An Open Eye

May 27th, Buenos Aires, Argentine Republic. Averting multi-vehicle collision. Low, distorted angle as subject is floating several feet above the ground. High res, blurry.

May 30th, Bridgeport, Connecticut. Extinguishing house fire. Three-quarter profile view, low quality capture from cellphone, blurry.

June 2nd, Metropolis. Brief appearance at press conference after preventing assassination attempt on visiting diplomat. 1080p footage, face-on.

Blurry.

Bruce doesn't know how he's doing it. He'd try to find out if he thought it was important, but he's confident that it's too subtle for Spyral's IPI, at least. The salient point is that he's protecting himself, and that means he has something to protect. An alter ego, a daytime persona. Or, night-time, as the case may be; this is not a creature that flourishes in shadow. Bruce wants to know exactly who he is, who he knows, who he cares about, who cares about him. What will break him when enough pressure is applied.

Bruce pushes his keyboard across his desk and rubs at his eyes. He has gathered approximately three terabytes of data on this man—this alien, this walking WMD—since the Black Zero event: folder upon folder full of amateur YouTube footage and news broadcasts from all around the world, an unfathomable number of stills cribbed from every social media site that exists.

Alfred calls it obsessive. Bruce calls it attention to detail.

Every time the Superman so much as breathes in public, the internet erupts with a flurry of candid shots and the tantalizing promise of new data points, but his crawler only ever brings him more Instagram pics of someone who looks like he watched a slightly cursed videotape.

Bruce sets up every new batch to run through facial recognition anyway, cross-references the results with what he's extrapolated about his height and weight and body mass, his chest and arm and inner goddamn thigh measurements, and collates a list of people from whatever his algorithms spit out.

It's mostly actors and athletes and a startling number of underwear models. The outliers, the everyday folk; those are the ones Bruce has more interest in. The quiet ones, keeping their heads down. When the frequency of any given name hits a certain threshold, that's when he starts digging further.

(Two months from now, Bruce will meet Clark Kent. He will be set on a different goal that night, but the name will be familiar enough that Bruce will pay him more attention than he would otherwise warrant. Enough that their tense interaction will devolve into an aggressive rut against the rear of the building.)

Bruce takes a gulp of his coffee. It's cold, but he tips his head back and finishes the rest anyway.

His eyes hurt. The clock on his taskbar reads 4:32 am, and he decides that a little sleep before tomorrow's eight a.m. board meeting would be prudent, if not useful. He sets off another web crawler before he turns in, and resigns himself to the trashpile of animated gifs and dubious photomanipulations that the morning will bring.

He's straining on his toes atop an ornate gargoyle, high above the inky streets of Gotham. It's teeming with rain, slanting over the skyline and beading on his gauntlets, trickling down into the grooved detailing. It collects there and then drops onto his face, sliding along the seam between the cowl and his skin. His hands twist against the slippery brickwork, but that only serves to tangle him further in his own grapnel wire.

"Well," the Superman says, voice like a thunderhead. He steps towards him across the smoggy air. "Look at the state of you."

His face is vivid, flawless: high-boned cheeks and cleft chin, a mouth as hard as marble. He looms over him, the personification of judgment, reaching out to press his palm over the symbol on Bruce's chest. Bruce jerks beneath his touch and pulls the wire tighter around his wrists. The Superman's eyes transfix him, colder and bluer than Arctic water as his fingers walk up Bruce's neck, his chin, slip between Bruce's lips and curl behind his teeth. He tastes like ozone.

"My fish on a hook," he says. His voice is a whisper; his voice is a sonic boom.

Bruce jolts awake a handful of seconds before it happens—enough time to register the weight between his legs, the hot slam of his blood—and then it belts the breath out of him when he comes in a long, brutal wave.

It's been a while, he tells himself as he cleans up, hands shaking. It's been a while since he's taken someone to his bed. Too fixated on his mission, he has neglected to indulge in even his own utilitarian touch.

He tries to remember the face in his dream, and can't.

Mid-afternoon, and he's sifting through the detritus collected in his database. His friend has been busy. There's new footage from Europe and Australia, as well as dotted around the States. One picture in particular keeps cropping up repeatedly—his system does a decent job of sieving out the duplicates when one goes viral and blankets social media like kudzu, but it's not infallible.

Bruce can't be annoyed about it, not this time.

The Superman is twisted in midair, his back a graceful arch against the sky. He's framed by Metropolis' skyscrapers, and whoever snapped the shot has inadvertently hit upon the golden ratio, shadows cast at just the right tangents. His cape billows, backlit and radiant, and every sleek line of his body is limned in sunlight.

He looks like a renaissance painting, an angel ascending. It's breathtaking. That his face is smeared and grainy doesn't matter. The fact that Bruce hates him to the core of his being—it doesn't matter.

The hair pricks up along Bruce's arms and the back of his neck. He knows what he is going to do.

Bruce closes his eyes and tightens his fist and tries to remember the face in his dream. Whenever it feels like he's close, the man's features almost realized, his eyes burn like fire and the image he's painstakingly built flares up and disperses like smoke.

He grunts in frustration and takes a different approach.

Nobody can agree on how strong the Superman is, only that he is phenomenally so. He could hold Bruce's wrists, for example, above his head, one-handed, with ease. Bruce hasn't had a partner who could do that, or who seemed inclined to even try, for a very long time.

(Two months from now, Bruce will meet Clark Kent and find himself pressed against warm brickwork. Clark Kent's smile will be beatific.)

A man like him—this weapon, this threat—he could pick Bruce up as though he is made of nothing, render him helpless with the bare minimum of effort. He could draw his fingers down Bruce's suit—down the Bat's uniform—splitting the seams like he's opening an envelope. He will only find a poison pen letter inside. Perhaps that will anger him.

And perhaps that is what Bruce wants, to see the wrath of a god, to smile in his face they dismantle one another. He pushes his head back against his chair and drags his hand; his feet slide against the floor.

It might well be a mutually-assured destruction, because Bruce may be weak in the shadow of such a being, but he is clever and he is resourceful and most of all he is tenacious. He will find a way to put his hand to the Superman's throat, and then he will—he will pull his head back, bare his neck as if for ritual sacrifice, carry him over his shoulder like a lamb, hook a finger into his mouth, reel him in and land him in the gutter with the rest of the human race.

(Two months from now, Clark Kent will float to the top of Bruce's list, caught by his surveillance devices around the Port of Gotham. Bruce will call him, Clark Kent will come to him, and afterwards, satisfied, Bruce will harden his heart.)

But he is not human and he doesn't recognize his place, and he will fight. He will fight, with all that he has, all that power focused into a singularity, bearing down onto Bruce like a thunderbolt. Enduring it will be the most crucial thing he'll ever do, his life's work in the balance. He will resist, and won't be struck down or enthralled, not by his fists, his mouth, his eyes, nor be crushed by his magnitude. Bruce will strain against him with all of his might, with every inch of his ferocity, his hands clawed and his teeth bared.

He will find something, find a weakness, because he knows there must be a way to get under his skin, to crawl into his veins, to penetrate the inviolate—spear his inviolable heart—

(Two months from now, Bruce will have the means to destroy Clark Kent.)

His screens blink and a new batch of images array themselves over the desktop in an endless tessellation of red, blue, gold—and Bruce arches up into his own hand, breath caught between his teeth. He comes with a shudder, his hoarse cry reverberating off the cave walls and echoing back at him like an unheard prayer.