I'm branching out: title's from a book this time! :D Also, it's my hope that by starting out with long parts from the beginning, I can prevent this thing from getting as rear-loaded as certain other fills. *crosses fingers* Because oh, look, thousands of extra words of setup. Who would have believed it. :D




"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."
—The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne




It isn't difficult to go on in the wake of Superman's death.

Sometimes Bruce feels like it should be. Considering his hand in it, that he'd let himself be so readily manipulated into doing Lex Luthor's dirty work, it should have taken him apart. It should have burned him down to the ground.

But instead—instead it remakes him. Bruce Wayne steps up to help with the reconstruction, Metropolis scarred all over again by the opening round of Superman's fight with Zod and Stryker's Island a burned-out husk; and Batman stands at Clark Kent's grave and rediscovers what it means to have purpose. He hadn't been willing to listen at the time, but Alfred had been right: he had felt helpless, helpless and hopeless—and when nothing he did mattered, when nothing he tried ever seemed to make a difference, the knowledge of Superman's single weakness had been like a gift. Killing Superman had been the one thing left, the one thing that maybe only Bruce could even do—

And then everything had changed. It hadn't been at Batman's hand, but Superman had died anyway, and Bruce had watched it happen and had understood. Superman had died and Bruce hadn't, and the second chance Clark had given him couldn't be wasted, couldn't. Clark had given them all a second chance. Bruce had had him pinned to the ground, had had a boot on his chest and a kryptonite edge pressed to his throat, and Clark had still asked him for help—had still, after everything he'd seen of Batman, believed that there was someone under that cowl who would save his mother.

(Bruce occasionally wonders how exactly Clark had thought that would go. He might have known about Martha Wayne, he'd been a reporter—he might have known the name would give Bruce pause. He might have known Bruce would want to save someone's mother from men with guns. But he hadn't—he hadn't said Stop or Wait, hadn't said Let me. Just Find him. Just Save Martha. Like he only wanted Bruce to agree, like Bruce's word was worth anything to him; like he thought Bruce would maybe nod, shove the spear the rest of the way through his neck, and then go zipping off to rescue Martha Kent.

Sometimes Bruce is grateful for it, this idea that Clark had in a certain sense trusted him, even at that moment. But sometimes he can't help seeing it another way. Sometimes it looks to him like it was more that Clark had counted on there being a line: like he'd assumed Bruce cared plenty about human life, and it was just that Clark didn't qualify.

Sometimes he wishes he could tell himself Clark had been wrong.)

And now Clark's gone.

But what he built before he went remains. Bruce and Diana are unquestionably stronger together than they would have been apart—Diana has raw power, the wisdom to wield it, but she doesn't know their twinned cities the way Bruce does. The last time she'd stepped in to try to sort out a human mess, it had been in the middle of a war; and that had been the kind with rules, fronts, uniforms, not the shadowy systematic rot of organized crime. There are ways for Bruce to help her. And being able to call on someone who can lift him with one hand isn't exactly a drawback for Batman.

Metropolis and Gotham are stronger, too, drawn together by the disaster zone between them. Deciding what to do about Stryker's, where to begin, is a joint effort; so is mourning Superman. He wasn't just Metropolis's hero, not really, and Bruce can't claim to be surprised that his highly-publicized death wipes the worst remains of Luthor's smear campaign away. Nobody likes speaking ill of the dead.

Which actually makes things much easier. Visiting Superman's memorial regularly is exactly the kind of overchoreographed play of performative thoughtfulness that people expect from Bruce Wayne. (Keeping it up for more than a few months is going to be an issue, potentially. But all Bruce needs to do is make a couple public missteps, start an ugly rumor, and then he can probably pass it off as a publicist's ongoing effort to rehabilitate his image.) He can make his usual trip to see his parents and then swing out to Metropolis, can stand over the engraved granite and look down at it for a few minutes before he adds his own handful of flowers to the pile.

And it is a pile. Almost six months now and the flowers are still coming, bright and boundless, spilling over the benches, the grass, the walkways. Bruce didn't know Clark well, not really, but he thinks Clark would have liked it. No statue, no gold leaf, nothing imposing or severe. Just half an acre of flowers, left again and again by people who want to remember him.

Bruce Wayne wouldn't kneel down. But Bruce can at least close his eyes, bow his head. He's found a sort of peace in this—nothing he deserves, but it's there anyway. Clark is gone. Bruce can't fix that, can't get him back, can't even ask for his forgiveness. But he can do better. He can reach out and he can try harder and he can do better.

That's probably all Clark ever wanted from him anyway.




He can't stand at Superman's memorial all afternoon. He gives himself another minute, breathes in the smell of ten thousand cut flowers; and then he steps away and heads back to the car. He'd already intended to go by one of the Metropolis offices today—that will take, mm, perhaps a couple of hours at the pace Bruce Wayne ought to work—

His phone buzzes. He almost starts to reach for the wrong pocket: but Bruce Wayne's personal phone has a loud annoying ringtone carefully chosen from the week's top forty. It's Bruce's own that's on silent.

He's expecting to see that it's Diana, but he still looks before he answers—thankfully, because it's not Diana.

It's Martha Kent.

He feels himself frown just a little. He gave her this number, of course, but no matter how many times he assures her that she could never be bothering him, she's almost always careful to stick to nights, weekends. Some part of him had silently expected her to—to do something with the fact that she knows Bruce Wayne so personally. But she never asks him for anything.

So it's a surprise when he accepts the call, lifts the phone to his ear, and hears her say, "Bruce—Bruce, I'm sorry, I wasn't sure—can you or, or Diana, could you—"

"Martha," Bruce says quickly, "Martha, slow down," because she sounds—awful, breathless, her voice scratched up somehow like maybe she's been crying. And sometimes she does when she's on the phone with him, but not like this.

"Sorry," she says again, "I'm sorry," and then she drags in a short hitching breath. "I—I don't know what to do, I don't know what—"

"Just tell me what's happened," and Bruce finds himself sliding toward one of his Batman voices—the calm, level one he deploys for victims, children, the people who need his help.

And he learned how to use that tone for a reason: it does make a difference. Martha inhales again, lets it out a little more steadily, and then she says the last thing Bruce was ever, ever expecting to hear: "Clark is standing on my porch."




Bruce stops moving.

It's not the smart reaction, but for one long whited-out moment he can't force himself past it. And some small corner of his brain is still ticking away, coolly assessing—it's all right. Bruce Wayne can get bad news sometimes in public, something surprising or stressful. It's for the best, even, if he's going to have to jet off to Kansas in ten minutes.

And he is. No matter what's happening—whether Martha Kent's been drugged, is ill, or is having some kind of breakdown, some grief-fueled hallucinatory event; whether whatever is out there on her porch looking like Clark Kent is a hologram, another Luthor-driven constructed Kryptonian body, something that's picked Clark Kent's corpse up like a glove and put it on, or—

or—

Whatever it is, Bruce reminds himself, she shouldn't drive it off and she shouldn't make it panic. She needs to go along with it, to seem like she isn't suspicious; and putting all the worst possibilities in her head will only make that harder for her. Bruce can't help her until he gets there. And if it is something evil, if it feels found out, it might just tear right through the wall and break her in half.

"All right," he says aloud, and Martha sucks in another shuddering breath on the other end of the line. "All right, is he—what is he doing?"

"Nothing," Martha whispers, "nothing, he's just—he's—god, Bruce, he's covered in dirt. He looks confused, it's like he's half-asleep—"

And then, faint, somewhere beyond her, Bruce hears someone say, "Mom?"

Drugging, illness, and hallucination can be eliminated, he tells himself, and ignores the stuttered leap of his heart: this is the beginning of about forty-five different horror movies in three or four languages. Just because it sounds bewildered, helpless—just because it sounds like Clark—

"Mother Mary," Martha murmurs.

She must move, she must be walking toward the door; the second soft, "Mom?" is louder.

"Clark—Clark, honey, it's okay," she says, mouth tilted away from the phone, and then, to Bruce, "Oh, god, tell me I can let him in. Tell me this isn't—"

So she's already thought of some of the worst things. If it intended to hurt you right away, it would just have broken down the door and done it, Bruce doesn't say. "It's all right, let him in," he tells her instead. "He's—I'm sure he's disoriented. Try to find a place inside the house with a lot of sunlight."

That's what she would do if it were really Clark. Not that she needs him to tell her that; except maybe she does, right now, because something that looks like her dead son is standing outside her screen door asking for help. "All right," she says, "all right. And you'll come?"

Bruce is ten steps away from the car. The Batplane's long since been repaired, and he has standing permission from Martha to set it down in the back field if he uses it to visit; plus driving time, and it won't be kind to underestimate—

"Forty-five minutes," he says, and doesn't wait for the driver, opens the car door himself. "I'll be there."