Forget-Me-Not

You heat the brand until it blazes as hot as your fury.

You can almost taste the distortions it makes in the air, heavy and metallic like blood in the back of your throat. You are sweltering as though in the epicenter of a battle, face and chest running with perspiration. The steel kicks off tremendous heat even with your gauntleted fist holding it at arm's length.

The body beneath you, however, does not sweat. Nor does it bleed, or burn, or otherwise scar. You could press the searing metal to the side of Clark's face and he might flinch, might grit his teeth, but he wouldn't feel a thing.

For now, though, Clark gazes steadily up at you, and waits. He can have the patience of a mountain when he sets his mind to it, and sometimes you think that's the only reason the two of you haven't already sheared apart like a fault plane, everything laid to waste by your tectonic moods.

Often, it's this constancy that sparks the anger, that sets off the fulminations in your head. It gets you thinking about how you'll turn back to earth someday, be nothing but ash and dirt while Clark will remain for centuries, maybe, millennia, eons, until the sun expands into a red giant—and how here, in this moment, you can't leave a mark on him that lasts any longer than an exhale.

(You tried to explain it, once, and Clark had looked at you as though you'd said something absurd. "Do you think you're that easy to forget, Bruce?"

"By then," you had replied, "I will have been gone for longer than the Earth has currently existed. Tell me, is your memory that good?")

You don't know that you can call it compassion, that Clark has decided to allow it. It seems like the wrong word for this kind of behavior, with its connotations of tenderness. It's indulgence, perhaps. Or pity, because you both know what will come of it: nothing.

But whatever it is that causes him to endure this repeated exercise in futility, you can only ever be grateful with the first press of the brand against his body, emblazoning your sign over his heart. There is a hiss—not of burning flesh but of evaporating moisture, your own sweat where it's glazed Clark's skin—and that's all. No cloying odor of burning hair or blistering skin, no agonized writhing, no pained gasps. No cruelty to it, in practice or intention.

Clark's eyes are open, sharp and blue; his chest steadily rises and falls. You take the brand away. Underneath he is turned a lurid pink, though it's quickly fading, like a fingerprint pressed into flushed skin might. You bend your head and kiss the mark. It's too hot against your lips. You keep your mouth to it anyway, take a deep breath, and another, pulling the heat into your lungs.

You know what grief feels like. It isn't quite like this, but it's something that needs to be weathered, regardless. It can't be allayed by gentle words or fingers in your hair, as much as Clark always tries. It doesn't leave, only changes, steadily transmuting back into a slow anger, as inexorable as a lava flow.

He murmurs your name and draws you up, touches the tight line of your mouth, the gray that creeps along your temple. He asks if you need to talk.

You do, but there's nothing to say that hasn't already been said. Eventually you spin Clark in enough circles that he arrives at the Kryptonite almost of his own volition.

It's straightforward to grind it down into a fine dust. Nothing you haven't done before. With a little trial and error, you devise a fluidized powder. After that, it's just a case of applying it with an electrostatic spray.

Your brand glows a savage green.

The cave is dark except for a single point of sickly light. Clark breaks a sweat as soon as he arrives. By the time he gets his shirt off and you've settled across his thighs, his hair is soaked, plastered to his forehead. You check in with him as you go—nonverbal questions in the weight of your touch, the crease of your brow. His response is forbearance incarnate.

It will hurt him, this time. You both know this.

You push his hair from his forehead, then draw your hand down his cheek. He turns into it and presses his nose into your palm, trusting. He is an awful color, and when you bring the brand closer, it only gets worse. Your adrenaline surges. He tremors between your thighs.

You decide you're going to make him stay the night so that you can see him bathed in tomorrow's morning sun.

"Here," he says. "Bruce." He guides your hand. His eyes are glassy. It'd be easy to tell yourself it's lust and not fear, but you've seen that look before.

You touch the brand to his skin, only briefly. There is a fine line between marking and maiming, and Clark Kent is thin-skinned. His mouth falls open but he doesn't make a sound; he convulses silently beneath you, arching as far as he can with the demand of your body on him.

You kiss him.

He only starts panting once you throw the brand into a lead case.

Gotham is your legacy, but she won't last forever. Long enough after you've gone for the Bat to pass back into myth, remembered by an esoteric scrawl of graffiti on her underbelly. Maybe long enough that she'll see a true dawn, but in truth, you think she would rather collapse under the weight of her own treachery first.

In the cosmic scale of things, she is no less ephemeral than you are. From founding to rubble in the blink of eternity's eye. Look on my works, ye mighty. All this means is you have a grudging respect for your own mortality and an objection to everyone else's, a desire to rail against the impermanence of human existence. You understand all too well how short a life can be.

Superman, though. He is a very different animal. Not now, sprawled in your sheets, skin blasted golden by the midday sun. Right now he's young enough to be human.

He rolls over, tucks his chin against your chest and smiles, sleep-sodden. He has healed as much as he is going to and your mark remains, a shiny cicatrix on his sternum. When he wears the suit, it will ride beneath the red and gold of his crest. You hope that he will always feel it there.

It should maybe stir feelings of possessiveness, ownership. Instead you only feel relief, and an abiding calm.

Time changes people, and he is going to have all the time in the world, someday. And that is why when it's over, when the heat death of the universe comes for him, all you want is for him to touch a hand over his heart and remember you.