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It was a fundamental reality of Clark Kent’s existence that the universe was never, under any circumstance, entirely quiet.
From the moment his yellow-sun-charged sensory senses had violently blossomed beneath the tiny roof of his parents’ barn in Smallville at the young age of eight, his world had been transformed into an inescapable, multi-layered acoustic amphitheater. He lived suspended in a deep ocean of vibrational datas.
He had spent twenty years constructing an elaborate, internal network of psychological bulkheads, dampers, and acoustic filters simply to retain his sanity, learning to classify sounds into the negligible, the urgent, and the vital, until he could tune out the cacophony of an entire continent while keeping one ear perpetually calibrated to the precise, biological rhythm of noisy humanity.
Which was precisely why standing on the freezing, gargoyle-crested parapet of the Gotham Municipal Water Reservoir at two-fifteen on a Tuesday morning caused his entire neurological equilibrium to screech to a sudden, violent halt.
Below him, five heavily armed contractors belonging to an illegal arms syndicate were quietly loading modified military-grade pulse rifles into the cargo bed of an unmarked delivery truck. Above them, descending from the smog-choked shadows with the terrifying, silent grace of a predator, was the Batman.
Clark had heard the stories, of course. The Justice League’s communications network was already filled with hushed, slightly defensive rumors about the vigilante of Gotham, a shadowy, uncooperative urban myth who supposedly operated on paranoia, body armor, and sheer atmospheric terror. Clark had arrived in Gotham with the characteristically optimistic intention of offering a friendly hand, a diplomatic communication between the sunlit skies of Metropolis and the gothic squalor of the neighboring bay.
He floated down, his red boots hovering three inches above the gravel, his cape fluttering lazily in the damp, sulfurous wind.
"Evening," Clark said, pitching his voice into that warm, resonant baritone that had calmed bank tellers during hostage crises and coaxed frightened cats out of sycamore trees across the Midwest. "Looks like you have your hands full with the transport. I thought I might offer some assistance with the heavy lifting."
The Dark Knight landed on the gravel with a muted, metallic crunch of reinforced combat boots, his hevy cape collapsing around his broad shoulders. He turned his head slowly. The shrp gaze fixed onto Clark with an intensity that could have bored through three inches of tempered steel.
"Metropolis is across the river, Superman," a voice rasped, a low, mechanical gravel that sounded like two millstones grinding together underwater. "I don't recall issuing a mutual aid request."
"I was in the neighborhood," Clark offered, providing a polite, disarming smile.
Automatically, unconsciously, Clark’s super-hearing did what it always did whenever he engaged with a new being: it swept across the man’s physical form to assess his baseline vitals. He checked for elevated heart rate, for the telltale bronchial wheeze of a smoker, for the adrenaline-induced micro-tremors that betrayed fear, deception, or imminent physical violence.
His sensory apparatus swept across the armored chest plate.
And found nothing.
Clark blinked, his smile freezing in place. He adjusted his internal focus, narrowing his auditory receptors down to a millimeter-wide cone of concentration directed squarely at the bat-shaped symbol over the vigilante's chest.
There was no sound.
There was no rhythmic, fluid rush of arterial blood through the carotid artery.
There was no soft, mechanical sigh of lungs expanding and contracting against the thoracic cage.
There was no sound of air passing over vocal cords, even though the man was literally speaking to him right now.
There was only a cold, impenetrable, terrifying void, an acoustic vacuum where a living, breathing human cardiovascular system was supposed to be.
"Are you, -" Clark stammered, his Midwestern composure completely shattering as his eyes widened behind his blue pupils, "are you wearing a lead-lined sonic dampener under that Kevlar?"
The Batman’s head tilted by a fraction of an inch, the eyes narrowing into razor-thin slits of sharp, analytical suspicion.
"I don't discuss my tactical countermeasures with unauthorized meta-humans," the vigilante growled, reaching into his belt, retrieving a smoke bomb, and slamming it into the wet gravel with a sudden, concussive bang.
A thick cloud of aerosolized graphite and tear gas blossomed across the roof. By the time Clark’s super-breath cleared the air with a single, gentle exhale, the parapet was empty.
Clark stood alone in the freezing Gotham drizzle, staring at the empty gravel, his hand rising to press against his own temple. His heart was hammering at a frantic, terrified eighty-five beats per minute.
He had no pulse, Clark’s brain screamed into the quiet night. The man was standing three feet from me, breathing air into a voice modulator, and he had no pulse. No breath. No heartbeat.
Clark took off into the clouds, breaking the sound barrier over the bay, his mind spiraling into a catastrophic, frantic tailspin.
Is my hearing failing? He thought in a sudden, icy wave of panic. Did that solar flare last Thursday damage my sensory cortex? Am I developing Kryptonian nerve degeneration? Am I going deaf?
The crisis did not abate over the following seventy-two hours. If anything, it escalated into a full-blown medical neurosis.
Clark spent the entirety of Wednesday sitting at his desk in the Daily Planet bullpen, surreptitiously testing his audiological range with the frantic, obsessive energy of a man who believed his brain was slowly liquefying. He listened to the rhythmic chewing of Jimmy. He listened to the erratic, squeaking fan belt of a milk truck navigating an icy mountain pass in the Swiss Alps. He tuned into the exact cardiovascular cadence of Perry White’s left ventricle, currently working overtime due to a pastrami sandwich and a three-point font mismatch on the front-page proofs, and tracked the blood pressure of twenty-four separate interns across three floors of the building.
Everything was working. His hearing was magnificent. It was capable of detecting a pin dropping on a shag carpet in Albuquerque.
"Kent!" Perry White’s voice roared from the corner office, rattling the frosted glass panels with enough concussive force to send loose paper clips scattering across Clark’s desk. "Get your corn-fed ass into my office before I replace your chair with a malfunctioning toaster!"
Clark stumbled to his feet, deliberately knocking his hip against a filing cabinet to maintain his clumsy persona, clutching his reporter’s notebook to his chest like a shield. "Coming, Mr. White!"
Perry didn't look up from a sprawling, red-ink-splattered mock-up of the Sunday business section.
"Wayne Enterprises is finalizing their commercial real estate consolidation in the financial district. The board is throwing a VIP reception at the Wayne Tower penthouse suite this afternoon. Bruce Wayne himself is in town, gracing our humble sister city with his presence between yacht accidents and European fashion weeks. "Lois is in Washington, which means you're up, Kent. You’re going to put on a tie, you’re going to walk into that penthouse, and you’re going to get me an exclusive one-on-one quote from the billionaire playboy about urban infrastructural reinvestment. And if you stutter so much that he thinks the Daily Planet employs human woodpeckers, I’m demoting you to writing astrology columns in Bismarck, North Dakota."
"Bruce Wayne, Mr. White?" Clark echoed, his voice pitching slightly upward into a mild, nervous register. "Isn't he notorious for refusing print interviews?"
"He's notorious for being a shallow, overfunded socialite who likes attention," Perry barked. "Go flatter his haircut and ask him about the tax credits. Dismissed!"
Two hours later, Clark found himself standing in the sixty-fourth-floor executive atrium of Wayne Tower Metropolis, holding a cheap plastic ballpoint pen and feeling utterly ridiculous.
The room was an intimidating monument to modernist wealth, floor-to-ceiling panoramic glass overlooking the expanse of Centennial Park, minimalist polished concrete floors, and walls covered with abstract expressionist paintings that looked like someone had thrown a bucket of squid ink at a canvas and charged six million dollars for the privilege.
"Mr. Kent," a voice purred from the terrace doorway. The sound was smooth, warm, and possessed a rich, aristocratic resonance that seemed to vibrate directly through the soles of Clark’s orthopedic shoes.
Clark turned.
Bruce Wayne stepped into the atrium. He was wearing a gray-colored linen suit that hung from his broad, powerful shoulders with effortless perfection, his shirt left casually open at the throat to reveal a glimpse of tanned, immaculate collarbone. His dark hair was artfully tousled, falling across his forehead with a calculated carelessness, and his blue eyes, - bright, piercing, and terrifyingly sharp -, locked onto Clark with an expression of intense, amused appraisal.
"Bruce Wayne," the billionaire said, stepping forward, extending a manicured, elegant hand. "I hear you're the Daily Planet's moral conscience. Perry White warned me that you might try to lecture me about corporate greed, so I made sure to hide my solid-gold paperweights."
Clark offered a self-effacing, clumsy smile, automatically reaching out to take the proffered hand. "Clark Kent, Mr. Wayne. And I don't lecture. I just ask questions."
Their palms met.
Bruce’s skin was cold.
Not chilly like a man who had stepped out of an air-conditioned limousine, it was cold. It was the smooth, porcelain temperature of a marble bust that had been kept in a dark basement for a century.
And then, Clark’s super-hearing, automatically tuning in to the man’s chest to monitor his heart rate for deception, registered the acoustic profile of the billionaire's torso.
Silence.
Clark’s breath hitched in his throat. His fingers involuntarily tightened around Bruce’s hand before he caught himself, applying precisely zero point zero two percent of his strength to avoid crushing the bones into powder.
He narrowed his auditory focus. He listened for the aortic valve. Nothing. He listened for the bronchial airflow. Nothing. He listened for the soft, mechanical hum of a pacemaker, an artificial heart, a hidden cybernetic relay, or a subterranean audio jammer.
Absolute, terrifying, unyielding vacuum.
Clark’s eyes widened behind his thick glasses. His knees went weak.
It's happening again, his mind screamed in hysterical, unadulterated terror.
It wasn't Batman. It's me.
I have space cancer. My ears are calcifying. I'm losing my hearing.
The universe is going silent, and I'm going to spend the rest of my immortal life communicating through sign language and interpretive dance.
"Mr. Kent?" Bruce murmured, his dark eyebrows knitting together in mild, amused curiosity, though his blue eyes remained razor-sharp, tracking the microscopic sweat beads forming on Clark’s forehead. "Are you quite alright? You look as though you've just seen a ghost. Or perhaps my linen suit is offending your Midwestern sensibilities?"
"I-No. No, Mr. Wayne, I'm- I'm fine," Clark stammered, frantically letting go of Bruce’s hand, stepping back so quickly his heel caught on the edge of a minimalist rug, sending him stumbling backward against a glass display case. "Just low blood sugar. Skipped breakfast. Very unprofessional. Terrible habit."
Bruce’s lips curved into a slow, devastatingly handsome smirk that showed just a hint of sharp white teeth. He reached into his pocket, retrieved an embroidered silk handkerchief, and gently dabbed at a drop of moisture on Clark’s temple with a lingering, surprisingly tender touch that sent a sudden, confused jolt of electricity racing straight down Clark’s spine.
"Well then, Clark," Bruce purred, dropping his voice into a lower, deliciously intimate register that made the hair on Clark’s arms stand up, "Why don't we sit down, order some lunch, and see if we can't restore your vitals? I find that journalists are much more agreeable when they aren't on the verge of fainting onto my rugs."
Bruce guided him toward a low, black leather sofa set beside a low glass coffee table. Clark sank into the cushion, feeling entirely too large and clumsy for the delicate furniture, frantically recalibrating his ears.
Focus, Kent, he told himself, staring at Bruce's linen lapel. Just isolate the pericardium. It's impossible for a human being to sit upright and talk without blood circulation. He has to have a heart rate.
"So," Bruce said, leaning back with a fluid grace that seemed almost liquid, crossing one long leg over the other. He rested his chin on his knuckles, his blue eyes gleaming. "Perry White said you wanted to talk about our urban infrastructure bonds. Or did you come all the way up to the sixty-fourth floor just to stare at me like I’m one of that absurd abstract paintings on the walls?"
"I-No, the bonds, of course," Clark said, clicking his ballpoint pen with a shaky thumb.
Click-click. Click-click.
He unintentionally leaned forward, aiming his right ear directly at Bruce's left ribcage.
"Mr. Wayne," Clark forced out, his voice slightly higher than usual, "Wayne Enterprises has committed forty million dollars to the Park Ridge transit revitalization. Some critics argue this is merely a tax shelter disguised as philanthropy. How do you respond to allegations that your civic generosity is calculated?"
"Everything I do is calculated, Clark," Bruce replied smoothly, his lips twitching with amused indulgence. He leaned forward, closing the distance between them by six inches.
Clark ignored it, ostensibly nodding like a diligent reporter.
Bruce noticed the movement, his eyebrows lifting slightly, a distinctly wicked spark lighting his eyes.
"Are you leaning in to catch my quote, Clark, or are you just trying to get a better look at my collarbones?"
Clark turned a vibrant, catastrophic shade of beet red. "I'm- It's acoustics. High ceilings in here. Very reverberant concrete."
"Reverberant," Bruce repeated, tasting the word like vintage wine. He tilted his head, exposing the long, smooth line of his throat. Right over the jugular vein.
Clark stared at it. With his microscopic vision, he could see the fine pores of Bruce's skin, the slight prickle of dark five-o'clock shadow that had been meticulously shaved, the pale translucence of the epidermis.
There was no pulse wave. No rhythmic expansion of the arterial wall.
The blood in the vessel was simply sitting there, cold and motionless, while the man smiled and flirted like a Hollywood star.
He's a mannequin, Clark thought, panic spiraling into sheer lunacy. Wayne Enterprises built an animatronic CEO to attend press conferences so the real Bruce Wayne can race speedboats in Monaco. It's the only rational explanation.
"Tell me, Clark," Bruce murmured, his voice dropping into that rich, smoky baritone that seemed designed to bypass rational thought entirely, "does the Daily Planet always send reporters who blush this beautifully, or am I receiving special treatment?"
"I don't blush, Mr. Wayne," Clark lied, his voice cracking. "It's heat. It’s pretty hot there."
Bruce threw his head back and laughed, a rich, melodic sound that filled the room.
Clark strained with every fiber of his being to hear the breath intake preceding the laugh.
Nothing.
Bruce hadn't inhaled. His chest hadn't expanded. He had simply generated the sound through sheer diaphragmatic sorcery, producing laughter without drawing a single cubic centimeter of oxygen into his pulmonary system.
"You're delightful, Clark Kent. Pretty and hot," Bruce said, resting his forearms on his knees, leaning in so close that Clark could feel the faint, chill air rolling off his skin like mist from an open refrigerator. "Most people who sit on that couch spend forty minutes trying to convince me to buy their startup or sleep with their cousin. You're sitting there looking at me as if you're trying to perform an emergency ultrasound with your bare eyes."
Clark slightly chukled and the absurd of situation. "I am not performing an ultrasound."
"Could have fooled me," Bruce said, his voice dropping to a teasing, conspiratorial whisper. "You've glanced at my chest six times in the last three minutes. If you wanted to know if I work out, Clark, you could have simply asked. I'm very proud of my bench press."
"I was looking at your tie bar." Clark said with smile.
"I'm not wearing a tie bar."
"At your buttons, then. Very- Very symmetrical mother-of-pearl!"
Bruce’s smile widened, sharp and devastating. "I like you, Clark. You're terrible at this, which makes you infinitely more interesting than anyone I've met all week. What are you doing for dinner tonight?"
Clark blinked, his pencil freezing over his notebook. "Dinner? With you?"
"Unless you have another billionaire lined up for the evening," Bruce purred, standing up with that effortless, silent grace, extending his hand once more to help Clark off the sofa. "Seven o'clock. A small Italian place in the East District. Very quiet. Excellent acoustics for men with sensitive ears."
Clark took the hand, feeling that same smooth, marble chill seep into his skin, his mind spinning like a broken compass.
Still no pulse, his brain whimpered. Not even one. Just one little thud, Bruce. Please. For my mental health.
"Seven o'clock," Clark managed to say, offering a dazed, overwhelmed nod. "I'll bring more questions about the transit bonds."
"Bring whatever you like, Clark," Bruce said softly, his thumb tracing a tiny, deliberate circle against the back of Clark's knuckles before letting go. "Just make sure you bring yourself."
What followed over the next six weeks was a period of psychological, audiological, and romantic chaos that Clark Kent was entirely unprepared to navigate.
The dinner had morphed into drinks at a quiet, absurdly expensive rooftop lounge where Bruce had spent two hours sipping an obscure vintage of red wine while looking at Clark through thick, dark eyelashes as if Clark were a whole damn meal and Bruce was a starving man who had forgotten what food tasted like.
Drinks had morphed into late-night walks through Centennial Park, weekend dinners in Gotham, and midnight visits where Bruce Wayne would simply appear in Metropolis via private helicopter, step out onto the terrace of Clark’s cramped apartment, and demand that Clark accompany him to an underground art exhibit or a twenty-four-hour diner in New Jersey.
Clark was falling.
He was falling with the terrifying, unstoppable momentum of a rogue comet plunging into a yellow sun. He loved the sharp, cynical brilliance of Bruce’s mind, he loved the quiet, fierce protective streak that burned beneath the shallow playboy exterior, he loved the way Bruce looked at him when they were alone, - not as a bumbling reporter, and not as an all-powerful alien savior, but simply as a man who deserved to be touched with gentle, worshipful reverie.
There was, however, a massive, screaming, neon-red problem that was driving Clark into an early grave:
Bruce Wayne did not have a pulse.
And neither did the Batman.
It took Clark precisely four weeks of shared Justice League monitor duty, midnight team-ups in the docks, and romantic dates in five-star restaurants to assemble the puzzle pieces into a terrifying, inescapable picture:
Batman smelled faintly of expensive cedarwood, high-end motor oil, and a specific, rare vintage of French antiseptic.
Bruce Wayne too smelled of expensive cedarwood, high-end motor oil, and the exact same vintage of French antiseptic.
Batman had a faint, three-inch surgical scar running along the lower edge of his left ribcage, which Clark had observed with X-ray vision during a skirmish with Metallo, while respectfully avoiding face under the mask.
And Bruce Wayne had the exact same three-inch surgical scar running along his left ribcage, which Clark had mapped with his fingertips while helping Bruce take off his silk shirt during a particularly heated make-out session on Clark’s corduroy sofa.
Batman was an acoustic dead zone.
As well as Bruce Wayne was an acoustic dead zone.
Bruce Wayne is the Batman, Clark had concluded one Tuesday evening, sitting on the floor of his kitchen while eating cereal out of a mixing bowl.
The revelation should have brought him immense clarity. It should have solved the mystery of the vigilante's identity, explained the endless funding of the Justice League’s orbital telemetry, and justified why Bruce Wayne had so many mysterious, unexplained bruises.
Instead, it had merely shifted his existential dread into a brand-new, terrifying category of panic:
Bruce Wayne is Batman, which means my hearing isn't broken. My hearing is fine.
Which means Bruce somehow still lived without pulse.
Clark had spent seven sleepless nights lying awake, staring at his ceiling, constructing increasingly unhinged, scientifically illiterate hypotheses to explain the phenomenon.
First one, Bruce Wayne was a hyper-advanced android constructed by S.T.A.R. Labs that had achieved sentience and decided to spend its free time adopting orphans and punching clowns.
Second one, Bruce Wayne had replaced his cardiovascular system with an experimental, silent magnetic-levitation pump manufactured by Wayne Enterprises Applied Sciences to prevent enemies from tracking his pulse with directional microphones.
As for the third one, Bruce Wayne had learned an ancient Tibetan monk technique that allowed him to stop his heart for forty-eight hours at a time purely through the sheer, stubborn force of his own repressed trauma.
And finally, Clark had yellow-sun macular-auditory nerve damage that specifically and exclusively rendered him deaf to the cardiovascular frequencies of moody, black-haired billionaires from New Jersey.
On no, he should have used sunscreen.
The tension reached its absolute breaking point on a rainy Friday evening in late October.
They were lying together on the massive, velvet-draped canopy bed in the master suite of Wayne Manor. The room was dim, illuminated only by the dying amber embers of a massive limestone fireplace and the pale, rhythmic flashes of lightning outside the windows.
Clark was lying on his back, wearing an old grey flannel shirt, his arm draped around Bruce’s bare shoulders. Bruce was resting his head squarely against Clark’s chest, his long, dark eyelashes fluttering against his cheekbones, his pale, scarred skin looking like polished marble against Clark’s golden, solar-warmed bronze.
And Clark was currently having a silent, high-octane nervous breakdown.
He slowly, carefully slid his left hand down Bruce’s arm, his fingertips settling with feather-light precision against the radial artery of Bruce’s wrist. He concentrated. He dialed his super-hearing up until he could hear the individual heartbeats of two stray field mice scurrying through the hedgerows five miles away on the edge of the estate.
Beneath his fingers was nothing.
Not a flutter. Not a micro-twitch. Not the faintest whisper of a capillary expansion. The wrist was cool, firm, and as silent as a granite tombstone.
Clark slowly moved his hand up to Bruce’s neck, his index finger resting gently against the carotid triangle beneath the sharp angle of the billionaire’s jaw.
Silence.
Clark let out a small, strangled, high-pitched whimper that sounded remarkably like a punctured accordion.
Bruce stirred. He lifted his head slowly, his dark blue eyes clouding with an intense, melancholic shadow as he looked down at Clark’s pale, sweat-streaked face. He saw the fingers resting against his neck. He saw the sheer, unadulterated terror in Clark’s wide cornflower-blue eyes.
Bruce sighed.
It was long, heavy, tragic sound that seemed to carry the weight of four centuries of gothic misery. He sat up slowly, sliding off the edge of the bed, reaching for a black silk dressing gown that lay draped over a nearby chaise lounge. He tied the sash around his waist with slow, deliberate finality, walking over to the fireplace, his back turned to Clark, his broad shoulders hunched as if preparing to receive an executioner's blade.
"You know, don't you?" Bruce said, his voice dropping into a hollow, gravelly rasp that was devoid of all playboy charm, the cold, tragic voice of the Dark Knight.
Clark scrambled upright, clutching the duvet to his waist, his glasses sitting crookedly on his nose.
"Know what, Bruce? That you don't have a cardiovascular system? Yes! I know. I’ve known for six weeks. Bruce, please, you have to tell me what kind of experimental cybernetic pump you installed in your chest, because I’ve been researching synthetic heart valves on the Fortress of Solitude’s archives for twenty days and none of them operate with zero acoustic resonance!"
Bruce paused. He turned his head slowly, staring at Clark over his shoulder with an expression of profound, baffled disbelief.
"A cybernetic pump?" Bruce echoed flatly.
"Yes," Clark said, with the desperate voice of a man whose sanity was hanging by a single thread.
"Or a magnetic impeller. Or an alien parasite! Bruce, you don't breathe. You haven't taken an involuntary breath since we sat down to eat dinner three hours ago. You take a deep breath before you speak to vibrate your vocal cords, and then you just... stop! Your lungs are completely static. Your heart doesn't beat. "I thought I was going deaf, Bruce! I spent three weeks listening to earthworms in Nebraska because I thought I had space cancer in my eardrums. What is wrong with your body?"
Bruce stared at him. The silence stretched for ten seconds, fifteen seconds, an eternity of heavy, crackling tension punctuated only by the popping of an ember in the fireplace.
Then, slowly, agonizingly, Bruce turned around to face the bed. His expression was dark, tragic, and steeped in three hundred years of generational angst. He raised his chin, his blue eyes flashing with a sudden, predatory, and melancholic light, his jaw setting into a line of absolute, stoic doom.
"I am not a machine, Clark," Bruce said, his voice dropping into a deep, gothic, theatrical baritone that belonged in a Victorian melodrama. "And your hearing is not failing you. What you are sensing, is the cold reality of what I am. A creature of the night. A monster damned to walk the earth between the shadows and the grave."
Bruce reached up with his right hand, gently hooking his thumb beneath his upper lip, pulling back the flesh to reveal two prominent, razor-sharp, elongated canine teeth that gleamed like polished ivory in the firelight.
"I am a vampire, Clark," Bruce confessed, his voice trembling with a raw, agonizing expectation of horror, disgust, and immediate abandonment. "The Wayne bloodline was cursed in the seventeenth century during the founding of Gotham. I do not age. I do not have a pulse. I do not draw breath unless I choose to mimic the living. I feast upon the hemoglobin of the living synthesized through Wayne Enterprises medical divisions, though the thirst never truly leaves me. I am a parasite, Clark. A dead thing masquerading as a man. And if you recoil from me if you go away and never look upon my face again, I will understand. Because I am fundamentally unworthy of your light."
What filled the cavernous bedroom was a sound so completely unexpected that Bruce’s eyes snapped wide open.
It started as a high-pitched, choked squeak.
Then, it bubbled up into an undignified, snorting gasp.
And then, Clark Kent threw his head back against the carved mahogany headboard and erupted into a deafening, hysterical, bed-shaking roar of pure, unadulterated laughter.
"Clark?" Bruce said, his fangs still partially bared, his entire tragic, gothic posture completely derailed by the sight of the reporter clutching his stomach and kicking his feet beneath the duvet like an overturned beetle. "Clark, this is not an appropriate response to an ancient blood curse!"
"A vampire!" Clark howled, tears of pure, gasping joy streaming down his cheeks as he pounded his fist into the mattress with enough force to make the heavy oak frame shudder. "O, thanks Rao!"
Bruce’s jaw dropped. The dark, brooding lord of the night was replaced instantly by an intensely offended, deeply bewildered billionaire who looked as though someone had just told him his bespoke tuxedo was purchased at a thrift shop.
"Are you- Are you laughing at me?" Bruce hissed, his fangs clicking together in indignant fury. "I just revealed to you that I am an immortal being who survives on the vital fluids of mortal beings, and you are having a hysterical fit on my imported Egyptian cotton sheets?"
"You don't understand!" Clark wheezed, sitting up, wiping tears from beneath his glasses, his chest heaving with breathless, radiant relief. "You're dead! You're literally dead! That’s why you don't have a heartbeat!"
"Of course I don't have a heartbeat, I am an undead creature of the damned-"
"My ears work!" Clark cheered, lunging across the bed with terrifying speed, throwing his arms around Bruce’s waist and tackling the dark knight of Gotham onto the soft velvet duvet with the unrestrained, joyful enthusiasm of a golden retriever that had just discovered its tennis ball wasn't lost under the porch after all.
"Bruce! My ears are completely fine! I don't have space cancer! I don't have yellow-sun nerve degeneration. I was hearing zero because there was zero to hear! You are biologically silent! I am a diagnostic genius!"
Bruce lay pinned beneath Clark, staring up at his beaming, tear-stained face with an expression of sheer, uncomprehending paralysis.
"You thought you had space cancer?" Bruce asked slowly, his voice flat.
"I had three separate medical reference books open in the Fortress of Solitude!" Clark confessed, peppering Bruce’s cold cheek with rapid, enthusiastic, joyful kisses that made Bruce’s fangs retract slightly out of sheer embarrassment. "I was testing my range on pigeons in London! I listened to Perry White’s gallbladder for forty-five minutes yesterday! I was terrified, Bruce. I thought my powers were rotting away."
Bruce’s eyebrows knitted together, a slow, dangerous twitch starting in his left eyelid.
"Wait," Bruce said, his voice dropping into that razor-sharp, analytical register that usually preceded someone getting thrown through a skylight. "What did you just say?"
Clark paused mid-peck, his lips hovering an inch above Bruce’s cheekbone. "I- I said my ears work?"
"No," Bruce said, his blue eyes narrowing into slits. "Before that. You mentioned the Fortress of Solitude. And yellow-sun nerve degeneration. And Rao."
Clark froze.
The joyful, triumphant grin on Clark’s face slowly, agonizingly calcified into a look of absolute, catastrophic horror.
"Oh," Clark whispered.
"Clark," Bruce said, his tone ominously calm, his hands coming up to grip Clark’s wrists. "Explain to me why a bumbling reporter from Kansas has an archive called the Fortress of Solitude."
Clark swallowed hard. His throat felt like sandpaper.
He looked down at Bruce at the pale, beautiful face, the dark hair, the sharp fangs, the centuries-old vampire who spent his nights dressed as a flying mammal beating up muggers in alleyways.
Well, Clark thought, if there was ever a time to balance the cosmic ledger of absurd identity reveals, it’s probably right now.
"Bruce," Clark squeaked. "Clark."
Clark slowly, gingerly sat back on his heels, letting go of Bruce’s waist. He reached up with both hands, took off his thick-rimmed wire glasses, and set them carefully on the mahogany nightstand.
Then, he straightened his spine.
His rounded, defensive shoulders pulled back, expanding his chest; his posture shifted from bumbling farm boy to towering, mythic majesty and the gentle, goofy expression on his face smoothed out into the calm of the most powerful being on planet Earth.
He floated two inches off the mattress.
Not standing. Not jumping. Literally hovering in zero gravity, his grey flannel shirt suddenly looking remarkably like a hero’s tunic in the dim firelight.
"I'm Superman," Clark said.
The silence that fell over the master suite of Wayne Manor was not merely quiet. It was an absolute, metaphysical vacuum.
Bruce Wayne lay on his back on the duvet, staring up at the hovering, glowing alien he had been dating for six weeks.
His brain, which possessed an IQ measured in triple digits and had mastered sixty-four forms of martial arts, completely, spectacularly blue-screened.
"You're..." Bruce whispered, his voice cracking by an octave. "You're the alien." "Yes," Clark said sheepishly, floating down until his knees touched the velvet again. "The sun god."
"Well, I prefer 'Superman', but-“
"The solar-powered meta-human who flies around Metropolis in bright red underwear," Bruce rasped, his eyes darting between Clark's face and the glasses on the nightstand with dizzying speed. "The one whose tactical files I have encrypted across six redundant hard drives in the cave."
"You have six hard drives about me?" Clark asked, touched.
"I have contingency plans to neutralize you with synthetic radioactive isotopes!" Bruce snarled, sitting up so fast his silk robe billowed like a thunderstorm, his fangs snapping out in absolute, indignant mortification.
"I spent three years analyzing your flight trajectories. I calculated your caloric burn. I had satellite surveillance tracking your atmospheric sonic booms! And you- You were sitting in my penthouse eating my finger sandwiches, blushing at my collarbones, and pretending you couldn't open a jar of mayonnaise without asking for assistance!"
"That jar was very slippery!" Clark protested defensively, crossing his arms over his broad chest. "And you're the one to talk. You're Batman. And a vampire! You have an entire gothic horror novel going on under your floorboards and you're mad at me for having heat vision?"
"I am the night!" Bruce shouted, throwing his hands in the air. "I am an ancient, cursed predator! You're a boy scout from a cornfield who happens to be an invincible extraterrestrial! Do you have any idea how humiliating this is? I was preparing a tragic, operatic monologue about how my dark nature would taint your innocent mortal soul, and you're an indestructible sun deity who shoots lasers from his eyes!"
"I thought your monologue was very romantic," Clark offered helpfully, smiling that sunny, infuriatingly earnest smile that always dismantled Bruce’s defenses in a fraction of a second.
Bruce groaned, - a long, muffled sound of pure psychological annihilation-, burying his face in his hands as his shoulders shook.
"I can't believe this," Bruce muttered through his fingers. "I fell in love with an alien in a tweed jacket. Alfred is going to mock me until the end of time. He's going to put little sun stickers on my blood bags."
Clark chuckled, a warm, resonant sound that vibrated through the room like golden sunlight. He slid forward, his large, warm hands gently reaching out to pull Bruce’s wrists away from his face.
Bruce didn't resist. He looked up, his dark blue eyes wide, vulnerable, and completely stripped of all armor, staring into the bright, cornflower-blue gaze of his partner.
"Bruce," Clark whispered softly, leaning in until their foreheads touched, his thumb tenderly tracing the sharp tip of one ivory fang.
"I don't care about the curse. I don't care about the fangs. And I definitely don't care that you don't have a pulse. You're the most brilliant, brave, ridiculous man I've ever met in my life. And I love you. All of you. Bat, billionaire, and bloodsucker."
Bruce stared at him for a long, silent moment, the ancient, cold weight in his chest melting away into something soft, miraculous, and completely full of light.
"You're an absolute idiot, Kal-El," Bruce murmured, the name rolling off his tongue with a reverent, tender weight.
"I know," Clark smiled, his lips brushing against Bruce’s cold, smiling mouth. "But at least I know my ears work."
Bruce laughed, a real, genuine, joyful sound that echoed off the high vaulted ceilings of Wayne Manor, and pulled the sun god down into the dark, where they finally, beautifully belonged.
"Oh"
"What, Bruce?"
"I realized. If I am immortal, and you are immortal, it means I won’t become a widower and won’t have to mourn you for centuries."
"Yeah, until kryptonite and silver do us part."