Desiderata

Gotham seethed in the grip of a midsummer heatwave. Its long days were breathlessly close and humidity clung like a wet towel until late into the evening, and as far as Clark could tell, it hadn't dampened the city's belligerence so much as shortened its temper. He approached from higher altitudes, bringing with him a draft of cool air that condensed like dew on his uniform.

He'd learned that he was not unwelcome here, but Gotham was firmly Bruce's jurisdiction. Partly territoriality, partly Bruce drawing lines where he felt he needed them drawn, which, after the whole... well, everything, were a lot of lines, everywhere. It helped that these careful boundaries weren't just for him. They were for the rest of the League, too. Even Diana.

So when Clark heard the low murmur of his name from the guts of the city, he accepted the invitation for what it was.

He banked eastward and wove around the city's sweltering brickwork until he located the Bat, staked out deep in the Cauldron, halfway up a tenement building clad with a lacework of downpipes and fire escapes. He had his binoculars trained on a boarded-up storefront opposite. His cape hung listless in the still air.

"Evening." Clark alighted next to him. Bruce smelled warm, overheated. Salty with perspiration. For all its performance textiles, he imagined the suit could only be so forgiving. "You called me?"

"I did." Bruce didn't sound bashful about it, but not as matter-of-fact as he intended, no doubt. Maybe he'd estimated that it would take Clark longer than a bare minute for him to get here, and was deciding if he was agreeably efficient, annoyingly efficient, or just overeager.

Truth was, Clark had been waiting for an opportunity like this: a situation that was more personal than the structured teamwork they'd been tentatively developing with the League. A pity Diana hadn't been invited too, but one step at a time.

"What's happening?" he asked.

Bruce finally lowered his binoculars and gestured with them to the building opposite. "I noticed some unusual activity on last night's patrol, thought I'd swing back around to check it out. Wondering if you could take a peek inside for me."

"I thought you enjoyed a little B&E," Clark said. Bruce gave him a look that would probably be withering even without the cowl's permanent frown. Clark shot him a bright grin back and maintained it until Bruce looked away, the corner of his mouth lifting.

A smile from the Bat? Bribery through-and-through. Clark could admit he was easily bought. He blinked until the building came into deep focus, and then he pushed his vision past the walls. There was a lot of lead in Gotham's old town, and this building was no different—traces of it in the painted walls gave things an opaque cast; the people within moved like ghosts. Lead pipe wound between floors in looping white mazes.

He could feel Bruce's gaze on him. "What is it you're looking for here?" he asked. If he knew, he could narrow down his area of focus.

Bruce hesitated. Ah—nothing in particular, then. Or nothing he wanted to share. Perhaps this was one of the many casual tests he seemed to administer almost without thinking. "Any chemicals on the property," he eventually said.

"I can't tell for sure, there's too much visual interference. There are some containers that might fit the bill," Clark said. "And—before you ask, no, I couldn't tell you what the molecular composition of their contents are, even if I had a clear view."

Bruce made a low, considering noise in his throat, apparently satisfied with this tidbit of information.

"You think they're cooking something down there?"

"Probably. I'll keep an eye on it, see what kind of distribution ring's involved. More useful long-term than scrubbing it right away. They'd just set up again someplace else."

Nothing Bruce couldn't have figured out on his own, and he'd come away with another detail for the dossier on Superman he no doubt kept on file. It wasn't that Clark didn't trust him—despite their rocky start, Bruce had been almost uncomfortably penitent while simultaneously keeping most of his cards close to his chest, a feat that made Clark's head spin—but he had a way of keeping his interpersonal relationships, which Clark assumed he suddenly had more than was usual for him, at a careful distance.

Most of them, anyway. Clark would give a lot for Bruce to look at him the way he looked at Diana. Instead, he'd caught Diana looking at him the same way she looked at Bruce. He was, in general, perplexed by them both.

Anyway—all tonight had proved was that when Bruce called, Clark would come flying. He should probably feel a little put out. Instead, he said, "Glad I could be of assistance," and, god help him, he actually meant it.

"Thank you, Superman," Bruce said, and for all Clark knew, he meant it as well.

He took a step back off the roof and spiraled skyward on an updraft of warm air. "Anytime you need me, just shout."

He hung there a moment, waiting. Everybody knew that was how it worked. At any given moment, someone was about to call for Superman. But he knew Bruce wouldn't call for Superman. He'd call for Clark.

And Clark had demonstrated tonight that with just a word, he would be at Bruce's side, regardless of distance or urgency. It was no less than he'd do for anyone else, for every last stranger on the planet—but especially for him. Bruce was good at intuiting things. Would he intuit this? Clark could try some less subtle hints.

Or maybe he should go do something useful instead of agitating. Open his ears to the world. Go home and sleep, even. It wouldn't be wrong to say that Clark had been trying to take his mind off things; his split with Lois was probably the least dramatic breakup he'd had, probably because most of his dating experience had been in his teen years when things had seemed more life-and-death than they did now, but the smaller apartment didn't feel like home yet, the neighborhood was new, and so was waking up alone.

He'd keep on task. That would probably be best for everyone involved. So. "I'll leave you to enjoy the view," he said.

Bruce had already settled back down and returned to his reconnaissance. He grunted and briefly raised a hand in farewell.

Clark slapped a companionable hand to the Bat's shoulder—not too firm, don't linger, don't pet him—kicked clear of the skyline, and flew.

The Cave was no less damp than the night air, but it was significantly less clingy. Bruce found it a relief to drag off the cowl and let it cool his skin. He immediately sensed that he wasn't alone—while he'd let anyone believe he had a preternatural ability to know when there was someone in his personal space, this time it was the quality of the Cave's ambient noise that clued him in.

He knew what the rustle of disgruntled chiroptera sounded like, and Alfred tinkering. This was neither. Over the echo of running water, Bruce heard the tail-end echoes of voices: Alfred, and one that wasn't.

Company, then.

He'd been hoping to shower off the strange smoke that had clung to him when he'd taken a last-minute scout through the abandoned store, then steal an hour, maybe an hour and a half where he could consider Clark, the things he'd said and the way he'd said them, and perhaps even sleep before the morning bulldozed in.

He climbed the cast-concrete staircase into the mezzanine workshop. Alfred and Diana, in conversation over the sprawling guts of a deconstructed gauntlet, took a graceful step apart from one another. A conversation between friends, that's all. Bruce knew when he was interrupting something he shouldn't.

Diana's poise had slipped more significantly when he'd encountered her a few days earlier, in close but completely proprietous quarters with Clark.

Bruce's primary issue with the situation was that he wasn't jealous. He could've handled that decorously. It was that he'd been taken with an unexpected wistfulness instead, a longing, almost. Worse, he couldn't tell which of them he was longing for. When Diana had kissed him that evening, quick and fierce in the aftermath of a skirmish, the adrenaline still pounding through their blood and a summer storm crashing around them, it hadn't clarified a thing.

Clark hadn't seemed to notice, and Diana hadn't said anything since. Bruce was, in general, perplexed by them both.

Alfred bid them both goodnight and made himself scarce. Diana was in civilian wear, and had been here long enough to have discarded her shoes. She offered neither apology nor explanation for her presence, and Bruce had learned not to anticipate either. She came and went as she pleased, but was always conscious of when she might be intruding. It felt less and less frequent that she was, as though she had carefully acclimatized Bruce to her company, or to company on the whole.

For an uncomfortable moment, Bruce thought that she might want to talk—about them, about Clark and her, about Clark and him.

But she only took him by the arm and towed him to his desk chair. He tried to resist at first, more out of pettiness than any practical reason. He knew that her grip was as unyielding as Clark's.

His pulse kicked up a fraction. Yeah, he probably shouldn't think about that right now.

"Hi," Bruce said. "Can I help you with something?" He sat in his chair with as much grace as he could muster after hours crouched on a rooftop. His knees sighed in relief.

Diana took his wrist and ran her fingers along his forearm, seeking the catches of one gauntlet, and then the other. "You can," she said. "I have some fingerprints. Would you run them through your magic machine?"

This last she said like a tease. She had come from a world of peaceful simplicity, but mankind's convolutions were no more mysterious to her than the true magic she wielded. Bruce raised an eyebrow, and her cheeks dimpled in a smile.

She tugged one hand free of its glove. Her fingers brushed the inside of his wrist, and Bruce took a breath.

"Where did you find them?" he asked.

"At a crime scene."

"Unprecedented."

"A crime scene in Gotham," she admitted. Bruce turned a stern eye on her, but instead of looking chastened, she set about stripping off his other glove. "You were busy."

"Thought you'd pick up my slack?"

"It's not heavy." Diana lifted Bruce's hand to her mouth and kissed his bruised knuckles. Her hair slid over her shoulder like raw silk.

"You don't have to soften me up," Bruce murmured. "I already said yes."

"No, you didn't."

"Alfred could have done this for you."

"He offered." Diana handed him a number of lifted prints she'd backed onto card. "But I wanted to see you."

It was hard to miss the emphasis she laid on that. Instead of having to field it and everything it may or may not entail, Bruce spread the fingerprint cards out and made a show of inspecting them. They were all perfectly serviceable to excellent. He should stop being surprised that Diana knew how to do things like lift prints from the scene of a crime.

Speaking of which, it must have been somewhere familiar to her if she wasn't armored up. The museum, then. Or the university, where she'd been guest lecturing on historic conservation. He took a punt. "So, which faculty got knocked over?"

"The chemistry laboratories," Diana said. Bruce glanced sideways at her. She looked moderately impressed, but it was likely for his benefit. "Mostly equipment, but some chemicals."

He captured the prints and set the database running. She leaned over the desk next to him and watched, her shoulder pressed to his. Her hands were fine-boned and graceful, richly sunkissed against the neutral gray of his workstation, and she was close enough that Bruce could breathe her fragrance. It stirred a gentle nostalgia in him: a memory of summer days in the manor garden, among the roses, their heavy flowers that swung like censers.

"Diana—"

"Have you seen Clark this evening?" she asked at the same time.

"Yes," Bruce said, after a pause. If he volunteered any more than that, he'd risk giving away that he'd called Clark to him simply because he could, and maybe because he'd wanted to. He might give away that Clark could be captured with only a soft word. "These chemicals, what were they?"

"I though you would be interested to know," Diana said. "I'll bring my notes to brunch tomorrow."

"That's extortion."

"Incentive."

"I have business to attend tomorrow."

"It's very pressing, I'm sure. I'll leave them with Clark, then, and you can fetch them from him."

Bruce looked away from his screen and at her. "You invited Clark?"

"Of course. It's important to keep him in the loop, is it not?" Diana brushed a strand of hair from his forehead and briefly touched his cheek. This all felt suspiciously like Diana's way of telling him to get his shit together. Bruce gladly would, if it were that easy.

"Hm. Still can't make time. Sorry."

Her disapproval at his avoidance was mild, but silent. The days of noisily grinding hard drives were long behind him and the ambient noise of the Cave wasn't enough to fill the quiet. He drummed his fingers on the worktop.

"You don't have to mediate," he said. "Clark and I, we're on... amicable terms."

"Amicable," she said archly. "Have you told him that?"

"Not in as many words. He knows."

"And what else does he know? Have you spoken to him of how you feel?"

Bruce bristled. "Have you?"

He was surprised by his own accusatory tone, blindsided by a sudden certainty that Diana's affections and Clark's attentiveness were an elaborate game—that they had already found a match in each other. It was an ugly thought that vanished as abruptly as it had formed, leaving only its impression behind. The Cave's shadows heaved in Bruce's peripheral vision. He closed his eyes and pressed them with his fingertips until he saw fractals. Neither of them would be cruel like that. The idea was all his.

Diana touched his shoulder. "Would it be a terrible thing, to be straightforward about this?"

Bruce looked up at her. He imagined Clark's hands in her hair, or her lips parting under the gentle brush of his thumb. They were beautiful, untouchable, and for all of their care, they could never break one another the way they could so easily break him.

"I don't know. Why don't you arrange an independent inquiry." He turned his attention back to his computer where the search results were pouring down the screen, setting about it with an intensity of focus that was wholly disproportionate to the task at hand. He could sense Diana's tempered amusement; his deflections had thus far cut no ice with her.

The bulk of his data was cloned from IAFIS, but also incorporated biometric data he'd skimmed from airport security around the world, and all the fingerprint recognition databases he could wriggle his way into. He had hits on almost all of the prints. None of them came with a criminal record. They were entirely students and staff.

"This might be the wrong approach," he said.

"Wait." Diana tapped one of the staff entries. A profile snapped open. "This man. We were briefly introduced. Chemistry isn't his department."

"Dr. Jonathan Crane, professor of psychology." Bruce tabbed through his personnel file. "HR doesn't like him much. Gets his wrist slapped a lot. Not exactly a smoking gun, but it looks like somewhere to start."

"You're invaluable," Diana said. "I'll speak with him."

"You're welcome." Bruce doesn't waste his breath telling her to be careful. To say that to a woman who could pluck bullets out of the air seemed nigh on insulting. Still, trepidation twisted coldly in his gut, and he had long learned to trust the feeling. He tapped his ear, indicating the commlinks he'd engineered for them. "If there's anything you need, call me."

He would come running.

The early sun cast itself through the trees and lay in broken columns against the lakehouse's windows. The glass building looked for all the world like a sweltering heat-trap, but Diana was greeted with the kiss of conditioned air as she opened the door.

"Hey. I thought you said ten." Clark rose from the couch. He smiled at her, drunk on morning sunshine, and Diana's heart filled at the sight of him.

"Clark," she said, and kissed him on both cheeks. She made a show of checking her watch. It was approaching half past the hour, as she well knew. She knew equally that Clark would accept her little white lie with equanimity. "I must have lost track of the time. I hope you can still come."

"I'd love to, which makes two of us," Clark said dryly. He looked as though he were about to say more about that, but Bruce joined them before he could, his sobriety falling over them like a sheet of rain.

Clark went still, all but holding his breath, and she wondered what, if anything, had transpired before she had arrived. She suspected it was nothing—there was an anticipation to this tension that sent shivers down her spine.

Diana watched Clark watching Bruce pour himself a coffee and gulp it. His gaze tracked down Bruce's arms and to the cuffs at his wrist, flicked over the buttons on his shirt and then up to the loose knot of his tie and the bob of his throat. All very restrained, but the stiffness to Bruce's shoulders suggested he was conscious of every moment of it.

Not for the first time, Diana wondered what they stood to gain from their foolish dance. She was, in general, perplexed by them both.

"Perhaps next time you could join us, too," Diana said warmly. She stood before Bruce and took his tie, tugging it into place. He resisted briefly, as was his nature, but then raised his chin and let her. His cheeks were unshaven and his eyes dark—it would be a safe bet to say he did not sleep well as a rule, and last night in particular.

He set his mug aside. "Maybe," he said as she smoothed his lapels down. He was like a mannequin in a thousand dollar suit; he didn't move to touch her and couldn't quite meet her eyes.

Ah.

She spared a glance at Clark to find that he was watching them both raptly, color in his cheeks and his own coffee forgotten in one hand.

When she returned her attention to Bruce, his eyebrows were raised a fraction. She raised hers in response. Diana knew many languages, and if Bruce wanted to speak this one, she was fluent enough. She tilted her head and Bruce gave his a minute shake. She pressed her lips together. Bruce scowled.

Then Clark cleared his throat, softly as though he were trying to do it without drawing attention—and Bruce finally took Diana's hands in his, if only to courteously extract himself from their wordless conversation.

Outside, Alfred drew a sleek vehicle up to the house.

"I have to get moving," Bruce said. "Enjoy your—enjoy brunch."

In his voice, that same bitterness that had echoed in the cave the night before. Diana squeezed his hands gently before letting them drop, and he shot her one final look that she could not decipher.

"Later." Clark set his coffee down, and appeared immediately at a loss with what to do with his hands—it looked to Diana as though he were about to offer a handshake. Bruce saved him the indecision by patting his shoulder, casually companionable in a way that was so near and yet so far from what Clark clearly desired. His expression faltered and fell.

If Bruce noticed, he didn't show it. The lakehouse door swung shut behind him, and he slipped into the car with only a quick glance over his shoulder.

Clark stared after him, then picked up his mug again and squinted into it. "Do you think he thinks we're, uh...?"

"Perhaps," Diana said.

"I thought you two were..."

"Perhaps," Diana said again. "Does he seem well to you?"

"He seems agitated." Clark's smile was strained. He looked upset, if not by Bruce's coolness, then by some other matter of the day.

"And how's Lois?" she asked. Although she suspected that wasn't the problem, she still wanted to know. She poured them fresh coffee and then took his arm in hers. This seemed like a morning best spent on the warm silvered wood of the dock. They would get to brunch perhaps another time.

Clark tipped his face to the sky as they stepped out into the rising heat. The sun caressed the unruly curl of his hair, casting golden halos through it. A sultry breeze ruffled the lake into shallow waves and made music in the leaves of the trees.

"Lois is... Lois. She did just fine before I showed up, and she'll do fine after me, too." He took a sip of his drink, then added, "She's in Chicago right now. I'm—we're okay. We're good."

"But something is the matter?"

"I, yeah, no," Clark said. "Well, maybe. I don't know."

"Ah, a mystery. Perhaps Bruce can unravel it for you."

Clark looked distinctly underwhelmed by the prospect of that conversation. "Bruce is good at mysteries, but he's not so great with feelings."

"Other people's better than his own, I think." Diana rested her hand on his. "Don't underestimate him."

"No, I don't think I'll make that mistake again." Clark laced their fingers. He took a long, deep breath as though steeling himself. "Diana, do you think it could work? Do you think he'd understand? Do you think he could want... this?"

Diana heard the question Clark was afraid to ask: did Bruce think of him as anything other than a teammate, a curiosity, an exemplar? Did Bruce want him. As though Bruce had been anything but obsessed with Clark, one way or another, from the moment he'd laid eyes on him.

"Has Bruce Wayne ever been known to turn down the offer of a threesome?" She grinned at Clark's choked laughter. She supposed that they hadn't been at all frank about what they'd been dancing around for months now. She felt a lightness of spirit for having said it, as facetious as it was.

"That's—that's not him," he said. "Not really."

"I know. What does your heart tell you, Kal?"

"It's kinda biased."

"Then what does his heart tell you?" she asked. "He is forever trying to balance the pessimism of his intellect and the optimism of his will, but here—" she covered Clark's chest with her palm; his natural warmth radiated through his shirt. "—here is where his truth lies. What do you hear?"

His heart thumped hard beneath her hand, and she felt an echo in her own.

Clark closed his eyes, listening.

"I think he's afraid," he said.

Something about the board was unsettling this morning. They smiled incessantly, which was unusual but not untoward. It was just that they seemed to have more teeth than Bruce would expect.

He adjusted his tie for the third time in as many minutes and worked his shirt collar away from his clammy neck. The sun glared through the window and seared the side of his face. A bead of sweat trickled down his temple, and for a second he was almost convinced that his skin was sloughing off.

He was just overtired. Where he had managed to steal some sleep, the nightmares had been particularly potent. He wiped his brow with his pocket square and tightened his tie again, which made him think of Diana's hands on him. She was strong enough to garotte him with it.

She wouldn't do that, any more than Clark would snap his neck. He didn't like that these thoughts were coming from him.

Bruce closed his eyes and clenched his jaw and listened to the quarterly figures as the presentation droned on. He'd shut down that lab tonight. It bothered him that some of the equipment he'd found there was unnecessary for a cook house. The breathing apparatus, sure. Gas burettes and leveling bulbs, reaction chambers—not so much. There was something about it that preyed on his mind.

"—in closing, Wayne Enterprises is officially bankrupt," the manager presenting the figures said. "Congratulations, Mr. Wayne, you pissed it all away. Every last cent."

"What?" Bruce tried to say. He felt the sound take form, but his throat had gone tight with shock.

"Did you think nobody would notice where the money was going? You and your clown suit—did you think you were saving the world?" The manager tutted with lazy disdain. "Stupid boy. Your parents would be ashamed. You should have been shot along with them."

The man slammed both hands down onto the desk in front of Bruce, and he convulsed out of the moment with a full-body hypnic jerk. His pulse soared.

The manager paused briefly, then moved on to his next powerpoint slide.

Bruce pressed a hand to his eyes. It was fine. Certainly not the first time Bruce Wayne had dozed off in a meeting. The exec to his left, a pouchy-faced man whose suit looked like it was trying to throttle him, made a sympathetic noise and topped his glass of water up for him. Bruce knocked it back like it was two fingers of scotch and excused himself from the rest of the meeting.

The bright sunlight blasting the street hurt Bruce's eyes. He ducked into the shadowy access street down one side of Wayne Headquarters and took some deep, slow breaths while he made himself frankly assess the condition of his sleep hygiene. He'd barely counted to ten before he felt the air change. Clark stood in front of him, ordinary in his glasses and flannel and offensive brown corduroy.

"You okay?" Clark asked.

"Yes."

"You don't sound it."

"Why did you bother asking if you were just going to disagree?"

"I was giving you the opportunity to be honest with me." Clark walked with him, down the narrow street that squared off into a maintenance area: fire escape doors and no trespassing signs, steel-barred window wells and a noisy HVAC unit.

The unit hummed and then started shrieking. Bruce heard echoing gunshots. Two of them, and the scatter and ping of—

The shriek resolved into a distant siren. Clark's hands were on his shoulders. "I can hear that," he said, and for a moment Bruce thought he meant the impossible reverberations of his memory, until his fingertips brushed Bruce's neck, resting against the pulse that hammered in his throat.

He towered over Bruce suddenly. His touch became a chokehold. "I know you," he snarled. The world spun away beneath Bruce's feet. He swung a hand out and latched onto Clark's wrist in desperation.

"—know you don't like to talk about things, but I'm here, if you want to. Diana, too. We're worried about you. Uh." Clark looked with bemusement at Bruce's hand on his wrist; his fingernails dug into Clark's skin for all the world like they could break it. He lifted his fingers from Bruce's neck as though he'd just realized he was touching him. "Sorry."

Bruce closed his eyes briefly. Clark's presence was like standing in front of an open fire. He took a moment to warm himself. "Nothing to apologize for, nothing to worry about," he said with all the airy disregard he could muster. "I haven't gotten a lot of sleep lately. I may be hallucinating a little. Nothing critical."

He could see the worry unfolding on Clark's face, its own perfect rebuke. Bruce took his wrist again, to distract him before he could say something too earnest. Everything about him felt on the brink of being too much.

"There is something you can do for me." This, at least, was something he knew how to handle. "Diana's case notes?"

"Sure," Clark said dubiously, but took out his phone one-handed and slid his thumb across its screen. Bruce tapped it with his own, and his notebook app flooded with data. Diana could have just sent it to him herself all along, but he was either too endeared by her unashamed machinating to find it annoying, or too worn out by his current preoccupations.

Besides, it still felt like a gift to see Clark and to have him close, to experience his presence after the miracle of his return. His pulse beat beneath Bruce's fingers, steady and calm. He is dead, his subconscious whispered. Has been dead. Will be dead.

"Bruce?" Clark murmured. "C'mon, you look awful. Let me take you home." He clasped Bruce's shoulder and Bruce had to scrabble for his self-control. For a moment the day's unease lifted like the sun burning the mist off the lake. He could let Clark take him home. It would be easy.

Bruce shook himself before things could fall into the realm of the unreal again. He needed to occupy himself with something, and fervently. He could steal some time during the day to look over the inventory of stolen chemicals. With any luck it would take some research to ascertain what kind of trouble was being concocted from them. A solid distraction from the dread that prowled in the recesses of his mind.

"I'm fine," he said. "I'll call you if I need to."

Clark patently didn't believe him, but could at least recognize a losing battle when he saw one. He flattened his mouth into a line, then his face relaxed in gentle resignation. "Okay," he said. "I'll be around."

He flowed into Bruce's space and landed a kiss on the bridge of his nose, brief and clumsy as though he hadn't known he was about to do it himself, then took a step back and up—and was gone.

Bruce resumed his breathing exercise to the white noise of the HVAC unit until his face stopped feeling hot, straightened his jacket and then stepped out onto the street, where he was instantly buttonholed by Diana in a sizeable pair of sunglasses.

"We have to stop meeting like this," he said lightly as she bore him towards a bistro tucked off the main street, navigating the flow of pedestrians with grace. He was as helpless arm-in-arm with her as he was under Clark's careful hand, his mouth. "You just missed Clark. Are you tag-teaming me?"

"We're trying," Diana said under her breath, locating a table and encouraging Bruce to sit. She would obviously brook no argument about this, so he fought down the urge to try. "I went to speak with Dr. Crane this morning. He wasn't there."

"Doesn't seem a piece of news that's worthy of brunch under duress."

"I'm sorry if this is an imposition," she said, though she didn't seem sorry at all. She crossed her legs; the toe of her shoe brushed Bruce's knee. "I thought you'd want to know that Dr. Crane has been dismissed with immediate effect."

Bruce arched a brow. "Gross misconduct?"

Diana smiled as the waiter approached; she ordered for them both without consultation. Bruce's stomach let him know it would gladly suffer the eggs Benedict.

"Unethical conduct."

"And HR told you that."

"Of course not. The dean of psychology did."

Bruce knew of him in passing: he was an underwhelming man who was prone to any number of embarrassments when it came to attractive women. Diana would've had him wrapped around her little finger.

"He didn't go into the specifics," Diana said. "But I know that Crane has endangered some of his students. He has been 'experimenting'."

Bruce heard the air quotes. "I don't like the sound of that."

Their food arrived. Bruce sliced into his egg and blood gushed out. He put his knife and fork down and watched it drip off the edge of his plate and into his lap.

"Nor do I. Perhaps tonight I will—" Diana glanced up at him from her poached salmon. "Bruce?"

He'd set his knife to a still-beating heart, bare and vulnerable on the white porcelain of his plate. Its unsevered veins and arteries made a bridge to his chest. The hair on the back of his neck and along his arms prickled.

"It's nothing," he said.

"You've gone very pale for nothing."

"Heartburn," Bruce said.

Diana reached over the table. She was going to take his heart, he thought. Rip it from him like Clark had, in another reality and a lifetime ago—but she only touched the back of his hand, her fingers stroking over his knuckles. He was rucking the tablecloth. He consciously relaxed; blood had a particular odor, and not one he could detect here. He forced himself to look. There was nothing but brunch on his plate.

"Did Clark say something to upset you?"

"No," Bruce said tersely. He attacked his eggs again, which did him the favor of remaining eggs. Christ, he was tired.

"Bruce," Diana said. "You know that we both care about you."

"Of course you do. I'm your friend and your teammate." He forked in a mouthful and spoke through it. "That's where we're going with this, am I right?"

Diana's cutlery hit her plate with a clink. "I'd prefer that you were straightforward with me, if you're implying something."

"I'm not implying anything. I'm saying that you and Clark have a lot in common. You're—" He stopped to carefully choose his next word. "Alike. He seems your type. I'm happy for you."

"My type." Diana raised her eyebrows. "And what is that?"

He knew what she though he meant, but it wasn't wholly about the narrowed power differential, wasn't about being able to bend steel or outpace a missile, or exist alongside each other until the sun burned itself out. It was about being the type who would understand when a suicide mission was the only option, and take it. The type who would fly to his own death without a second thought, the instrument of his doom in his hands.

"You seem to be into self-sacrifice," Bruce said.

Diana seemed taken by an unexpected sorrow at that. "Before the League, had you not dedicated your life to repairing a world that could not be repaired single-handedly? And even now, you work yourself to the bone in the knowledge you'll never get what you want in the end. If self-sacrifice is my type, then so are you." She speared her salmon. "And if I am your type, then so is Clark."

It was different when Bruce did it. Then it was a compulsion, not a virtue. But Diana was stubborn, and he didn't have the wherewithal to argue the point.

"I don't have a type," he said instead.

Diana's eyebrows climbed ever higher.

"Look, I'm happy for you both—"

"You don't sound happy."

"I am happy for you both, and—"

And Clark had kissed him less than an hour ago. And the arch of Diana's foot fit naturally against his calf.

She took his hand. "There is room in your heart for both of us. I would have to be blind to not see that. And without you in ours, Clark and I could be no more than warriors in arms. All in, Bruce, or not at all."

There, laid out in the gentlest of ultimatums: everything he hadn't wanted to consider. He knew what they wanted from him, and what they were willing to give, but it was not reasonable to expect anyone to navigate the impossible tribar of his emotional processes so intimately. Especially not his teammates. The League was too young and fractious to weather a collapse in leadership once they inevitably tired of him and things turned sour.

It would mean expecting more of Clark and Diana than he did of himself. Who, given the choice, would tolerate his obsessional cycles of fear, dread, anxiety, rage—constant small violences that they didn't deserve.

(And how many times had he stretched out across a bed to feel the warmth leaving the depression in the mattress, and found safety in the knowledge that nobody was coming back?

They should want better than that.)

"I don't think that's a good idea," he said.

"Why is that?"

"Don't make me say it out loud, Diana."

"I am going to make you say it out loud, so that you can hear how stupid it sounds."

Bruce exhaled a long sigh through his nose. It was hardly enough to deter Diana and her unerring conviction.

"You deserve better," he said. "If you had even half an idea—"

"It's not a matter of what we deserve," Diana interrupted immediately. Her voice rose in her passion; she leaned over with elbows on the table. "Would you weigh our desires with a finger on the scale, yet short-change your own? Does your heart not have heft in this, Bruce?"

Over the bistro's ambient noise, Bruce heard a digital click as someone snapped a cellphone picture of them, and his patience ran out like water from an upended bucket. A headache battered at his temple. If there could ever be a time and place that Bruce was willing to have this conversation, it was not here, and it was not now, and it was certainly not in front of an audience.

Diana at least seemed to understand this; she didn't make a fuss when he stood to leave. She caught him once more outside of the bistro, before he could get himself out of sight. "At least give it thought," she said, as if Bruce hadn't dwelled at length on any of this, and leaned in to kiss him farewell. Once on the cheek, and again, lingering at the corner of his mouth.

"I would ruin you both," he heard himself say. He'd have no choice: he would burn up in their radiance, or he would put them out.

Diana smiled at him. "I should like to see you try."

In the narrow alley behind the abandoned store, Bruce bolt-cut a padlock. Its heavy chain made a sound like a tormented ghost as it slid from the fire door handles. There was an established darkness inside. The only windows that weren't boarded up were fogged with grime; a lick of sunset oozed through and doused everything in red.

He found himself in the stockroom. The place was empty. Too early in the evening for any activity, perhaps. It was stifling and smelled pretty damn bad. Much worse than the night before. Some of the chemicals on Diana's list were harassing agents, so he nudged a precautionary micro-rebreather into his mouth.

There was evidence that somebody had been here since then. Apparatus had been set up on some of the old metal shelving: a collection of beakers that contained lumps of blackened matter and some rank-smelling condensate; burettes and clamp stands; meters of plastic tubing. Bruce touched a conical flask. Cold. His gauntlet left smudges where a coat of residue had collected externally, as well as all over the shelving and scattered debris of the store. It was as though the whole room had been filled with smoke, or something like it. The air felt thicker here.

He heard a sharp inhale close to his ear and he spun around, boots scuffing. His cape fluttered to stillness.

The sun finally dropped below the skyline, banking its embers in the clouds. A slaughtered moon hung low and fat in the sky, and the night grew darker, shadows overlapping shadows. Bruce stood unmoving and listened. Outside, the grind of traffic. A dog barking. Inside, his own breath fast and hollow in the rebreather. No sense that there was anyone else in the building with him.

Unease slithered up his spine.

He left the equipment where it was; he'd start in on it once he'd checked his perimeter. There was a door off to one side of the stock room that had been locked last night. He'd wasted his time picking it open to find nothing but a tiny office filled with mildewing paperwork, and had left it as he'd found it.

Tonight the door was ajar. Bruce pushed it open with the toe of his boot.

Its hinges gave a full-throated scream. Bats flurried past him and into him, battering his chest and face and snarling in his cape, and his rebreather was sent spinning across the room. He fell back and brought his hands up to protect his face. His elbow struck one of the flasks and it exploded against the floor, sending up a plume of foul, greasy smoke that stung his eyes and coated his throat.

He coughed and wiped his eyes and as his vision cleared, his universe approached a tipping point. Humid night air smothered him and he struggled to make sense of his surroundings. Had the bats borne him outside? It wouldn't be the first time.

A figure moved in his periphery, and he turned to watch it with half-wakefulness, as though filtered through a dream. Gotham was gone; there was only rustling long grass and the insistence of cicada song, the smell of fresh-dug earth. A row of headstones. In the distance, more headstones, fields of them, and on the horizon the silhouette of a broken city.

Martha Kent was crying openly. The sound was like a crowbar dragged over sidewalk slabs, and it put Bruce's teeth on edge. She gathered a handful of earth and scattered it into a grave. Time took it and ran; the seasons turned, grass spread over the grave's bare soil. Wildflowers wilted in the vase, bloomed again, withered.

Overhead, the sky teemed with clouds like a fast-flowing river. Bruce approached Clark's grave. Grief hung over him like an anvil.

He wanted to kneel, but before he could, the ground ruptured between his feet. It boiled and funneled, and a hand broke the surface, shedding clots of mud. The grave widened as something sat up, soil falling away like afterbirth.

Bruce felt his sanity inch back.

He hadn't returned to Clark's grave since his funeral. He had been unable to attend his exhumation. He knew this wasn't how Clark's resurrection had happened, and yet it felt more real than those memories.

"Bruce," Clark howled—this specter of Clark, this manifestation of his wrath—and bore down on him with rapidly accelerating fury, wrestling him into the wet earth he'd risen from. He eclipsed the world; the night sky glimmered in his chest cavity. It was as real as the apocalyptic tunnels had been, the grit and ash and the chains around his wrists.

Clark, Bruce tried to say. Clark, please. I'm sorry—but he made no sound, all of his guilt and grief dammed up and suppurating, untouched by forgiveness. He felt grave dirt under his hands, sliding down the back of his neck, into his mouth. The sides caved in on him; Clark's immense weight drove him into the earth.

Bruce braced himself against Clark's immovable presence and held his breath as if it were his last.

Someone grabbed his arm and yanked him up. Mud tumbled from his tuxedo. Diana, her grip like a bear trap, led him in a waltz. He could hear music, the clink of champagne glasses echoing in the museum's high-vaulted acoustics, but that was not where they were. The smell of wet earth pervaded.

There was not enough room in his family's mausoleum to dance.

Diana spun him against the wall hard enough to rattle his teeth. Her eyes flashed with deep hurt and unrestrained fury; the air buckled in her heat. In her hand was a blade. Not the one she'd told him about, the one she'd called the God Killer—the one whose name resonated in Bruce and sent spines of terror into his heart—not that sword. In her hand was the Blade of Alexander. It was as fake as the one at the museum had been, but a sword was much like any other when it was held at his throat.

"Little boy," Diana said. "Why should I be inclined to share with you?"

Even if he had an answer for her, his voice continued to abandon him. He struggled against her, trying to get away—he was an intractable problem, and he understood how she'd chosen to solve him. She held him fast to the wall with a hand on his wrist. There was no miraculous green rock to stop her. There was no solution to Diana.

"Shh. It's okay." She tenderly slid the blade between his ribs, and in an instant turned from violence to radiance. His heart beat richly in his ears and throat. He was lost in the intensity of her touch, pinned like a butterfly.

She kissed him: brow; cheek; lips.

The mausoleum lit up with a golden glow, brighter than the center of the sun, and seared him to dust.

Bruce's heartbeat pounded in Clark's ears, hammering faster than he'd ever heard it. His own pulse escalated in response. A cold streak of adrenaline flushed through him as he opened his hearing to Bruce's surroundings, expecting chaotic noise, gunfire, the overwhelming biological feedback of an insurmountable number of opponents.

He heard none of those things, only Bruce's terrified panting and the jackhammer of his heart.

"Batman." There was no response from his communicator. No indication that Bruce had tried to open the channel. He heard thrashing, shattering glass. "Batman, come in."

Gotham's skyline approached at a clip. His communicator pipped and he felt a moment of relief, but it was only Diana.

"Kal El, what's wrong?"

"I don't know, but Bruce isn't responding." Not to deflect his concern, nor even to admonish him for using real names over comms even though he did it himself all the time.

Another pip in his ear, and Diana said, "Batman? Please copy." After a handful of seconds, she exhaled in a sharp huff of concern. "Where is he?"

"Not sure exactly, but the place he's had staked out lately is a safe bet."

"I'll be there as soon as I can."

Clark circled above the Cauldron, homing in on the frantic rattle of Bruce's breathing and pinpointed the store. He speared in through one of the boarded-up windows in a spray of plywood. He could see the Bat lurching in the shadows, fighting as though he could subdue the dust. Filth streaked his uniform, ingrained into the texture of it.

The smell was so thick Clark could almost chew it, and his lip curled in distaste. His instinct was to take a breath and blast it out into the night air, but whatever it was, it had affected Bruce, and badly. He couldn't risk dispersing it over the city.

Priorities. He would deal with it once he'd given Bruce a once-over. He rolled with a wild right hook and gripped his shoulders. "Are you okay?"

Bruce recoiled from him like he'd been burned. His eyes were wide and as dark as coal; he made a wordless, panicked sound. Clark held on to him in reflex, trying to gentle his struggling. The tighter he held, the more Bruce railed against him, until Clark found himself pushing Bruce against the wall and pinning him.

"Batman." Worry seeped into his voice and made him Clark, not Superman. He didn't intend it, but he hoped it would help. "Tell me what's—Bruce, what's wrong?"

Unresponsive wasn't the right way to describe it—he was responding to stimuli, to Clark's presence and his hands on him, but it was as though Bruce couldn't hear him at all. It was like he was out of his mind. Clark touched the bare skin of his face; he was clammy, sweating. A mewl of terror escaped him, so unlike any noise Clark had imagined he could make.

Certainty crept down his spine. "Diana, I think he's been drugged. He's not himself."

Her concern was palpable. "Understood. I'll return to the cave and rally Alfred, perhaps he will have experienced this before, and has an antidote."

Clark hoisted Bruce into his arms. He kicked out, flinging his fists like he'd never been in so much as a barroom brawl in his entire life. "Jeez, Bruce." He sounded unsteady to himself, a forced amusement that rang hollow. "Always have to be difficult, don't you? Hold tight. Just—hold tight."

Bruce gained a little clarity on the way back to the cave. This was not entirely a good thing. It only meant his unformed panic took on more substance.

"No," he gasped, as Clark laid him onto the medbay gurney. "I won't let you." He instantly jackknifed up from the bed. Diana leaned gently on his shoulders to keep him steady. She looked at Clark, stricken.

"Alfred is coming," she said. "What has taken him?"

"I don't know. Something in that place—it's all over him. Help me get the suit off."

This wasn't exactly how Clark had envisioned it. Yes, Bruce sweating and moaning, if he were to be bold—but not making entreaties to whatever monsters lurked in his head. Yes, Diana holding him—but not Diana bracing her forearm over his throat to keep him from squirming away from them.

They got most of the suit off him without damaging it. This, at least, Clark hoped Bruce would appreciate. How they would deal with his increasingly coherent pleas, Clark didn't know.

"I'm sorry," Bruce said, had kept saying, again and again. Sometimes as furious as Clark had ever heard him, sometimes a sob. "I'm so sorry, please don't—please—"

"It's okay," Clark found himself saying back. Diana, too. "It's okay, Bruce. You're okay."

Bruce fell back, panting. The underarmor he wore beneath the suit was soaked with sweat. "Can't be you," he mumbled. "Impostor. You're dead."

He sounded almost lucid. His struggling subsided for the time being; Diana could hold his hand instead of having to pin him for his own safety. Clark took his other. His grip was like steel, his skin on fire.

"I'm not. You brought me back," Clark said. "You wanted me back so that's what you did." He swallowed thickly and dared brush Bruce's hair from his forehead. It was damp at the roots and his face was flushed. He was looking at Clark, but god knows what he was actually seeing. He felt far too hot, and Clark was half-afraid he was going to boil in his own skin. There was a small basin in the corner of the medbay; he edged back to draw Bruce a tumbler of water, or to soak a cloth for his face.

As soon as Clark dropped Bruce's hand, he lurched up and made a fist in Clark's cape. Clark let himself be dragged in close enough that he could feel the hot exhale of Bruce's breath, almost taste the thud of his pulse. "You're dead," Bruce said again, insistent. Sweat trickled down his neck. He sounded coherent. Reasonable, almost, except for what he was saying. "I killed you."

"Luthor's monster did that. You're not so tough."

Bruce's face contorted, and for a hopeful moment Clark thought that he was going to laugh, that he'd gotten through to him, or that he was starting to shake off his delirium—but then fear took him again in a dark tumult. "Stay away!" he roared, and tried to hurl himself from the gurney. It rattled and almost overturned.

Diana moved as Clark did, a hand each on Bruce's shoulders while he thrashed. Abject noises tore from him like an exorcism.

"I'll kill you," he groaned. "Both of you, I'll—get you killed. In the end, it's what—it's what I do." He took a breath like a drowning man coming up for air for the last time. "I couldn't save any of them. All ashes and dust in the end."

"Bruce." Diana spoke his name with a raw kind of intimacy. She took his face in her hands and leaned over him, touching her forehead to his. "Clark's death was my fault," she whispered. "My lariat slipped. This blame, at least, you are released from."

Diana's name caught in Clark's throat. She looked up and captured him with her gaze, as direct and unvarying as a homing bird.

"Clark," she said. Her hand went to her waist, to the loop of golden rope tethered there. The room lit up like the sunrise. "I am truly sorry. In that moment, I failed you, and the world. I was prepared to carry the knowledge of my mistake with as little shame as I could bear, but even for a short time it was a heavy burden."

The bulwark of Bruce's guilt was so encompassing, he'd had no idea that Diana had been harboring her own. He took her hand and his fingers brushed against her lariat. The pure truth of its song hummed in his mind. "There's nothing to forgive you for. What happened that night, none of us were expecting it. There's no blame here."

Diana breathed as though a weight had been lifted from her, and she gave him a small, warm smile.

A deep devotion welled in Clark's chest; he would face down the end of the world for them both and do it gladly. He couldn't hope to find the words for it. The ones he had were vastly inadequate. "I would do anything for you," he said. "Both of you."

"I haven't earned this," Bruce muttered, then groaned and shook the lariat from where it had draped over his wrist. Clark's heart leaped with relief.

"That is your truth," Diana said, "but it is not ours. Are you back with us?"

Bruce gave a tremulous sigh. His eyes were still glassy and unseeing. Clark heard his pulse begin to accelerate again, saw his muscles tighten and convulse. The sharp stink of fresh adrenaline filled the air.

"Your lariat," Clark said. "It seemed to help. He responded to us when it was touching him."

Diana made a small noise of triumph and looped it around Bruce's hand. He immediately made a fist, clutching at it.

"Where am I," he said. His voice was hoarse and cracking.

"Home," Diana said, sheer relief in her voice. She helped him sit up. "You're home, Bruce. You're safe. What was the last thing you remember?"

Bruce looked down at the rope between his fingers, then at Diana. "You stabbed me in the mausoleum," he said.

Diana sucked her teeth. "Oh, no. I heard that's very painful."

Bruce laughed as though he were on the verge of breaking down. It was still the sweetest thing Clark had heard for a long time, and in his gladness he leaned in to kiss Bruce's brow. For all his haziness, Bruce had other ideas. He tilted his head up and caught Clark's mouth in a fierce kiss.

"Enough platonic bullshit," he said tiredly. "I've had a hellish day, and I've wanted to kiss you for a long time, Clark. I had no reason not to. I'm an asshole. Sorry."

Clark grinned at him. "That's the rope talking," he said and kissed him back, Diana's hand warm on his neck.

The sun rose at five fifty-seven. Diana awoke to its gentle caress across the back of her thighs, and Clark slumbering at her side. There was a dip in the mattress where Bruce had slept restlessly between them. She laid her hand in it—still warm.

He was out on the deck, sat there with just the water and the somber dawn for company, a broad shadow cast against the windows and a whisper of steam from the mug of coffee forgotten at his side. From the set of his shoulders, she could tell this was going to be a difficult morning for him. There was nothing like one's fears laid bare to set the tone.

She retrieved a shirt from Bruce's expansive wardrobe and shrugged it on, and came to sit by him.

"I don't think I need this anymore," Bruce said. He handed her lariat back, still softly glowing golden.

Alfred had arrived shortly after Bruce had come back to himself, and had immediately begun processing the chemicals he'd been exposed to, Bruce outlining his symptoms and the content of his hallucinations. The coils of rope had illuminated him as he'd recounted exactly what he had endured last night.

Both she and Clark had taken him to bed, for comfort and for rest, and to whisper simple, tender things to him. The truth influencing him had allowed it, and had unleashed his gratitude in a way that brought tears to all of them. "You can let go," Diana had kept reminding him.

"I don't want to," Bruce had insisted.

His heart must be wild with remembering. But where his mind shied away, it would beat out the truth.

"I know what it means to love," Diana said, securing her lariat. "I know why you fear it."

He reached out at that, and touched the loop of it one more time. "I'm not afraid," he said, and he way he said it was almost distant, as though he had to take a moment to contemplate the vastness of the sentiment. "Not with Clark, not with you."

The moment was interrupted by a brisk flurry of air, and Clark touched down on the other side of Bruce, a paper under one arm. "Morning," he said. "Hey, look at this."

He unfolded the paper and shook out the gossip pages. There was a picture of Diana and Bruce arguing at the restaurant, with the headline: 7 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT BRUCE WAYNE'S LOVE LIFE.

"Give me that," Bruce said, and held out his hand. Clark rolled the paper up and handed it to him, and Bruce pitched it out over the lake. It unfurled, its pages scattering onto the water.

"Hey," Clark said, settling down beside him. "I paid good money for that."

"You of all people should know better."

"It was research."

Bruce fixed him with a severe look, and Diana couldn't keep her laughter tamped. She leaned against Bruce and let it take her, a hand spread against the broad span of his back. He ducked his head, his frown breaking into something more likely to be a smile.

Clark's fingertips brushed hers on their own journey across Bruce's shoulders. The tranquility of the morning washed over the three of them; tattered wisps of cloud clung to the horizon as the sun worked its way up to another blazing summer day. Clark turned his face to the sky and exhaled deeply.

Diana heard Bruce take a breath of his own, and another, each an unspoken word. He grew tense under her hand. Perhaps, with time, they would need to talk more frankly about this—or perhaps things would fall into place naturally, as though it was always intended for the three of them to be together. The threads of fate were often woven in surprising patterns.

"I have to run Crane down before he can make more of his chemical," Bruce eventually said. "Alfred is working on an antidote, but he could unleash it on the public at any time. It's unconscionable."

He stilled under Diana's hand, a barely suppressed shiver.

"I know you don't need our help, but we're here if you want it," Clark said.

"We are." Diana rubbed small circles with her thumb until he relaxed minutely. And then, low and confidential—the words were for him, whether Clark could hear them or not—she said, "What you needed to fight in yourself, it may be something you can use to fight other battles. Surviving a realization of your fears is a powerful advantage."

"What doesn't kill me." Bruce sounded dry, but his hand found its way about Diana's waist, big and warm and pulling her tight to his side. From Clark's contented sigh, Bruce had an arm around him as well. After a while, he said, "I didn't survive this alone."

Soon there would be a manhunt: Bruce would not rest until Crane was brought to justice. She and Clark would be at his shoulder at every step. but for now she was content to sit with them both, watching the sunrise chase the night and its terrors away.