark says, pulling him closer still. “I knew you would find me.”
“You couldn’t have known that,” Bruce argues. “You couldn’t have possibly known that. I-”
“Found me.”
“I was almost too late.”
“You weren’t.”
“I thought I was.”
“You weren’t.”
“If you keep doing this, someday I will be.”
“Bruce-”
“Kal, please. Give me a chance, next time. Let me come up with something so you won’t have to do what you did. I can’t keep watching you walk into hell to save us, I can’t- I can’t lose you.”
“…Come here.”
He chokes on something in his throat that sounds suspiciously like a sob, and allows himself to fall forward into Clark’s chest, curls his fingers in the soft cotton of his shirt.
“I trust you,” Clark says, the soft breath of his words ghosting over his ear. “I’ll help you come up with contingencies, and because it’s you, they’re going to be good ones. Despite what it looks like sometimes, I don’t want to die, Bruce, I have too much to lose.” He lifts Bruce’s chin, kisses him warm and soft and in that way that makes him feel like he’s flying, and murmurs promises into his lips. “I never doubted, I never will doubt, that you would come for me. I knew that all I needed to do was survive until then, and knowing that kept me alive.”
“I’m sorry,” Bruce whispers.
For taking out my frustrations on you. For making you comfort me when you’re still recovering. For all my hypocrisy in being the one to hurt you with words that I don’t mean. For not finding you faster. For letting you be taken at all. For anything. For everything.
“What for?” There’s the hint of a chuckle in his voice, and it settles Bruce better than anything should have the power to. Then it softens, and Clark’s arms tighten around him.
“I’m right here,” he says. He always knows exactly what Bruce needs to hear. “You did it, beautiful. You found me. You always do.”