Marriage of Inconvenience

by susiecarter

Chapter 6

 

 

There was no "thing".

But as long as Bruce was already committed to the task of avoiding the penthouse for at least seven or eight more hours—

Patrol wouldn't just be a productive use of the time itself. It was the only option he could think of that had any chance of excising this pointless strangling preoccupation with Clark. It would allow him to pare himself down to the essentials, to occupy that stark bare mental space where everything became straightforward. It was exactly what he needed most right now in order to clear his head, to prevent himself from making any new mistakes.

And he was already on the manor grounds. From the ship, it was less than a ten-minute drive to the lake house.

As he drove, he manipulated the controls on the dashboard in the sequence that would give Alfred warning that he was coming.

He leaned on the accelerator, a little. He knew this road well, it wasn't especially unsafe; and the idea of stripping Bruce Wayne off of himself and getting inside the Batsuit felt—appealingly urgent.

Alfred was, unsurprisingly, waiting for him upstairs, by the door. He was also frowning, which wasn't unprecedented but typically meant Bruce would have to spend at least five minutes deflecting whatever concern it was Alfred had fixated on, and Bruce felt a sharp impatience rise into his throat, and up behind his eyes.

"Alfred," he said, as he reached the door.

"Sir," Alfred said slowly. "I—wasn't expecting you tonight."

Bruce's patrol schedule had, unavoidably, been impacted by his marriage to the alien. He'd worked up to something approaching his usual workload gradually, at first, checking repeatedly for any sign the alien had realized what he was doing, where he was going, or had listened in—he had almost convinced himself the risk was genuinely minimal, and then the alien had shown up out of the blue. He'd have cut back sharply after that in any case, but then Swanwick had shown up and sent them to the ship, and then they'd left almost immediately afterward to visit Martha Kent, and then—then he had been—occupied.

Objectively reasonable; ironclad. But Alfred had always had a distinct tendency toward optimism, in this regard—liked to treat Bruce's deviations from schedule or routine as if they were promising signs of a newly relaxed approach, and then react to Bruce's resumption of an average level of activity as if it were a grave disappointment, and he hard-done-by indeed.

"Change in plans," Bruce informed him.

"Mm, so I infer, sir," Alfred said, still frowning. "You were here rather late last night as well. What have you told—Mr. Kent, if that remains his preferred mode of address?"

"It does," Bruce said, and then, "Nothing. He'll live."

"Sir—"

"He knows not to expect me for some time," Bruce amended. "Satisfied?"

But Alfred didn't snipe at him, didn't scold him, didn't take him to task for his tone.

He was watching Bruce, with a small line scored between his eyebrows where they drew together, his eyes narrowed slightly. And then he said quietly, "Sir, are you—all right?"

For fuck's sake. Bruce turned on his heel and headed for the stairs. "Patrol, Alfred," he said, and if Alfred replied, he chose not to hear it.

 

 

Patrol worked exactly as well as Bruce had expected it to, for about four hours.

And then, fucking inevitably—the alien showed up, again.

This time, he arrived when Bruce was already in the middle of a fight. There was nothing but the perfect clean focus of it, sharp as a knife; a dozen men, no room in Bruce's head for anything but tracking their relative motion, the plan and then the execution, block and strike and counter-strike, as swiftly and powerfully as he was able to force his body to perform.

And then Bruce became aware of a sound, the rush of air, and not toward him but overhead. He couldn't parse it; not a projectile, the quality of the sound and the breadth of the shape suggested by it were all wrong. A net?

He risked a glance upward, and caught a flicker of brilliant red, there and gone again in the dim illumination cast sideways by the nearest half-dead streetlight.

And then, abruptly, two of the remaining eight men were gone, and it was—Clark.

Bruce tensed, full-body, involuntary split-second reaction, and then controlled it. He could acknowledge, objectively, that what Clark had done, interfering the way he had, had spared Bruce a complicated maneuver; he was able to angle his next two blows toward the remaining men without needing to guard his left side.

And in the time it took him to do as much, naturally, the other four men dropped almost simultaneously, the blur in Bruce's field of vision and the sudden sharp burst of displaced air against his face testament to how the alien had done it.

How had he known? Or did he still intend to pretend he hadn't? Bruce couldn't begin to guess, couldn't fathom what his motives might be. He had come out here like this to escape the goddamn alien for a while, to recover some small fraction of the resources he needed to deal with the alien appropriately going forward, and all he could think, irrational, was that the alien had worked it out somehow, and now deliberately denied him even that.

Clark was standing there, the last two men slumped at his feet. He was wearing the bodysuit, the sigil picked out across the chest, that S–shape that had led the Metropolis-Gotham metro area to almost unanimously dub him "Superman", in defiance of the fact that "Kal-El" was a syllable shorter and the name he had been going by in public for weeks. And he had—he had re-affixed that long red cape to the shoulders of it, the fabric swirling around his calves and ankles in the night breeze even though it should have been, looked, far too thick and heavy to move in such a way.

And he was looking at Bruce—at Batman—with barely disguised wonder.

He also wasn't saying anything.

Simply leaving would do Bruce no good, as grating as it was to acknowledge it; the alien could catch up to him within an instant, no matter what method of locomotion he used.

Bruce tried anyway. At the absolute least, whatever the hell it was the alien had to say to Batman didn't need to be said at street level.

He grappled, swung, grappled again and allowed his own velocity to assist as the line retracted; a slightly broader arc to the cape caught just enough air to let him adjust his vector of motion, and his boots came down on precisely the cornice he'd been aiming for, the edge of the roof of the tallest building on the block.

But before he could even decide whether to lead the alien farther, Clark came down in front of him, curls wild from the speed he'd used to do it, touching down gently as he allowed gravity to take hold of him again.

Enough, Bruce decided.

"Why are you here," he gritted out.

"Oh," Clark said, like the idiot he was. "I just—I wanted to talk to you."

Jesus fucking Christ.

"Talk," Bruce repeated, in the Bat's ferocious growl.

"Yes," Clark said. "I—you recognize me, right? Not that you should," he amended quickly, "but I've—run into you out here before. I saw you, and I asked—" He stopped, throat working briefly. "I asked someone about you, and I tried to search for information about you, but there wasn't very much, and most of it contradicted itself. And I've—I'm—"

"Superman," Bruce said.

"Yes," Clark said, shifting his weight a little. "But it's—complicated for me, a little bit. So I wanted to ask you why you do it. This, I mean. Some of the things people have said about you are—very unkind. But you keep doing it. How do you know that it's the right choice, to do this?"

(—Christ, as if it weren't enough. He'd had to fucking show up out here, ready and willing to—

—to relate to, to understand, even this part of Bruce, and without even knowing that it was Bruce, as far as Bruce had been able to determine—)

"Wouldn't it be easier," Clark added, "to just stop?"

"No," Bruce said.

He hadn't intended to. He hadn't intended to give Clark any answer at all; he wanted to force this conversation to an unceremonious close, he wanted Clark to leave thoroughly unsatisfied and decide never to try again.

It was only—it was only that it had been impossible, instantly, to respond to that question in any other way.

(—no, it wouldn't be easier. How could it ever be easier, to stand by and do nothing; to know exactly what was happening in his city, to know there were innocent people who needed help and would not get it from anyone else, and not do anything—)

Clark was looking at him sharply now, intently.

"No," he repeated, slowly, as if testing the feel of the word in his mouth. "No, you—you wouldn't, would you? There isn't anyone else like you, in this city. I thought maybe there would be, when I went looking for more information about you, but there isn't. It's just you; and if you don't do something, maybe no one will. So you—you couldn't do anything else. You have to try."

He stopped, fell silent. He didn't look—happy, not precisely. But he looked—

He looked steadier, in some way Bruce couldn't define. He looked steadier, surer; resolved. As if he had been on the edge of some decision, when he'd done the stupidest and most frustrating thing he could have done and had come out here looking for Batman, and now that decision had been made, one way or another.

"Okay," he said, softly, more to himself than to Batman. And then he cleared his throat, and looked at Bruce again, and added, "Thanks. Thank you."

Intolerable. Bruce gave him Batman's most impassive stare, and then turned, took three sharp strides and leapt from the middle of the short edge of the roof, shooting a fresh grapnel as he went.

This time, at least, the alien had the sense not to keep fucking following him.

Christ. This could not, could not, keep happening. Bruce needed to re-establish some kind of sane distance between himself and the alien; and he needed to do it as rapidly and as decisively as possible, before—

Before he lost the capacity for it entirely.

 

 

---

 

 

Clark felt—not good, but better, a little, by the time he returned to the penthouse.

He'd been so sure of himself, at first. He wanted to help people, to help humans, and he could; he could hear and see so much, now that he was letting himself, and there were so many of them who needed things—things he could give them, and so easily, and because he was what he was instead of in spite of it.

He had—he had helped, sometimes, in Smallville. When he could, when there were accidents; farm equipment was so heavy, and it was so easy for him to lift it and so hard for humans to. But it had felt as if it were just another part of the pretense of Clark Kent: a thing he must throw off, a thing he must let go of, when his people came, when he was revealed as that which he had been all along. Kal-El of Krypton; abomination; proof of heresy; purposeless.

He should have known better.

And then—

Then the doubt had come creeping steadily back in, the uncertainty. Bruce had been so distant, gone if anything more often than he had been before, and when he was there, so oddly unfamiliar. The Council, too, had been—it had been easy, in a way, to say what he thought and felt in the moment. But their caution to him, the implicit assertion that they recognized that in some fundamental way he had chosen to no longer be fully Kryptonian and that they therefore disavowed him, had shaken him anyway—the part of himself that had always wanted so badly to somehow prove himself, to make his own Kryptonianness so thoroughly manifest that they would all weep and apologize and agree that he had never been an abomination after all.

And in a way, he'd gone to the same place he had always gone for comfort.

Nightwing—Batman. The stories he'd loved so dearly as a boy, the hero who had once protected Kandor from darkness, in the old days before the Codex when all Kryptonians had been walking around imperfect; the figure he'd seen in the night, abruptly and entirely real, like a sign that Clark had found the place that was meant for him after all, that all his childhood dreams could still come true.

He didn't—he didn't really know any more than he had before. He didn't know whether he would be able to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong between him and Bruce, if he could even identify it at all. He didn't know whether he would even—be allowed to remain on Earth, whether he could stay; whether Bruce would want him to, would agree to let him; whether he could keep being Superman, whether it was a mistake even to have begun.

But he felt—soothed, somewhere within himself, simply to have done it at all. Simply to have found Batman, and spoken to him; simply to know that he was not alone, in what he did and what he wanted to do, in what he hoped to become to the people of Earth.

He touched down on the balcony, and stood there for a moment, looking through the glass doors. It had long since grown dark, but he'd—he'd left the lights on, and the living area was bright and open and empty in front of him. He remembered seeing it for the first time, looking at it with the eyes of a stranger; how little he'd known about anything, then, how little he'd understood.

He opened the balcony door, and went inside.

He didn't know when Bruce would come back, if he came back at all. But there was no harm in waiting a little longer, Clark thought, just in case he did.

Clark removed the cape, put on a shirt and a pair of pants; if Bruce did come back, Clark wouldn't pass up the opportunity to undress with him, however remote it might seem. If he could only—get Bruce to hold still for a minute, to tell him what it was that was wrong, perhaps the night could still end well.

He sat down on the edge of the sofa, leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. He couldn't pass the time by calling Aunt Martha; even in Kansas, it was far too late, verging on far too early. He could—take Siraya to fly a little? It was a clear, fine night; but no, if Bruce did return then Clark didn't want to miss it, didn't want to come back only to find Bruce had already fallen asleep—

The sound of the elevator doors opening startled him. He blinked, came to his feet and turned. "Oh—Bruce."

Bruce smiled, but Clark felt himself flinch from it. It wasn't—the right smile; it did not reach Bruce's eyes at all. "Pretty sure I said don't wait up, but I guess I shouldn't complain."

"Bruce," Clark said carefully.

"See, the thing is, I changed my mind," Bruce said, in a warm pleasant tone that seemed unfathomably, jarringly out of place. "You were right: we do need to talk. Because you seem like maybe you're getting the wrong idea about this whole thing, and it occurred to me that it's like—I really do need to say so, right? Because for all that you picked out a nice little human name for yourself, and you're so interested in pretending you're one of us, you aren't. You know?"

Clark swallowed. He should—listen. This was what he'd wanted: for Bruce to talk to him, to tell him what the matter was. "Yes," he made himself say. "Yes, of course. I know that."

"There's all kinds of things I'd normally do," Bruce told him. "Cues I'd use—cues I've been trying to use. But I should've figured you wouldn't pick up on them, or you wouldn't understand them even if you did notice them. That's on me, hundred percent."

"Cues," Clark repeated. "Cues to—tell me—?"

"We fucked," Bruce said, "and it was great and all, but the thing you need to realize is it doesn't mean anything."

Clark felt a great awful wave, hot and cold and then hot again, move through him, from his guts to his face to the tips of his toes. He said nothing; he couldn't.

"I'm sure ol' Mrs. Kent fed you some serious fairytale bullshit," Bruce added mildly, "when she was telling you all about human marriage over her kitchen table in Kansas. But that's not how anything actually works, okay?"

Clark's throat felt impossibly tight. He swallowed, once and then again. It did not help.

He had—he had some idea what that meant. Not only from movies, but from books; Aunt Martha had read to him, when he had first been endeavoring to learn English, and she'd started with simple books, books for very small children, and then had moved up to things like—like fairytales. Kisses, and true love, and happily ever after.

But he knew that was not how things worked. Of course he did.

"Of course," he said, as evenly as he could. "This marriage was always as much a Kryptonian marriage as it was a human marriage. It was formed in order to legally enforce the parameters of an arrangement. Sentiments like love are permissible, a pleasant surprise if they should happen to arise, but nothing a Kryptonian would expect—"

"Mm," Bruce said, and smiled, very, very wide. "Not a real Kryptonian, though, are you? Abomination and all, I mean."

It was a blow, and one for which Clark had not been prepared in the least. He had come to—to believe, however gradually, that Bruce did not care about such a thing, that in Bruce's eyes such a label had no real meaning. That it did not matter to Bruce at all, except

(—I mean, I asked. I wanted to know more about it. I wanted to know more about you—)

in that it had mattered to Clark.

But apparently he had been wrong; and to know it was staggering, agonizing. To know it hurt.

"The dead parents thing doesn't really set you apart in this room," Bruce was adding, shifting his weight forward into his toes, bouncing as if idly on the balls of his feet. "Mine bit it, too. Did you know that?"

"I—yes," Clark managed. "Bruce—"

"Ah, but you don't, though. That's the thing, you don't. Because when it happened to me," Bruce said—levelly, horribly, smiling smiling smiling—"the only world that ended was mine."

Clark swallowed.

He didn't—he didn't know what was happening, or why; he didn't know why Bruce was saying these things to him now, why he was doing it in this way. But he—

He could, in that moment, almost grasp what Bruce meant, the awful twisted logic of it. He could imagine how much worse it would have been, a relentless selfish agony that would never quite have gone away, if no one else had lost anything at all; if Mother and Father had been taken from him forever, and yet there had been no proportional cataclysm to match the implosive collapse in the core of him. If he had—if he had simply had to go on living with it, all the rest of his world unchanged around him and an endlessly bleeding wound in the middle of him.

"Seriously, I don't see why you get to be so tortured about everything all the time," Bruce said. "I mean, I never had a guild either, right? I never had a purpose, I never had a place I'd been made for. I had to make that for myself—"

He stopped, so abruptly Clark would have been startled even if the words themselves hadn't caught at him already.

Clark had—Clark had only just begun to figure out how to try to do such a thing. He'd had no idea that Bruce felt the same way about his company, or about the work he did there; but surely that was what he meant?

Bruce had gone very still. He was no longer smiling. His throat moved; his gaze had fallen from Clark, and now leapt back to him, all at once.

"I—should have," he said, "that's what I—that's what I meant. I should have," and he shrugged, but it wasn't—it was stiff, awkward. "Never had what it took, I guess."

As if, what? As if he thought that was the thing Clark would not understand? As if Clark did not know exactly what it meant, how it felt, to believe you would never accomplish such a thing, what it might look like or where to begin?

"That isn't true, Bruce," he said quietly, and took a step forward; another, when Bruce didn't turn from him, didn't come up with some excuse and rush back to the elevator. "That isn't true. Whether you—feel anything, or—you don't want to touch me again, or—it doesn't matter: you have a place wherever I am."

"No," Bruce said, so calmly Clark almost did not understand it.

"Bruce—"

"No," and Bruce took a sharp step toward him, caught him by the front of his shirt and shoved at him, knuckles hard against his collarbones. "There's nothing here. There's nothing here for you, there never will be—"

"Bruce," Clark said helplessly, and Bruce's face twisted as if he were in terrible pain; and then he pulled very hard on Clark's shirt, jerked Clark in toward him and—and kissed him.

Not like he had before, long and deep and intent. This was—there were more teeth, blunt and harsh against Clark's lip, and he could hear the hard catch of Bruce's breath, and Bruce's hands were fists, clenched, implacable, but they were also shaking.

Clark lifted his own hands to cover them, smoothed his thumbs across the trembling line of Bruce's knuckles, and said into Bruce's mouth, "Wait. Bruce, wait, just—"

Bruce tore away from him. "I can't," he said, hoarse and strange.

Clark understood nothing. He felt sick, sore, broken open. He had followed Bruce's motion as best he could, and he still had Bruce's hands beneath his own even though Bruce had released his shirt; he squeezed them, mindless, coaxing, and said, "Can't what? Please—"

"I can't," Bruce said again.

And he stepped away, pulled free of Clark's hands—reached for his finger, for the ring, the ring he had had to put on himself because Clark had not been given the chance to; and he drew it from his hand, and set it down on the edge of the bright gleaming kitchen counter as he passed it, and he left.

 

 

---

 

 

Clark stood there alone in the quiet for what felt like a long time.

He could not look away from the ring. He did not know why. He could not bring himself to move closer to it, to touch it, and yet something in him rebelled equally at the idea of leaving it there, of Bruce coming back here and finding it and believing Clark had not—had not cared that he had left it, had also turned his back on it and walked away.

In the end, he made himself go to it, and he picked it up. It no longer felt warm at all; too much time had passed since Bruce had taken it off his hand.

Clark closed his hand around it, and put it into his pocket, and then, equally reasonless, equally foolish, could not bring himself to let go of it. He was—he could not stay here, could not bear to get into the bed alone and try to sleep. But if he flew away somewhere, and it fell from his pocket—no. No.

He kept his hand there, and he held Bruce's ring between his thumb and his fingertips. He went back out onto the balcony, and flew only the barest distance, with Bruce's ring pinned carefully the entire time: to the roof, that was all.

Siraya lifted her head, as he approached her nest, and made a sleepy curious noise.

"It's all right," he told her in Kryptonian. "It's just me," and he climbed over the twisted metal edge of her nest, curled up against her forelimbs and laid his head against her shoulder; and she made another soft uncertain sound, but did not shift him off, blew a warm breath through his hair and then twisted her head to scratch her face a little, and then she went back to sleep.

He did not.

The sky changed. The horizon began gradually to brighten; the stars faded, one by one. Clark lay there with Siraya, and kept his fingers pressed to the shape of Bruce's ring in his pocket, and watched the world move around him.

And then, with perhaps an hour left before sunrise, he heard a sound.

The elevator to the penthouse.

His throat closed. He bit at his mouth, and then rose, very carefully, and Siraya made a murmuring sound and shifted a little but didn't wake.

Bruce was moving quickly, and almost silently—but not quite. Clark listened, only just closely enough to hear the swift soft sounds of his steps against the carpeting, and then, familiar: the shush of cloth, the tiny slippery tap of buttons. The sheets on the bed, brushing against each other.

Clark waited until it had all stopped, gone still. And then he rose from the roof, and came down as quietly as he could on the balcony.

He opened the door. Bruce must have heard it; but from here, at this angle, Clark could see into the bedroom, Bruce's side of the bed, and the shape of Bruce beneath the covers did not move.

Clark went inside. He did not touch his own clothes, did not want to wait a moment and did not want to blast the spun-glass quiet apart with superspeed.

He lowered himself down, and slid into the bed next to Bruce; and Bruce did not move, and Clark lay there and felt so relieved, so fiercely frantically grateful, his eyes stung.

 

 

When they woke—when they pretended to wake—Clark carefully took his cues from Bruce.

Or at least he tried to. Bruce was acting normal, almost impossibly so. Clark did not know how he was doing it, nor why; he could not do the same, knew he was too quiet and was watching Bruce too much, but he could at least carefully fail to bring up the night before, and he did.

Bruce did not bring it up either. He had his coffee. He complained about his schedule, meetings and an interview taping. His PA had reminded him, and therefore by extension had reminded Clark, that they would be putting in an appearance tonight at the last of a concert series being held in Gotham. The negotiations with the Kryptonians were quietly expected to be complete within days; this appearance was intended to be straightforward and extremely public, but relatively undemanding.

Clark nodded along, and did his best to smile, to come close to it, whenever Bruce smiled at him. He hoped it could—could at least serve to reassure Bruce that Clark could be trusted not to press him, not to demand anything of him that he did not want to give.

He had thought, once, that he had a great deal left to learn about Bruce. But he understood now that it was more than that: there was a great deal of Bruce that was—that was hidden from him, tucked tightly away where Bruce had never intended it to be seen, and whether Clark would ever be allowed to see it was a question Clark was not sure he wanted to know the answer to.

He did not try to kiss Bruce. He managed to catch Bruce's hand for a moment, around Bruce's empty coffee mug, and squeezed it just a little as he said goodbye. Bruce smiled at him, and said, "Yeah, see you later," and Clark did not know whether he meant it. Clark did not know anything.

In the end, he lost half the day himself, not to meetings or an interview but to a great deal of flooding in Bangladesh. But he lifted the last person to safety with hours to spare before the concert would begin.

He was—nervous. He did not know what to expect. He tried not to wonder whether Bruce would—would even show up, or would have vanished again, would at last blow Clark himself off as he had blown off so many appointments and meetings and parties, claiming it was no big deal, seeming never to think twice about it.

But Bruce returned to the penthouse while Clark was still getting dressed. There had been a suit laid out across the bed for each of them, presumably selected by someone Bruce employed; but Clark's had had no tie, and Bruce owned so many ties, Clark had not known how to even choose.

Bruce picked one for him, and even—told him to stand still, looped it over his head and then tied it himself, hands easy and sure as he knotted it smoothly over Clark's chest. He made himself ready in perhaps half the time it had taken Clark, and looked twice as good.

They were driven to the concert hall early enough to answer a handful of questions outside; it had been part of their schedule for the night, pre-arranged.

Clark hadn't thought to worry about it. But the very first reporter to speak shouted at Bruce, "Where's your ring, Mr. Wayne?" and Clark felt a quick cold stab of panic.

(—he still had it. He'd moved it from one pocket to the next, when he'd changed his clothes; had tucked it away into a corner of the undersuit that was normally closed, which had opened to allow it when he had asked it to.

He hadn't given it back. Bruce hadn't asked for it. What if Bruce didn't want it back? What if he said so now? What if he became—sharp the way he had before, vicious and unfamiliar, a stranger all over again—)

Bruce blinked into the flashing cameras, and smiled. "Oh, yeah, real shame—it was giving me the worst calluses. Manicurist couldn't take it anymore, poor thing, so I sent it off to get resized."

A lie. All of it, every word, a lie. But—

But surely it wasn't precisely a bad thing, that he wasn't—telling them outright that Clark was a fool, decent enough to fuck but a poor husband, that there's nothing here and there never will be.

Inside the concert hall, when the questions were over, they were shown to the section of reserved seating all the way up next to where the orchestra would soon be.

There were two seats beside them that were specially marked, and Clark glanced at them and then had to try hard not to make a face; the little folded labels propped up on them said Luthor, 1 and Luthor, 2.

It could be someone else. But the only person named Luthor that Clark had ever met was Alexander Luthor, Jr—and the way he had spoken, when he'd come up to Bruce and Clark at their not-quite-wedding-reception, still made Clark viscerally uncomfortable to remember. Running into him again was the last thing Clark needed, tonight.

But: the seats were empty, at least for the moment. All the seats around them were empty, in point of fact. A relief in more than one way; it meant he and Bruce were able to sit quietly together without anyone near enough to speak to them, and without needing to worry they would be overheard if they spoke, either.

Clark risked a glance. Bruce was sitting back easily in his chair, as if relaxed.

But that couldn't possibly be how he was actually feeling. It was startling all over again, disconcerting, to look at him like this and to understand what must be there but was not showing, not even in the smallest degree. It should, perhaps, have been frustrating, or even frightening.

(—how often had Bruce been lying to him, just like this: not with words, but with his face, his body, the way he moved, the way he smiled? Had any of it been real at all?)

But all Clark could think, looking at Bruce beside him, was—how badly he wanted to be on the other side of the mask, with Bruce; how badly he wanted to close a distance he had for so long not even known was there.

He only really realized he'd begun to move in the moment that he did it. He found himself taking Bruce's hand, and it was a gesture he had made before, a gesture Bruce had made before, at events just like this one, though admittedly more often because there was at least one camera pointed at them.

There were no cameras now, though, and—

And Bruce was sitting to Clark's right, which meant his nearer hand, the hand that Clark had taken and was holding, was his left: the hand where Bruce's ring no longer was.

Bruce was looking down at their hands, his own bare, Clark's both helplessly wrapped around it, Clark's ring where it still circled Clark's own finger. The concert hall was—was beginning to truly fill around them, the hour of the performance approaching at last.

But when Bruce looked up, it was not at the people nearby seeking out their own seats, and it was not at the stage where the orchestra was only just beginning to set up.

It was at Clark.

Bruce's expression was utterly blank, thoroughly unreadable. He looked staggeringly attractive like this, in one of the fine three-piece suits that fit him so well, a sharp white dress shirt; he hadn't shaved since the morning, and there was stubble coming in along the line of his jaw, and Clark had a half-formed memory of—touching it, feeling it rub along his own face just before Bruce had kissed him when they were—

Bruce's eyes were intent, and seemed very dark. Clark wanted to touch him so much more and couldn't, and as if to make up the difference, he found his senses expanding themselves: he could pick out the finest of the wrinkles that had settled into the corners of Bruce's eyes, each shade of brown and almost-green that made up the dark hazel color; he could hear Bruce's breath, the brush of his eyelashes as he blinked and the soft wet sound of his throat as he swallowed, the beat of his heart in his chest, and—

And something that was making a very tiny click; click; click.

Clark sucked in a breath.

Bruce's eyebrows drew together sharply. "Clark," he said, "what's—"

Clark did not need to look. He could tell where it was, its exact dimensions. He did not know whether Bruce's weight coming up off the seat would set it off, or whether it was clicking because somewhere inside it there was a timer. He forced the world to freeze around him, and he ducked down, reached behind Bruce's knees and grabbed the device and then lunged to his feet and leapt into the air.

He went straight through the roof of the building, and did not regret it: it had had something to do with Bruce's weight after all, somehow. He barely had enough time to pry at it with his bare fingertips, peeling up part of the casing that contained it, undeniably a Kryptonian alloy—and then it exploded in his face.

Except, of course, it didn't. It imploded, the bright sharp blue-white of the Phantom Zone, collapsing in on itself, and he would have cried out except it dragged the breath from him; it felt as if it were peeling him apart, a terrible sucking pressure, but he only had to withstand it for a moment, he knew, and then the implosive rift would collapse on itself—

And then it did, and was gone, and left him hanging there in the dark sky, gasping.

It had shredded apart his suit jacket, one shoulder and the chest of his dress shirt underneath; even, he realized with a dim pang, the tie that Bruce had tied for him. But the undersuit seemed to be essentially intact, underneath, and his slacks were also nearly whole—and he slid the piece of casing into one pocket, as he sank carefully back down through the hole he'd left in the ceiling of the concert hall.

There were dozens, hundreds, of faces upturned toward him, a swell of murmuring rising and growing louder, louder. But among them all, Clark could only really see Bruce: seated where Clark had left him, gazing up, face pale and set and giving nothing at all away.

 

 

The concert was canceled.

They returned to the penthouse in silence. Clark felt half afraid to touch his pockets, half afraid not to; in one was Bruce's ring, and in the other was the twisted piece of casing.

Kryptonian, again. But what did that mean? Who could it be? Dru-Zod had been so loud in saying his piece, in asserting again and again that he saw no value in humans or in forming an alliance with them, Clark would have believed it was him in a heartbeat—but he had asked, and Zod had sworn in the name of his house and his guild, and had promised so readily that if he had sought Bruce's death, then Bruce would have died already. Why would he have lied about such a thing? And why would he do it like this, use implosive devices and security drones, instead of simply walking up to Bruce and demanding Bruce engage him in combat? It made no sense; it had to be someone else—

"Is it you?"

Clark blinked. "What?" he said, uncomprehending. And then, in a single horrible lurch, he understood what Bruce was asking, and he turned sharply.

Bruce was standing there, a hand against the end of the kitchen counter by the entryway. He was pale and very still, and he was watching Clark with sharp, sharp eyes.

"No," Clark said unsteadily. "No. Bruce, please, I'd never—"

"It was Kryptonian," Bruce said, very level. "That blue energy, that was the same as the first time, the implosion in the Wayne Enterprises building. The drone, in Smallville—"

"Yes, they were—they were all Kryptonian," Clark admitted, "and I do not understand how that can be. It does not make any sense to me, but it is—it was not me."

Bruce did not move. Nothing in the set of his face changed.

Clark swallowed, throat aching, and shut his eyes. "But you have no reason to believe that," he agreed, very softly.

The quiet stretched between them, for a moment.

And then Bruce said, half-choked as if it had been torn from him, "I—want to."

Clark opened his eyes.

The spark of hope, small as it was, spurred him sharply into motion. He crossed the entryway toward Bruce, took his hands and said, "Please, Bruce, stay here. Do not—whoever it is who is doing this, whatever they intend to try next, if anything happens to you, I could not—I—"

Something passed across Bruce's face, sharp and strained. "Clark," he said unsteadily, and he lifted one hand free of Clark's and touched Clark's face, very lightly.

Clark leaned into it helplessly, screwed his eyes shut and tried to make himself think.

"I will fix this," he said. "Just—just give me a chance."

And then he released Bruce and threw himself into the air, hurtled away at superspeed; because he did not want to know what Bruce would have said next, because he could not bear to hear it.

 

 

He hoped he was right, to think the penthouse would be safe—at least as long as he was not in it.

Every time Bruce had been attacked, after all, Clark had been there with him. Perhaps it was just coincidence; but he could not afford to discount anything that might mean something.

He found a rooftop high above the city, and he removed the fragment of the casing and Bruce's ring from the pockets of his slacks, asked the undersuit to hold the ring for him and kept the casing in his hand, and then took them off and folded them neatly, and left them there on the roof.

However little he knew about Batman, he was sure of at least one thing: Batman paid attention to Gotham.

So he sank down to a sidewalk, in a part of the city he had never been to before. And he walked for a while—in the undersuit, the—Superman suit, tessellated deep blue and red, until there was no doubt that he had been seen; and then he walked a little more.

And within perhaps half an hour, he heard a very soft rustling sound, following him from above.

He stopped and turned around, and looked up. "I need your help," he said. "Please."

Quiet; and then a rapid scrabbling motion; and then Batman dropped silently from the roofline above him, swung down and landed in front of him with hardly more than a scuff against the pavement, though the black boots he wore were very heavy.

"You—probably already know this," Clark said, "but there was an incident at Gotham City Opera, about two hours ago. Someone tried to kill Bruce Wayne, for the third time since he married me. The device was destroyed, but I pulled a piece off of it first." He held it out.

Batman didn't move. "Take it to the authorities," he said, in that deep rolling growl.

"No," Clark said, too sharply, and then caught his breath, let it out again and shut his eyes for a moment and then said it again, more evenly. "No. I cannot do that. It is Kryptonian. Each time he has been—it has been a Kryptonian device, Kryptonian technology. But I need to know who, I need to know why, I need to—I need to be certain that all is as it appears to be. If it is truly my people who have done this, then your diplomats, your envoys, will have every right to reject any further negotiations, and to deny us refuge on your world. But if it is not—" He stopped, and shook his head. "There must be a chance. And I don't want this to get any worse than it has to, until I am certain I know the truth."

"And you think I can solve this," Batman said.

"You are a human," Clark said, "you can examine it using human methods. If I—what? Take that to a Kryptonian ship, and stick it into a Kryptonian machine, and say, 'Ah, yes, here, this clearly indicates that we could not possibly be to blame for this'—"

Batman exhaled. "Fine," he allowed. "And if everything I find points exactly where it looks like it points?"

"Then I—tried," Clark said softly. "I had to try."

And Batman looked at him, and then away—and then reached out, took the casing from his palm with one hand and with the other was already aiming upwards, one of those climbing devices of his, and within the space of a breath, he was back among the rooftops, as good as gone in the dark.

Clark shut his eyes.

"Thank you," he said, to the empty street, though there was no way Batman could hear him.

 

 

---

 

 

Bruce returned to the lake house at the upper limit of the Batmobile's speed.

It was a risk, doing this now. One of the last things Clark had said to him—to Bruce Wayne—had been stay here, and if Clark went straight back to the penthouse now, then he would, inevitably, find Bruce Wayne gone.

He might accept it. Or he might try to look for Bruce; he might use his powers to do it, believing it to be urgent, believing it to be necessary. He might, at last, locate Bruce here, and find everything.

But figuring out who was trying to kill him was more important. It had to be. Whether it was Clark or not.

(—it could still be Clark. It had to remain possible for it to be Clark, because if he ruled that out, not based on any objective evidence but simply because he wanted so badly to decide that it could not be Clark, that Clark had been telling him the truth all along—simply because of his fucking feelings—)

He'd rushed to get here, to suit up and go and find out what the fuck it was Clark thought he was doing strolling around the middle of the Bowery in the Superman suit, without contacting Alfred in advance. But Alfred had joined him nevertheless, on comms, halfway through; Bruce had been able to tell, some change in the quality of the quiet coming through his earpiece.

He came in through the lake, now, only just giving the water time to recede from the entryway before plowing through it and down into the tunnel. He pulled in, leapt out, begrudged himself every instant of extraneous logistical necessity.

"Three times, sir," Alfred said sharply, as Bruce passed him. "You didn't tell me there had been a second—"

"I know," Bruce bit out, and then stopped himself, breathed, forced himself to meet Alfred's eyes. "I hadn't—intended to keep it from you."

Alfred's face softened fractionally at the concession.

"But I need to deal with this as quickly as possible."

"Yes, Master Wayne," Alfred agreed after a moment, shockingly cooperative; and Bruce pulled the cowl off and kept going.

He removed the rest of the armor and changed his clothes before he sat down, because if he needed to get out of here in a hurry, to return to the penthouse or to deal with Clark, it would be better not to have it—to give himself options, room to lie.

(—as if he had any right to insist on suspecting Clark of anything, to assert that he could not afford to trust Clark; as if he had been trustworthy, as if he had in any respect demonstrated genuine integrity Clark had failed to match—)

But he had the piece of casing Clark had given him, from the device; and he had the portable interface the ship had made for him.

He selected a worktable, set down the twisted fragment of metal with one hand and the portable interface device with the other. He kept the command key with him at all times, because he hadn't been able to work out any more secure place to keep it, anywhere else where he could be certain he would know if the alien attempted to retrieve it; he removed it from the hidden panel in the Batsuit where he had tucked it away, and he slid it into the portable interface.

And, after a moment, Lara appeared beside him.

She loaded, default; and then lifted her head, blinking, and looked for him, found him.

"Analysis of the drone is complete," she said. "The primary data core was indeed destroyed when my son stopped the drone. Analysis of the external surface and available secondary data indicates that it reached you in Kansas after traveling a significant distance through this world's atmosphere at extremely high speeds. Assessments of its likely origin point meet your requested metrics for certainty: it is probable that it departed from within ten of your miles of this location." And then she glanced down at the surface of the worktable, frowning slightly, and said, "What is this?"

Ten miles; that covered an unfortunately large chunk of Gotham, almost certainly part of Metropolis—and probably, within some margin of error, the main Kryptonian vessel itself, along with the scout ship. Not, ultimately, all that much use to him in narrowing down a suspect.

"It's a piece retrieved from an implosive device," Bruce said, "that was used earlier tonight to try to kill me again."

Lara glanced at him, and then back at the fragment of casing. "The portable interface device renders me capable of basic data collection," she said. "There is a limited amount I can tell you. The alloy is indeed Kryptonian; the stress patterns within the metal, and the trace energy I can detect, both confirm exposure to an implosive rift of the Phantom Zone."

"Kryptonian," Bruce repeated, staring at it.

Of course it was. He hadn't expected anything else.

But which Kryptonian would—would even have known Bruce and Clark would be present within Gotham City Opera, let alone which seats had been reserved for them? Which Kryptonian would have cared? Easy to imagine one of them—General Zod, in all his fury in the Canadian Arctic—wanting Bruce out of the way; far more difficult to imagine them somehow successfully navigating human practices like ticketing, like reservations, in order to do it.

No. There was something he had overlooked, somewhere. There had to be.

He shut his eyes. He was experiencing the faint nagging sensation of some detail attempting to rise to the level of his conscious awareness.

He focused; pictured the concert hall within the opera house, the precise location where he and Clark had been seated, the people who had been moving around them. Had he recognized someone specific? No, that wasn't it. Had he observed something about their position within the hall that suggested a particular potential means of access to their seats? He reviewed the scene again; nothing jumped out at him. He forced himself to revisit every detail, one at a time: the precise sensation of the seat beneath him, the conditioned air as it had moved around him, Clark's—Clark's hands, against his; the open stage in front of them, the empty seats beside them—

The small markers, on the two seats directly adjacent to him, that had been labeled Luthor.

He opened his eyes.

Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor, who'd been preoccupied, overt about it even for him, at their reception

(—Remarkable, isn't it, how much they look like us? How much they look like people? If anyone's the inferior copy here, it's us. With our feet stuck on the ground, with our breakable little bodies—)

and who could easily have had a member of his own PR team inquire with one of Bruce's people, someone who'd never have any reason to believe it was anything but an earnest attempt to coordinate; who'd have readily informed them that Bruce and Clark would be appearing at the concert hall that evening, something that was about to be public knowledge in any case. And the drone—

The drone had, according to Lara, almost certainly come from somewhere in or near Metropolis. And had done it—Christ, had done it the day Bruce and Clark had blown off that LexCorp reception. That LexCorp brunch reception; they'd been an hour behind, in Kansas. Luthor must not have known where they were, hadn't heard they'd taken off unexpectedly—or had, Bruce thought, but had considered it unsubstantiated. Had anyone caught a photo of them over Gotham, as they left? Or had Clark simply been moving too fast? If Luthor had been monitoring flights, Bruce Wayne's private jets, instead, perhaps he simply hadn't known for certain; had prepared the drone anyway, just in case, and hadn't realized it would be capable of reorienting itself to a target six states away in its attempt to carry out his instructions.

And the first time, the Wayne Enterprises tower—

Bruce moved past Lara to the monitor attached to the worktable, brought up the goddamn security logs one more time. He hadn't been looking for Luthor at all; he'd been searching for something, anything, that might have given him some indication of a Kryptonian moving too fast to see, or of—of Clark having done it, vanishing during some split second when Bruce and Lois Lane had had their attention on each other instead of on him.

But there it was. A LexCorp R&D rep had been in the building that day: had deposited what had been registered as a prototype for presentation to a joint project management team, to be stored in the secure corporate research area. One floor below the executive lounge in which they had held the interview.

And a Kryptonian, Bruce thought distantly, would have known Clark would be able to see through the floor, through Bruce's seat in the concert hall, and locate the devices. They, presumably, had data, records, a clear understanding of everything a yellow sun did to alter their biology.

But Luthor might not have. Kal-El had demonstrated the strength, the speed, the laser vision and the invulnerability, for the world to see; had certainly made mention of the senses publicly, but had the specific details ever emerged? Bruce had been analyzing the evidence at least as thoroughly as Luthor could have been, and still hadn't been certain of the true extent of Clark's abilities until Clark had willingly confirmed it for him, the night of the reception, had told him in the car—and then had demonstrated it for him so thoroughly, so indelibly, the day that device had gone off in the Wayne Enterprises building.

And that had to tip the balance of the evidence toward Luthor, even if Bruce couldn't begin to guess how he'd gotten his hands on two Phantom Zone devices, on a functioning Kryptonian security drone. He must have hedged his bets; if Clark couldn't find the device in the concert hall, then Luthor hadn't wanted to take that reserved seat two feet away, would never have risked himself. But if Clark could find it, and did, then Luthor had planted the seeds of deflection: he'd reserved seats that very same night, and simply hadn't yet arrived; how lucky, that he hadn't been right there when the device went off, that the alien had been able to find it and save his buddy Brucie.

Still, even if Bruce was right—the question of provenance did matter. Luthor couldn't plausibly have stolen all of it; the Phantom Zone devices, perhaps, but not the security drone. Judging by the difficulty that top-level NSERC researchers had had in the Arctic, getting inside the scout ship without getting cut into pieces—and they had been working on it for months. No, it was implausible that Luthor had somehow managed to get his hands on a drone, from either the main Kryptonian vessel or the Kryptonian scout ship, without a Kryptonian's help, their authorization, something, to prevent the drone from eliminating Luthor himself.

Which brought him back to the same problem he had had all along: why would a Kryptonian have done such a thing? As far as Bruce could tell, the Kryptonians who didn't care to negotiate with humanity in good faith were very, very loud about it—General Zod being the foremost example. Clark had very clearly been picking and choosing which of the sentiments he had expressed, up in Canada, to translate with accuracy versus with a certain artistic license; and the overall force of his opinion had nevertheless been obvious, to Bruce. Zod simply hadn't considered humans worth his time. So why would he exert himself to cooperate with one? Why would he hand over Kryptonian technology to one—the same Kryptonian technology he hadn't wanted to allow DARPA or NSERC to access freely?

Bruce looked up.

Lara—the projection of Lara—was still standing there patiently. She had glanced at the screen, as he'd brought up those security records for himself, and then had watched his face, but had said nothing, hadn't interrupted him.

"Speculate," Bruce said aloud. "Were you—was Lara Lor-Van—personally familiar with General Dru-Zod of Krypton?"

Lara frowned, just a little. "Yes," she said slowly. "Have you—met him?"

"Memorably, yes," Bruce said. "I came away with the strong impression that he is extremely frustrated by your High Council's decision to marry your son to me and proceed with negotiations with humanity. Does that align with your recollection of him?"

"It does," Lara said, and her mouth pressed itself into a grim line.

"Do you believe he would, under any circumstances, cooperate with an individual human to achieve a goal?"

He felt reasonably sure he already knew the answer.

But to his surprise, Lara seemed to hesitate; opened her mouth, closed it again, wet it and met his eyes and said, "It is—possible. If it were the only course open to him, the only means by which he believed he could preserve Krypton, then he would do anything. Anything, no matter how personally repugnant he found it. That is how he was made.

"Even a Kryptonian who disagreed with a ruling of the Council would nevertheless abide by it, because it would be inconceivable to do otherwise except under the most extraordinary circumstances. But your death—your death would dissolve your marriage to my son, would dissolve the protections granted to humanity by that marriage under Kryptonian law, and would therefore remove the foundations upon which the Council's decisions thus far have rested."

"And killing me personally," Bruce said slowly, "would do the same thing, but—too directly. Too proactively."

"Yes," Lara said. "But to allow certain technology to fall into the hands of one of your kind, ostensibly in ignorance of whatever they might or might not intend to do with it—a far more psychologically comfortable position, far easier to justify."

Bruce turned it over in his head. "Luthor tried this," he said after a moment, "because he doesn't trust your people, because he doesn't want the rest of us to trust you either. He wouldn't be trying to frame Kryptonians for my death otherwise—he wants your people to be blamed for it. Why would Zod help him do that?"

Lara raised her eyebrows, and spread her hands apart. "Why not? What does he care what your people think? You are native fauna, to be exterminated before your world is transformed into a new Krypton. What is the good opinion of your kind worth to him? Why should he want to be trusted by you, or care whether he is not? What will it even matter, if he can, through your death, free himself from the constraints placed upon him by the Council and our laws?"

And when she put it like that—

"Fair enough," Bruce said evenly. "And the warrior guild—without Krypton, you said, they are dangerous."

"Yes," Lara agreed, grave.

And Bruce looked at her, and then down at the fragment of the casing that lay in front of him on the worktable, and tried to decide what the hell he was going to do.

(—if it wasn't, if it really hadn't ever been, Clark—if—if—)

 

 

---

 

 

Bruce returned to the penthouse within a few hours.

He'd wanted to spend a little longer reviewing what he knew, with Lara's help; pinning down the details, an approximate timetable, to ensure that it all genuinely lined up the way he had thought it did.

(It did.)

He was expecting, in the part of himself that always required him to prepare himself for the worst, for Clark to appear at any moment, to come blasting down through the ceiling of the Cave and demand to know what he was doing.

But it didn't happen.

Clark was—waiting for him, instead.

The next-likeliest option, Bruce had assumed, was that Clark would be ready to accost him the moment he walked through the doors.

But that wasn't how it happened either.

He went inside. There was no one in the living room. Clark was—he had seated himself on the end of the bed, instead, his own side; and judging by the look on his face, his wide uncertain eyes, the sculptural twist of his torso, he'd heard the elevator, the doors, and jerked around—hadn't used the speed to do it, and was only just finding Bruce with his eyes.

(The only way to be certain was to test. To test, again and again, over and over; to search for weaknesses, for cracks, because they'd expose themselves in time anyway, because the only thing you could was make sure you weren't taken by surprise when they did—)

"Sorry," Bruce said, mild. "Just—had to clear my head, you know."

Clark seemed, with a moment's effort, to rein himself in, to compose himself; he blinked, and swallowed, and wet his mouth, carefully folded his hands over each other. "No, that's—fine," he said, almost evenly. "I was worried, that is all."

"Surprised you didn't listen for me," Bruce said, "look for me, if you were so worried."

(—again and again; the only way to be certain—)

Clark looked away, shuttered his eyes. "I did not think you would want me to," he said softly, and then his gaze rose again, fastened itself on Bruce's face. "But I—if you—if anything tries to hurt you, Bruce, please. Please, call for me, and I will come."

Bruce made a show of thinking it over, tilting his head consideringly. "Well, since you're three for three so far, it would be kind of stupid of me to turn that down," he said at last.

"Thank you," Clark said, low.

And Bruce—

Bruce abruptly couldn't stand to—

"Listen," he said, in Bruce Wayne's warmest and least dismissive tones. "It got heavy, for a bit there. It's weird right now. I get it. But I genuinely don't want to actually get murdered, so."

And Clark accepted the deliberate release of tension for what it was, generous as ever; breathed out half a laugh, through his nose, and the taut line of his shoulders began to bend just a little.

"Come on," Bruce added, with something approximating gentleness. "Lie down."

And Clark did it.

He was wearing the undersuit, nothing else; he'd slept in it many times. He rose, lifted the covers for himself, slid beneath the sheets—turned, immediately, onto his side so that he faced Bruce, head against the pillow, hands folded absently beneath his cheek.

And he lay there and watched, quietly, as Bruce moved around the room for a minute: took off his shoes, shed his suit jacket, his socks, his slacks. Bruce called it at briefs, dress shirt on with only a few buttons undone, and rolled the sleeves up to his elbows.

(—no point in attempting to press further. He'd deliberately cut Clark a break, and to switch gears now would be difficult to rationalize. Besides, if Clark by some chance took him up on it, then he would have to—go through with it, perform, and he didn't—

—it didn't feel—

—it didn't feel right, to—)

He shut off the lights, and got into the bed himself, facing Clark.

And they lay there, looking at each other silently in the dimness, until Bruce reached out—covered one of Clark's hands with his own, and deliberately, demonstratively, shut his eyes; and then he forced himself to lie still, to think of nothing at all, until he fell asleep.

 

 

The negotiations with the Kryptonians wrapped up within two days.

Earlier than expected, earlier than even the most optimistic estimates Bruce had cobbled together based on the chatter he had been picking up. There were, granted, certain formalities remaining to be addressed; but the bulk of the heavy lifting had been done, and there was a sudden tremendous push, behind the scenes, to set the stage for a final announcement.

Bruce and Clark were, naturally, going to have to take a central position on that stage. The details were relayed within the last twenty-four hours: a security measure, which was understandable enough.

Clark would be present at the last official meeting between the High Council of Krypton and the representatives of humanity—which would be broadcast live from the building that housed the UN headquarters in Metropolis. There would then be a followup: a public event arranged to celebrate the alliance between Kryptonians and Earth, one last opportunity to schmooze, congratulate and be congratulated, shake a hundred hands in half an hour. That would be held in Gotham; and Bruce would be there, waiting to greet his husband publicly.

A countdown, effectively, to Luthor's last chance to remove Bruce from the field of play. Bruce spent it on tenterhooks—and judging by the way Clark's gaze kept sliding into the middle distance, the way he flinched occasionally at what was presumably the loudness of some sound too far away for Bruce to hear, he was doing the same: monitoring, helplessly, relentlessly, for anything, the sound of a Kryptonian drone or the wings of a war kite, the hum of energy from the Phantom Zone.

But they reached the morning of the day itself without incident. The calm before the storm, undoubtedly; but Bruce wasn't going to turn it down.

Bruce and Clark had to part relatively early; Clark was intended to be present at the UN building well in advance of the actual public proceedings, and the same held for Bruce, who had been told to arrive at the park where the followup event would be held three hours early in order for certain photo ops to be arranged without an unsightly actual crowd, and who had already estimated that Bruce Wayne ought to be at least half an hour late.

Clark didn't need a car, naturally. He would simply leave from the penthouse balcony.

Bruce saw him out. It was only reasonable. They were still on uncertain terms with each other, but it would be stranger not to do it.

(—and he—

he didn't want to leave it that way, goddammit; when there was still so much he didn't know, when anything might happen, when there was every chance Clark might be too far away to save him this time—)

And Clark—closed his hands just a little too tightly over Bruce's, and didn't seem inclined to let go.

"Hey," Bruce said to him quietly. "I'm fine. Everything's going to be fine."

He worked one hand gently free, lifted it to touch Clark's face. It had been—days now, since they'd kissed at all; but Clark took the cue just as Bruce had meant it, allowed Bruce to tip his jaw up and shut his eyes, and Bruce kissed him. Quickly, softly, that was all. Once, and then again.

"Okay," Clark said against his cheek, hoarse, when it was over. "All right."

And then he let go—lifted himself up and away from Bruce, seemingly effortless, and was gone.

 

 

It was a little easier to keep himself focused, without Clark there.

Bruce dressed; took his time, and didn't apologize to the driver who had had to wait for him for forty minutes in the car, idling in the street.

He knew approximately what lay ahead of him, in general terms. It would be very much a matter of hurry-up-and-wait; everything would need to be in place well in advance of the Kryptonians and other officials actually arriving, and there would be a great deal of standing around with nothing in particular to do.

Which was exactly what he wanted.

Something was going to happen. It was inevitable. After all the effort that had gone into this, Luthor's, Zod's—or whoever else might have thrown their hand in with Luthor—they would not give up on it now. They would, if anything, find themselves unrestrained by whatever might previously have held them back; because now that the negotiations were so nearly complete, they had nothing left to lose.

And Bruce had confirmed, by as many different means as were available to him, that Alexander Luthor, Jr., was among the Metropolis-area luminaries, socialites, and business magnates expected to be present here in person.

He paid lip service to Bruce Wayne's habits, on occasions like these. He smarmed his way through a couple of the carefully staged photo ops he was expected to participate in and then wandered away, checking to see whether there were drinks being served anywhere yet; he waved at those who had too much personal dignity to wave back, shook hands with those who would have preferred to wave, greeted half a dozen people whose names he should've known as if he couldn't quite remember who they were.

But he had identified Luthor's position in the slowly growing crowd the moment he'd gotten out of the car, and he worked his way closer with singular focus.

Luthor wasn't a subtle man; he enjoyed listening to himself talk, and he lacked the self-control to conceal his motives and intentions. Besides—

Besides, while it presumably came second to standing next to Clark, one of the safest places in the world to be when Lex Luthor was trying to kill you was in front of him. At the very least, Luthor wouldn't be setting off any more implosive devices, not if he was standing in their radius of effect.

He approached Luthor from a sidelong angle, gave every appearance of aiming his attention elsewhere so that it was Luthor who turned, who said, "Well, well, well! Fancy seeing you here."

Bruce turned his head, raised his eyebrows as if in surprise. "Lex! I'll be damned," he said easily, and smiled, reached out to shake Luthor's hand.

Luthor, inevitably, failed to recognize the socially appropriate moment to let go again; held on, and smiled back, sharp searching eyes intent on Bruce's face.

"How's it going, anyway?"

"Very well," Luthor said, "oh, very well indeed." He cocked his head, still smiling. He hadn't let go of Bruce's hand. "But then you know that, don't you, Brucie?"

Bruce affected benign bewilderment. "Having this whole thing with the Kryptonians sorted out, you mean? Sure, it's great news."

"My, you are a slippery one, aren't you?" Luthor said, in a jarringly warm, enthusiastic tone. "I really—I really had no idea. You just—you hide it so well. How do you do it? I've never been any good at that part, I'm afraid. I try! I do try. But people can—" He paused, shook his head a little, gestured with a fluttering of the fingers on his free hand and inhaled through his nose. "Smell it on me, maybe. I don't know what it is, but something always gives me away."

Bruce grinned at him, unflinching. "Therapy works wonders, I'm told," he said. "Therapy, appropriate medication prescribed by a professional."

"Oh, don't be snide," Luthor murmured. "Do as I say, not as I do? Though I suppose you wouldn't want the competition, would you? Wouldn't do to have me dressing up all in black, galumphing through the streets of Gotham in the middle of the night." He squinted upwards. "What do you think would be on my chest, hmm? Dear old Dad, alien ships filling the sky, the inevitability of death—tough to boil down to a single iconic image. You really lucked out on that one."

Bruce allowed the sharp wave of ice, the visceral animal terror of being trapped, to move through him, and refused to let the expression on his face change. "You seem a little confused, Lex," he said, very levelly.

"Ah, but I'm not," Luthor said. "I'm not confused at all. I know exactly who I'm talking to, don't I? And I think I should be afforded a little latitude here," he added, narrowing his eyes, dropping Bruce's hand at last. "I had an excellent plan, you know. I was so pleased with it. It would've worked whether I'd killed you or not, you see—the evidence would've pointed to the aliens either way. Questions would've needed to be asked," and he said this in a parody of a formal tone, lifting his chin, miming the stuffy seriousness of a talking head on cable news. "But you ruined it. The interview—I should've known, I guess. But you controlled the story that came out of that so well, none of the counternarratives I tried to set up got anywhere.

"And Kansas? I'd give you credit for tactical maneuvering, except you didn't even know you were doing it. You were just trying to make your little pet happy. But you left, you left and you barely told anyone. You were supposed to be here, where everyone could see you—where everyone could've seen that drone come after you." Luthor shook his head, sighing, expression profoundly put-out. "The concert hall might've finally been enough—if only there had been a little more time. But what can you do?"

Bruce eyed him sharply. "Luthor," he said. "Luthor, what's going to happen? What is Zod going to do?"

"It's too late now, you see," Luthor said, and his tone was almost conversational, but there was something in the expression on his face, a faint tic in the muscles in his cheeks, that constituted the first sign of genuine unease Bruce had seen in him.

And then he fell silent, and turned, and Bruce looked, too.

There were jumbotrons set up at intervals around the park, the area that had been set aside for the event—massive screens, where Bruce assumed the live broadcast from the UN would play out so a thousand photographs could be taken of all the attendees politely applauding. They had just come to life, and were briefly blank, white, but an image appeared almost immediately.

Bruce was expecting—something, anything. Luthor had made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, and if the video had been showing the UN chamber full of decapitated bodies, Bruce would not have been surprised in the least.

But everything looked fine, in the video. A few delegates were still milling around, but were clearly in the process of taking their seats. The Kryptonians were all standing together, on one side of the raised dais, the podium apparently going unused, and there were a dozen officials standing on the other side, human representatives.

Some cue was clearly given. One of the Kryptonians—an older woman, with a face that was familiar to Bruce from the Canadian Arctic—began to speak, and it was in Kryptonian, but apparently someone had coordinated a handover of subtitles. It was generic, but reasonable enough: an expression of goodwill and gratitude. Nothing unusual; not a surprise declaration of war, at least unless those subtitles were inaccurate on purpose.

But Luthor was watching intently, transfixed; and then he said, soft, "Too late for all of us."

And up on the screens, massive and quadrupled—something did happen, after all.

Someone pushed forward, from the back of the group of Kryptonians toward the front. There was a rush of murmuring, and Bruce saw, in a sharp cold instant, that it was General Zod.

General Zod—but he was no longer wearing one of those transparent helmets.

He spoke, in a raised voice, half a shout; Kryptonian, goddammit. The older woman who had been speaking turned to frown thunderously at him, asked him a sharp question; and then—

Then he raised his arm, his hand. There was a shape in it, a shape that ended in an open port: a weapon, and he fired it, and a bright white light, trailing irregular humming streamers of pale blue, pulsed out of it and struck the woman in the chest.

She cried out, and fell. Zod said something else, shifted his weight a little and fired again, at a tall narrow-faced Kryptonian man who was staring at him in open-mouthed horror, and—and the man, too, fell.

Then the screaming started.

The camera responsible for the broadcast was jostled, bumped sideways, jostled again. Everyone seemed to have risen from their seats at once, including delegates who were directly in front of the camera, and it was briefly difficult to see anything but silhouettes, overlapping figures, panicked faces in focus for a split second and then gone again.

When Bruce could pick him out again, Zod was gesturing briskly to another Kryptonian, a man, who stepped up to the edge of the dais and said, "Hear me, people of Earth. I speak for the Sword of Rao, under the command of General Zod. He has dissolved the Kryptonian High Council, because it is no longer fit to serve its purpose, because it has led Krypton to ruin. We will use the resources at our disposal as they were meant to be used. Be grateful—your world will be remade, will stand at the heart of a glorious empire, though you will not live to see it."

And then—then, not on the screens but in the sky, Bruce saw something moving.

It was, he understood distantly, the Kryptonian ship. It must have begun moving inward, away from its previous position over the ocean and toward the coastline, almost as soon as Zod had begun speaking, and now it was—it had nearly reached the skyline of Metropolis, barely a mile away across the bay.

As he watched, it split apart. Or—no, it was—there was a second ship, somehow. It had been held, docked, within the tripod shape of the main vessel; but now it had been released, and dropped, maneuvering away.

But the main vessel was still moving in the same direction, positioning itself directly above the center of Metropolis.

Bruce shoved a hand into his pocket, pulled out his phone and brought up the keypad, and tapped in the sequence that would signal Alfred to stop whatever he might be doing and descend immediately into the shelter of the Cave. He needed—

Fuck, he needed everything, and at the same time he felt half frozen by the awareness that none of it would do him any good. Even if he had the Batsuit, all of his equipment, the Batplane to get himself up there—if the Kryptonians who had aligned themselves with Zod had all done as he seemed to, had allowed themselves to adjust to Earth's biosphere in secret, could breathe its air and absorb its sunlight unhindered, then they were all as powerful as Clark. Against that, he was—he was helpless.

He stood there, eyes burning, chest aching, and hated it.

And then, in the distance, something else broke away from the Kryptonian vessel. Something much, much smaller than that second ship, and moving very fast.

It was oddly difficult to get a bead on, and Bruce didn't understand why and then, abruptly, did: because it was moving directly toward the park. It was, he grasped in a split second, moving directly toward Bruce, and he wanted more than anything to run—to evade, to escape, to regroup—but he would never be fast enough, and the only thing that would gall more than standing here and allowing it to reach him was indulging himself in such futility.

He didn't move.

The shape resolved itself into—into another Kryptonian woman, dark-haired, in a heavy armored suit. She was flying, the way Clark did. She landed with a force that shook the ground, skidded a little; came to a stop, and then turned her head so that her gaze found Bruce, and stalked toward him.

Futility, to attempt to do anything about it.

She strode up to him, and grabbed him by the arm—struck him across the face, but it must have been only the barest fraction of the strength she might have used, and there was something bizarrely casual about it; it hadn't really been meant to hurt him as such, he thought, blinking, tasting the blood in his mouth, but to disorient him. A stunning blow, dealt to an animal to prevent it from struggling excessively.

The woman lifted him from the ground, without visible effort.

An animal, Bruce thought again.

And then he turned his face into the wind, as the woman carried him up above the park, and he shouted, "Siraya—"

(She knows you, now that you've ridden her. She'll hear, and come to you.)

"Silence," the woman said to him sharply.

But it was done, and it—it had worked. They were already beginning to rise high over Gotham; Bruce knew where the penthouse was from here, knew which direction to look, and there was a massive winged shape in the air, he spotted it even before he heard Siraya roar.

The woman shouted something, furious, and tried to twist away—but Siraya was there, and had presumably had considerably more practice flying than the woman and her brand-new superpowers had. Siraya screeched, scrabbled at the woman's armor, and Bruce felt the curving toes of one of those powerful forelimbs close over his ribs—

But the woman jerked her other hand up, the hand she wasn't using to lift Bruce, and she had a weapon just like Zod's; she brought it to bear, fired, and Siraya screamed and tumbled away from them, and then there was no more time—they had reached the Kryptonian ship.

 

 

---

 

 

Clark was standing in a hallway outside the chamber where the negotiations would formally conclude, waiting for the cue that would be given to him to enter, when the screaming began.

Even before he began to move, he jerked his hearing wide open—and he caught half a dozen sounds at once, the sizzle of weapons fire, the rattle of an exhale, the dull terrible thump of—of a body falling, he understood—

He went straight through the wall, and for a moment could make no sense of what he saw.

There were two members of the High Council lying upon the dais; dead? The humans had scattered, had fled screaming or else had thrown themselves down and now huddled, shaking quietly, seeking to hide themselves. There was General Zod, and he had no breather mask on, and he was—he raised the weapon in his hand, and there was a third member of the High Council still in front of him, frowning at him incredulously, shouting, "Stop this! Zod, what is this madness?"

Clark hurled himself between them, as Zod fired—felt the heat of it, a brief sharpness, against his lower ribs, but it couldn't truly hurt him, and within a moment he had caught Elder Tor-Zol by the arms, carried him across half of the room and set him down, and then turned.

He had used the speed, allowed the world to blur; but as he faced the dais again, he saw that Zod had followed the motion. He had prepared for this, Clark understood belatedly; he had removed his breather mask and had told no one, had acclimatized himself in secret, because—

Because, perhaps, he had seen for himself in the Arctic that it would be worth the cost, had felt Clark restrain him and had understood precisely how much this world had given Clark.

But Clark was the only one in this room who had any hope of stopping him.

He dove back toward the dais. Zod's face twisted into a snarl, and he fired at Clark, once and then again; Clark let both shots hit him, because better that than allow them to strike any of the humans who remained within the chamber, and then he was close enough to catch Zod by the arms.

Zod managed to pull one arm free, though not the other. He struck Clark in the face; it hurt, more than Clark could remember anything hurting him physically in all the time since he'd come to Earth. But he bore it, and caught Zod by the wrist—Zod shot him again, this time in the chest, and then the base of his throat, but that barely hurt at all, in comparison.

Except it was not only Zod. There were half a dozen more behind him, warrior guild, and behind them one of the religious guild who did not seem as horrified by the deaths of two elders as he should have been. Clark couldn't stop them all.

He risked a glance behind himself. Elder Sor Lir-Ay, Elder Shu-Zin, had both scrambled away; that was something. He was—he didn't know what to do. He didn't know what was happening—

"Clark!"

A shout, from somewhere outside the building, but—not for long, Clark realized, in the instant before a sizable chunk of the chamber's roof fell in.

Over the front rows of delegates' seats—the rows that had emptied first—Kara swooped low, on the back of her own war kite, Toraka. Toraka shrieked, flared his wings and slammed into the warriors behind Zod, and Clark took the opportunity to break away, smashed Zod across the face with his elbow as he did it, and then followed Kara and Toraka as Toraka skidded across the dais and a little bit through the wall behind it.

"Kara—"

"They have taken the ship," she said immediately, her face sharp with anger. "There are not so many of them, but they have all breathed Earth's air and felt its sun. I couldn't stop them—"

"Kara, you must do it, too," Clark said. "It will hurt, but not for long."

She lifted her chin. "I am not afraid," she said. "But I could not have done it alone, in the air—they would have caught me anyway, if I had."

"You are not alone anymore," he said, and she smiled at him, fierce, and then lifted her hands to her throat and allowed her helmet to fold itself away.

It was as awful as he remembered—worse, in a way, when it was happening to Kara and not to him. She folded up helplessly across the dais, choking, and blood spattered from her mouth; but Clark was there, and Toraka, and they could hold a small space for a few minutes at least.

Clark was not warrior guild. He did not know what he was doing, had never practiced it. But he had lived on Earth for so long, now—though Zod and the rest of them had all the same powers he did, they had not worked as hard or as long to figure out how to use them, how to control them; they couldn't have, or they would have given away their secret.

So he was still a little faster, a little stronger, than most of them. It wasn't much.

But it was enough. Toraka swiped three of them away from him, hurled them back against one of the empty rows of seats in front of the dais, and Clark punched a fourth who was approaching him from the side, and then there was a blur—Clark sped up, too, and the blur became Zod, snarling; he had given up on his energy weapon, tossed it aside, and had deployed the sword-spike within the right arm of his armor instead—

And then Kara shouted, slammed into Zod's side and caught the sword-spike against the length of her own arm, shoved it upward and away from Clark, and smashed her own armored fist into Zod's face.

She was warrior guild, luckily for Clark.

She looked at him, and grinned; and there was still blood between her teeth, but he could see it already, in the way she moved and stood—she felt it, the strength, the speed.

And then, through the air, there came a strange reverberating hum.

He looked up, and so did Kara. And through the hole she and Toraka had left in the building, they could see it: the ship, hovering in the sky over the city, and the sharp hot beam of light that had burst from it.

"The alteration," Kara said. "They have begun it. The World Engine—"

"No," Clark said. "No."

"Yes," Zod said.

He was staggering up, from where Kara's blow had laid him low, and he was grinning, teeth bared.

"We have sent the World Engine to the far side of the planet. The gravitational pulsation process alone will be enough to wipe this world clean of inconvenient life. Though there are certain cases in which, perhaps, I should ensure it—unless you can stop me, Kal-El."

And then he was—he took off, a hot hard rush of air where he had been, shrinking rapidly to nothing but the glint of metal in the sunlight, racing back up to the ship.

There had been four left, besides him; but they took off after him before Clark could even—grab them, shake them, demand to know what that had meant. In certain cases, I should ensure it. Was that—did he mean Bruce? Where was Bruce?

Clark did not know, and felt abruptly cold.

"Kara," he said, hoarse.

"Go," Kara said. "Go after them. I will go to the World Engine. If Toraka and I can deactivate it, destroy it—that will at least buy us time. If you can distract them, delay them, anything—"

"I will try," Clark said.

"Try," Kara agreed, "but be careful with my cousin."

And Clark was able to smile at her then, if only a little. "Be careful with mine," he said, and she reached for him, squeezed his shoulder—and then swung herself onto Toraka's back, and he leapt into the air.

Clark did not linger. He flung himself after them, up through the ceiling of the chamber and into the sky. It took him only a moment, allowing his vision to sharpen itself for him, to find the shapes of the four warriors who had—

Who had, he understood too late, not followed Zod. They were—they flew, but not toward the ship. They were going somewhere else; and he allowed his vision to contract again across the miles that already lay between, looked in the direction they had gone, and grasped it all at once.

 

 

They had had a head start.

But this time, he was not carrying Bruce. This time, he could fly at speeds Bruce could not have survived; and in the end, he reached Smallville only seconds behind them.

One of them had already smashed through the front door of the farmhouse, had caught Martha by the throat and was lifting her from her feet. Clark struck him in the side, and though his body was now as invulnerable as Clark's, the metal of his armor crumpled inward with the impact, could not rebound into shape around his body the way Clark's undersuit could—he fell, grunting with the sheer discomfort of it, clawing at the metal where it constricted him so viciously.

Another had reached the front porch. Clark turned to face her, and she strode forward and struck him, blocked him when he tried to kick her legs out from under her and struck him again—but he was able to catch her arm, to drag her up and over his body, away from the porch, and then slam her down into the ground. He punched as hard as he could, at the base of her throat, and she went pale, choked and scrabbled at the metal; she would be able to peel it away soon enough, but now he had perhaps ten seconds to rise and find the other two.

He did.

One of them had come down farther from the house, and was walking across the front yard. He saw Clark rise to his feet, reached out beside himself and took Martha's pickup truck by the rear end of the frame beneath the truck bed, and lifted it, hurled it—Clark blurred upward and caught it before it could strike the farmhouse, brought it back and lowered it down in the driveway. He kept going at the same speed, grabbed the warrior by the shoulder and simply dragged him away from the house, and the warrior snarled, swung a kick at him and aimed a blow at his head at the same time; Clark ducked away from the one but caught the other full-force, and it knocked the breath from him, but only for a moment—

And then, abruptly, the warrior went still.

He locked eyes with Clark, for a moment. And then he turned his head, in—in the direction of Metropolis, the direction they had come from. The direction of the ship, Clark thought. A message, a transmission, coming to him through his armor.

Orders from General Zod, it had to be. Because all four at once staggered to their feet, even the first one whose armor had crushed in around him, and took off again.

Clark blinked, and caught his breath. "Martha—Aunt Martha—"

"Here, I'm right here," Aunt Martha said, and she—she had scrambled out of the farmhouse, hidden herself around the corner of the front porch, he understood; she came rushing out, and threw her arms around him. "Oh, Clark, honey—are you all right? Who were they? What's—what's happening, why did they—"

"The negotiations had succeeded," Clark said. "Some of my people—did not want that to happen, and now they have attacked the rest of us, they have attacked Earth itself, in order to stop it."

"Oh," Aunt Martha said, kind of blankly. "Well, shit. Shit, you—you'd better go, then, hadn't you?"

"Yes, I—but are you—?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine! Don't you worry about me," she said. "Go on, save the world. I'll be here when you're done, all right?"

"All right," Clark agreed, soft, and he squeezed her shoulders, felt her cover his hands with her own, and for a moment felt almost reassured, almost safe.

And then, on the very farthest edge of his hearing, there was a far-off sound.

He sped up, quick enough at it now that it could almost be called reflex, to try to discern what it was, that sound, before it was over. He opened himself wide, and he listened.

"Clark—"

He lost hold of the thread; his head filled with noise, sharp and terrible, and he flinched from it, jerked away from Aunt Martha without meaning to and had to close his eyes, concentrate hard, before he could make it stop, make the world quiet again.

But that was—that had been—

"Bruce," he heard himself say. "It's—Bruce just—"

"Go," Aunt Martha said immediately, and Clark threw himself back into the air, and went.

 

 

---

 

 

Bruce was on the ship.

Clark did not know where. Zod, his followers—they could not stop Clark from reaching the ship, and he struck the hull, punched it until the metal came apart beneath his hands, clawed his way inside, but—

Kara had been right; there were not as many of them as Clark might have feared.

But there were enough.

He was strong, and he was furious, and he was afraid. He smashed them through decks, and flung them from the side of the ship, and struck them over and over until they had stopped moving, until he feared he might have killed them.

But he took too long to do it. And before he could work out where Bruce was, before he could concentrate enough to listen for him—Zod came for him again.

He was trying to focus, too hard. Zod caught him by surprise, came up from one side of him before he realized it and struck him, and then carried him onward—smashed both of them straight through the side of the ship again, out over the city.

Clark jerked free, kicked Zod away from himself and turned back toward the ship; but Zod caught up to him again, closed armored fingers around his leg and flung him back down toward the city, tumbling through the air.

He caught himself, and tried again; again, Zod reached him halfway there, hammered into his side and sent him reeling, so far he nearly struck an office tower. He was so—so frustrated, so furious, he felt his eyes heat up sharply; he had used it so rarely, but he allowed the hard red-hot light to burst from his eyes, to strike Zod, because he had to get to Bruce—

The sound, the strange reverberating hum that was coming from the ship, changed.

Calibration was complete. The—the actual gravitational pulsation was about to begin. Clark twisted in the air, stared down at the office tower he had so nearly struck; the city, the streets, the people, and his heart was in his throat.

Bruce was somewhere on that ship, and Clark had promised to come to him, if he called. But—

But all those lives: who would save them, if he didn't?

(No, you wouldn't, would you? There isn't anyone else like you, in this city. It's just you; and if you don't do something, maybe no one will. So you have to try.)

He squeezed his eyes shut.

The first pulse came with a sharp thrum Clark could feel in his bones. Directly beneath the ship, half a dozen cars, a handful of chunks of concrete, a streetlight, rose upward, suspended—and then the pulse released, and it all fell.

Only a small radius, at first. But that would change. And if he—if he kept trying to reach Bruce, at the expense of dozens of lives, hundreds—

He couldn't. He couldn't.

He dove.

 

 

Zod followed him, of course.

They fought their way through the streets. They smashed through walls, buildings. People were running, screaming. The pulses from the ship grew stronger, louder.

Clark tried to hold Zod at bay. He used the speed, when he could—he caught people as they fell, or the cars they were trapped inside of, the buses.

It—he wasn't enough. He could not catch the buildings, and they were so easily smashed through, a single blow from Zod enough to send them toppling. Clark tried to stop him, grappled with him—was flung, hammered into the pavement, flung again; he managed to keep Zod from impaling him with the spike-sword, but Zod sliced him across the face, gouged halfway through his shoulder, cut him open across the ribs.

But then, suddenly, the next pulse that came from the ship was—smaller, lesser.

Kara. She had done it. She had found the World Engine and she had disabled it, destroyed it. That was the only thing it could be.

Clark threw himself up into the air. Zod would catch him within a moment, would drag him down and strike him again, but if Kara returned—she could reach the ship, if Clark could only hold Zod for a little longer—

And then Clark saw something separate itself from the ship: a smaller craft, a pod.

It rose into the air on a delicate curve, caught the sunlight and gleamed with sudden brightness. And then it completed that curve, turned and—

—and aimed itself directly back toward the center of the ship.

Clark did not understand what it was doing, for an unforgivably long moment. And then he did; he did, and he pushed all the rest of the world away from himself, seeking a single thread: something, anything, that he knew—

He did not hear Bruce's voice. He did not hear anything he would have claimed to recognize, if he had been asked.

But he heard breath; ragged, uneven, through a tight throat. He heard the soft brush of eyelashes. He heard a heart.

And he knew, with a sudden terrible certainty, that it was Bruce.

And then, behind him and below him, Zod said, "No. No, no—"

Clark saw him begin to move, in the edge of his vision; flung himself forward instantly, and suddenly he was—instead of fighting to reach the ship, the pod, himself, he was fighting to prevent Zod from doing it.

But he managed to catch Zod by the arm, managed to work his fingers in between two of the curving layered plates that protected Zod's shoulders, and he twisted in the air, used his entire body to do it—dragged Zod back, and flung him down into the street, matched his speed as he went and followed him, and when Zod smashed heavily into the pavement, through it, Clark drove him farther into the ground, grappled him and held him down, and—

And he was no longer using his breather mask. But he was still wearing it, the fixture around the neck of his armor from which it emerged; he had had to have it on, though he must have deactivated the actual ventilation functions, in order to maintain the pretense that he was no more acclimatized to Earth's atmosphere than anyone else.

Clark put all his weight into one arm, pinned Zod across the chest with his full strength; and with his other hand, he found the control grooves along the edge of the breather mask, and he reactivated it.

It re-formed itself, shimmering panels slotting themselves into place around Zod's head—and it filled immediately, automatically, with Kryptonian atmosphere.

Zod jerked beneath him, gagged; thrashed, scrabbling with his hands, but his eyes were rolling back in his head, blood foaming across his mouth.

Adjustment to Earth's atmosphere hurt. But so did readjustment in the other direction.

It would give him enough time. It had to give him enough time; and he left Zod lying there choking, and threw himself into the sky.

 

 

---

 

 

The Kryptonians stuffed Bruce into one of those goddamn helmets, and then dragged him through the ship.

Technically, a good sign. If they'd wanted him dead immediately, they could have left off the helmet.

But once they'd hauled him far enough, the woman who'd taken him from the park said, "You will yield all information of use, or die," and then she dragged him up and shoved him into—

Into some kind of machine, he understood.

Close-fitting restraints locked themselves into place around his upper arms. Something shifted inward, toward his head.

He jerked away from it, pointlessly, reflexively, and thrashed. Someone snapped something Kryptonian, above him, and a hard hand came down against his jaw, forced his head sideways toward—something, some smooth socket-like fixture that was glowing faintly, and he still had the damn helmet on, but something happened anyway, when the surface of that socket aligned with the surface of the helmet's transparent panels, and then he was—

 

 

He was in an alleyway.

It was wet, dark. There was something about it, some particular combination of the vaguely unpleasant odors around him and a certain free-floating sense of grim misery, that was immediately familiar. He was in Gotham.

He was in Gotham, and yet, somehow, he didn't know quite where, couldn't place himself. That was strange, he thought, and he frowned.

He began to walk forward along the alley. There had to be something nearby that would give him a clue as to his location; he would be able to orient himself, and then he could get back to—to whatever it was he had been doing here.

He heard a very small sound.

He stopped walking. The sound had been—odd, unusual. He wanted to hear it better, wanted to know where it was coming from.

There it was again. Again, and again. Sort of—clacking, and it was coming from—

He stepped toward the side of the alleyway, the gutter, and saw something glinting, and leaned down to see what it was.

It was—

It was a handful of loose pearls, rolling, bouncing.

He jerked away, stumbled backward a step. His heart was pounding, his gut twisting. He couldn't breathe. No. He couldn't be here. He couldn't be here, not again. This couldn't be happening.

He turned on his heel, because he wanted to run away.

But there was a figure standing at the other end of the alley.

He froze.

The figure started walking toward him. It was—

It was Clark, somehow.

He had a gun in his hand. He didn't seem to have noticed it; he was looking at Bruce with distant curiosity, his brow ever so slightly furrowed.

And then he stopped walking, and did glance down at his hand—lifted it, and looked at the gun, and tilted his head.

"Primitive," he said after a moment. "But you fear destruction by this means so greatly. Why?"

Bruce looked at him, and didn't answer.

(—this was wrong.)

"What are you doing here?" he said instead.

Clark frowned. "You cannot prevent this. Stop trying."

(—this was all wrong—)

Bruce didn't say anything.

But Clark frowned harder anyway—threw the gun carelessly to one side, where it clattered against the concrete, without looking away from Bruce, and strode toward him. "Stop trying," he said again, and he was—he'd come within arm's reach, and he was lifting his hands.

Bruce took a step back; but not quickly enough. Not that anything could be quickly enough, when Clark blurred like that, and he clutched at Clark's wrists and writhed, because Clark had closed his hands around Bruce's throat, had begun to squeeze—

"Stop trying," Clark said again, sounding faintly irritated.

"Clark," Bruce choked out—

 

 

—jostled, and the contact broke, between the helmet and that socket, and Bruce stopped struggling and allowed his entire body to go slack, limp.

The hand released his face. He waited like that, for precisely two and a half additional seconds.

And then he twisted his arm in the restraint, jammed his hand into the pocket of his suit and gripped the command key, and brought it up and around—just far enough that the end of it pressed into the interface surface that sat a foot away from the side of the machine.

It wasn't the right kind of interface, at least not by default. But it was just as flexible, just as fluid, as every other piece of Kryptonian technology Bruce had seen: the surface gave beneath the pressure, a trapezoidal slot forming around the end of the command key automatically, and apparently that was all that was needed.

The space around Bruce went dark. The pressure of the restraints opened, around his arms. And Lara's voice said, "Get up, now."

Bruce got up.

The Kryptonians in the room were busy shouting at each other; apparently more had gone wrong with the nearby systems than just the lights going out. Two of them spotted him. One cried out and pointed, and then both of them started shooting at him.

He ducked, rolled. "Left," Lara said from beside him, and he threw himself bodily to the left—ah, there was a hatch there, that was why.

He scrambled through it, and it hissed smoothly shut behind him, immediate humming impacts against it testifying to the fact that the Kryptonians were still shooting.

"Copy yourself into the ship's system," he said, breathless.

Lara, crouched beside him, went utterly still for a moment.

And then she said, "Duplication complete."

Bruce allowed his head to tip back against the wall, an instant's helpless relief, and then pushed himself up. "Are you able to retrieve the command key from the interface for me?"

"Set your hand to the wall," she said.

He did it; and the texture of the wall changed fractionally beneath his fingertips, before he saw that vague blue glow form, the same way it had on the scout ship. Checking his authorization to manipulate a command key belonging to the House of El, presumably—but he had it, and after a moment, just as he'd hoped, the wall shifted, softened, melted away, and abruptly the familiar command key rested within a small open space in the face of the wall.

Bruce took it, and put it back in his pocket.

"I have integrated all ship's data," Lara told him.

"Great," Bruce said. "What the hell is going on?"

"We do not have time for me to answer that question," Lara said, only a little impatiently. "When you married my son, you were given a protective device—a necklace."

"Yes," Bruce said.

He hadn't worn it; he'd assumed any Kryptonian who spotted the chain around his neck would know what it was, which would aggressively limit the kind of advantage it could give him.

But that didn't mean he didn't have it.

He'd ditched one out of two emergency collapsible grapnels to free up the compartment in the heel of his right shoe; apparently that had been the right decision. He popped it open, removed the necklace from it, and put it around his neck.

"Activate it," Lara said, and he touched it, glanced down to watch as, sure enough, metal expanded seemingly out of nowhere and twined around itself into the shape of the sigil of the House of El—

And then there was a sharp hum, and a blue-white bolt came singing toward him and ricocheted off it.

"To your right," Lara said, and Bruce crouched and scrambled sideways, already thinking it through; he would need to adjust certain elements of his usual strategy, if it was now going to be better to take a shot to the chest than to take it anywhere else on his body—

He spotted the next hatch before Lara could even draw his attention to it, and once he was through it, Lara closed it for him.

"Any Kryptonian aboard this ship who refused to accept Zod's authority was rounded up and imprisoned within a cargo module," Lara said. "I have forced that module to separate from the ship; its systems contain sufficient emergency power to allow it to land safely using only its existing set of maneuvering thrusters." She paused, and then said, "The ship has also—initiated planetary alteration."

"Planetary alteration," Bruce repeated. "Can we stop it?"

"Yes," Lara said slowly. "You will not be able to terminate alteration from any location except the command deck, and you will not be able to reach the command deck alive."

"But," Bruce said.

"But—you will be able to terminate alteration," Lara allowed, "if you destroy the ship."

Bruce inhaled, wet his mouth and met her eyes. "And how do I do that?" he said.

 

 

Lara guided him, one corridor at a time, to the pod bay.

The way she had explained it had made it almost sound simple, considering it involved impossibly advanced alien technology from the other end of the galaxy. He was already a little too familiar with rifts to the Phantom Zone, but they weren't only used to implode people who were in other people's way; Kryptonians used them, under certain circumstances, to generate energy.

The main Kryptonian vessel had had to travel a long, long way, to reach Earth. In order to pull that off, it had required a Phantom drive. And no one had known exactly how far it might have to go—or exactly how far the pods might have to go, if they were launched from the main ship during an emergency. So the pods had also been retrofitted with Phantom drives.

And if Bruce overloaded the drive on one of the pods, and then flew it into the drive that was powering the ship—that would create a new rift, a much larger rift, right in the middle of the ship.

She'd gone quiet, after that, except to give him directions.

But about halfway there, she said, "Bruce, I—you will need to override both the safety core and the piloting system at the same time. A program such as mine does not possess the authorization for such a thing. Nor can it, by Kryptonian law."

Bruce glanced at her. She thought he hadn't grasped the implications right away, presumably; it was kind of her, in a way, to try to clarify so gently.

"I know," he said aloud. "Is there any other way I'm at all likely to be able to destroy this ship before the—planetary alteration—is complete?"

"No," Lara said after a moment, very softly.

"Then I'll do it," Bruce said.

And then—then the look on her face changed. She knew he understood, now; and she inclined her head to him gravely, watched him for a moment longer, and then glanced down the corridor and said quietly, "Left."

He went left.

 

 

---

 

 

When they reached the pod bay, they had to pause again for a moment so Lara could access one of the individual pods' systems, and then so she could force open the pod bay's doors.

Once she'd done it, Bruce could finally fucking deactivate the Kryptonian helmet. He yanked the base of it from his shoulders and let it drop to the deck—

And then there was a loud screech, and—Christ, and Siraya swept straight into the pod bay, wings flaring to help her slow herself down, claws skidding across the decking.

She'd been shot; but she hadn't been killed. The wound across her side was ugly, seared at the edges and bloody through the middle. It had slowed her down, had kept her from catching up to Bruce. But apparently it hadn't kept her from catching up to the ship, eventually.

Because—Bruce had called for her, and she'd come.

"Good girl," he said to her quietly, and—

And it was the least he could do, wasn't it?

He swallowed, reached into his pocket and took out the command key. Siraya was still saddled—as far as Bruce could tell, she stayed saddled all the time—and she let him poke around, find a fold he could tuck the command key under and a strap he could use to secure it in place. He'd—

He'd be able to save that much, for Clark's sake. No reason to take it with him, just to destroy it.

"All right," he said to her, when he was done. "All right, go," and Lara spoke in a soft voice, Kryptonian; Siraya creeled, and turned herself around—and then she spread her wings out, and leapt from the edge of the pod bay, and was gone.

And then—

Then he was ready.

The pod Lara had initialized for him opened up and let him inside. Much like the controls on the scout ship for navigating visual sensor data, the controls for piloting the pod were remarkably intuitive, even though they relied on that same arrangement of grooves, an intrinsically unfamiliar setup.

He launched the pod, flew it up and around, and, carefully, precisely, followed Lara's quiet instructions to force the drive to overload.

And then he reoriented the pod toward the ship.

"The ship's Phantom drive core is here," Lara said, and on the viewing pane of the pod, part of the ship's hull was highlighted for him, helpfully outlined.

He angled the pod toward it, and slid his fingers forward over the edges of the grooves; the pod obediently picked up speed, and in the viewing pane, the Kryptonian ship began to grow rapidly larger.

"I could not have asked for a husband more worthy of my son," Lara said softly.

Bruce bit down on the inside of his cheek. "I wish you were right," he said, hoarse.

He kept his eyes open. He refused to flinch. This wasn't any of the ways he had ever expected to die, but if he could do it and save Metropolis, Gotham, the world, by it—he was grateful, in a way. If he had ever feared anything about dying, truly feared it, it wasn't the fact of death itself but the prospect of—of dying pointlessly, dying uselessly; dying for no good reason at all.

This was better. This had to be better. He couldn't regret it.

Alfred—Alfred would probably even understand it, at least if he ever learned precisely what the circumstances had been. But Clark—

He had no time to compose a thought, to articulate anything even to himself; he could only feel it, the deep sore ache.

And then, a breath of a sliver of an instant before the pod impacted the side of the Kryptonian ship—

It had happened, Bruce thought, it must have. He had certainly felt, for a moment, as though he had very thoroughly come apart.

But he had failed to stop existing. He was—he came, vaguely, to the understanding that he was gasping, that he was clutching at nothing less than the warm solidity of Clark, wrapped around him.

Clark was—Clark had an arm around Bruce's back, a hand wrapped very tightly over the nape of Bruce's neck. He was holding Bruce against him, and shuddering, and breathing very fast; and then he drew away, but only just far enough to stare at Bruce with wide eyes.

Behind them, the Kryptonian ship imploded, a burst of familiar blue-white energy cracking through the middle of it, the hull crumpling inward as it was forcibly contracted by the rift within it. The area of effect extended far enough that fully three-quarters of the ship collapsed into it—and the remains tumbled from the air over the precise epicenter of that beam that had come from the ship, already-wrecked upthrust pavement giving way to the impact with a thunderous rumble.

 

 

Clark didn't let go of Bruce, once he had brought them down to ground level.

He was—he was still clutching the nape of Bruce's neck, Bruce's face, and he seemed to be struggling intensely with something immense. "What were you doing," he managed at last, hoarse. "What the hell were you thinking—"

"It was the only way to destroy the ship," Bruce said.

Clark stared at him. Something in his face crumpled. "Bruce," he said, in a soft wretched way. "Bruce—"

"I'm—sorry," Bruce said, and it felt as if it should have been more difficult to say than it was; it felt as if for once it was true. "I wouldn't have, if—if there had been any other—"

"Bruce," Clark said, hushed, and he drew Bruce against him again, pressed his mouth to Bruce's temple and shook all over, and then whispered, "I'm sorry I didn't come for you."

Which was stupid, Bruce thought distantly, because he had. He had, when there had been no one else.

He heard, as if from very far away, a sound. He ignored it, thoroughly.

And then Clark jerked against him, clutched him impossibly closer and said in a ragged voice, "You have got to be kidding me," and Bruce turned his head and understood precisely why: standing there, across the wide rubble-strewn space that lay between them and the ship, was General Zod.

"You," Zod gritted out, face twisting, and he began to move—began to run, aided by his strength or his armor or both, huge leaping steps, building up speed as he came at them.

Clark tensed against Bruce. He was clearly trying to decide what to do, where he could even take Bruce in the next half-second that would be safe, how to stop Zod at all and whether he could do it.

And then there was a blur—a blur, except Clark hadn't moved, hadn't let go of Bruce.

A blur, and a massive impact, a rush of air and blowing ash, dust.

And when it began to clear, Bruce could pick out two figures, partly entangled, through the remaining haze: Zod, stopped short, faltering—tipping his head forward to gape downwards in blank surprise at his own chest; and Kara Zor-El, gripping his arm where she had twisted it neatly so that the sword that extended from his armor had plunged through him.

Zod let out a strange sighing breath—almost, Bruce thought, as if he were relieved.

And then he began to fall. And Kara caught his weight, not to prevent it or to help him, but simply to lower him down, as he went; and then he was gone, and only his body lay there.

For a moment, everything seemed to be stillness.

And then the first military helicopter swung in overhead, and began to descend.

 

 

---

 

 

Clark was grateful to discover that no matter how many questions everyone wished to ask of them, no one seemed inclined to tell him he couldn't leave, and take Bruce home.

He expected Bruce to ask to be returned to the penthouse.

But instead Bruce stood there, in the middle of the wreckage where what was left of the Kryptonian ship had come down, and met his eyes and said, "Take me to the other ship. The scout ship."

Clark blinked. "All right," he said uncertainly.

For this, at least, he could be sure he was allowed to gather Bruce into his arms. He still didn't know whether—whether there was anything else he would be allowed to give Bruce, and under what terms. But this much was a relief in and of itself, when his whole body still echoed with that first terrible moment of understanding, the icy crystallization of awareness that Bruce was inside that pod, that he was about to—

Clark shuddered, involuntary, and held Bruce a little more tightly to himself, as they flew; and if Bruce noticed it, he was kind, and didn't complain.

The scout ship lay as they had left it, upon the stretch of land that Bruce apparently owned. But as they drew closer to it, Clark realized that Bruce wasn't looking toward the ship. He was looking past it, out across the grounds and toward—something else, Clark understood, some other structure that stood in the distance, with a lake that spread out, shimmering, beside it.

"There?" Clark said, into Bruce's ear.

And Bruce nodded.

So Clark took them past the ship, and went—there.

It was a house, beside that lake. A glass house, somehow; Clark had never seen anything like it. It was beautiful, the way the lake reflected it, the way it reflected the lake in turn. The sun was dropping low, because it was now afternoon, and the angle of it filled the house with light.

But even though Bruce had asked to come here, he didn't—he didn't seem happy to have arrived. He was silent, and his face was strange and grave.

"Where are we?" Clark said softly, when he had brought them down in the driveway. "Bruce, what's going—"

Bruce looked at him, and then away. "Come inside," he said.

Clark did.

He followed Bruce into the house; and Bruce led him through it without looking at anything, without even seeming to see it. Through it, and toward a set of stairs that descended into—into the ground, somehow.

Bruce went down them. So Clark went down them, too.

And as the stairs descended farther, the space began to—to open up around them. It was very large, Clark understood gradually. Large, and well-lit; and part of it was concrete, deliberately shaped, but part of it was simply stone, a cave. Water poured from—from the lake, it had to be: poured down and was guided here and there as it descended, to keep it clear of the parts of the space that were full of—

Full of equipment.

There were tables, screens, tools, vehicles. Clark had slowed on the stairs, as he began to take it all in, but Bruce was waiting for him at the bottom; he sped up again, a little, and as he reached the base of the stairs himself, Bruce turned just a little to one side, away from the glass case that stood beside the stairs and toward an alcove on the other side.

An alcove that contained—it was—

"Batman," Clark said blankly.

He stared at it, the suit. It was Batman's, it was—exactly right; the cowl that covered two-thirds of Batman's face, and the dark armor that covered his chest, his body, and the belt that ran around the waist; the boots. Everything.

He looked at it, and then at Bruce. And—

And there, sitting on one of the tables beyond Bruce, was—was the fragment, the casing Clark had pried from the Phantom Zone device and given to Batman with his own hands. Displayed across the monitor that was attached to the same table was a list of some kind; Clark squinted for an instant, brought it into focus, and understood within three lines that it was a list of the people who had been inside the Wayne Enterprises building, the day he and Bruce had gone there to be interviewed by Lois Lane—the day Bruce had almost been killed for the first time.

Batman. Nightwing. And it was—it had been, always, all along—

No. It was impossible. Wasn't it?

Batman had been a hero from the old stories, the one place Clark had been able to think of to go for help when he hadn't known what else to do. But Bruce, Bruce wasn't—Bruce was charming, frustrating, so impossibly difficult to understand. Bruce had hardly ever seemed to take anything seriously, except when suddenly everything had become serious at once and he wouldn't talk to Clark about any of it at all, and—

And he had just tried to fly himself straight into the side of the Kryptonian ship, to—to save people, when he had thought no one else would.

Clark swallowed, and bit his mouth, and looked at Bruce again.

"It was you," he said. "It was—you were—you were pretending?"

Bruce said nothing.

"You were pretending," Clark said again, but this time it wasn't a question. "This was it, the thing you wouldn't let me understand about you. Why you were always leaving, where you were going. The part of you that was hidden all the time, the reason you hid it."

Bruce stood there, expressionless.

But he was—he had squared his shoulders, Clark saw. He had braced himself. He was waiting for something, something that would hurt. He was waiting to be judged, and found wanting.

For lying. For holding back. It was—Clark could have been angry. But all he could think was—

"And you're giving it to me," he said quietly.

He reached out, careful, hesitant, and touched Bruce's face; and Bruce had believed himself ready for anything, but he hadn't been ready for that, because he swayed into Clark's hand the barest fraction, and his eyes fell shut.

"You're giving it to me," Clark said, more softly still. "That's—good, that's—please. Bruce, I want it, I want everything," and still, still, Bruce made no sound, but Clark saw his throat work. "I want all of you, Bruce Thomas-Wayne," he added, and Bruce's mouth twisted for an instant almost as if he were in pain.

"You have it," he said, very low.

And Clark shut his eyes for a moment, allowed himself to absorb it; because he didn't have it, not yet, but Bruce was telling him that he could. That all there was to know about Bruce, all he had begun to think would be closed to him forever, wasn't out of his reach after all.

And then he looked at Bruce again; and he reached into the closure he had asked the suit to make for him, and took out Bruce's ring.

"Bruce," he said, and he let his other hand fall from Bruce's face, took Bruce's hand in it instead. "Bruce, I—will you marry me?"

Bruce opened his eyes at last, drew a harsh shaking breath—looked at the ring in Clark's hand, and then at Clark, as if he never wanted to look away.

"Yes," he said unsteadily.

And Clark slid the ring onto his finger, the way—the way humans did it when they loved each other already, when they wanted to spend the rest of their lives the same way; and then he leaned in close and pressed his mouth to Bruce's, and kissed him.

And this time, he thought—this time, it would be real.

 

 

Notes:

"The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it: we are better judges of convenience than we are of love."

—Mignon McLaughlin

And some of us are terrible judges of both, Bruce.