grasp his heart (once and for all)

Bruce Wayne doesn't believe in fate.

He doesn't believe in destiny, either. Nor does he believe in predestination, providence, or kismet. His future is something he'll decide for himself, not something he'll be railroaded into by some allegedly divine, entirely unverifiable higher power, and so it should go without saying that he doesn't believe in something so tiresome as soulmates. He would rather roll with happenstance, and he can count on one hand the number of times he's done that willingly.

As far as he's concerned, soulmates are a construct perpetuated by romcoms and greeting cards, lifestyle magazines, dating apps and world tour vacation packages with untenable guarantees. It's a lucrative business. Love, codified and commodified to the nth degree. "Oh, you just haven't met the one," people occasionally tell Bruce Wayne, who, when three champagnes deep, is inclined to hold forth on the ridiculousness of it all. Pretty people tell him this, desirable people. Manipulative people. People who would benefit greatly if he were to suddenly feel a connection to them that amounted to more than just a one-night stand.

But he never does. He's forty-three and graying and he never has, and that in itself is proof enough for him.

In the profoundly lonely, his attitude might come across as sour grapes, but in Bruce Wayne's case it works in his favor. People seem to find it alluring instead of something pitiable—or perhaps they see him as a challenge. Either way, it's laughably easy to work the persona when he remains steadfastly unattached and all anyone wants to do is attach themselves to him, even if it's just to prove him wrong.

All-consuming passion, the media often calls it. A cliché that comes up repeatedly in innumerable bodice-rippers and soap operas and pop ballads. It's all-consuming bullshit, Bruce thinks, clicking through his database of Superman candids that he's scraped from every corner of the internet.

"Mr. Wayne?"

Bruce closes his eyes briefly. He has work to do—the leech's transfer timer ticks in the forefront of his mind—but this guy's voice, strident over the banal chit-chat of Luthor's guests, keeps disrupting his focus like a stone skimming across a still pond. Bruce composes his face, turns on his heel to face him, and keeps counting down.

"Mr. Wayne," the man says again, less forthright this time, more conversational and slightly eager now that he's got Bruce's attention. "Clark Kent, Daily Planet."

Press. Of course. Terrific.

Kent holds out his hand. Bruce takes it, and his blood runs cold.

He has a moment's grace to collect himself, since Kent proceeds to stare at him slack jawed as though Bruce has just told him one of his darkest secrets unprompted. It's not uncommon that people are like this around him, and it's always insufferable.

"My foundation has already issued a statement on... books," Bruce says, and discovers that it's possible for Kent to look further confounded.

Bruce lets the corner of his mouth curl up as Kent struggles to find a suitable response, but the Wayne charm wears off soon enough, as it always does. Kent pulls his shoulders back, straightens his tie, and with preternatural aim, sets about grilling him on the Bat of Gotham.

There's no accounting for the flush of anger that his questions inspire—it's not like the Bat has ever been flavor of the month—but the heat of it doesn't manage to chase the chill from his bones. Bruce keeps his response calm but cutting, decides to channel a little of his Superman-shaped frustration into it since it's a conveniently low blow, and then extracts himself from the conversation with his teeth bared.

Bruce is halfway down the stairs toward the server room when someone halts him by grabbing his wrist, ruching the fabric of his suit jacket. He turns, expecting an attendant ready to herd up a wayward guest, or maybe even Luthor's viciously solicitous personal assistant, but it's only Kent again, trailing after him as though he can't get enough of Bruce's sharp tongue. He's handsome enough despite his small-town schoolteacher aesthetic, and if Bruce weren't busy, he might consider it.

But he is, so he doesn't bother suppressing his irritation. "If it's something printable you want, you had your chance and you blew it."

"That's not what I—" In contrast, Kent's tone is something barely short of pained. He tightens his hold when Bruce makes as though to leave, and quickly says, "Mr. Wayne. May I call you Bruce?"

There's a quality to his voice that makes the back of Bruce's neck prickle. He shrugs it off and tilts his head, lifting his eyebrows in question over Kent's hand around his wrist. It barely masks his displeasure at being restrained in such a fashion, but he doesn't much care.

"No," he says, and tries to move off again.

Kent still doesn't let go. He has a strong grip, and Bruce isn't certain he can break it without arousing suspicion. If he weren't busy—the thought flits across Bruce's mind like a hummingbird. He swats it flat.

"Wait." Kent maintains eye contact unflinchingly, and Bruce wonders what he wants to see in him, to make him search like that. "Okay. I'm not exactly happy about this, but I think—I mean, did you—"

Of course. Bruce sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose with his free hand. This again. "Look, son," he begins. It's a well-practiced, rote-worn brushoff. He can recite it in under a minute—which, coincidentally, is the amount of time left on the leech's transfer.

Kent's back straightens, and he finally drops Bruce's wrist. Before he can stop himself, Bruce files away the sense-memory of his grip. His expression is probably beyond sour.

Behind him, one of the waitstaff edges past with a lightly-accented excuse me.

"Oh," Kent says. His brow knits, but he's not looking at Bruce. The middle distance has become more appealing to him all of sudden. "Sorry, I must have—"

"Yeah."

"You're a—an attractive man," Kent says distractedly, flicking his eyes back, away, back again. "I guess that happens a lot."

"On occasion," Bruce says.

"Right. If you'd excuse my—uh, if you'll excuse me." Kent ducks his head in apology, then takes the stairs two at a time, back up into the throng of the gala. If Bruce is lucky, he's embarrassed himself enough that he won't stay at the event for much longer.

"Christ," he mutters, and goes to collect his leech.

Which has vanished.

And so has Kent.

His furious pacing around the Cave soon irritates Alfred, at work tinkering in the guts of the car. Bruce knows this because he has started increasing the distance between floor and tools whenever he puts them down.

"He must have had someone with him. A partner, down in the server room while he was running interference. Someone posing as waitstaff, perhaps. "

"Perhaps." Alfred drops his socket wrench onto the grating with a loud clang and straightens up from poring over the engine block. He knuckles the small of this back and grimaces.

"No other Daily Planet staff in attendance, or I'd have put money on Lane. Though just because she wasn't on the guest list doesn't mean—"

"—doesn't mean she wasn't there," Alfred says wearily. "As you've said. Sir, if I may be so bold."

"When are you not?"

"Maybe Mr. Kent was a patsy. Or maybe his interest in you falls within the bounds of coincidence, and your fixation is unusually myopic. Perhaps another look at that guest list may be in order."

They've long since perfected the art of discarding each other's advice without being overtly rude about it; in honor of this, Bruce taps his chin and gives the impression of thinking it over. "No," he says. "There was something about him, Alfred. I can't put my finger on it. I'm almost certain he's my man."

"You don't say," Alfred mutters under his breath, something Bruce would take more offense at if Alfred weren't also old and gray and alone. He wipes his hands off on his overalls. "Well, then. I assume your next move is to harry the poor fellow to distraction."

"Actually," Bruce says, because sometimes he likes to stake a temporary claim to the moral high ground before ceding it hard. "I'm going to apologize to him."

Behind his glasses, Alfred's eyes narrow in suspicion.

"Then I'm going to harry him."

It's already midday and Clark is still wrestling with a particularly tepid graf, pecking out an account of the benefit gig with one hand and nursing a coffee as though it would help with the other. So far the article is one-third eye-glazing filler, two-thirds press release churnalism. The evening wasn't without its quirks, but it's proving difficult to write around the more worrying elements of Luthor's speech when that's all there was to it. Beyond that, things had only gotten more—what was it Wayne had said? Right. Unprintable.

Now is not the time, Clark tells himself, but he feels his face warming at the memory. He loosens his tie, tips his head back against his chair, takes a deep breath and tries not to think about his hand clasped tight around Bruce Wayne's wrist.

He's not very good at it. Bruce Wayne now has a particular configuration in his recall: it's dark eyes and white teeth, the sleek line of his shoulders and an aggressive display of arms. The man is a notorious disaster—but, Clark thinks, as he scrabbles for a silver lining, at least he's easy on the eye.

Clark's cursor blinks at him reprovingly. He retaliates by rattling off a sentence so stultifying he immediately forgets what he's written.

"Fingers off the keyboard, Smallville. Oh, new aftershave? The smoky note suits you."

Clark slouches, obediently moving his hands to his lap. Behind him, Lois leans on his shoulder and starts reading off his screen out loud. She must have already turned in her piece on the Juarez factory fire if she's got time to menace him.

"Come on, Lois." Clark minimizes the window in self defense. "At least wait till I'm done before you start gutting it."

"I'm doing you a favor here. You need to take a machete to that lede before you do anything else."

"I spent half the morning on it."

"It shows. Reading it is like being stuck in an elevator with someone wearing too much cologne."

Clark sighs. If he could get migraines he'd probably be developing one about now.

"Speaking of which—no mention of Wayne? I know he was there, Twitter lit up over it. Hashtag Bruce on the loose."

"Anything I'm prepared to say about him will be cut with extreme prejudice."

Lois throws back her head and laughs. "Oh, you had an encounter, then."

"You could say that."

"And, what. You got nothing?"

He might have gotten something if he'd been asking the questions he was supposed to be asking, instead of digging for something to use in the Gotham Bat exposé Perry keeps knocking back. All he needs is one solid lead. Something more than the rumors of dubious provenance that'll condemn it to the Monday burn off.

"His foundation had already issued—" Clark is interrupted by the trill of his phone. He groans inwardly and reaches for it, only to be beaten to the punch.

"Clark Kent's desk," Lois says breezily. She shuffles around to sit on the edge of said desk, tugging the cord and twisting to avoid Clark's half-hearted attempt to grab the phone from her.

"Lo—"

Her mouth bends in an exaggerated moue, amusement breaking through. Probably a crank call; if he's lucky, someone's scried the Bat's secret identity in a Mountain Dew stain. "Oh, wow, sure. One moment, please," she says and covers the receiver with one hand. "It's for you."

Clark smiles at her and she grins back as he takes the phone. They'd had a good year. He still misses her sometimes, even if he knows they'd never shake out in the long term.

"Kent speaking."

"Mr. Kent," says a familiar voice. "Bruce Wayne."

Clark sits up in his chair. Lois pats him on the shoulder and gathers her coat and bag for lunch. She makes the universal gesture for coffee as she leaves, and Clark gives her the thumbs down. Technically, he should be bouncing off the walls by now.

"Mr. Wayne." Clark finds that his hands are shaking, as though the caffeine got to him after all. It's an exotic sensation, and entirely unwelcome. "Is there something I can help you with?"

"Possibly." Wayne sounds a lot warmer than he had at the benefit; his enunciation is more manicured, Gotham scrubbed out of his accent. His phone voice, Clark assumes. "I would like to offer an apology, firstly."

"Apology accepted," Clark says reflexively.

"That wasn't actually it," Wayne says, "but I'm glad I caught you while you're feeling charitable."

Clark gets the vague impression that Wayne is making fun of him, but he can't pin down why. Maybe it's the affable tones. It may be a stark contrast to his acerbity the night before, but doesn't disguise it as completely as he thinks.

"I believe that last night I was a little drunk and a lot rude," Wayne says.

Maybe it's that Bruce Wayne, as a rule, doesn't give a damn about being rude to journalists.

"A lot drunk," Clark says, and then remembers that journalists, as a rule, shouldn't be rude to Bruce Wayne. "Only a little rude."

"Hmm. I'm not sure if that's more flattering or less, but whatever gets me off the hook." His laugh is deep and lazy and not at all chastened; it's the kind of laugh that encourages people to laugh in response and forget that what he just said wasn't all that charming.

Clark deliberately keeps any trace of amusement from his voice. "And secondly?" he prompts.

"Secondly," Wayne says, "secondly, if you're amenable, I'd be happy to sit down with you and discuss my foundation's literacy advocacy project. Something friendlier for your article than the usual boilerplate."

Said article needs a thirty on it and to be slam-dunked into the edit queue by the end of the day, but Clark could pitch a followup feature on Wayne's project in tomorrow's editorial meeting. It's an innocuous enough subject, though Perry will likely grumble about Clark's preoccupation with all things Gotham.

He wouldn't be wrong. It would also give Clark an excuse to probe Wayne for more on the Bat.

"That's very generous of you," Clark says. "What's the catch?"

Wayne laughs again—a short bark that is more genuinely amused than last time. "It's the obvious kicker. You'll have to endure an evening of my company."

Evening? Clark had assumed brunch or early afternoon. A perfunctory interview squeezed in sideways, between whatever it was that Bruce Wayne did all day. If he weren't suspicious already, he would be by now.

"How about the Blue Heron on Earl and West 3rd. Do you know it? The pescado zarandeado is superb."

Clark surreptitiously googles the restaurant. It has a dress code and no prices in evidence. "I think the Blue Heron may be too rich for my blood," he says.

"I'll pick up the tab, of course."

"Mr. Wayne." It's probably ignorance and nothing worse, but Clark is a little exasperated at having to explain this to him nonetheless. "If I'm going to write about your foundation, I can't accept your hospitality. That would be a conflict of interests."

On the other end of the line, there's a pause like a held breath, then Wayne says, "And are you conflicted about your interest, Mr. Kent?"

Clark presses his fingers to his temple; his phantom headache ratchets up a notch. "Yes," he says tightly.

Another beat of silence, and then Wayne carries on unfazed. "How about the Harlow Country—no, wait. I was blackballed. The Riverside Club?"

"Great," Clark says, then puts some effort into lying enthusiastically. "I look forward to it."

He hangs up, pencils the information into his schedule, pushes his keyboard aside, folds his arms on his desk and then carefully rests his face on them.

Lois plants a venti near his elbow. "Tell me everything."

Clark takes a long inhale, then lets out an equally long groan. "I think Bruce Wayne might be my... uh. You know," he says into his shirtsleeves.

"Oh no," Lois says. He'd said something similar to her when they first met and that had guttered out fairly quickly, so her unvarnished sarcasm is warranted in this instance. "You poor bastard. I got you a raspberry caramel macchiato."

"I love you," he says dolefully, still face-down.

"I know, sweetie." She prods him in the ribs then taps his monitor with a fingernail. "Now, buck up, drink that coffee, and get to editorializing the hell out of this thing."

In retrospect, he really should have gotten his personal assistant to make the arrangements.

"Jesus," Bruce mutters to his reflection in the lakehouse window.

Clark touches down in an abandoned lot, disguised by the shadows breeding in the lee of the adjacent tenement buildings. It's only moments ago he was gilded by the sunset over Metropolis, but here the last glimmers of dusk are being eaten by Gotham's stone edifices and its perpetual haze of exhaust. The afternoon sun rides low, its red reflections bouncing off damp concrete. It's a city that revels in the winter hours.

There's an address on a folded sheet of foolscap in a pocket of his trench coat. He has it fixed in his memory, but he reads the indentations in the paper with his fingertips once more, just to be sure. He'd heard Kahina Ziri's testimony and watched her interviews. He doesn't know if speaking with her will help either of them, but his diligence won't let him rest easy.

He finds the place easily enough, a half-dozen blocks at a brisk walk later. Ziri isn't here, and hasn't been for days according to the ligneous old man by the stairwell. He presses a two-dollar scratchcard into Clark's hand like a talisman. A familiar symbol is etched into the matte silver.

"There's a new kind of mean in him," the man says.

Even when Clark isn't chasing the Bat, he is present. It would be remiss of him to not seize on the smallest crumb of information when it's offered, but the man has nothing more to say, apocryphal or otherwise, and only encourages him to get out of the neighborhood—"He is angry, and he's hunting."

Clark may not suffer the cold, but that doesn't mean he can't feel a chill.

The warning echoes in Clark's ears as he turns into an alleyway, looking for a likely spot to take off from unobserved—there's still time for him to find a sports bar and collect some reactions for his Goliaths assignment before everyone is incoherently drunk. He glances behind him and sees nothing but slatted shadows, the coarse yellow of Gotham's streetlamps and the indifferent sweep of car headlights that don't penetrate beyond the throat of the alleyway. His feet are already lifting from the pitted asphalt as he looks ahead again.

There's somebody there, still and silent on the fire escape above him. He crashes back to earth.

Somebody, but not just anybody.

"It's you," Clark says.

The Gotham Bat descends out of the shadows and lands soft-footed, his cape flaring around him. The first thing Clark notices is that he is definitely human. The second thing is that he is massive. The Bat might be built like an ox but he moves like a gymnast, disciplined and precise as though he knows the boundaries of his body to the last millimeter.

There's something familiar about the efficiency of his gait, but Clark is too busy being crowded against the alley's grimy brickwork to dwell on it.

"Yes, it is," the Bat says in a breathy monotone. Disguised—no doubt one function of the dense layers of electronics in the Bat's cowl that are attenuating Clark's x-ray attempts something fierce—but he can almost hear the real voice obfuscated beneath its digital grind.

Clark swallows and lifts his chin—the Bat is not merely broad; he is also several inches taller than Clark, and is using all of them to loom. It's not that Clark is physically intimidated, because he could, if he needed to, extract himself from this situation safely, quickly and with ease if not without cost, but he finds his hands are shaking anyway. At least that lends him some verisimilitude while he waits to discover what the Bat wants with him. He can understand why people find him terrifying.

He leans in and curls his fingers against Clark's collar. The glove leather has been battered soft; the metal knuckles press cold against Clark's throat. Clark's mouth goes dry.

The Bat tugs out Clark's press pass by its lanyard.

"This isn't your beat, Metropolis," he says. Clark can't tell if he's uninterested or if it's just the flattening effect of the voice changer. "Why are you here."

Ah. Territoriality.

"I was following up with a source," Clark says, "but it looks like I have another story now."

"No, you don't. Who is your contact."

"That's not important."

"I will decide," the Bat says, and balls up his fist in Clark's coat, "what is important here."

"They've done nothing wrong. They don't need your attention." The last thing Clark wants here is a physical confrontation. He raises his hands, palms out, a calming gesture. It only makes the Bat seethe.

Impatience sparks in his eyes, bright against the stark black of the cowl and—is he wearing greasepaint?

Clark can definitely smell greasepaint. Also the bland carbon-fiber synthetics of the suit, and detergent, sweat, shampoo. Notes of ordinariness that belong to whoever animates this creature. Even as the Bat rolls his shoulders and lifts Clark by his coat, he's chasing that sense of familiarity again.

Then the Bat shoves him hard against the wall, pinning him on his toes, and once again Clark's attention is refocused. A seam rips somewhere. He doesn't even have to pretend that the breath's been knocked out of him; the Bat braces his knee between Clark's for leverage and it's enlightening. His heart thunders.

Some instinct makes Clark grip the Bat's wrist. The air tastes sharp on his tongue, like it's been split by lightning, like he's—like—

—oh, no.

"Who," the Bat demands from between clenched teeth.

"What are you going to do if I won't tell you?" Clark says, and if he sounds shaken, that would be appropriate. "Brand me?"

The Bat's breath hisses from between his teeth, the noise over the voice changer like a distant storm. He drops Clark just as suddenly as he'd grabbed him and takes a half-step back.

Clark takes a moment to straighten his lapels. Zini's absence concerns him, and he could kill two birds with one stone here. He can placate the Bat, and then perhaps the Bat will find her. He might scare her a bit, but Clark doesn't think he'd hurt her.

"I was looking for Kahina Zini, but she's AWOL."

"Zini." His earlier dispassion must have been affected, because disgust seeps into the Bat's voice, loud and clear. "You're just chasing your alien."

There is disappointment behind the contempt, as if he were anticipating something else. Clark frowns. "What did you think I was doing?"

"Not important," the Bat says gruffly. He turns away in a swirl of tattered cape. If nothing else, Clark admires his commitment to theatricality. "Get out. If I see you in Gotham again, you'll regret it."

Territoriality and considerable control issues then, though they mean little when held up to reality. The Bat may think that Gotham is a city-state and he its iron-fisted ruler, but Clark has as much right to be here as any of its citizens. Still, probably wise to give him a heads-up, if only to avoid a replay of this particular situation.

And he should want to avoid it, he thinks. In his current change of clothes, at least.

He wonders if the Bat has ever been held against a wall by somebody stronger than him. Clark suspects not—or not for a long time. He wonders how he might react to that.

Clark closes his eyes and takes a breath.

"You will," he calls out to him. "See me here again. I've been extended an invitation."

The Bat pauses, a density of shadow among more. Clark watches him tilt his head, maybe thinking, maybe irritated by Clark's temerity. Maybe winding up to a tinpot dictator meltdown.

"Bruce Wayne isn't willing to condemn your actions, for reasons all his own. I'm not sure he'd still cut you that slack if he heard you'd been threatening his guests."

His shoulder hitch; a deep breath or a sigh, perhaps a quiet laugh—and then he moves back into Clark's space. The fist bunched in the front of Clark's coat is gentler this time, but that's not saying much.

"Bruce Wayne thinks he owns this city." The Bat leans in, almost nose-to-nose with him. Close enough that Clark feels the air between them thrum. "He's wrong."

He snaps away, leaving Clark with the implication and an itch under his skin. There's a sharp retort and the whine of grappling wire. The Bat whips up the side of the building like a demon, and vanishes into the night like one, too.

Bruce swings through scarves of smog and past the frost-spalled façade of the tenements, lands on the remains of a fire escape, and from there takes to the rooftops as though he can outrun his frustration. Kent wasn't retrieving the leech from a partner, nor peddling it to an interested party. Not tonight, anyway. His only crime is sticking his nose in where it's not wanted.

He makes Bruce acutely uncomfortable. Both times they've interacted, it's felt like somebody stepping on his grave—a full-body response that makes him shiver just to think about—but no matter how unsettling it is, Bruce can't seem to leave it be. Every instinct is telling him that Kent is somebody he should pursue.

So that is what he'll do, until he can drag into the light whatever it is that's bothering him, and get his goddamn property back in the process.

"Am I to understand that you're playing both the good cop and the bad cop?" Alfred says in Bruce's earpiece.

"For a given value of good. Depends how tomorrow night goes."

And here's a new irritant: Alfred's suggestive tones. "Ah, that's right. Your dinner engagement."

"Strictly public relations."

"Practically a civic duty, sir," Alfred says lightly. "I won't wait up."

It only takes an hour or so for Clark to get his notes together for his meeting with Wayne, and halfway through trying to pick out the right tie, realizes that might have been the easiest part of his evening.

He's still preoccupied from his encounter with the Bat. It's a strange, off-kilter feeling. Partly because there's not much precedent for coming face-to-face with a cryptid, and partly because of the way it had energized him, like flying through an electrical storm. That skin-tingling rush of anticipation, the air crackling like a circuit waiting to be completed; it would have taken the lightest touch to spark it to life.

He's certain of it. Which should be impossible, because he's just gone through all that with Bruce Wayne—

But—

He could entertain the idea that it is possible. Damned if he knows. Maybe it's normal for Kryptonians to find two soulmates. Or, god forbid, more.

He knows now that he experiences the connection differently from most people. It's more than just a feeling, more than a click. His heightened perception and perpetual awareness of his body and its capabilities means that he saw it happen: the sudden rerouting of electrochemical pathways; how his biomagnetic field extended and aligned and attuned itself; all the minute biological reactions that aren't likely to be mined for love poems. It's not outlandish that this aspect might be different, too.

Clark groans and throws the ties onto his bed. All he knows for sure is that fate is determined to hook him up with the most inappropriate partners she can find. The only thing he and the Bat have in common is a cape. With Wayne, he has even less.

He recalls what Jor-El had told him in the brief time they'd spent together on the scout ship, that Krypton had abandoned natural birth centuries before. Clark wonders if this was why—because the bonds they formed were indiscriminate and unpredictable and cared nothing for their guilds or bloodlines or class distinctions.

He rakes both hands through his hair. One thing at a time. Make it through the evening unscathed, and deal with the rest later. Step one, make a good impression. He picks up the ties again, and despairs over ever deciphering what 'casual elegant' means.

Left to his own judgment, he's sunk. He digs his phone out from beneath the pants and shirts and jackets he's strewn on the bed, and calls Lois. When she picks up, he can hear the clatter of food being prepared.

"Hey, you. Make it quick, I only have so many hands."

"Blue tie or red?" he says.

"Neither. None."

"There's a dress code, Lo. I'm having a problem with the visual semantics. Any thoughts on the suit would also be great."

"Where are you going again?"

"The Riverside Club."

Lois whistles. "Swanky. Okay, if in doubt, go dark. But not all black, or you'll look like you got kicked out of a funeral wake. Blue tie to bring out your eyes. Good luck on your date, don't let him pressure you into putting out."

"It's not—it's really not a date. We'll be talking shop."

"Uh-huh. Well, good luck on your, I dunno, whatever-it-is that's got you all aflutter."

"Meeting," Clark says, dry. "Thanks. By the way, your pasta is about to boil over."

"God, you can actually tell I'm cooking pasta. Oh—ahhh shit, I gotta go—"

The restaurant is every bit as daunting as Clark had feared. At thirty-eight stories up, it's the jewel in the crown of the Riverside Hotel, offering an unimpeded view of Gotham by night—which is, on the whole, a lot prettier than it is at ground level. With the restaurant's sultry lighting and the ambient murmur of its clientele in the background, Clark can almost believe the harbor below isn't saturated with abandoned firearms, bottom-feeding corpses, and any number of chemical agents just waiting for the right catalyst.

It's probably inappropriate to wish for the evening to be derailed by the harbor catching alight, but Clark aims a silent entreaty in the direction of the neon ACE Chemicals signage nonetheless.

Wayne spares him undue stress by actually turning up on time, which is more consideration than Clark had given him credit for. He greets the maître d' warmly but doesn't seem to notice Clark's offered hand; it's a snub that's maybe inadvertent, maybe not, but definitely par for the course with him.

Their table is, of course, excellently placed.

"Gotham," Bruce says to him as they're seated. Their reflections are crisply mirrored in the dark windows, and studded with city lights. "What do you think?"

"I'll be honest with you, Mr. Wayne, I like to keep it at arm's length. But from up here? Beautiful."

Wayne seems pleasantly surprised at his response. "The night does hide a multitude of sins," he says, unfastening his jacket button as he sits.

He's as put-together as he was the night of the gala; hair coiffed, metal glinting at collar and cuffs, but despite his amiable smile there's that same tension around his eyes and in his body language. He seems—not wholly defensive this time, but wary. Considering the nature of their last encounter, it's not unexpected. Welcome, even. Clark's not certain how he would have dealt with Wayne if he'd opted for the charm offensive.

He puts that chilling thought aside and browses the menu. Wayne handles the wine presentation ritual with only a perfunctory interest, to the sommelier's eternal suffering. ("It's a seafood restaurant. How wrong can you go with a white?")

There are no prices. Clark can practically hear Perry itemizing the company expenses as he tries to divine which might be the most reasonably-priced meal. Which is none of them, his common sense insists. Wayne may have extended an olive branch but Clark's under no illusions. Wayne doesn't particularly like him, possibly wants something from him, and he brought Clark here because it's out of his comfort zone. It's only a matter of time before the other shoe drops.

How much can a wild mushroom salad cost, even with scallops? He'll be fine. Sea bass for the main course. Just fine. Wayne orders something entirely off-menu that makes the waiter suffer as gracefully as the sommelier had. Fine, it's fine.

The soft lighting does ridiculous things to Wayne's cheekbones as he smiles blandly at the waiter. God, this is really not fine.

"So, Mr. Kent," Wayne says, as the waiter plucks the menu from him and retreats. "I read your piece on the mishandling of Metropolis' tax fund allocation for recycling facilities some time back."

"You remember that?" It was one of Clark's first assignments at the Planet, and possibly a hazing ritual. "You read that? The whole thing?"

Wayne seems aware of his own reputation, and at least moderately amused by it. "Well, it wouldn't do to read just half," he says. He taps a finger against the tabletop. "I remember being impressed by the meticulousness of your research. You have an eye for detail."

Clark fervently hopes that Wayne isn't attempting to headhunt him for his audit department. "I'm impressed that you found something interesting to say about it."

"Who doesn't enjoy a rousing account of municipal fraud over breakfast?"

Again, the impression that he's gently being mocked. Sincerity is probably the best, and safest, response, so he smiles and says, "Thank you, Mr. Wayne. I appreciate that."

Wayne takes that in stride, lifting his glass for a toast. His eyes flick from Clark's fingers on the stem of the glass, to his mouth, then to his eyes. "To investigative journalism."

So—it's not mockery, more like teasing. Clark isn't sure that's any better. It still makes his stomach twist like a pretzel. "And to… books," he responds.

The corner of Wayne's mouth twitches. Their wine glasses meet delicately.

Their meals arrive, and after an unnecessary performance with the napkins, Clark places his smartphone on the table between them.

"Mind if I record?" It seems inappropriate, even though it's the whole reason he's here, and Clark finds himself leaning on his Midwestern accent. Forgive the country boy, he knows not what he does. "I know it's probably bad manners, but not as much as taking notes at the dinner table would be."

Wayne looks down at the phone and his brow creases. For a split-second Clark would swear that he's forgotten they're here for business and not pleasure, but then he smiles slightly too sharp a smile. "Go ahead."

He waits while Clark sets up, then proceeds to filibuster his way through the appetizer and most of the entrée, and doesn't even sound like he's reciting a script he's been drilled on.

The questions Clark had prepared are surplus to requirements but he softballs a few anyway—the long-term plans for extending out of Gotham; the logistics of running the program in conjunction with the Friends of the Metropolis Library. Wayne hits them out of the park. He may be grubbing for publicity, but it's something he's engaged with. There is an unlikely passion beneath the hard shell of Wayne's sardonicism, something beyond the seamless bullshit he usually deals in, and Clark finds that he wants to find out what else makes him tick. If he were to reach over the table and touch the back of his hand, their connection would spring to life, and maybe—

Maybe he'd cut Clark down as ruthlessly as he had at the gala, like it's a matter of survival under threat.

"Can I ask you something?" Wayne says as the dishes are cleared, leaning forward with glass in hand. He's made motions to top up several times and is visibly relaxed, though as far as Clark can tell the level of his wine has remained largely unchanged. Clark, for his part, has nervously sipped his way through two-thirds of the bottle. He shifts under the weight of Wayne's attention, and turns it into a gentle sway forward, as though tipsy but playing it off as attentiveness.

"It's probably your turn," he says.

"The other night, at Luthor's place. When you caught me on the stairs."

Clark's hope resurges full-force. Maybe the foundation coverage was just a pretext, and for all his dismissiveness he's been thinking on their encounter after all. He attempts to fortify himself with another sip of wine.

"Did you notice anybody else?"

Wayne's voice holds polite inquiry. His gaze is level and unwavering. It feels like a test, and Clark has no reason to answer with anything but honesty.

"Only you, Bruce."

He hears Bruce's—goddamn it all. He hears Wayne's breath subtly catch, and a flicker of something passes across his face that he disguises quickly enough that Clark can't tell if he's displeased at being addressed with familiarity, at the strange intimacy of Clark's statement, or if he doesn't mind either of these things and that's actually what's pissing him off. Whichever it may be, his expression flattens into something horribly bland, and he quits with the constant eye contact to stare slightly over Clark's shoulder instead, which isn't as much of a relief as Clark thought it would be.

If it was a test, then it appears that Clark has flunked it spectacularly.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Wayne." His dismay is genuine. He probably can't smooth this over, but he can redirect. "I didn't see anybody else. Why do you ask?"

"Let's not stand on formality. Bruce is fine." Wayne's shoulders relax, and he's back to watching Clark closely. "I ask because Luthor is breathing down my neck."

"I don't follow. Why is that?"

"Somebody gained access to the LexCorp server banks and indulged in a touch of corporate espionage. Stagg's getting some heat as well, and Queen, and it's causing some intercompany tension. Wayne Enterprises would never stoop to such underhanded tactics, naturally—"

"Oh, no, of course not."

"—but that doesn't mean Lex Junior can't make a nuisance of himself over it. He is a very irritating person."

"You want to know if I saw anyone suspicious down there."

"That's right."

He casts his mind back—he'd only barely noted the glass-walled room below, since there had been only one person setting his alarm bells ringing that night.

Clark offers a stiff smile. "Only you, Bruce."

"I was looking for the bathroom," Bruce says smoothly and with no apparent chagrin. "That's the trouble with an open bar."

"No doubt." Something about the situation nags at him. Open. Clark drums the edge of the table with his fingers.

"What is it?" Bruce's voice has turned low and anticipatory.

Clark leans over and taps at his phone, terminating the recording app. Bruce's eyebrows raise fractionally.

"Why would someone concerned about corporate espionage leave their private data unmonitored, unsecured, and easily accessible, right in the middle of a public event?" Clark says.

"That's—that is a good question." But not so good that he can't be annoyed at it, for whatever reason. Bruce leans back in his chair, arms folded over the breadth of his chest. "When you put it that way."

"You think Luthor was baiting somebody?"

"Hm." Bruce's eyes have lost focus; he catches his thumbnail between his teeth in thought.

"Do you have any idea what was on the server?"

There's a beat of silence. Bruce takes his thumb from his mouth and says, "No."

"Would you tell me if you did?"

Bruce's expression doesn't budge an inch, having apparently contracted a terminal case of sangfroid.

"Is this the real reason you invited me here?"

Bruce appears to give that cursory thought. "I have a complicated relationship with the fourth estate, Mr. Kent," he says. "It isn't not why I invited you here, but I'm not uninterested in what thoughts you may or may not have on the matter."

"Well," Clark says. "I'm glad we got that cleared up."

Bruce smiles narrowly. "I'll be frank," he says. "And this is very much off the record—I want to know the nature of the stolen information, and I also want to know who took it."

And he wants Clark to help him find it. The buttering up over his investigative writing becomes all too clear. Of course, Bruce Wayne is the kind of person who would only appreciate Clark's skills for how they might benefit him. And as if thinking about pinning the Bat to a wall yesterday wasn't bad enough, Clark's traitorous imagination presents several ways that Wayne might benefit from his more unique abilities. Clark bites hard at the inside of his cheek.

"Mr. Kent, can we come to an arrangement here?"

"I'm not sure about that."

"Dessert?" Wayne suggests.

"No, thank you."

"No sweetening you up," Wayne says under his breath. Then, louder and more plainly for Clark to hear: "Then let's cut to the chase. What's your price?"

"Excuse me?"

Wayne bunches his napkin up and tosses it onto the table. For all his gregariousness this evening, he is evidently not a man who enjoys having his time wasted. "To retrieve the data and to keep my name out of the inevitable media storm. What's your price."

"Mr. Wayne—Bruce," Clark says, and makes a conscious effort to relax the clench of his jaw. "I won't be bought. If there's a story in this, I will report on the facts to the best of my—"

"All right, not money." Wayne appears unflustered at his bribery being rebuffed. He probably doesn't even see it as bribery. Clark supposes that if you're rich enough to buy anything, there are few problems that can't be solved with the right sized check. "Information, perhaps. If you want a story out of this, I can give you a story. You're interested in the Bat. I can tell you about the Bat." He pauses. "That's what you're really here for, isn't it?"

Clark lets out a slow breath, rubs at his face, and tries not to feel completely insulted that Wayne thinks he'd sell out his integrity for a fresh batch of unsubstantiated rumors. At this point, only an idiot would believe anything coming out of his mouth.

Especially now that he's got firsthand experience with the Bat himself, and a good idea of how to catch his attention again.

"No," he says. "I don't think I want to do your dirty work, Mr. Wayne."

Wayne is still for a moment, unreadable. Then, "More's the pity," he says in a way that makes Clark hot in the face, and lifts his chin at the passing waitstaff, gesturing for the bill. They both reach for it when it comes, the black leather folder caught between them over the table.

Please, Clark thinks. Please don't make a scene.

Wayne says nothing, just lifts his eyebrows and tugs gently. Clark can only be dogged about this. "Let me get it. You can settle up with the Planet's accounts department if it bothers you."

"If you aren't going to run a piece on me, then there's nothing wrong with me paying," Wayne says, and directs an uncanny valley smile at him. It probably looks just fine in pictures. "That's how it works, isn't it? So. My treat."

Clark shakes his head. "If I'm not—Mr. Wayne, your initiative is worthy of recognition. I'm not going to sideline it just because we had a clash of, of..."

"Morals," Wayne supplies, still with that awful smile. He shifts his grip on the bill folder. Their fingers brush.

A moment of unalloyed shock unfolds across Wayne's face, and Clark suddenly realizes why he didn't want to shake hands earlier. His own breath has caught hard in his throat at the contact, his skin alight with rippling shivers. The synesthesia is like silver bells in his mind.

Clark watches in fascination as their electromagnetic fields pulse and luminesce in reciprocal behavior. Wayne drops the bill folder abruptly and with a visible shudder.

He does feel it, then. He doesn't like it, but he feels it, and that's—something. Clark can't be anything but ambivalent about it.

"Fine," Wayne says placidly, and adjusts his shirt cuff. "Have it your way."

Clark Kent is probably the straightest journalist Bruce has ever encountered, and his idealistic deflecting would be admirable if it weren't utterly infuriating. The more Bruce pushes at him, misleads him, tempts him, the more convinced he is that Kent isn't involved in the leech's disappearance at all. This is dire on several levels.

From most to least petty: he'll have to tell Alfred that he was right.

Secondly, Kent's attraction to him must be a bona fide crush, not just employed as a decoy, though Bruce's turn as a terrible dinner companion hopefully put a damper on it. For all of Kent's fresh-faced appeal, Bruce doesn't want to encourage him, but he gets the feeling he's going to turn up like a bad penny regardless. He knows how muckrakers are. Now that Kent's caught a whiff of skulduggery, he may try to involve himself. He may snoop.

Tonight has backfired somewhat.

Most pressingly, Bruce will have to find a new lead if he ever hopes to recover the device, or he'll have to risk a second attempt at Luthor's data. He resigns himself to an evening of combing the Friends of the Metropolis Library guest list, trying to figure out who might be holding a grudge, nursing a slight, or is simply inclined to opportunism.

Kent is quiet for the lengthy elevator journey. Bruce watches his profile in the mirrored brass interior. His expression stays mild but preoccupied, and the doors opening seem to take him unawares. Gotham's standard night-time ambience hits them with a sheet of icy rain as they exit the hotel; their breath clouds in the air as they wait under the awnings for a car.

"Well, that could have gone worse," Kent says.

Probably the wine talking. Bruce glances at him sidelong. "How, exactly?"

Kent gives him look that's drier than a good martini, and Bruce is reluctantly charmed. He offsets it by counting the many reasons that inviting him home would be disastrous. The thought has darted across his mind more than once this evening, despite how wary he is about letting Kent get too close. Bruce wonders if Kent had noticed, and from that, what he'd assumed about his character.

"I don't think you need any tips." Despite everything, Kent is smiling. "I knew there'd be a catch. Just so you know, I don't think any less of you for it."

"Oh, spare me. You do. I don't care."

He's blunt but it's not without humor; Bruce refuses to believe he's left anything but a bad impression this evening. Kent really is too polite for his own good. A cab draws up while he's stammering his way through an earnest but not entirely convincing rebuttal, and Bruce opens the rear door and herds him in.

"It's almost midnight. Best get home before you turn back into a bumpkin."

"Very funny." Kent smiles as though pleasantly embarrassed, one hand curled on the frame of the car door. He looks like he's going to say something more, but his expression smooths again just before he ducks in, the reflected streetlights blanking out his glasses. "Thank you for the evening, Mr. Wayne."

The lack of a modifier is conspicuous. Good. "I hope you enjoyed the food, at least," Bruce says. "Let's do it again sometime."

The door slams on Kent's sharp laughter, and he's borne away in stop-starts into Gotham's late-evening traffic. Bruce's car turns up soon after, Alfred at the wheel with a nod and a curt greeting. Bruce slides into the rear seat, loosens his tie and slumps against the upholstery with a sigh. He idly rubs his fingertips with his thumb.

Alfred clicks his tongue and stares at him in the rear-view mirror until Bruce sighs again and belts in. "I'll need the benefit guest list," he says, as though that was his idea from the start.

The wet ambience of the Cave is welcome after the evening he's had. Bruce slings his suit jacket over the back of his chair and dumps his handful of cufflinks and button studs with a noise like loose change. Alfred squirrels them away before they can get lost among the workshop's miscellany, and then dutifully returns with the list.

Bruce looks through it once and then throws it to one side. He recognizes most of the names—it's a traditional mix of art patrons, socialites and politicians—and those he doesn't he runs through a cursory check. Nothing worse than a couple of parking tickets between them. Remarkably respectable, or remarkably discreet.

Bruce rubs at his eyes. "Do we have any way into Luthor's security feeds?"

"I think we still have one lone proxy that won't be nuked on sight," Alfred says, "but it won't last long once we tunnel in."

"I need as much footage from the gala as you can get. Service stairs cameras, about ten fifteen onwards."

"I'll see what I can do."

Bruce leaves Alfred to finesse his way through the security protocols. He doesn't have his head in the right place for it tonight. His patience is frayed to a thread, as though he's spent all evening on the defensive instead of methodically offending a perfectly pleasant, if stubborn, individual.

"Another one for the sin bin," Alfred mutters a little later. "I got you your footage, but I'll need a new setup next time you want to go rummaging through the competition's sock drawer."

"I'll get you something nice and Russian," Bruce says absently, already grabbing the files from Alfred's workspace.

He scrubs through the security cams until he spots himself on the stairs, Kent on his heels. It's low-res garbage and the angle is not ideal, but he can pinpoint the moment Kent grabs his wrist and he turns to face him, and—Bruce frowns. The timestamp is still ticking in the corner; it's a full six seconds before either of them say anything.

He can't quite read the expression on his own face. His body language is troubling. He is swept into Kent's orbit.

Bruce takes in a long breath and lets it out again just as slowly. The conversation looks a lot more intimate than he recalls, which is alarming in and of itself, but not quite as alarming as the woman in the crimson dress who edges past them on the stairs. He had not noticed her even peripherally. The realization that he'd been so unaware of his surroundings trickles down his spine like ice water.

Bruce switches windows and grimly tabs through his rogue's gallery of attendees, but there are any number of svelte, dark-haired women. He can't get a clear shot of her face. He replays the footage, then leans in, backs it up and plays it again. And again.

There's a particular deliberateness to the way she's kept her face turned from the camera, trying to be casual, as though something of interest has caught her attention elsewhere. She raises her hand to pat at her updo as she passes by on Kent's left. She hasn't a hair out of place, but it means her forearm would have obscured her profile should either of them have glanced her way.

He freezes the footage, takes his list of suspects and spends an excruciating hour crawling through the internet media coverage of the event, poring over photo captions and striking off everyone who wasn't wearing red. Eventually there are only two names left: the wife of the mayor of Metropolis, and Diana Prince, one-time antiquities dealer and current curator at the Louvre, Paris. She appears to have made a trans-Atlantic trip for an engagement at the Gotham Museum, but Bruce can see no purpose to her attending Luthor's benefit.

Her motive may be opaque, but Bruce knows where he'd put his money.

"Now that's some good old-fashioned detective work," Alfred says, handing him a mug of tea. "Much more wholesome than… hmm."

"Than what?" Bruce says.

"I rather thought you'd interrupt me, sir."

Bruce swings his chair around and stares down Alfred's disapproval. He has a newspaper under one arm, and Bruce sees how this is about to go. "I've spent a lifetime crossing lines, Alfred," he says. "This isn't any different. We can't pretend it's just guns and knives any more. We're talking dirty bombs. Hundreds, thousands of casualties, right here in Gotham. To endure that again so soon after—" Bruce cuts himself short. No need to tip his hand by bringing Black Zero into it. "I need this information, and I will get it by any means necessary. The gloves are off."

"And so, apparently, are all bets," Alfred says tightly. He drops the paper over Bruce's keyboard; the Bat's brand-mark glares up from the front-page photograph. "It's no remedy for the world, Master Bruce. This cruelty."

He waits, as though he expects pushback, but Bruce doesn't feel like arguing the point tonight. He sweeps the paper aside and turns back to his screens.

"Good night," Alfred says, when it becomes apparent that Bruce is going to let the tea turn stone-cold. "Sleep well, if you can."

The morning is damp and dark, streetlights glancing off the glass façades of central Metropolis. It's substantially early; dawn is a good hour away and the commuters have yet to snarl up the main thoroughfare.

The deserted Daily Planet bullpen is almost relaxing; a gentle lull before the inescapable storm of the newsday. Clark does a little off-the-clock research while he eats breakfast at his desk. None of the industry blogs have anything on this alleged Luthor-Stagg-Queen-Wayne tension, but that's not unexpected if things haven't escalated beyond passive-aggression.

He leaves Lois a breakfast burrito in exchange for a couple of pilfered contact numbers. It's too early in the day to expect anyone to pick up, so he finds himself browsing a chain reaction of business blogs and picking bits of scrambled egg from his tie in the meanwhile.

And, as inevitable as a midday margarita, there's Wayne. He's grip-and-grinning with a nameless associate, or at a speaking engagement, gesturing with more braggadocio than is healthy for one man. Clark takes a gradual lateral slide away from professional articles and into recent paparazzi shots, and comes to his senses while staring at Wayne at some sparkling event or other, accompanied by a disparaging caption and date whose dress well and truly fails the fingertip test.

Clark stops there to quickly take stock of his self-respect, and then closes the remaining half-dozen browser tabs. The bustle of the bullpen filters back to him. Outside, the first hint of sun is bleaching the skyline, and the traffic below honks like angry geese. He hears Lois discover her burrito.

"What did you do?" she calls over.

"Nothing."

"What are you about to do?"

"Nothing," he says again. He shoots her a reassuring smile, despite knowing perfectly well that it will not deflect her at all. "I'm just going to make some polite inquiries, nothing to worry about."

Lois plucks the post-it note from the corner of Clark's screen and frowns at the phone numbers scrawled on it. "I thought you were covering Wayne's book club," she says.

"I am. This is something else."

"Not unrelated to Wayne?"

"Not unrelated," Clark says. "Last night was interesting."

"Sounds it. This number is for Stagg's PR guy."

"It sure is."

Lois leaves abruptly, only to reappear half a minute later with her chair in tow. "Okay, what's going on," she says, scooting in close, elbow to elbow. "Are you digging for dirt or did he sweet-talk you into some busywork?"

"Nobody needs to dig to find his dirt," Clark says, gesturing. "It's all just hanging out there, like—uh, no, it's probably nothing. Just a matter of due diligence, that's all."

"Yeah, that sounds like bullshit." Lois rests her elbow on Clark's desk. "My slate's too full to shark your story, so if you want to fill me in with the details, go ahead."

"It's just some intercorporation bickering, I think. Someone jacked some of Luthor's data during the benefit. Allegedly."

"So the big boys are jockeying for wunderkind's trade secrets." Lois frowns. "And Wayne straight-up told you about this? I know he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I thought he had some sense."

"I know. He seems eager to get his hands on whatever it is, with my help."

Lois narrows her eyes. "And he thought that you, specifically, a reporter, could help him acquire sensitive information, because?"

"Because of my investigative," Clark says, then trails off, vaguely embarrassed, "skills." He knew it was flattery at the time, he just hadn't realized how effective it was. The warm glow of Bruce's approval has lingered, despite how firmly Clark had turned him and his dubiously legal proposition down.

"And because he could tell you're into him," Lois says. "You do him this favor and your reputation is in his hands. He'll have you under his thumb for good. He's exactly that kind of asshole, Clark."

"No, I don't think it's that," Clark says, which isn't exactly a refutation, but that's also not the salient point. "I mean, yeah, he's kind of mercenary, but everyone knows he's got issues a mile wide with the whole—"

Wait. Wayne had been incredibly unhappy with him at the benefit. He'd practically snarled when Clark had tried to push for an acknowledgement. Why the abrupt cease in hostilities for the sake of Clark's expertise when it comes with that kind of baggage—and when he has enough money to hire every private investigator in the tri-state area?

"What?"

Son of a gun. Wayne thinks he took the data.

"I, uh. Could you give me a minute? I'd like to make these calls," Clark says. "I'm not helping him out, I promise."

"O-kay, it's your funeral," Lois says, sing-song. She raises a skeptical eyebrow as she wheels back to her desk. "This burrito better be worth it."

"It's from the best place in Albuquerque. Trust me, there's not much that isn't worth it." Clark lifts his phone from its cradle, and hears the crinkle of tinfoil over the dial tone, and the squeak of the mail trolley's wheels. Jenny's making her rounds; she drops the morning's deliveries on his desk with a smile.

He spreads it out one-handed as he sits in Stagg Enterprises' hold queue, Opus Number 1 piping into his ear. One of the envelopes is thicker than the others. He wedges the phone between his shoulder and ear and tears it open.

A fat square of newspaper falls out. Clark unfolds it to find the front page of the Gotham Free Press and some polaroids.

Slowly, he hangs up. BAT BRAND OF JUSTICE? the headline says, unmistakably a condemnation, despite the question mark. He slides the photographs out of their makeshift parcel.

There's a half-dozen of them, and they're of a dead body. Clark recognizes the man immediately. Cesar Santos, the sex trafficker they found cuffed to a radiator in a dilapidated Gotham flophouse, branded like so much cattle. It would be fitting if it weren't reprehensible.

He knew, of course—the Bat's idea of justice suffers from a moral disengagement. It's wholly retributive, not restorative. It's still a deep shock to see the result of his actions; to come face-to-face with the tangible repercussions of a man who most people barely believe exists.

"Jesus," Clark says under his breath. His breakfast churns in his stomach. The Bat's symbol is livid against the death-pallor of the man's skin. JUDGE, is scrawled under the photograph in angry red pen. JURY, the next. EXECUTIONER. And then, driving the very sharp point home with very blunt force: JUSTICE?

There's something comforting about the ambient glow of the street below and the moon diffusing through the evening clouds. Clark leaves his apartment in darkness, save for the small lamp on his nightstand. It might be late, but when he closes his eyes and focuses, he can hear his mom moving around in the farmhouse still, the low babble of the radio, the mellow clink of a spoon in a mug.

He can stave off the desolation of his mood for a while, but he can't outrun it forever.

He pushes a window open and leaps into the sky. A minute and change later, he lands with a crunch in a shorn wheatfield. He frowns at the texture of it, and wiggles his toes. Forgot to put some shoes back on. The earth is cold under his feet, brittle with frost. Above him, the illimitable sky is pinpricked with stars.

There's still a welcoming glow at the open kitchen window of the farmhouse. He drifts over and folds his arms on the sill. "Hey, Ma," he says.

His mom is at the table, nursing a hot mug of cocoa. The soft warmth of the kitchen and the smell of the chocolate hits him with a wallop of nostalgia, and he takes a deep, painful breath. It's quintessentially home, more than Metropolis is managing to be.

"Clark!" she says with a smile fit to brighten the night sky, and gets up in a hurry to open the back door. She looks from his bare face to his stocking feet and back, then immediately pulls him into a tight hug. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Clark says into her hair. She'd have been watching the news, of course. Everyone's been watching the news, but he thinks she'll let him lie about this. "I'm fine. Everything's fine."

She pushes him out to arm's length, her hands on his shoulders, and gives him the look. Okay, maybe not. "Now, I know you didn't come all the way out here because you heard me making cocoa."

"That is exactly why I came," Clark says with a weak grin. She goes to set the kettle back on the stove and fetch him a mug from the rack. "I also know whenever you're baking brownies. I only have so much willpower."

Mom is having none of it. "Take a load off," she says. "Let's talk about it."

She hands him the mug as he sits. There are tiny marshmallows melting in the cocoa, so he must have been even worse at hiding his upset than he thought. Mom settles herself next to him, her hair loose and gray; the kitchen's gentle shadows pick out the fine creases around her eyes and mouth. They get a little deeper every year, Clark thinks, and is gripped with sudden panic over her fragility. Sometimes he—he doesn't forget, exactly, he just doesn't think about it, except when he's stressed out or anxious. That she won't be around forever.

He takes a sip of his cocoa, then another deep breath that sounds more like a sigh. It helps nobody when he gets like this.

"Oh, sweetheart," she says, and covers one of his hands where he's wrapped it around the mug.

He manages a smile, for her. "Sorry. I—yeah, I don't want to talk about it. Not right now. But I was wondering. Can I ask you something about you and Pa?"

"Well, of course," she says, so kindly that Clark can barely stand it.

"When you first met," Clark says slowly, feeling out the depth of his uncertainty and wondering if there's any answer that might shallow the gradient. "Did you know?"

"Me and your Pa, we fell in love in a very ordinary way," she says, after a little thought. "No love at first sight, no fireworks or sparks, not like they say. Maybe we were fated to be, but I don't know about that one way or the other. We had to work at it. Is that what's keeping you in the doldrums?"

Clark shrugs. "Apart from the obvious, I guess."

"You miss Lois?" she says, and tucks her hand into the crook of his elbow.

"Yeah, sometimes. But that's not it." He fishes out a half-melted marshmallow and lets it dissolve to nothing on his tongue before he continues. "I met someone. But it's complicated."

"Well, you already have a lot on your plate," she says. "And love ain't ever straightforward, Clark. No matter how hard people try to make it look that way."

"It's not love," Clark says, and surprises himself with how bitter he sounds.

Mom gives him a sympathetic look. "But you hope it could be?"

"I don't know. He's kind of an ass."

"He?" she says, and catches his cheek in her cupped palm, turning his face so he's looking at her. "Oh, Clark, is that what you're worried about? You know that don't matter to me one jot."

"No, I know," Clark says, smiling at her. He can feel his ears turning red regardless. "I know. Turns out that's the least confusing part of this whole thing, if I'm honest."

"How about I make us another cup of chocolate, and you tell me the rest."

"God, where to start," Clark says, as Mom busies herself with the kettle again. "He's—well, he famously doesn't believe in soulmates, for a start."

"Famously?"

"He's a public figure, I guess you could say. We met at a benefit I was covering and ended up going to dinner. He was kind of awful, though I think he was deliberately trying to put me off, you know?"

Mom looks over at him through the steam drifting from the kettle. "Did he manage?"

Wayne might present himself as unscrupulous, blasé, and a little bit vulgar, but he's not as transparent as he seems—and much smarter than he'd have people believe. Not irrelevantly, Clark is also under the impression that Wayne would like to take him apart with his teeth.

He rubs at his face, his mouth. "Not entirely," he says.

"Well, he can't be that much of an ass, because it sounds as though you like him enough to worry about it," she says.

"Maybe," Clark says. "Or maybe it's just that he's not as impossible as the other guy."

There's the clatter of a teaspoon dropped in the sink. "Other guy?"

Clark tries to grin at her shock, but it feels more like a grimace. Judging from her concerned expression, it looks like one too. "I got the same—" he gestures with both hands: fireworks, sparks, "—same vibe from the Bat."

"The Bat?"

"Of Gotham."

"The Bat of Gotham?" At least she doesn't look worried any more. She's laughing a little. "A boogeyman, Clark?"

"He's a person, Ma. In a rubber suit." And a criminally angry violence specialist, no matter how easy he is to ridicule.

"Well, I don't think you're in any position to be casting aspersions," she says as she hands him a fresh mug.

Clark snorts, accepting the jab in the spirit it's intended. "Anyway," he says, "Other than, you know. That's what's going on with me. It's a whole heap of stress just trying to figure out how to feel about it."

"My sweet baby boy. You always were a romantic," she says, and brushes the hair from his forehead. "Remember, it only has to mean as much or as little as you want. Don't be so dead set on putting yourself through heartache when you know you don't have to."

Clark sighs. "I think it works a little differently for me," he says. "I don't know, Ma—"

A timezone over he hears the squeal of tires and the harsh crunch of gravel, and a high-performance engine revving hard. There's a frantic shout in the bleakness of a Gotham night.

"—well, I gotta fly." He spins her up from the table and kisses her cheek, and her hand when she clasps his face. "Love you, okay."

There's a power vacuum in the hierarchy of Gotham's dockside racketeers—one left by Santos' arrest and subsequent murder, about which the Bat hasn't the time nor resources to experience any particular feeling. He was low level, but there are always plenty further down the food chain who are ready to fight tooth and claw for a new position. An incremental increase of status brings incremental safety.

The Bat would be foolish to not take full advantage of the infighting to mop up some more of Knyazev's trafficking ring. This is why he has just crashed through a dry-docked cruiser yacht in pursuit of an all-terrain vehicle stuffed full of bickering underlings who keep trying to shoot out his tires with a .45. He was perhaps less circumspect about it than he could have been, but he's not in a very good mood.

He yanks the handbrake and turns a tight ninety degrees into a side street between warehouses, and again onto a parallel road. The layout of the harbor will force them to turn onto an adjacent road, and he'll intercept them in four, three, two—

The car's headlights sweep over a figure standing in the middle of the road, side-on to his approach. The Bat slams on the brakes out of sheer instinct—a fraction of a second before he registers that it's the Superman himself, standing straight-backed and imperious as though he is entitled to exist in the space the Bat intends to occupy moments from now. His cape streams behind him like a war banner.

His tires screech on the blacktop; the car fishtails and wrenches the Bat's shoulders when he tightens his grip on the wheel in a futile attempt to counter-steer. He makes a last-ditch effort to drift around the alien and his stoic refusal to get out of the fucking way, but a second later the crunch of impact jars through the chassis and up his spine. The Superman hip checks him into a shipping crate, the expression on his face in the split-second between collision and rebound as impassive as stone.

The car bounces off the crate into a wide spin, and then embeds itself into the pilings of a gantry crane.

All the Bat can hear is the creak of metal under stress, the insistent bip of a half dozen status alarms, and his own breath loud in his ears. He catches the startled white of his eyes reflected in his dash screens.

His right hand is jammed between the frame of the driver's seat and the handbrake's housing. He grunts and tries to pull it free, without success and more than a minor amount of pain. Feels like two fingers are fractured, at a minimum. He unfastens the clasps of his gauntlet; the leather has enough give that he can work himself loose from the crushed metal. In the intermittent illumination of the dashboard readouts, he can see that his fingers are already swelling and his knuckles are purpling up. Great. He won't be able to tie his own shoelaces for a week.

If he survives long enough to worry about that. The high-pitched squeal of shearing metal fractures the night; the windscreen canopy is wrenched from its hydraulic hinges and flung aside. The Bat stands up in the ruined shell of his vehicle and comes face-to-face with an angry god.

"You need to stop," the Superman says. He's backlit by the dock's floodlights, cheekbones carved out of the shadow of his face. "People are dying."

His tone is very reasonable. The sanctimonious prick. Bruce can recite the name of every single person who lost their life in Metropolis when this sentient wrecking-ball plowed through it. He clenches his hands into fists; the pain of it barely touches him through his dull rage. He stares the Superman down and considers that tonight, or one night soon, his face might be the last thing he sees.

"Hypocrite," he says.

The Superman's face relaxes out of its thunderous frown, and into something that could be taken for concern. "You're hurt," he says. His voice is like molten iron; it sinks into Bruce's skin, warm and dangerous, and he suddenly knows, with terrible inevitability, what is about to happen.

Bruce's entire body shudders, his breath pinned in his throat when the Superman's fingertips brush his bare wrist. His bell is tolling.

"No," he says. The existential terror of it comes crashing down onto him. He has never believed, and deeply, fervently wants to keep disbelieving, but when faced with empirical evidence he can do nothing but acknowledge the bitter truth.

Of course he's not fit for another human being. He should have known that he'd only ever find himself in the company of monsters.

"Your fingers are broken," the Superman says. The resonance in his voice curls down Bruce's spine and diffuses through him.

"Don't touch me," he says, uselessly. The Superman has already slid his hand around Bruce's forearm and is turning it, slowly but firmly, the way he might handle a skittish animal. Bruce's skin prickles at the contact and he breaks a feverish sweat. One wrong move and he could crush Bruce's bones into powder, or rip his arm from its socket, but he is acutely aware that the physiological response he's experiencing is not fear.

"I had suspected that this might, uh. That we're..." the Superman says with something like resignation, and sighs out a breath. His fingers shift, pressing gently into the paper-thin skin at Bruce's wrist; his blood courses through his veins a fraction of a millimeter beneath the Superman's fingertips. The alien looks up at him, his brow furrowed. "...are you okay?"

He's checking his vitals, Bruce realizes faintly. His heart batters itself against his ribcage in nameless desperation. He feels like he's been cornered, his back pressed up against a wall.

"What do you care," he grinds out. He shakes his wrist free. The Superman lets him, even though he only need tighten his grip and he could effectively cuff Bruce with his bare hands. It would be simple for him. Simple to bend the world to his will, and Bruce with it.

"I came to stop you, but that doesn't mean I want to see you injured," the Superman says. "I know what you're capable of, but you're still as breakable as anyone."

"Anyone but you." Bruce's hand throbs agonizingly. He clenches his jaw at the reminder that he is less than perfect, less than the sum of what he believes, and his temper snaps like a delicate bone. "Tell me. Do you bleed?"

The Superman looks taken aback, of all things. Bruce reaches out with his good hand—his gloved hand—and takes a grip on his neck. He feels the the Superman's throat muscles ride as he swallows, feels his blood pound for all the world like Bruce's does. His pupils dilate. He is a remarkable facsimile of a man.

"Bat," the alien says.

His mouth works, but he has nothing else to say for himself. Maybe he intended to deliver an ultimatum, but instead he frees himself from Bruce's hand without effort, and takes a step back off the car to hover above the asphalt. An upward draft of air licks at his cape.

"Next time," he says, and he swallows again, hard, and turns away. Ah, Bruce thinks. Here it comes. "Next time they shine your light in the sky, don't go to it."

He spares Bruce a backward glance, then leaps into the air, through the cloud cover. The sonic boom of him breaking the sound barrier reverberates through Bruce's body.

Bruce is soaked with sweat, his hair dripping with it when he peels off the cowl. He's instantly chilled by Cave's cold air, but that just means he starts shivering, too. He hastily binds his fingers, chokes down some painkillers dry, strips out of the rest of the Suit and then staggers upstairs and into his bed.

There, he jerks off so frantically he barely knows what he's doing. He comes quickly and savagely and it all but knocks him insensate for a moment; all he can do is lie there panting as he slowly comes back online.

Okay, he thinks, climbing up from the bed. Let's be logical about this. He ignores his bedraggled reflection swimming in the shadows of the lakehouse windows and stumbles into the shower.

If he should posit that soulmates—and he can barely think the word without a frisson of distaste—if soulmates as a phenomenon exist, then, by definition, each individual should only have one person they can connect with in such a fashion. A soulmate. Singular. The fact that Bruce has experienced something bordering on inexplicable with two separate people suggests one of several possibilities.

Either: polyamory is a rare, rogue variable (as if things weren't complicated enough).

Or: Kent is his… allocated partner, and Bruce's response to the Superman is either a psychosexual short-circuit caused by his prolonged focus on him (uncomfortable on a number of levels), or some kind of unanticipated interplay with the alien's biology (even more uncomfortable on even more levels).

Or: the Superman is the one he's been burdened with, and he just happens to be attracted to Kent in the usual fashion (sigh).

Or—and this is his preferred conclusion—stress and exhaustion are taking their toll, he can't trust that his response to either Kent or the Superman is genuine, and the whole concept remains a contrivance on Hallmark's part (but just because he wants it to be true, doesn't make it so).

He twists the shower on and spares an idle thought for Kent, who is looking more and more like an attractive proposition. He suddenly, vividly, recalls intimidating him up against a Gotham alley wall.

Bruce groans, rests his forehead against the cool tile and, since he may as well, imagines doing it again.

Technically he got his Gotham Goliaths piece in on time, but Clark would be the first to admit that the quality was lacking. Perry agreed unreservedly, which is why he's been saddled with researching a piece on corporate hospitality that will invariably be consigned to two column inches between ads, if not exclusively to the online edition, before he's allowed to further pursue his article on Wayne.

It mostly involves hanging about in ornate marble foyers for hours at a time waiting for self-important hotel managers, which isn't the most arduous of journalistic duties he's undertaken but definitely one of the most boring—and occasionally disorienting. The bars all blend together after a while. Is this the Atwater or the Centennial? He checks the logo on the napkin that came with his soda. The Grand. Right.

A handbag lands on the counter next to his drink.

"Excuse me," says its owner. Clark looks up, and finds a surreally beautiful woman in a crimson biker jacket hopping up onto the stool next to him. "May I speak with you for a moment?"

"Uh, hi," Clark says. He's immediately curious, and a friendly smile costs nothing. "Sure."

"You know Bruce Wayne."

Clark's smile falters before he can help it. "Who doesn't?"

"I mean, you are acquainted with him. I saw you talking with him."

"He's not short of people eager to talk to him," Clark says. She doesn't seem pushy enough to be on the gossip beat, but if she is then Clark might not be able to stop laughing. He wonders whether she spotted them at the benefit or at the restaurant—he would prefer to know the level of plausible deniability he has to work with here—but he suspects she's not really listening. She's opened her bag and is frowning as she fishes around in it.

"Should have kept it in my pocket," she says apologetically, then her face lights up. "Ah, here it is."

She takes out a chunky black device that looks like an off-brand mp3 player from 2005, and slides it across the bar counter to him. Clark immediately knows what it must be, but he picks it up and examines it anyway.

"This belongs to him," the woman says. "There's something I want from it, but I can't decrypt the data. I think he can, though, or he would not have bothered stealing it."

"Wait," Clark says. "Where did you get this?"

"From the Lexcorp servers," she says, as though Clark has asked a question with a thunderously obvious answer—which, technically, he has. "At the Friends of the Metropolis Library fundraiser. Remember?"

So, the benefit. That leaves him more wriggle room than a candlelit dinner date, though he cares less about that now it's more clear that she's not going to plaster his picture all over the front page of the Gotham Tattle—and because he's just had one particularly nagging suspicion confirmed.

"Okay," Clark says, and rubs his forehead. It's not the most shocking revelation, but that doesn't mean he has to be happy about it. "I can't be in possession of this. I can't return it to him." He slides the data-stealing doodad back to her.

"Why not?" she says, pushing it back again until it bumps his fingers. "It is his."

"I know, he's been looking for it," he says. "Who are you?"

"My name is Diana."

"Diana. He already thinks I took it."

"Is it stealing, to steal from another thief?"

"As interesting as this philosophical approach to handling stolen goods is, I don't think that'll wash when I try to give it back to him," Clark says. "Why don't you do it yourself?"

"Because I was the one who took it," she says simply. "I doubt he will hold any goodwill for me, and I still need something from him. I don't think it will be enough leverage."

"He's not exactly brimming with warmth for me, either."

"You seemed close enough when I passed you on the stairs."

Clark shakes his head. He's aware of how they may have looked, leaning in towards each other as though sharing a secret. It would have implied friendship, if not trust, despite the reality of it.

Diana sighs tolerantly, then glances around. "I didn't want it to come to this, but," she says, and encircles his wrist with her hand. She holds his gaze with determination, her dark eyes boring into his. "It looks like I'll have to convince you."

"Oh. Uh. Listen, you're very lovely, but I'm not—"

He tries to lift her hand away, but he can't break her hold. Her strength rivals his own, at least with the amount of force he's willing to use on a civilian in a semi-busy hotel bar on a weekday lunchtime.

Clark makes himself go very still.

"I know who you are," Diana murmurs. "Please, I'm asking you as an ally. I... dearly want what is on this device."

"Who are you?" Clark asks her again, a damn sight less steadily than last time.

"I am Diana of Themyscira."

"Themyscira," Clark says. He doesn't know where that is, but he knows where it isn't. "Not Krypton."

"Not Krypton," Diana says with such heartfelt sympathy Clark feels tears prick at the corners of his eyes, then she lean in close, a warm smile growing across her face. "Would you like to talk some more? I'll buy you a soda."

Bruce doesn't so much regain consciousness as he begins registering pain. He rolls out of bed and into the kitchen, where Alfred sits him on a stool, splints his fingers properly and fills him with enough espresso and aspirin that he can function independently. Dawn is creeping slowly at the edges of the sky and everything is muted and still; it's Alfred's preferred environment for both first aid and reproving glances.

"I saw the car," Alfred says, manipulating Bruce's fingers into place and ignoring him as he hisses through his teeth. "I suppose it's pointless to ask."

Bruce definitely has a headache burgeoning, right in the back of his skull. His shoulders feel stiff and his bones keenly remember the impact of his car against the Superman's hip. "It's not," he says. "Last night. I met him."

Alfred pauses in his ministrations. "Ah, I see," he says, then resumes smoothing down the medical tape. "There. No punching for at least a week."

"No problem. I can adapt some kickboxing techniques. Maybe brush up on pressure points."

"Master Bruce," Alfred says sharply.

"Three days."

"A week."

"Five."

"A week. You have a board meeting in an hour, and you're about due an appearance down in R&D while you're there. So tell me, what was Bruce Wayne doing when this unfortunate incident befell him?"

"Not sure." Bruce heaves to his feet and tops up his coffee on his way back into the bedroom. Pain still loiters at the edge of his awareness. "What seems like a good mid-life crisis?"

"Vigilantism," Alfred suggests.

Bruce has had plenty of practice dressing himself with one limb or another out of commission, so it's only the tie that gives him any kind of trouble. He struggles to make the sloppy half-windsor presentable, Alfred watching with measured indulgence until Bruce concedes defeat with a sigh and a furrow of his brow.

"So," Alfred murmurs, tugging the knot into shape. "Is he everything you'd feared?"

Bruce feels the Superman's hand at his wrist, and an ache in his chest like internal bruising.

"And more," he says.

Bruce receives a message from his personal assistant halfway through the meeting, heralded by a loud cheerful trill because Bruce Wayne doesn't mute his phone for anybody. The senior manager reading out his own overstuffed powerpoint slides pauses just long enough for Bruce to make an insincere apology and step out of the room.

Kent wants to meet with him again. He should have Grace make the arrangements this time, like he should have last time, but she's forwarded his number anyway—

?, he sends to Kent's phone.

Meet tonight, Kent sends back an overeager thirty seconds later. Dooley's bar next to the Planet 7pm?

Whatever it is, it'll have to wait. Bruce already has plans this evening.

Too short notice. Can do Sat.

Fine by me. Same time & place

Bruce fires back an affirmative, and then realizes he didn't even ask what Kent wanted to see him about.

"Christ," he mutters. He tucks his phone into his pocket, straightens out his jacket and his face, then spends the rest of the meeting with half an eye on the proceedings and half on an ultimately unsent message: what is it you want from me?

"You have something that belongs to me."

Diana Prince's reflection in the glass display case suggests she might have something to say for herself. Bruce takes her arm, intending to guide her away to somewhere more private so they can talk, but she rolls her shoulder and slips from his grip like smoke.

It's a graceful maneuver, and well-practiced. Whoever she is, she's martially trained. Not entirely expected. Bruce smiles at her as she turns to look at him, her eyebrows raised in polite inquiry.

"Mr. Wayne?" she says.

This time, Bruce offers her his arm. She glances from his face to his fingers—no longer splinted, having experienced a moment of wrap rage over his sandwich at lunch, but definitely bruised—then settles her arm in his.

"Like I was saying." They glide between the museum's patrons. The golden uplighting catches the glitter of diamonds and sequins; the fizz of champagne in crystal flutes. "You have something that belongs to me, and I'd like it back."

"You know as well as I that it doesn't belong to you," Diana says easily. "Either way, I don't have it."

Bruce brings them to a halt next to a different display—the sword of Alexander. Allegedly. "Let's not play games," he says.

"Who's playing?" She adjusts his bow-tie, then leans in to whisper in his ear; she barely has to go to her toes to do it. She's wearing an exotic scent that makes Bruce think of hot, distant beaches. "I gave it to your friend."

Dooley's gets heaving on a Saturday night, but it's still early enough that Clark doesn't have to start defending the booth he's staked out. He's read all of the Daily Planet front pages framed on the walls of the bar, smallprint and all, and his first drink is almost finished, his basket of fries is cooling off, and the large clock hung among the newsprint ticks toward a quarter past seven.

He starts on the second beer he'd gotten for Wayne—the one that only makes him look like a softcore alcoholic the longer he sits here alone—and decides to give Lois a call. If Wayne doesn't make an appearance before she shoos him off, then he'll have to chase Clark on his own time if he wants his espionage doohickey back.

"You have to stop calling me in the middle of your dates," Lois says. "It's probably off-putting, you know?"

"It's not a date," Clark says automatically. "He's not even here yet."

Lois sighs. "Look. Guys who are genuinely into you are perfectly capable of showing up on time and actually participating. You're allowed to have standards, Clark."

"It's not a date," Clark says again, "I just needed to hand something off to him."

"Uh-huh. You really think he's going to turn up at Dooley's? He's used to places that are terrified of losing a Michelin star if he so much as wrinkles his nose at the table setting. Does Dooley's even know what a Michelin star is?"

"I sincerely hope not," Clark says around a forkful of fries. "I'm bargaining on him enjoying this as much as I enjoyed the Riverside."

And since Clark's stuffed his mouth full, this is, of course, precisely when Wayne finally arrives. He looks so ordinary that Clark almost doesn't recognize him as he fits himself into the other side of the booth. He's in blue jeans and a long woolen winter coat, a creased button-down under it. His hair has been blown around by the inclement weather.

Despite the Sears catalogue casual, his smile is more warning than greeting.

"Oh, hey, I gotta go," Clark mumbles into his phone.

"What am I going to do with you, Smallville? Okay, talk soon, godspeed."

"Got started without me?" Wayne says, eyeing his small collection of beer bottles.

"You were running late." Clark tucks his phone away. Wayne's gadget weighs heavily alongside it in his pocket, but maybe they should make it through the opening pleasantries first. "Hope you don't mind."

"Not at all." He fails to offer either apology or explanation for his tardiness, and in fact appears to be looking around for waitstaff.

"I'll—get you a drink," Clark says and swiftly gets to his feet. If Wayne flags down one of the harried food servers and asks for the wine list he's not sure he'd survive the embarrassment. "Beer?"

"Something stiffer," Wayne says, and Clark learns that, with the faintest shift in inflection, he can make anything sound sordid. Clark mostly manages to recover his composure once he gets to the bar, loses it again when he realizes he's meant to intuit exactly what Wayne wants, and has reached a deliriously zen kind of place by the time he returns to their booth with a Scotch on the rocks.

Wayne accepts the drink magnanimously with one gloved hand. They're black leather, probably butter-soft, and it makes Clark think about the Bat, his fists in his coat and his fingers at his neck. Despite what both fate and his libido have to say on the matter, Clark decides that he's not interested—not outside of his potential as a headline, and his nature as a criminal that must be stopped.

Not when he already has Wayne to contend with. He's pretty screwed as it is.

"Not sticking around?" Clark asks, indicating the coat and gloves with a nod.

"That depends on why I'm here." Wayne swirls his drink so the ice clinks. Faint consternation passes across his face. "I assume this wasn't a social invitation."

But he thought it could have been and had turned up anyway. It's almost enough that Clark might let him off easy over his spy widget. Almost. He retrieves it from his pocket and places it in the center of the table.

Wayne looks at it, then back at him. He makes no move to take it.

"I didn't steal it," Clark tells him.

"I know. It was Diana Prince. Pretty girl, European, incredible shoulders. Am I right?"

"I couldn't place her accent," Clark says carefully. "But, yeah. If you knew that, I'd have appreciated it if you'd spared me this whole ordeal."

"I didn't know at the time. I needed to recover the leech quickly and I thought you had it."

Clark sighs. "I guess I figured as much."

Wayne finally picks up the device. He turns it over in his hands and has the bare-faced audacity to feign curiosity over it. "It's definitely not WayneTech technology, I can tell you that for certain. I don't think it's Queen's style, either—"

"Look, don't piss on my boots and tell me it's raining, Mr. Wayne. I know that it's yours."

Wayne glances up at him, sharply amused. "That's an earthy turn of phrase. I like it."

"Could you just—" Clark holds up both hands in defeat. "Just be straight with me for five minutes. Please."

"Straight with you," Wayne repeats, uninflected.

"Diana is searching for a photographic plate from the First World War. She thinks there's something on your leech that will help her find it. That doesn't sound like it has anything to do with corporate secrets to me."

What it sounds like is that Wayne may be the kind of person who gets involved in the repatriation of art and artifacts, albeit in a surreptitious, anonymous and questionably legal fashion and possibly just for kicks, but Clark will wait for him to stop being obtuse at every turn before he gives him any credit for that.

"It doesn't, does it?" Wayne says agreeably. "I suppose there could be a document or two of historical importance on there."

He could be hedging rather than lying through his teeth this time. His heartbeat is steady, at least. Languorous, almost. Clark could easily believe that he has no idea what's on the device at all.

"I promised Diana I'd find it for her," he says.

"Are you in the habit of making promises to people you barely know? Especially ones that require the cooperation of another person you also barely know?"

"Not as a rule," Clark says. "But I think you'll help me out. You owe me for this."

Whether 'this' is the return of the leech or the whole performance up to this point, Clark will let him decide.

"Is that right." The corners of Wayne's eyes crinkle when he smiles—and finally it's a genuine smile, awkward on his face as though he's not used to it happening.

Which makes it easier for Clark to rest his forearm on the table and lean in, ever so slightly, and lock eyes with him. "Bruce," he says. Low, soft and not quite the right tone to be beseeching. "Please."

Bruce's drink pauses halfway to his lips, still with that same smile. "How about we get out of here," he says, and tips his head back to down the rest, throat working in a long swallow. "This place is wall-to-wall reporters."

The night air is dense with snow. Clark pulls his coat closed as they step out onto the street, his breath coalescing in a crisp white cloud as he fakes a cold shiver. The door swings shut behind them, muting the music and the clamor of voices and glassware; the city's nighttime traffic noises creep between them instead, the crunch of car tires on frozen-over slush.

"Thank you for the evening," Bruce says, with what should be sarcasm, but somehow isn't. He flashes Clark a grin. The harsh neon of the bar's sign is a far cry from the Riverside's ambient lighting, but nobody told Bruce's cheekbones that.

"All half-hour of it." Clark falls into step as Bruce heads toward the nearest cab stand. "You're welcome. You'll be in touch?"

Bruce says nothing for a few paces, then catches Clark's arm and brings them to an abrupt stop. Clark turns, ready to ask what his problem is this time, but the expression on Bruce's face isn't one Clark's seen before. He's utterly solemn for a change; no wry arch of his brows or tilt of his mouth. It makes him startlingly unreadable.

"If I asked you to come home with me," he says, "would you?"

Clark takes in the tense span of Bruce's shoulders under his winter coat, the dusting of snowflakes in his hair. His eyes, cast dark under the street lighting. How still he's standing. Clark has spared a thought or two (or three) on how this might go. Bruce was always more lurid about it in his imaginings, but only to make it a convincing fantasy. Clark's stomach turns a slow flip.

"That depends," he says. "Is this a hypothetical proposition?"

Bruce runs his hand up to Clark's shoulder, brushing away imaginary lint or actual snow, then plucks at his coat's lapel. "No," he says. "I'm asking you."

Clark lets himself lean in a little, the way he wants to; the way he's being encouraged to. "Why? You haven't seemed all that enamored of me until now."

Bruce looks off down the street, further inscrutable for a moment. "I don't like to mix business with pleasure," he says.

"That's patently untrue."

"Usually, yes." His hand migrates from Clark's collar to touch him, light and brief, along the line of his jaw. He's still wearing the gloves. The leather is as soft as Clark expected; the sensation he has come to anticipate when they touch is muted, but not deadened entirely.

Clark shivers with it, and Bruce keeps looking at him with that odd, quiet intensity. His focus is unaccountably terrifying when it's directed completely at one thing.

"You'll give me Diana's photograph, even if I say no?" It's blunt, perhaps, but Clark wants to make sure there isn't a certain kind of misunderstanding going on here.

"Of course," Bruce says, without hesitation and with only minor indignation. "I'm not trying to leverage my way into this, Clark."

"And do you think this would be appropriate," Clark presses. "Considering our professional relationship?"

"Professional relationship," says the Bruce Wayne that Clark is more familiar with, genial and caustic both. "A little late in the day to be playing the journalistic integrity card, don't you think, Mr. Kent?" The leech reappears; he tosses it from one hand to the other and then pockets it again. "Come home with me. Let me violate your ethics."

There it is. Clark feels heat rise in his face. "Wow," he says, and that's about when he gives up on his cool front. He can't help grinning. "You don't have to make it sound so sleazy."

"I though that was the appeal."

"No. It really isn't."

Bruce raises his eyebrows. It's an obvious question: so what is the appeal?

That's easy. Everybody knows that Bruce Wayne has a raw kind of magnetism, most of all Bruce himself, who trades on it often. But for Clark, maybe it's the playboy rep tempered by the cynicism that comes with age and experience, or the unexpected flashes of sharp humor from someone who's ostensibly as shallow as a puddle.

Or maybe Clark's certainty that there's more to him, shuttered away behind that careless smile, is a misguided one. But if he looks and finds nothing further of note, and the worst outcome is that he ends up another notch on Bruce Wayne's bedpost, then—well. There are worse ways to hit a dead end.

Clark shrugs and smiles helplessly at him. Then, on a nameless impulse, he mirrors Bruce's earlier gesture, lightly cupping Bruce's cheek. His stubble rasps against Clark's bare palm.

The effect is immediate. The touch sings through him, and Clark hears the answering riot of Bruce's heart, despite all external indications that he's calm. When Clark shifts his vision, the air lights up around them in a vibrant, shimmering aurora.

Bruce takes a short, captivated breath, as though he can see it too—then he takes Clark's hand away and holds it between his gloved ones, and softly asks, "Yes or no, Clark."

Clark touches him with almost painful tenderness, and Bruce feels the impact of it deep in his bones. Lust boils through him and he can't help but think of both the Superman's unearthly splendor and the honest sweetness of Clark's smile. He is desperately, desperately tired of this—tired of feeling powerless in the face of a huge, indifferent force, like he's going to be pulled under at any moment and all he can do is hope his instincts kick in at the right time to keep him afloat.

What Bruce wants to do—needs to do—is to unequivocally reject the Superman, debride the concept of him from his psyche as anything but the extinction-level event that he is, and if this is something of an unorthodox way of going about it, well, no worthy problem was ever solved within the plane of its original conception.

So he lets Clark touch him, and then he brings Clark home because he chooses to do so. He's going to undress him because he wants to, and they're going to sleep together for reasons he hasn't the time nor inclination to articulate. Not when he's holding Clark against the mirror-black glass of the lakehouse wall and tugging his shirt open, and Clark is watching him so intently, eyes bright behind those glasses of his.

Bruce kisses him with deliberate slowness, deliberate care. Clark's mouth opens beneath his and he sighs, the smallest of surrenders. It feels absolutely right. A moment of clarity.

The subtle turmoil he's felt every time Clark has touched him, or he has touched Clark—it rolls over him like a storm down a mountainside, but when it finally breaks, it's warm summer rain. He can barely remember why he found it so objectionable now that it's resolved itself into this. So much of Clark's skin is under his hands. He hasn't been this hard in twenty years.

He takes Clark's wrist, guides his hand and encourages him to explore. Clark laughs, short and breathy against Bruce's mouth, and says, "I guess if you're compensating for something, it's not this." He sounds how Bruce feels: overwhelmed in a way that no amount of flippancy can disguise.

Snow hits the windows in a muted flurry and clings to the glass, and Bruce wants to see how Clark looks against the white cotton of his sheets.

"Come with me," he says. He means to lead Clark into the bedroom but they only make it to the couch. Clark stays where Bruce pushes him, legs sprawled apart and curiosity on his face as Bruce kneels, as though he'd anticipated being the one to get to the floor. Bruce Wayne has a reputation, sure, but most of it is conjecture, assumptions. It only ever comes down to how he feels in the moment.

And what he feels like doing at the moment is lavishing on Clark the most indulgent blowjob he's ever been this side of. He runs his hands up Clark's thighs and over the urgent demand of his erection and watches his fingers curl into the couch upholstery.

"You can touch," Bruce tells him as he unzips his slacks. "I'm going to."

But Clark doesn't right away—not until his cock is pressing against Bruce's lips, silky and hot, jumping with the force of his heartbeat. Not until a droplet of precome slides down the underside and his breath begins to gutter. Then he says, "Bruce, please," in tones that suggest his flirtatious turn at the bar wasn't all that much of an act, and frames Bruce's face in his hands.

(It takes five hundred and twenty pounds of force to crush—

Bruce closes his eyes. He does not think of the Superman and his unfathomable strength and whether he might feel desire like this, and he does not think about how that desire might manifest and how Bruce could humanly weather it. He doesn't think about what it is they might deserve from one another.

He thinks about Clark—here and now. He makes space enough for him, and only him. This might be the first time he's ever done this without one eye on the exit.)

Clark rolls his head back against the couch and makes soft astonished noises when Bruce takes him in his mouth; his thighs tense under Bruce's hands and his pulse beats like a hummingbird's wing against his tongue. When Bruce finally lets him come, it's with his hands in Bruce's hair, a cut-off gasp, and followed by an indolent, breathless laugh.

He pulls Bruce up off the floor into an awkward half-lean so he can kiss him and rock his palm over the front of his pants—and he brings Bruce off just like that between his mouth and his hand, Bruce's arms shaking where they're braced against the back of the couch either side of Clark's head.

"Jesus," he rasps, his voice thick in his throat. Clark smiles at him, openly pleased with himself, then heaves Bruce bodily onto the couch, his hand in the crook of Bruce's knee.

"That was nice," he says, trying to fit himself alongside despite the couch being far too small for the both of them.

Bruce grunts and shifts over for him as best he can. Clark's elbow digs into his ribs. "And with that ringing endorsement of my sexual prowess..."

Clark laughs again. For a moment he gazes at Bruce like he hung the moon in the sky, and Bruce is damned if he knows what to do with that.

"So," Clark says, making an attempt to fasten his shirt in the limited space his elbows have. Some of the delight washes out of him. "What usually happens next? Do you call me a cab? Sorry, I'm not really au fait with, um. Do I call myself a cab?"

This is where Bruce should have been prepared to dispense one of his small, pointless cruelties. He should direct him to the bathroom, maybe offer him a beverage and then, yes, call him a cab.

The leech is burning a hole in his pocket.

He catches Clark's hand, interrupting his button-fastening, and leans over to kiss him instead.

Bruce does call him that cab, eventually. Even once he's departed, the heat of him lingers on Bruce's palms, his lips, in the hollow of his chest.

In the Cave he catches a few minutes sleep as the leech decrypts, and finds that the Superman still rules his dreamscape as ruthlessly as he does his waking thoughts. Divorced of conscious control, the Superman restrains him, defangs him, reaches inside of him and forces his way into his heart.

Bruce jerks awake to phantom chest pains and the insistent flash and beep of his decryption program. Luthor's files array themselves across his desktop. Some even auto-open. Subtle, he is not.

The White Portuguese is a ship, as it happens. It's carrying a payload of a xenomineral—or Kryptonite, as the files dub the glowing green rock. It's due to dock at the Port of Gotham in the early hours of tomorrow morning. And that's exactly what Luthor wants him to know.

The Bat loads his rifle and sights a truck that trundles along the wharf. The White Portuguese came in to dock several hours ago and there's been a lot of surreptitious hustling of stevedores and not much else since then, but this kind of thing always takes time even when it's a few shades short of legal.

He shifts on his perch, alleviating a leg cramp that's threatening to set in. The wind whisks his cape around him and tries to pry its way beneath the thermal layers of his uniform. It's too cold to snow, as Alfred would say, so visibility is good.

Finally the cargo starts moving, and he confirms the consignment he's after is definitely going on the truck, so the Bat takes a breath, exhales, and squeezes the trigger. His aim is always perfect, because it has to be. The tracker snaps to the truck's tailgate.

He could hunt it down tonight, put the fear into Luthor's men and take the Kryptonite for himself.

But he won't. His reason for this is twofold: firstly, he doesn't want to attract the Superman's attention tonight. The last thing he wants is another encounter, and/or the Kryptonite falling into his hands. Secondly, the schemata Luthor had thoughtfully included along with the ship's itinerary was very clear on how it could be weaponized.

Luthor wants the Bat to try to kill the Superman. That much is obvious. The why is probably more complex, but the Bat is hardly in a position to question his motivations. What he wants to know is this: what is Luthor's next move if he doesn't bring him the alien's head?

"You didn't have to come see me," Bruce says. "If you give me Ms. Prince's contact details, I can pass the information directly to her once my people make the necessary progress on the leech."

"No," Clark says lightly from the other side of Bruce's desk. He sits back in his chair; his eyes flick from Bruce's hands, flat against the polished mahogany, to the glint of his tie pin, to his face. "I want to be certain that you'll keep your word."

Bruce frowns at him. Clark maintains his brisk demeanor for about five seconds before his irrepressible smile breaks through.

"I see."

"Uh huh."

"We're not going to fool around in my office." Bruce says this even as he gets to his feet and shrugs off his jacket.

"Of course not." Clark tips his head back as Bruce approaches him, casually baring the curve of his throat. "That would be very unprofessional."

"In the middle of the work day," Bruce says, "on my desk?"

"Very unprofessional," Clark repeats. "In the middle of the day, in your... soundproofed?" Bruce nods. "Soundproofed office. But it's not the most scandalous thing you've ever done, I bet—"

The article on the Wayne Foundation's project appears in the Planet early that week, but the byline features a name that Bruce doesn't recognize.

I admire your integrity, he sends.

I thought one of us should have some, Clark fires back, complete with a series of emoticons that has Bruce suffering through the rest of the day.

The week has been a pressure cooker. The news channels are tuned to a fever pitch, social media is even more of an exercise in masochism than usual, and despite a significant amount of negative speculation around the subject, the odds are short on whether the Superman will show to the Senate hearing.

Bruce keeps one eye on the coverage as he works, if he can call it that once he sees Wallace Keefe in the midst of the furore. He had stared the edifice of the Superman in the eye and sprayed false god across his chest, and implicated Bruce Wayne in the process, yet he seems to hate Bruce just as much. More than that, he seems to hold him equally responsible for the condition of his life—and maybe he's right. Bruce spreads the returned checks out on his desk. OPEN YOUR EYES. NO TRUCE.

(On the television, the Superman arrives, his back turned on the crowd of protesters. He doesn't spare them a glance.)

It's not just the contempt in the messages scratched into the checks, or the money thrown back in Bruce's face. It's the neglected duty Bruce sees in it—he has failed this man twice over, and he's asking him why, in violent rhetoric, in poison scrawled across the headline covering the fall of Wayne Tower, because it's the only language he has left.

And Bruce doesn't have an answer for him, not even when the fire rolls out of the Senate building and he's present in that split-second of silence before the screams. It's a moment that will live in his blood and his bones, as intimate as any of his other failures.

His resolve is set. This cannot continue, whether terrorist or subjugator or Luthor's insane brinksmanship is responsible—this, this is what the Superman drags to the surface. This is what he inspires. This is what he leaves behind: ruined families that all the money in the world can't repair; good men driven to extremes. If he doesn't destroy the world, then mankind will do it in his name.

Time is running out on him.

That night he leaves a calling-card in the shattered remains of Luthor's laboratory. Deep in the cave, in a corner even the bats don't dare gather, the xenomineral casts its sickly light.

There are probably a dozen more healthy ways to deal with today, but Clark finds himself on Bruce's doorstep with something like inevitability. Alfred lets him in, takes one look at him and tries to fill him full of tea and pastries.

"You're worse than my mom," Clark tells him, and it's only the guiltily missed calls on his phone that stop him cracking even a half-hearted smile. He'd sent a message to her, and to Lois as well—I'm fine, please don't worry, I just can't talk about it right now, I love you.

The news broke gradually over the course of the evening: the bomb had been in Keefe's chair. Keefe had worked for Wayne Enterprises. And maybe Clark came here because he doesn't expect Bruce will want to talk about it either—and if he does, well. Clark knows how to make him stop. It might do him good, even. Blot out the screaming in his head, even if it's just for a short while.

"I'll let Master Bruce know you're here." Alfred pats his shoulder and vanishes somewhere. Despite being a largely transparent glass box, the lakehouse evidently has some hidden nooks. Clark suspects it may even have a basement, if the occasional strange subterranean acoustics are any indication, but he was raised better than to pry.

Bruce himself appears a while later; it's been long enough that Clark has demolished the plateful of bakewell tarts and drained most of the teapot, too. He's obviously freshly showered: damp hair combed back, crisp lines of a fresh shirt, in all respects effortlessly attractive—

"You look rough as hell."

—except when he opens his mouth, of course, and it might explain why Clark feels immediately boneless, but it doesn't explain the sick roil of his stomach.

Bruce frowns and takes a seat alongside him.

"Been a long, awful day," Clark says. His mouth is sour and watering. He swallows it down, and realizes that this must be what it's like to feel ill. Probably the emotional stress and strain catching up with him all at once, psychosomatic symptoms, but he can't remember ever feeling so damn wretched so suddenly. He pours himself the last of the tea and hopes it'll settle him down.

He takes a sip, then, with careful deliberateness, places the teacup on the coffee table. He covers his mouth with the back of his hand. He's—he's sweating. Shaking. This is not normal. He does not feel good, at all.

"Clark?" Bruce says. He presses his hand to Clark's forehead and the sensation is like nothing he's felt before. He jerks away with a sharp intake of breath, and for a horrible moment is afraid he's going to lose his lunch all over the polished stone floor tiles.

"Sorry, I'm just feeling a bit—" he says. "May I use—?"

"Of course," Bruce says, concern in the tense lines of his face. "Christ, Clark, you don't need to ask."

Clark staggers into the bathroom. He sits doubled over on the edge of the bathtub with his head in his hands, just breathing until he feels marginally better and he can sit back up and run the cold faucet.

Bruce appears in the doorway as Clark is splashing his face. "You alright?" he says with vague reluctance, arms folded and shoulder against the doorframe.

"I watched it happen." It's out of his mouth before he knows what he's saying, even if it's the last thing he wants to talk about. He braces his arms on the basin, addressing the pale specter of his reflection in the mirror. "Right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do."

"We all saw it. Hell of a thing for a live broadcast," Bruce says grimly. "There was nothing any of us could have done. Nobody but him. But he didn't do a damn thing."

"He—" Clark takes as deep a breath as he can manage. He got as many people out as he could, but he should have been able to do more. He should have seen it coming and he should have—he should have seen it. But he didn't, because he wasn't looking. "I don't want to hear that right now, Bruce."

"Of course you don't."

Clark hears what he left unspoken: no more puff piece editorials for a while. If only that were the extent of Clark's worries. Finally, a little anger bubbling up to displace the sickness. It's almost welcome.

"He worked for you. Wallace Keefe."

"He did," Bruce says, and if Clark meant to accuse him of anything, he hasn't noticed. "He lost his legs at Black Zero. As you can imagine, he wasn't the Superman's number one fan."

"No. That would be you," Clark says, before he can stop himself.

Bruce finds something to smile about there. It's so bitter it would have made his eyes water, if it'd reached them.

"Why did he—" Clark says, then thinks better of it. He doesn't think it would help to know, even if Bruce should have any of the answers. He runs more water and cups it to his face.

"I failed him," Bruce says abruptly.

Clark looks up from the basin.

"He was my responsibility. After Black Zero, so many people were left devastated. The victim's fund wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. He needed support, not money. I failed him, and he was—" Bruce pauses. He presses his mouth into a line, and then continues, slowly. "He was radicalized by his anger, and it drove him to this."

Clark can scarcely believe what he's hearing. He shakes his head. "You can't think this was your fault, Bruce."

"Of course it's not my fault," Bruce says. And there's the scorn, something of a relief after his monotone confessional. "There's only one person I hold responsible for this."

"Sorry," Clark says. He doesn't need enhanced senses to hear those air quotes, and he has no energy for the way this conversation is about to turn. "I'm sorry. Can we talk about something else?"

"Like how I'm about to drive you home and put you to bed before you pass out in my tub?"

Clark feels his face pinch as he tries to imagine one of Bruce's sleek vehicles pulling up in front of his apartment. "Drive me home?"

"I don't think that's germane to the main issue here. Considering the usual standard of your journalism, I guess that means you are actually about to pass out." Bruce holds out his hand. "Look, we don't have to raise your neighbors' eyebrows. We can take the Prius."

Clark relinquishes his death-grip on the basin to be pulled to his feet. He's rocked with a fresh wave of nausea; holding Bruce's hand feels like grabbing a knifeblade. The edge of his vision swarms with black spots. "You drive a Prius?" he manages.

"I own a Prius. I drive a lot of things. Come on."

Clark's color doesn't improve for the duration of the trip, but thankfully doesn't worsen either. It takes an hour longer via the bridge, but Bruce suspects he wouldn't survive a choppy ferry crossing with his dignity intact. The day has taken a steep toll on him. Bruce supposes he's been suffocating under the strata of information, sifting through the unsanitized details as they come in. It's all part and parcel of being a newsman, but Bruce sometimes forgets that he hasn't been doing it for all that long.

That, or maybe it's flu. It is the season. Or even food poisoning, though he'd expect someone who inhales dive bar cheese fries as a matter of course to be more robust.

It should have been easy to tip Clark into his apartment, draw him a glass of water and then compartmentalize away his concern—sometimes, being Bruce Wayne means being whatever someone needs in the moment, but nobody's ever expected him to have any kind of bedside manner—but Bruce finds himself thinking on the discomfort in Clark's face, what little he could do to ease it and how it's bothering him more than he'd like. He restlessly drums the steering wheel as he drives home.

The lathe still hasn't completed its current pass on the Kryptonite sample by the time he's returned to the Cave. He slumps into his seat and takes the opportunity of the downtime to click idly around the rest of the decrypted files his program spat out. It's obvious which ones Luthor wanted him to scrape, but Bruce's firmware may be better, or less discerning, than Luthor had anticipated. There's a hoard of cruft come along with the import schedule and mineral schema.

Some of the data is more interesting than the rest. In a subfolder of a subfolder, Bruce stumbles across something that makes his heart stand still. Neatly organized files, each with a logo. He recognizes one of them in particular, but he forces himself to start systematically. Alphabetically.

In the first, he finds video of a trident-wielding man who travels through the ocean like a torpedo. Second, what appears at first glance to be some kind of snuff film, and makes Bruce recoil in his seat. Third, a kid so fast that Bruce has to watch the footage twice to understand what occurred.

Fourth—

Fifth, a wet-collodion photograph from the First World War of a warrior standing stoic amid companions. In the same folder, CCTV footage of that same woman in Paris a year ago. Diana Prince herself, timelessly beautiful.

The fourth folder remains; the one with the Superman's crest assigned to it. Bruce has to actively modulate his breathing as he clicks it open. His heart rate is a lost cause.

The contents load. There's video, pictures, documents; a birth certificate, a passport, a driver's license.

"No," Bruce says, a blow of a word.

He opens them all, and discovers that tyranny has a gentle touch, a kind voice, and flourishes under his attention like a garden after the rain.

Clark drags himself into the bullpen a minute before eight. The nausea has mostly abated—judging by his bedsheets, he sweated it out—but he still feels wretched and unfocused after a night of restless sleep.

"Don't tell me," Lois says, leaning over his partition. "You figured out how to make Kryptonian booze and now you have the worst hangover in history."

Clark groans. "Do I look that bad?"

She slips into his cubicle and he barely stops himself from flinching when she presses her hand to his forehead and then both hands to his cheeks. It's fine, though. Her skin is cool; it doesn't burn the way it had done with Bruce, like his palm had been laced with needles.

"Is this normal?" Lois asks. "I don't remember you ever being sick. Yesterday was—"

"I don't know, Lo," Clark says, before she can remind him what exactly yesterday was. "I was fine until the evening. Physically, I mean. I went to see Bruce, and it came on suddenly."

"Uh huh." She still isn't convinced that Bruce is only thirty to forty percent a jerk, despite otherwise believing that Clark is a decent judge of character. Not that Clark's in any place to be judging people. He's been giving Bruce a consistently hard time over his integrity, when he should have been looking more closely at himself. Bruce's casual disdain for Superman has escalated into full-blown animosity, and it's weighing on him more and more. Clark has all but tricked him into bed with someone he hates. There's no getting around that.

Especially after yesterday. A terrible suspicion has knotted itself in Clark's stomach: that Bruce's disposition towards Superman has somehow poisoned the connection between them. Yesterday his hatred was unequivocal, and when they had touched it wasn't just painful. It was like the whole world had gone dim.

He's not heard of anything like that happening before, not in a single film or book or advice column. Maybe Bruce had the measure of it all along; there's no such thing as soulmates. It's just him and his romantic streak and his freakish biology. The thought makes his throat tighten, gone thick in a way he remembers from his childhood, when he knew he was about to cry. Kryptonian weirdness or anything else, it doesn't matter. It's obvious what he has to do. The only thing that's right.

"Whoa, Clark," Lois says. "Honey. You want me to find you an aspirin or do you need a bucket?"

By early evening, Bruce is calm enough to send a message: Come here.

No doubt Clark will be feeling better than he had yesterday, as Bruce has taken more care to scrub the Kryptonite particulate off his skin. To think he had believed that Clark had been sick with grief.

Clark arrives forty-three minutes later, about the right time for him to have walked from his apartment to the ferry terminal and then caught a cab out of Gotham. If he'd flown, he would have been here in seconds. It makes Bruce irrationally angry to know this, even though he's hardly a stranger to necessary pretense.

Bruce lets him in. Clark looks wan and guarded, but he does smile, even though Bruce hasn't said a word to him, even to ask how he's doing. Maybe he thinks he's here because Bruce wants him to be. If the fact he arrived in a cab makes Bruce angry, this leaves him incandescent with rage. He turns away and strides into the kitchen; Clark's puzzlement is clear as he calls Bruce's name into the stillness of the lakehouse. Bruce's hands shake perceptibly as he pours himself two fingers of bourbon and Clark keeps asking him what's wrong.

He can probably hear his heart pounding.

He has always been able to hear his heart pounding.

Bruce turns and leans against the countertop and tries to purify his fury of the grief that is threatening to overwhelm it. He remembers Clark's taste like blood in his mouth. He had so quickly grown fond—

"Are you okay?" Clark asks him. The Superman asks him, the same way he'd asked the Bat, that night on the docks.

"No," Bruce tells him. "I am not."

"What's wrong? Has something happened? Where's—where's Alfred?"

Bruce stares at him. He seems so guileless. The unstyled hair, the unfashionable glasses, and those shirts—god, nobody is that gauche. It couldn't be more of a disguise. It's so obvious, and he's supposed to be a goddamn detective. He's been fucking his worst nightmare and he didn't even—

Didn't even suspect him. Not even when presented with the most straightforward of evidence. Bruce is very good at dissecting things, at breaking problems down into their smallest components in order to solve them, only sometimes—sometimes he forgets to put the pieces back together again.

His anger knows no bounds. His tumbler shatters. Bourbon slides over the tile like mercury. It's at his feet, so he's fairly sure he didn't throw it.

"Bruce," the Superman says. His hands are on Bruce's elbows, holding him steady, imprisoning him in an unbreakable grip. His touch seeps sweetly into Bruce's veins. He takes a deep breath, and another. The Superman cradles him like a lover might, every inch the picture of concern.

"Tell me," Bruce says, relaxing into his embrace, leaning in to speak softly in his ear. "Are you human? Or something less reliable, perhaps."

There's a split second of hesitation, a sudden tension in the Superman's frame before he leans back and unreels a confused expression, and that is all the confirmation that Bruce needs.

"Explain yourself," Bruce demands.

The Superman opens his mouth, closes it again, then purses it in that stubborn way that's become so familiar. "I'm sorry," he says. He reaches up and slowly takes off the glasses. His shoulders draw back, his chin comes up. A startling transformation, even if he's blinking as though he truly is shortsighted.

"You lied to me," Bruce says.

"Lied is a strong word. You didn't ask. It's not as though I tell everyone I meet," the Superman says, because if he is capable of deception, then he is equally capable of petulance. "Besides, you're a fine one to talk, Mr. I-didn't-steal-that-data."

He's so… Clark. Bruce scrubs his hands through his hair and groans in frustration. "Did you think I wouldn't find out?"

"No," the Superman says, subdued. Clark says. It's Clark. He's wearing Walmart khakis, for Christ's sake. "I just didn't know how to tell you. You were so vehemently disgusted by me, and I know not saying anything has just made things worse, but things would've been... so completely over between us. It's selfish but I didn't want it to end. Bruce, I—" He breaks off, and then carefully asks, as though the realization is forming alongside the words, "How did you find out?"

"The leech," Bruce says. "Luthor's data."

"Oh." Clark goes quiet. The silence stretches out. "And I handed it right to you," he says at last, no bitterness to it, just a tired resignation. He puts a hand to his forehead and his face crumples, and Bruce can't bear to look at him any longer. He turns to get another glass down from a cabinet, then pours himself a fresh drink.

"I'd offer, but I suspect it won't do much for you."

"No, it won't," Clark says. He sounds bereft. "Can I have one anyway?"

Bruce obliges him. He goes to sit on the couch while Clark stares into the tumbler as though he can read the future there. Perhaps he can; there isn't a verifiable way to know the extent of his abilities, the unobservable skills he could be harboring.

Time to get into it, straight to the bone. Bruce steels himself.

"Was it all a trick, Clark?"

Clark looks up at him. "What do you mean?"

Bruce crooks his finger. Clark moves over to him obediently and stands before him—and doesn't that precipitate a whole tangle of responses. If only that blade of Alexander had been real. He could use it right now.

When all's said and done, he still wants Clark to touch him, and anticipating that he may be annihilated in the process does nothing to tamp this desire. That this has gone on as it has, with Bruce unknowingly bargaining with his life each time, is enough to leave him breathless with horror. Not enough to stop him wanting, though.

He closes his eyes and imagines the actuality of the Superman's raw power bearing down on him, and it's like trying to fathom the true infinity of the cosmos. Phosphenes spark across the inside of his eyelids. He'd not been under the impression that Clark had been holding back—there had certainly been no indication in the tension of his body or the eagerness of his embrace, nor in any of the sounds he'd made.

Bruce can only conclude that the Superman's gentleness comes naturally. It would have been an unimaginable concept mere hours ago.

He takes Clark's drink from him and places it on the coffee table, and then catches Clark's hands in his own. He is a wall of heat, a spark behind Bruce's ribcage. A strange symbiosis. He forces himself away from thoughts of obligate mutualism.

"Oh. That." Clark gives a half-hearted shrug. "I want so badly to believe it means—you know. That thing you so desperately don't want it to be." He laughs, short and wistful. "But lucky you, I think it's just what my biology does when I'm attracted to somebody."

That may support Bruce's hypothesis that soulmates are bullshit, but it's something of a cold comfort. That Clark just inadvertently confessed that he has some interest in the Bat, too—a further, dangerous complication.

"It's pretty intrusive," Bruce says. "How can I know it's not something more insidious."

Bruce's subconscious has presented him with a world under the Superman's thrall more than once—only there, his subjects had feared him. Bruce finds it infinitely more terrifying that they might love him.

"Apart from the fact you're chewing me out right now?" Clark says. "I can't make you like me, if that's what you mean." He takes a seat on the coffee table and picks up his drink again. "I can't make you feel anything you don't want to."

Bruce weighs that statement against his own baggage, and can't keep back the bitter fragment of a laugh. "What if that's not true. What if I've been conditioned to trust you."

He has been careless around Clark, he knows that. Slips in the persona that would have been unconscionable around anyone else. It had become too easy—too pleasant—to respond in kind to his astute observations and quick humor. And Clark, for his part, had kept chipping away at the surface of him, discarding the parts that weren't true, revealing him like a sculptor reveals the features and contours of a statue cut-by-cut.

Clark looks at him askance. "That sounds pretty paranoid, if you don't mind me saying."

"I do mind."

"Look, you can dig around on me. I've been in other relationships. Sometimes I was the one who was—" he gestures vaguely, "and there was nothing I could do about it, and nothing I would have done, if I could."

"I see," Bruce says.

Clark clearly doesn't believe that he does. He takes a sip of the bourbon and makes a face, then sets it aside, and Bruce is overwhelmed with the dissonance—suddenly, completely certain that there's been a mistake, that the same being couldn't possibly have leveled skyscrapers with indifference and kissed him with reverence, flung satellites out of the sky and touched him without leaving a bruise.

"You brought a war to us," he says, out loud. Is he reminding himself, or starting a new fight? Sifting the ashes while he chases out the shape of his theory.

"You're talking about General Zod."

Clark's shoulders go back, his spine straightens. He's staring past Bruce, his focus on his own reflection in the lakehouse glass, or beyond that, beyond the sunset like a colored photograph and the evening that's drawing in to make hostages of them both.

"How can any of us know." Bruce never thought he'd voice this to anyone but Alfred, never mind directly to the Superman's face, and god, he doesn't want to know if the Superman will justify his eventual tyranny as a necessary condition for the success of the world, but it's his responsibility to ask. "You brought a war to us and we forgave you. Venerated you. Did you compel that? Is it in your blood? You could subjugate us all."

"Venerated," Clark repeats, wry, and looks as though he's considering the bourbon again. After a moment, he says, "If that was what I wanted, I had my chance. If I wanted Krypton to rise again, all I would've had to do was submit to Zod."

"But instead," Bruce says, "you killed him."

"Yes." Clark's eyes unfocus. Perhaps he's watching the snow fall outside the glass, or a rodent scurrying a mile away, or a planet rotating, light years into space. "I did. Earth is my home, Bruce. Krypton had its chance. I took a life to save billions more, but it wasn't a choice I ever wanted to make. It wasn't easy. It'll never be—" He sucks in a breath and catches Bruce unawares with a piercing look, with the unearthly vividness of his eyes. "Would you have done the same?"

Bruce thinks about the xenomineral, his spear and his grenades and his canisters of gas and can say in no uncertain terms that yes, he would do the same. He comes to a halt centered there, suddenly the antagonist in the very worst of his worst nightmares. He stops coddling his drink and downs it.

"How did Luthor know?" Clark asks him. "What else was on the leech?"

"Nothing else," Bruce says. "Just company secrets."

He has some doubt that Clark will believe that easily, so he slams his empty glass aside, takes Clark's face in both hands and enjoys an angry little victory in his startlement when he kisses him.

A short-lived one, though the derailment works. Clark steps away from him. "Bruce," he says, confusion giving way to determination, to firm but apologetic tones. "I came here to break things off. It wasn't right for me to pursue this. Not with me being who I am, and—well. I'm sorry I let it get this far. I don't know why I thought things could shake out any other way."

The Superman of Bruce's imaginings would never have been so earnest, so contrite. The Superman of Bruce's imaginings would have continued taking what he wanted with neither consideration nor remorse.

"How I feel about you hasn't changed," Clark is saying. Bruce can tell that he's trying hard to be level and reasonable. He still sounds crushed. "But I'll understand if you never—"

"Stop," Bruce says. The Superman can be brought low by means other than brute force, and Bruce can finally acknowledge how little he wants to see that happen. All his fury has abandoned him, and all that's left is that deficient spot, the one Clark fits right into, the relief of it as unfamiliar and as welcome as peace.

Some part of Clark expected there to be violence in this—that Bruce's anger hasn't evaporated so much as distilled itself, contained but still potent, so it's that much more of a shock that Bruce is so gentle as he guides them through to the bedroom. No—gentle is wrong. He's careful. Bruce knows that he doesn't have to be gentle. He knows now that he could pummel Clark until his fists ached. He could work out all of his hurt and fear and betrayal on him and it wouldn't leave a mark.

But Bruce takes his hand, unfastens his shirt cuff and kisses the inside of his wrist, his mouth lingering against Clark's pulse. The sensation sings through him. There's none of the miasma that had knocked him sideways last night. Only the spark of contact and the vivid warmth of him. He eases Clark back onto the bed. Clark goes willingly, and that at least sends Bruce's heartrate spiking out of bounds. His face is a thunderhead, as though he sees Clark's easy acquiescence as mockery. He refastens Clark's shirt cuff around one of the angular curlicues of his ugly modern metal headboard, and maybe that could be interpreted as mockery in return, but Clark knows enough of Bruce Wayne to see it for what it is: a bid for control.

"If you break this," Bruce says, his voice unsteady even if his hands don't shake, "tear it, lose the button, bend the frame, anything—"

"I understand," Clark tells him, and grips the cool metal with a resoluteness that's just shy of buckling it.

Bruce straddles him. He's as hard as Clark is, despite—or maybe because of—all the arguing. It presses them together with feverish intensity when he leans in and rests his head in the crook of Clark's shoulder. His breath is strictly regimented. "I'm going to fuck you now," he says. "Do you understand that, too?"

Clark understands. With his money and connections and family name, his physical presence and force of character, Bruce is accustomed to holding all of the power in his relationships. A bid for control, and then some.

"Yes," Clark breathes against his ear.

Bruce groans and drives hard against him until Clark feels like he's going to choke on his own gasps, then leans back to fumble Clark's pants open. Clark makes an abortive motion with his free hand in automatic, imperative need to touch himself, but Bruce catches it and cuffs it the same way as the other. He sits back and looks at him, eyes flicking from wrists to mouth to cock in an obscene signum crucis, then abruptly gets off the bed to engage in what Clark assumes is the perennially awkward lube-hunting interlude.

It's only a minute or two before he reappears, but it's broken the heavy air, a dispersal of the tension that felt as though it was ramping towards something catastrophic. The expression on Bruce's face might be sheepishness, if Clark believed that Bruce could experience so timid an emotion. Clark grins up at him and wiggles his fingers.

"Just—don't say a goddamn thing," Bruce mutters. After all that, he tosses the lube aside and settles himself across Clark's thighs again. Clark makes a zipping motion with one hand, despite it being nowhere near his mouth.

The snow banks at the foot of the lakehouse windows. Clark can hear the crack of ice forming around the lake, and the grind of Bruce's teeth.

"I'm sorry," Clark says, one more time.

"There was no escape for me, was there," Bruce says. He drags his hands down Clark's biceps, along his forearms. "It was always going to be you, all along."

"Depends who you ask. You don't have to be so fatalistic about it." Clark pauses to measure his next words carefully. "I'll leave, if you want me to. I'll stay away. There's no obligation here, no cosmic law that says that this is how it has to be."

Bruce's face goes as smooth as seaglass, and as opaque. His fingers encircle Clark's wrists, tighten for a moment, and then move up. Palm-to-palm, and then Bruce laces their fingers together. Clark wonders if he knows that he can read the stark adoration in his heartbeat, drumming it out like Morse code. He wonders if it means he's already forgiven, even if his apology will never be accepted.

"But if it means anything to you—" he begins, but Bruce interrupts him with a sharp hush, as if he knows what Clark is going to say. Maybe he's that predictable to Bruce already, and hearing that Clark would have fallen for him anyway would be too much of a platitude for him to bear.

"Save it," Bruce says, not unkindly, and leans forward, throwing his weight on their entwined hands.

Clark's immediate instinct is to push back, so he does, holding them in equilibrium, but only for a moment. He said that he understood—and he did, when Bruce said he wanted to fuck him; he understood that it wasn't about sex. And it's still not strictly about sex, he thinks, but it's not much of a powerplay any more, either.

He relaxes and succumbs to the pressure Bruce has him under. A button pings from one cuff; the other slips free of its hole.

"I didn't do that," Clark says. "That was you."

"It was."

Bruce arches over him, pressing their hands into the soft pillow above Clark's head. It brings them face to face and Clark tilts his head to brush their lips together. Bruce's fingers tighten around Clark's.

"There," Clark murmurs, keeping it light despite how rough his voice has gone. "You win. You have bent the Superman to your whim. Feel better now?"

"Don't be patronizing. It doesn't suit you," Bruce says, but he dips in for another, longer kiss. "So, what is it? Pheromones?"

Still on this, then. Clark noses into the corner of Bruce's jaw and takes a long, slow inhale. "Nope."

"...hypnosis?"

"Bruce, c'mon."

"It's something, though. It feels like there's a degree of compulsion to this."

"Compulsion? An inclination at best."

Bruce, to make a point, or maybe in a bid to express a particular affection, starts up a slow, decidedly filthy grind. Okay, definitely more pronounced than an inclination. It drags a low moan out of Clark, and Bruce favors him with another kiss.

"Something does come to mind," Clark tells him as their lips part. "Something unthinkably alien. You'll hate it."

Bruce pauses; his thighs tense against Clark's. "Spit it out."

"It could be," Clark says, somewhat giddily, "that you genuinely like me."

Apparently all that warrants is a grunt. Bruce pulls his hands away, unlacing their fingers—Clark's heart lurches, as though of all the things that have gone down this evening, this could have been his biggest misstep—but Bruce is only working a frantic hand between them, to free himself from his pants and to wrap his fingers around the both of them.

Clark spreads his hands over Bruce's shoulders and rolls with it, and it's not long before he can hear, over his own whispered urging, the telltale hitch of Bruce's breath. It's a sound he covets; Clark only hopes that Bruce feels the same way about his own messy gasps.

They end up slumped on their sides, nose to nose and catching their breath. Bruce drags his thumb over Clark's lower lip, rough and unconsidered, and Clark will happily take that as his answer. That tightness in his throat is back with its portent of tears, a mental release from the day's anxieties to go with the physical. He is tired beyond reason, but he's warm and slack, and against all odds—he's wanted.

He closes his eyes, Bruce's hand against his face, and, in rare contentment, lets himself drift away.

Once Clark is dozing lightly, Bruce walks out into the darkness to stand on the cold deck, the wood damp under his bare feet. He breathes in a little of the quiet; a brief reset that only kind of does the trick. For all of Clark's affection, he feels blackened around the edges still. Emptied of its anger and all the sediment washed out, his heart feels as fragile as glass.

He was prepared to kill a despot, a tyrant, a god. He is not prepared to kill a man. Certainly not this one. He'll box up the Kryptonite and find another way to deal with his concerns. A durable solution. An endurable solution.

Talking, he thinks ruefully, talking might be necessary. He's closer to giving up his secrets than he's ever been.

In the overcast sky, his signal burns bright into clouds.

"Bruce," a voice says. Superman drifts in the diffuse light from the lakehouse, resplendent, suspended over the lake in a swirl of snow. He tips his head to the sky. "I have to go now."

Bruce is unable to move, or even breathe, when Superman moves closer and kisses him, shallow and brief, his thumb on Bruce's cheekbone. His cape brushes softly against Bruce's forearm. When he can open his eyes again, he's alone. He returns to the bedroom, and there's a twist in his chest when he sees the bed, rumpled but empty. Absurd. Of course he's gone. Superman had bid him farewell, and Superman is Clark. His shirt still hangs from the bedpost.

There's no doubt that he's hunting the Bat. It's something of a relief that Bruce didn't have to make any upsetting excuses to get him to leave, but he suspects the rest of the evening is going to proceed in a supremely fucked-up fashion.

He heads to the Cave to suit up. He's been summoned, but he doesn't need to know why, or by whom. There's only one person he'll find there.

The snow gives way to a cold sleet as Clark approaches the old GCPD building, as though Gotham won't stand for anything so unsullied to touch her and so melts it out of the air. There's a lone figure standing next to the Bat's searchlight.

It's assuredly not the Bat.

He touches down on the rooftop, and Luthor advances on him like a dust devil, the wind blowing his hair and coat around frenetically.

"Mr. Luthor," Clark says, without entirely managing to keep the surprise from his voice. "What are you doing here?"

"I," Luthor says, "came to talk, as a matter of fact. You might think, flip this switch, boy, and you'll get a bat out of hell. But we know better, don't we, you and I? He's getting slow in his old age, but how long do you think until he shows up to crash our party, hmm?"

Clark furrows his brow. His confusion is only exacerbated when Luthor fishes a minute minder from his pocket.

"I'm sorry, I lied, I didn't come to talk at all," he says with ostentatious insincerity. "Well. Not to talk to you, because you and your ilk never listen, do you? Not really. Not to prayers nor curses. Not without a tithe—or would you rather a sacrifice in your name?"

This would feel like the superhero version of a crank call, if the allusions to divinity weren't making him uncomfortable. Clark folds his arms. "What do you want, Mr. Luthor."

"Hmm. My wants are simple. My desires, complex." He taps the timer against his chin. "My problem is, Superman, the problem, above all, is you."

"I'm sorry?"

"A sacrifice," Luthor says, thoughtful. "A blood sacrifice? Horus, Surya, Apollo. Kal-El. How do they like their tributes? How would you like yours, Clark Joseph Kent?"

"I'm no god," Clark says, quick to undermine the drama he's thrown into that particular reveal. Luthor has always been considered a harmless eccentric, albeit one who occasionally designs weaponry, but there's something fervid in his eyes tonight. A savage religion. All this talk of blood— "What have you done?"

Luthor's face lights up. "Oh, I am so glad you asked."

Clark doesn't spare more than a red-tinged glance at Luthor scurrying for his helicopter before he kicks up from the roof, instantly a hundred meters above the city, the polaroids fluttering in his wake. His heart thunders in his throat, and at first he can't get his vision to behave—he swipes at his eyes with the back of one hand, blinks and blinks and finally the x-ray filters in.

Gotham is old and old-fashioned and full of lead.

He sweeps through the docks and the east end, the Cauldron and the Bowery, but his view is obstructed at every turn, ribbons of impenetrable flashing or ghostly decorative toolings covered in flaking lead paint, miles and miles of pipework, laceworks of interference winding around every building. It's busy and overwhelming, and the harder he tries to see—tries to see anything, the more he starts to panic. The minutes tick down in his head.

He'll—he will have to do as Luthor says. If his mom is to have any chance, it's—

The Bat. The Bat, who knows every dark and narrow space in this awful city.

He just needs to be convinced, somehow—

And there aren't many ways to do that. As far as he can tell, there's no more negotiating with the Bat than there is with the weather, but there's something he can do—the only thing he can think of to do, in fact. It'll be an unambiguous white flag, but will ultimately leave him vulnerable, even if it works.

But there's not enough time to worry about that now, any more than there's time to waste on straight-up fighting the Bat until he agrees to help. His mother needs him.

When he returns to the signal, the Bat is there—but the Superman is not. Clark descends from the bleak winter sky, his shirt tails flapping around him, glasses beaded with rain.

The Bat takes a step back, whatever passes for astonishment on his grim face.

"Please, you have to listen to me," Clark says, landing slowly, his hands up in surrender. "I need your help. Please, I come to you as—as a citizen. As a son—"

"I'm listening."

Said without hesitation, and with only trace elements of guardedness. The Bat approaches him, a flash of white in his hand—a polaroid—and Clark could almost collapse with the relief of it, that at least one thing is going right for a change.

"Lex Luthor took my mom. He kidnapped her. I—I don't know where she's being held and I can't—please, I can't find her. He wants me to kill you, that's his ransom, but you know this city better than anyone—"

He's interrupted by an immense thunderclap, and the sky is illuminated with a net of lightning. The Bat looks up just as Clark does, following the afterimages that trail across the bay. He glances back at the Bat—and god, even three paces away he can feel the draw of him. He's going to have to figure this out.

"Looks ominous," the Bat rasps. "The lightning, it's not natural. Where is it gathering? Over your Kryptonian ship?"

"Yeah," Clark says. The possibilities reel out before him, each more inauspicious than the next, whether the government tinkering with the ship has ruptured the Phantom Zone and Faora-Ul has been freed, or some other Kryptonian catastrophe is afoot—god, he does not need this right now. He grits his teeth, urgency quickening his temper. "I think it is."

"Do you know what's going on?"

"No," Clark snaps. "Listen, she's running out of time—"

The Bat swoops in to grab Clark by the arm. "No, you listen. Get over the bay. Find out what's going on there and stop it. I'll take care of your mother."

Clark closes his eyes and takes a calming breath. "Okay." he says. "Her name's Martha. Please—"

"Martha," the Bat repeats. It sounds almost meditative in the soft low burr of the modulator. He's still for a long moment. "Clark, I'll make you a promise."

Clark is mildly surprised that the Bat recognizes him, never mind remembers his name. Both of the Bat's hands have found his arms, bracing him.

"I promise that Martha won't die tonight."

The blocks surrounding Centennial Park has lost power, the streets dark and abandoned save for military personnel setting up a perimeter. Helicopters circle overhead, but Clark negotiates them easily, orients himself and then rockets through the hull of the ship.

"Forty seconds to animation," says a smooth artificial voice.

Luthor turns at his entrance, coat swept back so he can plant his hands on his hips. "What's this?" he says. "Should I have supplied the platter? It appears you're one Bat-head short."

"It's over, Lex."

"Oh, no no no." A pause, and Luthor bobs his head to the side in acknowledgement. "Well, plan A was a bust. I can see that. Who could have predicted that the two of you would reconcile? Then again, it's true what they say. The line between hate and love is very, very thin. Though in my experience, it usually goes the other way."

"It's over. I'll take you in without breaking you," Clark says. "Which is more than you deserve."

"Oh," Luthor says. "But none of us ever get what we deserve. You, for instance. You deserve to be brought low, your flaws revealed to the world, hands bloody and head hung—"

"Twenty seconds to animation."

"—not long now. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? Hmm?"

Clark should probably have anticipated a community theater-level performance of Nietzsche at some point, yet it doesn't make Luthor any less unnerving. "I'm not dead yet, Lex," he says.

"Yet. Lightning and thunder require time, Clark Joe. The light of the stars requires—" Luthor flicks the air in front of Clark's face, "—time."

The minute minder pings.

"Plan B it is."

The creature tears itself from its synthesized womb, translucent afterbirth sloughing from its malformed body, Luthor babbling all the while: "Ancient Kryptonian deformity, blood of my blood—my tribute to you. All-powerful, and not at all good. Uh-oh, not good at all—"

Clark catches the first swing of its fist, his cape whipping around him with the force he's unleashed just to keep the creature stationary. Luthor is maniacal, but he doesn't deserve to be pasted against the ship's walls like that. Or maybe he does—but like he said, nobody gets what they deserve.

He tells himself this as the creature grabs him, its fingers crushing his ribcage and squeezing the air out of him in an unexpected flare of agony, and then punches its way out of the ship. He strains against its grip, but each finger is as thick as Clark's thigh and inconceivably strong—almost stronger than Clark is, and he wonders: is this how people feel when he carries them? Even when he's bearing them to safety, do they struggle with the knowledge that he could break them on a whim?

But there'll be time for philosophical soul-searching when he's not being flung around as though he's no more than a rag doll. He's just about levered one cruel finger off his chest when he's swung in a broad, disorienting arc, and the creature winds up and pitches him through the park like a baseball.

He tumbles to a stop near the memorial wall, tail over teacups in a heap of wet soil and rubble. Above him the sky opens in a thunderous downpour; the rain hits the pavement like silver needles, caught in the beams of the circling helicopters. Clark rolls over and gets himself half-upright, just in time for the creature to snatch him by the ankle and fling him through his own statue. He twists in the air, trying to harness his momentum and decelerate, but he strikes one of the mirror-glass facades on 5th Street before he can right himself.

Glass explodes around him and into the night. The stink of scorched and melting carpet tile thickens the air; his suit is hot with friction. Outside, the creature roars, a primeval hunter's cry that turns Clark's insides to soup. He skids to a halt with his shoulder against a copier.

Memory snaps its bear-trap jaws, the phantom of Zod's hands at his neck. He has to get this thing out of the city before it can—before it happens all over again. He screws his eyes tight and thinks.

And listens, without even meaning to, really but he can't—he needs to know. I'm okay, I'm alright, he hears Ma say over the wail of police sirens and the tear of a jet engine, and relief breaks over him, galvanizes him, cuts his fury loose and it's—

It's stratospheric.

The creature is easy to find, lit up by the swarm of military aircraft. Clark doesn't hesitate; he intercepts it at mach speed, driving skyward so fast the g-force throws its limbs back and its hide begins to glow. Up and up until he's cleared the city, cleared the atmosphere and the creature can turn in the weightlessness and land a suckerpunch to the side of his face.

Son of a—

He spins away, ears ringing as his jaw restructures itself, the Earth's horizon turning in his peripheral vision. Every time the creature hits him it gets closer to hurting, as though he's getting weaker or—or it's getting stronger, somehow. As though it's taking everything Clark can throw at it and then turning it all right back on him a hundredfold.

Clark kicks himself back into motion, pushing higher, hoping the chill of space will freeze its blood in its veins, or at least slow it down. A faint hope; it'll likely affect the creature no more than it affects him, but every inch he can get this monstrosity away from Earth is an inch well-fought.

It's when he swings himself onto the creature's back to try to subdue it without being punted into reentry—that's when he sees it. He'd not heard its approach in the soundlessness of space.

Over the years, he'd tried to test the extent of his invulnerability. Within the scope of the dangers he's thrown himself into, it was all too easy to believe it was limitless. He finds that belief becomes increasingly flimsy as the nuclear missile climbs toward him. There's not enough air up here to take a breath, and nobody to hear a prayer. He sincerely hopes he's wrong about the creature absorbing power, because—

Clark holds firm and throws all his strength into turning the creature so the warhead will strike it face-on.

Mom, he thinks. Lois. Bruce—

The sky catches fire, roiling and fulminating. Bruce looks up at a night lit as bright as midday, and lets the horror prickle over him for a moment before running it down. Something hurtles out of the burning clouds like a comet and impacts Stryker's Island. A dome of electricity spreads from the epicenter—the same phenomena he'd watched gather over the Kryptonian ship.

"Alfred. What's going on down there?" The Batwing shudders as the shockwave passes over it, its displays flickering despite the craft's rigorous EMP shielding. One of the diagnostic tablets he has hooked up into the controls dies completely.

"Where to begin," Alfred responds. "It seems that the Kryptonian abomination you so desperately feared has finally put in an appearance." There's a weary pause. "It's going to be a bitter winter, sir."

Bruce banks on descent and captures a glimpse of the creature himself; its eyes cut a red glow through the smoke lifting from the island and it's only an instinctive Hail Mary of an evasive maneuver that saves him from being bisected in midair.

"Kryptonian. Alfred, listen to me—I need you to get to the armory. The spear. The gas canisters and the launcher. Take them and—"

Bruce grits his teeth and pulls back on the thrust lever, but the altitude doesn't save him from another lash of heat. The creature clips the outboard wing flap and sends him into a slow-spinning nosedive. He feels sweat slip beneath the cowl.

"Sir—"

"The manor," Bruce says, the controls shuddering in his grip. "Take them to the manor, then get as far away as you can, Alfred. Do you hear me? Get the hell—"

The ground comes up faster than he left it. He forces himself into a breathing exercise, slow, deep, and he tries to ease the craft into something more horizontal. All the better to plow headlong into the fragmented remains of a building.

The canopy shatters as the craft rolls against the bricks, and then it's just him and the sweltering air and his crumpled harness buckle. A sitting duck. He hears the creature roar and he looks up to stare his own death in the face. No time to be afraid, and there's nobody to immortalize his last words, so he just goes with what feels right.

He sincerely hopes Prince didn't hear him. The beast's assault ricochets off her bracers and disperses; she doesn't even spare him a glance before leaping into the fray with the effortlessness of the mythological. The smoke blusters outward at her passage, limned by the sparks her sword and shield make on the creature's stony hide. Bruce doesn't have the bandwidth to be surprised, or fascinated, or anything but concerned with slicing himself out of the Batwing's harness and rolling for cover. He has doubts over whether he has anything to contribute to the fight as it stands. The sooner they can move this onto home turf, the better.

There's a resonant boom from the sky, one Bruce feels as much as hears—not the creature's electrical discharge this time, but a noise that raises a shiver of dread in him regardless. He sees Clark arc through the clouds and hit the creature like a freight train, lifting it off its feet and driving it to the far end of the island.

He drops in next to Bruce a moment later, cape snapping around him in the disturbed air.

Bruce swallows. "She's fine," he says, casting Clark a side-on glance.

"I heard," Clark says. "Thank you." He pats Bruce on the shoulder, turning a grateful smile in his direction. He's luminous. Glowing, as though made anew. Bruce can feel it in his chest.

"The creature," Bruce says. "It's Kryptonian. But it isn't—like you."

"No. Luthor made it, somehow. I think he was having an existential meltdown."

"You seem to have that effect on people."

"Tell me about it," Clark says. "This thing—it's grown, got kind of spikier, too. Anything you throw at it makes it stronger and, well. It just got nuked."

"Terrific."

The words are ready on Bruce's tongue, to ask if he took the blast alongside the monster and if he knew he would survive it, or if he felt the bounds of his mortality in that moment—if he doesn't bleed, does he burn—but the haunted look that passes across Clark's face tells him enough.

"Superman," Diana says in greeting, and Clark's expression melts away to be replaced with an amiable smile. She turns to Bruce. "Bat… man."

If she hears his muttered imprecation, she is unchastened by it. "Diana Prince," Bruce says, more loudly. "To what do we owe the pleasure."

"I just wanted my photograph," she says to him. "You needn't have made it so complicated."

Clark frowns at them both, and Bruce redirects before he can put two and two together. It's not going to work for long, but there are more opportune times. "We have to get the creature away from here," he says. "Get it to chase us north. I have weapons that will work against it."

"Really," Clark says, flat.

"Luthor's mineral," Bruce says. "He wanted me to kill you, too."

"Figures." Clark takes a measured step back. It wouldn't be amiss of him to suspect Bruce of having something in his belt, though he would, unfortunately, be wrong. "Okay, where to?"

"I need to fix my plane first. Cover me."

Diana distracts the creature with filament-bright cracks of her lariat, hamstringing it whenever she can despite it healing itself almost instantly. Clark can't risk blasting it; instead he relies on his speed and agility, flying figure-eights around its swinging fists, avoiding it mostly but eating dirt now and then. It's not the most graceful of maneuvers but it's enough to keep it lumbering in a wide circle while the Bat fixes his plane.

It's called the Batwing, apparently, because he's a man who believes in sticking to a theme, and save for the cockpit, it's not as badly damaged as he'd feared. Clark can hear him talking to himself under his breath, and a small exclamation of triumph as he gets the the wings back into alignment with a well-aimed boot-heel.

"Do you have a moment," the Bat says without raising his voice. Conversational, even. There's the hiss of a butane torch. "I need your heat vision."

"Diana?" Clark calls. She nods to him, spins her sword with a loose turn of her wrist and all but severs one of the creature's legs. She leaps up onto its back, her lariat coiling like a live things around its neck, and she steers it away as it stumbles.

"The vertical takeoff is shot," the Bat is saying as Clark touches down next to him. He points at a wicked-looking shear in the wing, its edges as sharp as knives. "But once this is repaired, you can put me in the air."

"Or I could carry you," Clark says. "It would be quicker."

"Just weld it, Clark," the Bat says with such odd, weary fondness that it brings Clark up short, and it takes another, brusquer prompting before he can shake it off and direct his attention to the wing.

"Okay," he says over the ping of rapidly-cooling metal. The glowing repair-line fades away. "Where are we taking this?"

"North, into Gotham County proper. I know where there's open space, nobody around, minimal opportunity for collateral damage. Just an old ruin. It's an eyesore anyway." The Bat hoists himself into the cockpit and drags some apparatus out of the equipment on the passenger side.

"You're talking about the Wayne estate," Clark says immediately. He's traveled past the scorched shell of the manor enough times. "You're wrong, people live around there. You must know that. Everybody knows that Bruce Wayne—"

The Bat's attention seems resolutely fixed on untangling an aviation mask and goggles from its helmet.

Realization coalesces so rapidly it makes Clark feel nauseous. "And… your weapons are there."

The Bat looks up at him. "We'll talk about this later," he says.

"You're god damn right we will," Clark says, reeling as everything settles neatly into place. All the tensions, intentions, pretensions—he'd held Clark against a wall, wedged a thigh between his. Chased him for the leech, teased him, kissed him for it: the Bat's leech, not Bruce's, he gets it now. He'd grabbed Clark's neck, threatened him. They'd—on his desk. All along, they'd both been— "What the fuck, Bruce."

"You kiss your mother with that mouth?" Bruce Wayne says.

"Oh, fuck you," Clark says in unfiltered, and in his opinion, perfectly righteous exasperation.

"Hm," Bruce says in a slow rasp. The bastard is actually smiling. "Didn't think you had it in you. Good to know."

He's about to cover his face with the mask, but Clark grabs his wrist and looms over him until he opens his mouth to say something smart-assed, then presses in further. The Bat is difficult to kiss. His mouth tastes like metal shavings, and he bites. The edge of the cowl scrapes Clark's face. The Bat winds his fingers in Clark's hair and pulls his head back; his teeth graze the side of Clark's neck.

"Stop fooling around and get me in the air," Bruce says into his ear.

Clark slingshots him in approximately the right direction like the Batwing is nothing more than a paper airplane, and they then proceed play a demented game of Pied Piper to get the beast across the water and onto the Wayne estate. Clark and Diana torment it into running zig-zags between them, giving Bruce enough time to fly ahead to the manor. His landing leaves a lot to be desired, but at least he didn't hit any solid objects this time. Other than the ground, anyway.

Bruce springs from the cockpit, shedding the aviation mask as he goes, his cape skimming the damp long grass as he approaches the solitary remnants of his ancestral home. Alfred has acquitted himself admirably. The spear glows on the leaf-strewn hearth, a bandolier of grenades and gas canisters flanking it. The first of his line were hunters. It seems fitting that the last should be, too.

He makes a mental exercise of deliberately imagining the spear held at Clark's neck, the Bat's boot on his chest and hand on the spear's haft, and all he concludes from his reaction is that he's nothing if not masochistic.

The ground begins to tremor. He checks over the launcher, loads a gas canister by the yellow light of the sky and shoulders the rest of the weaponry. He's only just clear of the building before the creature slams into it, toppling the remains of the pediment and crushing the front of the building, a thundering cloud of dust rolling out in its wake.

It's just cold, empty stone. It hasn't meant anything to Bruce in years. He rolls clear and stabs the spear blade-first into the soft earth, takes to a knee among the dying wildflowers, and readies the launcher.

Diana's lariat cuts a blaze through the dust, encircling the creature and giving Bruce somewhere to aim. Perfect.

Not so perfect: no bead on Clark. Figuratively speaking.

"I'm about to unload some Kryptonite," Bruce says as the creature lumbers through the dust cloud. There's a fierce red glow kindling above the gold of Diana's lariat, and Bruce can smell ozone. "Get clear."

Clark darts skyward, a spire of dust in his wake, and Bruce fires in the next instant. The dust cloud takes on a toxic hue. The gas was calibrated for a humanoid weighing around two hundred and thirty pounds, so it won't have as significant an impact on this hulking beast. He can only hope it'll be enough.

There's the rustle of vegetation and a flicker of red cape in his periphery. "It won't be safe for you here much longer," Bruce says.

"And you won't survive a single blow from that thing, but it would be rude to make Diana do all the work." Clark pauses. "She wants you to know 'whenever you're ready', by the way. If you'd like to run your plan by me?"

"I'm going to take this—" Bruce indicates the spear haft with a jerk of his elbow, "and I'm sure you can figure out the rest."

Diana yells, and her lariat uncoils in a flourish of light. She's ejected from the dust cloud at speed, shield up and braced. The creature has struck her with enough force that her boots gouge the earth in a long slide. She careens against the mausoleum, and Bruce is half on his feet before he can form a thought. Sometimes justice means digging up bones and giving them a proper burial, but there's a literality to this that he dislikes.

"You want to carry me, here's your chance," he says to Clark, beating down his agitation as he loads another canister. The creature slouches toward Diana; he can't afford to be anything but calm. "Get me in the air."

Diana rolls her shoulders and leaps to meet it halfway—the gas must be doing something; her sword slashes bring dark bubbling ichor to the surface of its skin, more like discharge than blood. Bruce aims and fires. The creature is felled to its knees by a precise cut of Diana's blade, and on the return swing and without hesitation, she takes out one of its eyes.

"Clark," Bruce says, tossing the launcher aside and grasping the spear haft. "Now."

Clark grabs his arm. "If it lands one hit it'll break every bone you have."

"I got that." Bruce tries to shake his arm free. "I'll take my chances."

"Bruce—"

There's no time for this, not for uncertainty nor misgivings—the silence that hesitation breeds is where a gun is cocked, where a crowbar is swung. A split second can mean the difference between a building and a heap of rubble, between a city and a wasteland, between a day won or unendurably lost. Bruce sets his jaw. He pulls the spear from the earth, turns it, catching the haft under the glowing spearhead, and brings it between them in one fluid motion. Clark flinches and lets go of his arm; Bruce doesn't miss the flicker of hurt in his eyes.

"We do whatever is necessary." Bruce pours the weight of his conviction behind the words, and Clark—Bruce can see that he understands, but there's something more in his face, in the fault-lines of his expression. It tells Bruce that this might not be the first time someone he cares about has run headlong toward their own death.

He will have to get used to it, if this is the path he's chosen.

Bruce brings his hand to Clark's chest and lets the resonance of contact sink into him—would liked to have kissed him again, maybe should have—and then turns and sprints towards the creature, unnatural hot rain pelting his face, thunder brewing in the scarred clouds. His cape hushes among the withered flowers. Diana calls to him as he approaches. She adopts a crouch and lifts her shield, and he understands. His boot hits dead center and she vaults him into the air in a maelstrom of grass and dust and strands of gold, her battle cry soaring over it all. His cape snaps out to slow his descent; not quite controlled enough to maneuver, but enough that he can assess his trajectory and velocity. He will only get one shot at this.

He hurtles toward the monster. He fights the drag of wind resistance as he lifts the spear to his shoulder like a javelin and prepares himself—

—only to have it wrenched out of his hands. Clark shoulders him hard enough to collapse his cape; the ground comes up to slap the air right out of him. He rolls onto hands and knees, panting, too furious to be indignant.

The creature bellows, and Bruce looks up to see that it's held fast by Diana's lariat. Clark is bearing down on it with the spear. Bruce sees his first strike glance off its hide. Clark staggers in midair, rallies, and his second strike sinks home, between its ribs.

His triumph is short lived. He sees Diana's boot slip in the churned earth, and the slack in her lariat before she can regain her footing. Only a second, but a second too long.

The creature shakes free and lashes out with a powerful thrust of its arm, and Clark—god, Clark, still clinging to the spear, takes it in the chest. Bruce can only watch, crushed under the weight of his own terror, as the monster's spiked fist erupts from Clark's back.

The creature topples into the strewn rubble of Wayne manor, and takes Clark with it.

Bruce waits for the fumble of his heart, the brief interruption that tells him Clark has slipped out of the world and forever away, but it doesn't come. He clutches Clark tighter to him, broken stone under his knees and his cheek pressed to Clark's forehead, his hope at unbearable odds with the warm blood slicked between them.

Diana's hand alights on his shoulder. "Bruce," she says, with a sympathy that's terrible in its understanding.

"No," Bruce says fiercely. He knows how it sounds, and he tries to find the words to tell her that it's determination and not grief; he's not denying or bargaining or railing against a reality too huge to bear. That Clark—the essence of him is present in Bruce still, vital and vibrant and not dead. Not dead. "Help me. We have to get him back to the Cave."

"Okay," Diana says softly. She gets to one knee beside him. "Let's take him home."

Bruce glares at her. "He's alive," he says, insistent. He wants to explain why he is so certain, but even now, like this—with Clark's chest cracked open as though inviting Bruce to reach in and grasp his heart once and for all—he can't bring himself to say it.

Bruce should have anticipated that Alfred would have ignored him completely and stayed behind. His reasoning is that if there were anywhere he'd survive a rampaging alien beast it would be in a brutalist bomb shelter, Master Bruce. He helped draw up the specifications, he knows how many cubic meters of concrete each wall took. Bruce lets his grousing wash over him, interjecting only to tell him what he needs: the goggles from the suit's tactical loadout.

Clark's blood wells against his palm, going tacky between his fingers.

Diana helps him carry Clark into the workshop, to the laboratory at the far end and the biosafety cabinet. Bruce breaks out the glass front with his elbow. Luthor's files came with all kinds of data—he had observed the Superman as closely as Bruce had, but had the advantage of extensive experimentation on Zod's body. He'd landed on the theoretical source of the Kryptonians' accelerated healing.

Bruce hopes to whatever god may be listening that he was right. He yanks his goggles on one-handed and drapes Clark over the front of the unit.

"Cover your eyes," he says, even though Alfred has already turned away and he doesn't know if it'll even affect Diana at all. He activates the xenon lamp, hitting Clark with a two-second blast of short-wavelength ultraviolet light. It's designed to kill pathogens, sterilize equipment, and unfiltered exposure is enough to give a normal human being immediate and severe sunburn.

For a moment there's nothing, and Bruce's hope dwindles to a pinprick—and then Clark convulses to life. Bruce catches him as his pained gasp echoes off the flat planes of the workshop, mingling with Diana's jubilant cry. Bruce's ribs ache with his carefully contained relief.

"Again?" Diana says.

Bruce hefts Clark back into his arms. The skin around the wound is an angry red and blistering, but it subsides even as he's looking at it. He watches in morbid fascination as Clark's sternum regrows, muscle and flesh knitting across it, veins spreading like filigree. His head lolls back on Bruce's shoulder; he's still unconscious, but breathing now. It's raspy and bubbling as his lungs reconstruct, but Bruce will gladly take it over his unrelenting stillness.

His fingertips find the edge of the wound in Clark's back. No change there. "Help me turn him around. Alfred—I need you to find every full-spectrum bulb you can—"

"Right you are," Alfred says. "And sun lamps? I expect Bruce Wayne is hankering for a summer look right about now."

A sharp laugh escapes him; it's brutal on the tension in his chest. "Yes. A tanning bed, grow lights, anything like that."

"Let me take him." Diana eases Clark around so his back is against the biosafety cabinet. Another flash of the UVGI and the exit wound is effectively cauterized.

Bruce can sense Diana's gaze on him, her quiet cataloguing of the rigidity in his shoulders, how tight his jaw is clenched, how his hands don't know how to be anything but fists when they aren't touching Clark.

"Check his pulse," she softly suggests, and when Bruce doesn't move, she takes his hand and tugs off his gauntlet. He's momentarily trapped in an indecision: desperate to touch, fighting a part of him that is convinced he'll feel nothing. The evidence that tells him Clark is alive feels too ephemeral, as though it could change from one breath to the next. Not enough to withstand the overriding motif of his life. He loses people. It's what he does.

But he places his fingers against Clark's neck anyway, and against all his pessimistic expectations he can feel the faint flutter of his heartbeat. More than that, there's the steady thrum of his presence; one that's echoed by the eerie warmth in Bruce's chest. His breath leaves him in a rush—it feels like he's been holding it for hours, days, forever—and he yanks off his other gauntlet so he can clasp Clark's face with both hands, touch his forehead with his own and just, for a moment, let himself be overwhelmingly, unapologetically glad.

Bruce monitors him around the clock for the first few days, adjusting the balance of EM radiation to optimize his healing. The room ends up looking like a cross between a mad scientist's lab and a planetarium: tanning beds standing on end like sarcophagi; half a kilometer of cabling; dozens of bulbs hanging from the ceiling like a map of the stars.

Too much, and in its compromised condition, Clark's body can't keep up and he burns. Too little, and his vitals fade and a shard of panic lodges itself between Bruce's ribs.

Ideally, he should be out in the sun proper. Ideally, it would be midsummer. From a day spent with him on the lakeside, Bruce ascertains that the short hours of milky winter light aren't enough for a steady recovery, inferior even to the artificial glow of belowgrounds.

Ma Kent takes up permanent residence in his kitchen, gently pulling Alfred's leg over the secret ingredient in her shortcrust pastry. When she's not doing that, she's at Clark's side, politely manipulating Bruce into eating and/or sleeping and definitely into showering.

She's the one at Clark's bedside when he finally wakes up, as it should be.

"Lois Lane?"

"Mr. Wayne?" She sounds delicate and faraway, and Bruce isn't certain it's all the phone's fault. "Oh, no. Are you looking for Clark? I—we don't know where he is, or what—whether he's. We don't know what happened to him—"

"I know where he is," Bruce tells her. Then, carefully: "I know who he is."

"Oh," she says. "Okay. Alright. Thank god. Is he…?"

"Make your excuses, Ms. Lane. I'm sending a car for you. It'll be there within the hour."

"Right," Lois says, some steel back in her voice. "Don't feel like you had to run that by me first or anything, it's not like I have a job to do, you domineering f—" Bruce hears her move the phone away from her face and take a deep breath, and another. When she speaks again, she's infinitely more diplomatic. "I'll be ready."

"I thought you'd want to see him," Bruce says. "That's all."

"I do," she says, and makes a noise like she's laughing and sighing at once. "Apology accepted, I guess."

Lois arrives, and it almost seems like she's about to be polite, but then she sees Martha and shoves her bag and coat at Bruce as though he's the goddamn butler. Alfred looks up at him from where he's preparing the coffee, eyebrows raised as if he'd heard that thought as clear as a bell.

"Oh!" Martha exclaims, enveloping Lois into a hug. "Sweetheart, it's so good to see you." Bruce deliberately doesn't listen in on what else passes between them, only breaking in when their fraught murmuring peters out and Alfred looks in danger of offering yet more hot beverages.

"Lois." He indicates with a jerk of his head that she should follow him, past the kitchen and to the long expanse of veneer that panels the core of the lakehouse. "Clark trusts you," he says. "And so I'm trusting this with you, because you're his friend."

"Well, that's all very melodramatic of you, but—" she says, and Bruce slides back the panel to reveal the metal staircase down to the Cave. "Okay, what the hell is this."

The best way to answer her question is to show her, so he begins his descent. Lois' heels echo in the darkness behind him, slowing as the workshop comes into view, the armory, the car. He halts, and half-turns to look at her. She's closed her eyes, one hand resting on the uneven rocky wall as though it's the only thing keeping her upright.

"You're the Batman," she says after a moment. "Bruce Wayne is the Batman. Great. That's—that's great. Makes as much sense as anything else lately. God, I barely understood what Clark saw in you and now I have literally no idea. You don't even have an ass."

"I'm flattered that you saw fit to check," Bruce says. "Are you okay?"

"Oh, sure, I've just got the scoop of the century staring me in the face and I can't do a damn thing with it. I'm just—fine. Peachy. Thanks for that."

"You already got your scoop of the century a couple years back." Bruce gently takes her arm. She's shaking. "Listen. He's okay, and he's only going to get better."

"How can you be so sure?" Lois says, and the tears finally come. She angrily wipes at her eyes. "He's not like anybody else. Martha said he was—right through! What if he's not, what if it's—"

"I just know," Bruce says. Her shoulders hitch, and he draws her into a semblance of a hug. "Trust me on this."

"So it's true, then," she says to the lapel of his suit jacket. She doesn't elaborate further, and Bruce's lapel doesn't ask. After a moment she pats him awkwardly and then carefully extricates herself, apparently as at ease with Bruce's attempts at comfort as he is with administering them. She deflects by wiping a finger under each eye as though her mascara isn't a lost cause. Bruce offers her his pocket square, and she takes it. "Tell anyone you saw me cry and I'll libel you into next week," she says, with honest gratitude.

Bruce hands Lois some tinted goggles. She obediently pulls them on, and Bruce cracks the door open. No harsh stripe of UV spears out, though; only the daylight bulbs are lit. He must be having a good morning.

He's stretched out on his back, eyes closed and as naked as the day he fell out of the sky.

"Oh." Lois takes the goggles off again, stretching the strap between her hands. "Uh."

"Nothing you haven't seen before, I assume," Bruce says.

"His skewed concept of personal boundaries is the one thing that's not a tabloid fabrication," Clark says. "Pass me a towel?"

"That, and the Holiday Regents thing," Bruce says, deploying said towel. He is looking better today; there's color in his face—besides the blushing—and none of the exhausted half-sentences or slurred, rounded-off words that had characterized his first week after returning to consciousness. Bruce touches his wrist lightly. "Hey."

"Hey," Clark says back, looking up at him with a small, quiet smile.

"Steady with those PDAs," Lois says, but her sarcasm is half-hearted. She's staring at the tender red welt in the center of Clark's chest as he pulls himself into sitting upright, visibly doing his best not to grimace. "Oh, Clark..."

"It's not as bad as it looks," he says as she leans in to carefully hug him. He brushes her hair behind her ear. "But could you sweet-talk some sick leave out of Perry for me? Tell him I'm at death's door."

"That's not funny, Clark," Lois says. Then, "Anything you want."

"Well, since you offered," Bruce says. "There is something you could do."

Winter loosens its grip on the earth and lets the flowers grow. The last of the snowdrops ripple in the spring winds, their fellows already given way to the pale yellow daffodils and clumps of crocuses.

True to both Bruce's request and her own word, Lois has kept the public's interest in the Superman piqued, and on a hopeful note. It's series of features that are more retrospectives than anything, but folded around the recent events. He's alive and well, is her assurance, but has sought solitude to recover from his grievous injury. White seems to have green-lit it without second thought.

Clark himself is increasingly hale, and has taken to swimming in the lake in the evenings to catch every last inch of the sun. Sometimes he's disastrously naked, but other days Bruce isn't so lucky.

And Bruce—Bruce is thinking about rebuilding. The remains of Wayne Manor have been cleared, architectural plans drawn up and fresh foundations set. He's tracked Barry Allen to Central City, Arthur Curry to a small fishing village in Newfoundland, and is slowly making inroads with S.T.A.R. Labs about Victor Stone. The future is taking shape.

Beer in one hand and coffee in the other, he lowers himself to sit on the edge of the deck, the toes of his shoes skimming the surface of the frigid lake water. Clark swims over in three strong strokes then raises his arm. Bruce tosses the bottle out over the water and he catches it one-handed, takes the cap off with a slide of his thumb, then rises effortlessly to settle next to Bruce on the deck, shoulder to shoulder, dampening his shirt.

"We haven't had the talk yet," he says, taking a swig.

"I can practically hear those capital letters."

The low glimmer of the setting sun catches the water as it drips from Clark's hair and runs over his collarbones. Bruce tracks the path of the droplets as they slide down the pale starburst of scarring on his chest. He takes his own scars for granted, but he's never liked them on anyone else—though Clark's fades a little more every day, and will eventually vanish entirely. Bruce isn't certain he deserves to bear witness to that, but it doesn't stop him examining the contours of it every morning, Clark watching him evenly as he catalogues its gradual healing.

Clark redirects his attention by blowing over the neck of his bottle; a sound like a distant foghorn. "I'll start then, shall I? Unless you think it'll be a waste of time."

"It's not a waste of time," Bruce offers, after a beat.

"Okay, easy questions first, then," Clark says, steadfastly ignoring his reluctance.

He puts his beer down and touches Bruce's hand. Bruce is forced to meet his gaze just to alleviate the sheer unbearable earnestness of it all, though in actuality it alleviates nothing. The way Clark looks at him—sometimes it feels like it could stop his heart mid-beat, kill him standing up.

"What are we, Bruce?" Clark asks. "What are we going to be?"

"The easy questions. Right."

"We can skip straight to the hard ones, if you'd rather—"

"Friends," Bruce says quickly. "We're friends."

Clark grins out over the lake. "Would you say, maybe, boyfriends?"

"I would say, maybe, that's a little juvenile."

Clark has apparently been giving this pressing matter some thought. "Friends with benefits, then?"

"If you want to be crude about it."

"I don't want to be crude about it. How about lov—"

"Ah," Bruce interrupts, eyes closed in an attempt to endure this with some dignity. He gesture emphatically with his coffee mug. "Don't even think about finishing that sentence. I know you can't be drunk, you have no excuse for that kind of sentimental Mills and Boon—"

"Alright, alright, you made your point," Clark says, laughing. "Oh! I know. Paramours."

"There's only so far human patience can stretch, Clark."

Clark nudges him with his shoulder and they fall silent for a while, listening to the wind rustle through the newly-budding trees and the lap of the water around the deck's pilings. Bruce keeps himself warm on his coffee and in the last remnants of the sun, and in Clark's radiant heat along his side.

"How about," Clark eventually says, leaning in, "partners?"

It's a reliable way to think of it, but it doesn't really encompass the way Clark, of a morning, leads Bruce into wakefulness with the warm touch of his hand along his back. Nor how he understands Bruce's drive to rebalance the moral universe, even if he doesn't always agree with how he goes about it. Or the way he tolerates Bruce's habitual pettifogging when there's something he doesn't want to talk about, or the tone he takes when he explains that yes, actually, he does genuinely like this shirt.

It can't communicate the way he knows Bruce when he no longer has the social graces to hide behind, no more roles to play. When he's the essence of who he is—and can still forgive him for it.

And it can't hope to touch the depth of terror that is knowing what Clark looks like after twenty percent of the blood in his body has leaked out onto the ground. Bruce knows the shape of his life when it's down to a single frayed thread, and exactly what he would do to prevent that from happening again. He already knows the cadence of Clark's heart as well as he knows his own, and he intends to keep it that way.

He may not believe in fate, but he welcomes good fortune when it finds him.

"No," Bruce says. "That's not the word."