Ack, sorry this is late! I would love to give you a solid excuse, but I just plain forgot. /o\
ANYWAY. That estimate is 200% subject to change! But I'm PRETTY sure nothing new and unexpected is going to pop up and insert itself into this fill, at this point. PRETTY sure. ;D Also, now that we're on the downslope toward the endgame, I'm planning to swap POV basically every other part, just because there's so much going on with each of them—hopefully this is not too confusing! ♥ YOU ALL
Clark's not sure what's wrong.
Frankly he almost wishes it were a League problem, something he could solve with a little of Superman's strength or a quick blast of the laser vision—something Diana could lop in half with her sword.
But everything with the League is actually fine. The sighting of Superman at the bank has obviously raised their visibility a little, and now that there's more than two people involved, it makes sense for them to ramp things up, go a little more public. Which is good, as it turns out, because it's not long before somebody in some kind of weird armor appears over Gotham yelling about time travel and blasting things with a really loud pulse gun. Clark can't decide which is weirder: that, or the fact that Batman actually asks for their help dealing with it.
And when they get there, everything goes fine, too. Diana is steady, agelessly calm—and Clark struggles a little to manage the sound coming from that gun, but Diana takes its pulses right on her shield and doesn't flinch. And Batman—well. He's still not really saying more than ten words to Clark at a time. But this time around, eight of those words get used to point out the armor's likeliest weak point. Clark'll take it.
Clark does get in Diana's way once; and Batman gets knocked backward off a roof so hard Clark almost breaks away from the fight to dive for him, until that good old hiss-thunk registers through the background noise. But overall, they really do manage to function as a team, just like they did before Clark died—and presumably with a little more practice together, they'll only get better.
So everything to do with the League is actually great.
The problem, whatever it is, is with Bruce.
It's not that he doesn't believe Bruce, about the bruise and everything. Bruce had told him he hadn't done that and had meant it. But Bruce also—he changes, and Clark's not sure what else could have caused it.
Clark had thought—well. He supposes he shouldn't be surprised if the nightmare set things back a little bit. But it had felt like they were—they were getting somewhere that night, they were inching that much closer to becoming something. The way Bruce had touched him, undressed him, lingered over him; god, he's squirming just remembering it. First it had surprised the hell out of him, because they'd never—they hadn't done it that way before. And then it had—
Having sex with Bruce has always been easy and fun, and Clark has always liked it. Even back when he'd felt kind of guilty about it—that had been because he'd liked it so much. He hadn't been able to convince himself to stop, even though a part of him had still felt like nothing was a real relationship unless it happened the same way he and Lois had happened, followed all the same steps.
But after Clark had finished being surprised about the way Bruce was touching him, he'd found that it struck him somewhere deep: Bruce being that careful and slow, that tender. He'd found himself thinking for the first time that he could fall in love with Bruce—and then, afterward, still hot and dazed and shuddering with it, that maybe he already had.
And now there's something wrong.
If that night hadn't happened, Clark might not even have noticed. At least not right away. But now that he's felt that sense of something larger between them, that sudden profound potential, it's easy to tell that Bruce is trying to stifle it.
Not that he's obvious about it. He's just—building a distance into all this, creating a gap where there's never been one before. He doesn't reach for Clark right away, doesn't lean into him as readily; smirks more, but smiles less. Clark doesn't come to the penthouse and find him waiting anymore: instead he's on the phone, on his laptop, busy, his mind somewhere else.
And afterward—the first couple times, Clark had gone to the west bedroom on his own, unwilling to push things when for all he knew he would wake up having hurled Bruce out the window. But he doesn't have another nightmare—hasn't, since that talk with Batman on the sidewalk. And he tells Bruce as much; and then, the night after, he deliberately misses his cue to get up, and pretends to fall asleep in the master bed instead.
Bruce doesn't lie back down, doesn't stay. He goes to the west bedroom himself, and leaves Clark there in the dark.
He gets weird, brusque, dismissive. He never lets Clark unbutton his shirt again—and sometimes it's hard not to think that all this must be about the bruise somehow, because Clark's not sure what else could be behind it. The nightmare seems more likely, but the timing doesn't match up. Does it? Bruce had been normal that evening—at least for Bruce—until Clark had gotten his shirt halfway off. Hadn't he? Or maybe it's been going on longer than that. Clark tries to remember another time when he'd been focused enough to get Bruce out of his clothes, and can't do it—maybe Bruce has some kind of issue with it, and wanted it not to be a big deal. Clark can't come up with anything else.
He'd thought at first, with a sick cold feeling, that Bruce maybe wanted to call things off, or at least was working up to it. Sometimes he still does think so. Except—
Except when he touches Bruce, kisses Bruce, it all stops. However far away from the balcony Bruce is when Clark arrives, however frustrated he sounds talking into the phone—once Clark gets a hand on him, gets an arm around his back or rubs a thumb up over his jaw, everything feels almost like it's fine again. Bruce kisses him harder now, if anything, longer, more deeply; one time they don't actually have sex at all, they just kiss on the sofa for—for hours, it must be, for longer than Clark's ever kissed anyone.
But then Bruce will get out of reach, will withdraw in that indefinable way, and everything will go off-kilter again. Clark doesn't know what to do about it except reach for him harder, hold on all the tighter—but that won't work forever.
(A tornado, he can't help thinking, would almost have been easier. He's older now, he understands himself better; if Bruce tried to wave him off like Dad had, he'd ignore it. He could close his hands around Bruce and not let go, and that's all it would take. That's all he'd have to do to fix it.
If Clark really were God the way Luthor had kept saying, he'd have made sure relationships could be managed as predictably as physics.)
Diana Prince does something—or maybe whoever's behind Batman's cowl does—and what the Justice League did in Gotham is news under precisely that name, a big splashy profile on each of them making the rounds. The photos of Diana and Clark are pretty blurry, and there's only a smeared half-image of something that could be Batman moving along a roofline, but put together, it lines things up pretty convincingly. Half of it is taken up with SUPERMAN RESURRECTED—nothing had come out of the incident at the First Metropolitan but some bad smartphone video and a lot of clickbait. A lot more people saw the fight in Gotham.
And maybe it's because of the publicity—maybe claiming to be organized, prepared, makes them more tempting. Maybe it's coincidence. But one way or another, a whole bunch of Justice-League-sized problems seem to come right out of the woodwork.
"I thought you two had already taken care of these things," Clark says, punching a robot into the two others behind it hard enough that all three of them fall down.
"So did I," Diana says, and then she pauses to swing the shield around and down, cutting neatly through a robot's arm with the edge. "But I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Why should Luthor have satisfied himself with only one building full of malfunctioning robots, when he could have two?"
"It's true," Clark admits. "Of all the things I remember about that guy, his sense of restraint isn't high on the list."
He catches another robot just starting to lunge at him and heaves it overhead and around, into—but very carefully not through—the wall of the building next to them. It strikes almost high enough along the side to knock a second robot off where it's started to climb up.
Almost. But not quite.
"Go on," Diana says, and throws him a grin over her shoulder before driving her sword into a robot so far that it comes out the other side. "I can hold the street for a minute or two without you."
It's a pleasure to lift off, to get to use at least one power fully—they've been trying to handle the robots without causing too much extra damage, focusing more on keeping the situation contained than on fighting quickly.
Batman is already three-quarters of the way up the building next door; which is taller, so he's actually at about the same height as the roof Clark and the robot are headed for.
"How did you get up here faster than it did?" Clark says into the radio.
(Batman had insisted. Super senses were all well and good, but it didn't matter how well Clark and Diana could hear him if he couldn't hear their replies.)
"I had a head start," Batman says, and then, almost to himself, "They seem to like roofs."
"And?"
"And that could be important—"
Clark lands on the roof, and the robot goes for him all at once: metal clanging, gyros whirring somewhere inside it, electrical connections snapping and hissing and vibrating.
So he almost doesn't hear Batman say, low and sharp, "Scope."
"What?" Clark says, holding one of the robot's grappling arms out of the way while he tries to remember what Batman had said about their power sources. Under the panel with the grille, right?
"Scope," Batman says.
For a second Clark's hearing blows wide, an almost reflexive attempt to figure out what the hell Batman's talking about; and mixed in with the whole sudden glorious rush of sound, there is something unusual: the lightest, gentlest little click, off up somewhere where nobody should be, where no one else is except one person—
And then it's like he hears it all at once. The flat sharp crack, and the thud, the impact itself and then a shudderingly loud echo, when Clark is listening like this, as Batman hits the roof.
The panel's already come away in Clark's hand, another moment and the robot is down—but it's a moment too long. Batman came tearing through the air at a desperate flat angle, not straight along the line of the roof but rather cutting across a corner, and at the speed he's going, there's not enough roof left for him to skid to a stop. Clark sees one gloved hand fly out, and then he drops, and Clark's already in the air.
At first he thinks it's worry, the way he's shaky when they land—the way he wobbled in the air, how hard he had to concentrate to come down without his feet going through the pavement by mistake.
But then he sets Batman down, kneeling over him, and Batman shoves him, pushes him away; and Clark is about to yell at him to just let Clark help already, and that's when he catches a glimmer of green.
He just stares for a second, catching up: the robot leading him away, and—and scope, Batman had said, like a rifle scope, like a sniper scope, and a kryptonite bullet—?
There's a crash somewhere, and Clark's ready to ignore except a moment later he realizes that it was the last robot dropping at Diana's hand. "What happened?" she says, kneeling into place across from Clark, clear concerned gaze on Batman's face.
"Bullet," Batman says. "Kryptonite."
(At least he's not any more generous with his words for Diana than for Clark. Very even-handed of him.)
"Lodged in the rib," he adds.
"Did you get shot on purpose?" Clark demands. If this is Batman's idea of a "sorry I tried to murder you" present—
"Not worse than any other bullet," Batman says. "Not for me."
"I could have dodged it—"
"And let it hit someone in the building across the street?" Batman murmurs.
"—or caught it—"
"All right, all right," Diana says, and then reaches out: blood is seeping out of Batman's armor in a steady dark trickle, a faint green light flickering out here and there underneath. She presses her hand over it, pushing down harder than any human could. And under the cowl, Batman's chin goes white and tense; but no more blood is leaking out from under Diana's palm. "I think it would be best if you weren't carrying him, Clark," she adds, working her free hand around and under Batman's shoulders.
And Clark wants to argue—it's not that much kryptonite; it might have been a problem if it had hit him, but buried in Batman's side like that, he can hardly even feel it, and he's less than a foot away.
But Batman just saved him, and the last thing Clark should be doing about that is misjudging himself and dropping him.
"Okay," Clark says. "Okay. I'll—uh, clean up these robot bits. Wait for the police."
"The fun part," Diana agrees, gentle.
Clark looks down at her hand, at Batman's blood on her knuckles; and then at the cowl, the dark eyes. That blank face still makes him think of nightmares—but there's somebody under it who just got shot for him. "Thank you," Clark says, touching Batman's shoulder. And then he gets up and turns away and makes himself not watch, not listen, as they leave.
I am totally aware that there's, like, decades of debate on the subject of kryptonite bullets and Superman, and all I have to say is: I choose to believe Bruce wouldn't risk being wrong. As the man himself says, if there's even a one percent chance—and the consequences are serious enough—the only responsible thing to do is treat it like a certainty ...
FILL: as to which may be the true; Bruce/Clark, identity porn (19/23ish?)
ANYWAY. That estimate is 200% subject to change! But I'm PRETTY sure nothing new and unexpected is going to pop up and insert itself into this fill, at this point. PRETTY sure. ;D Also, now that we're on the downslope toward the endgame, I'm planning to swap POV basically every other part, just because there's so much going on with each of them—hopefully this is not too confusing! ♥ YOU ALL
Clark's not sure what's wrong.
Frankly he almost wishes it were a League problem, something he could solve with a little of Superman's strength or a quick blast of the laser vision—something Diana could lop in half with her sword.
But everything with the League is actually fine. The sighting of Superman at the bank has obviously raised their visibility a little, and now that there's more than two people involved, it makes sense for them to ramp things up, go a little more public. Which is good, as it turns out, because it's not long before somebody in some kind of weird armor appears over Gotham yelling about time travel and blasting things with a really loud pulse gun. Clark can't decide which is weirder: that, or the fact that Batman actually asks for their help dealing with it.
And when they get there, everything goes fine, too. Diana is steady, agelessly calm—and Clark struggles a little to manage the sound coming from that gun, but Diana takes its pulses right on her shield and doesn't flinch. And Batman—well. He's still not really saying more than ten words to Clark at a time. But this time around, eight of those words get used to point out the armor's likeliest weak point. Clark'll take it.
Clark does get in Diana's way once; and Batman gets knocked backward off a roof so hard Clark almost breaks away from the fight to dive for him, until that good old hiss-thunk registers through the background noise. But overall, they really do manage to function as a team, just like they did before Clark died—and presumably with a little more practice together, they'll only get better.
So everything to do with the League is actually great.
The problem, whatever it is, is with Bruce.
It's not that he doesn't believe Bruce, about the bruise and everything. Bruce had told him he hadn't done that and had meant it. But Bruce also—he changes, and Clark's not sure what else could have caused it.
Clark had thought—well. He supposes he shouldn't be surprised if the nightmare set things back a little bit. But it had felt like they were—they were getting somewhere that night, they were inching that much closer to becoming something. The way Bruce had touched him, undressed him, lingered over him; god, he's squirming just remembering it. First it had surprised the hell out of him, because they'd never—they hadn't done it that way before. And then it had—
Having sex with Bruce has always been easy and fun, and Clark has always liked it. Even back when he'd felt kind of guilty about it—that had been because he'd liked it so much. He hadn't been able to convince himself to stop, even though a part of him had still felt like nothing was a real relationship unless it happened the same way he and Lois had happened, followed all the same steps.
But after Clark had finished being surprised about the way Bruce was touching him, he'd found that it struck him somewhere deep: Bruce being that careful and slow, that tender. He'd found himself thinking for the first time that he could fall in love with Bruce—and then, afterward, still hot and dazed and shuddering with it, that maybe he already had.
And now there's something wrong.
If that night hadn't happened, Clark might not even have noticed. At least not right away. But now that he's felt that sense of something larger between them, that sudden profound potential, it's easy to tell that Bruce is trying to stifle it.
Not that he's obvious about it. He's just—building a distance into all this, creating a gap where there's never been one before. He doesn't reach for Clark right away, doesn't lean into him as readily; smirks more, but smiles less. Clark doesn't come to the penthouse and find him waiting anymore: instead he's on the phone, on his laptop, busy, his mind somewhere else.
And afterward—the first couple times, Clark had gone to the west bedroom on his own, unwilling to push things when for all he knew he would wake up having hurled Bruce out the window. But he doesn't have another nightmare—hasn't, since that talk with Batman on the sidewalk. And he tells Bruce as much; and then, the night after, he deliberately misses his cue to get up, and pretends to fall asleep in the master bed instead.
Bruce doesn't lie back down, doesn't stay. He goes to the west bedroom himself, and leaves Clark there in the dark.
He gets weird, brusque, dismissive. He never lets Clark unbutton his shirt again—and sometimes it's hard not to think that all this must be about the bruise somehow, because Clark's not sure what else could be behind it. The nightmare seems more likely, but the timing doesn't match up. Does it? Bruce had been normal that evening—at least for Bruce—until Clark had gotten his shirt halfway off. Hadn't he? Or maybe it's been going on longer than that. Clark tries to remember another time when he'd been focused enough to get Bruce out of his clothes, and can't do it—maybe Bruce has some kind of issue with it, and wanted it not to be a big deal. Clark can't come up with anything else.
He'd thought at first, with a sick cold feeling, that Bruce maybe wanted to call things off, or at least was working up to it. Sometimes he still does think so. Except—
Except when he touches Bruce, kisses Bruce, it all stops. However far away from the balcony Bruce is when Clark arrives, however frustrated he sounds talking into the phone—once Clark gets a hand on him, gets an arm around his back or rubs a thumb up over his jaw, everything feels almost like it's fine again. Bruce kisses him harder now, if anything, longer, more deeply; one time they don't actually have sex at all, they just kiss on the sofa for—for hours, it must be, for longer than Clark's ever kissed anyone.
But then Bruce will get out of reach, will withdraw in that indefinable way, and everything will go off-kilter again. Clark doesn't know what to do about it except reach for him harder, hold on all the tighter—but that won't work forever.
(A tornado, he can't help thinking, would almost have been easier. He's older now, he understands himself better; if Bruce tried to wave him off like Dad had, he'd ignore it. He could close his hands around Bruce and not let go, and that's all it would take. That's all he'd have to do to fix it.
If Clark really were God the way Luthor had kept saying, he'd have made sure relationships could be managed as predictably as physics.)
Diana Prince does something—or maybe whoever's behind Batman's cowl does—and what the Justice League did in Gotham is news under precisely that name, a big splashy profile on each of them making the rounds. The photos of Diana and Clark are pretty blurry, and there's only a smeared half-image of something that could be Batman moving along a roofline, but put together, it lines things up pretty convincingly. Half of it is taken up with SUPERMAN RESURRECTED—nothing had come out of the incident at the First Metropolitan but some bad smartphone video and a lot of clickbait. A lot more people saw the fight in Gotham.
And maybe it's because of the publicity—maybe claiming to be organized, prepared, makes them more tempting. Maybe it's coincidence. But one way or another, a whole bunch of Justice-League-sized problems seem to come right out of the woodwork.
"I thought you two had already taken care of these things," Clark says, punching a robot into the two others behind it hard enough that all three of them fall down.
"So did I," Diana says, and then she pauses to swing the shield around and down, cutting neatly through a robot's arm with the edge. "But I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Why should Luthor have satisfied himself with only one building full of malfunctioning robots, when he could have two?"
"It's true," Clark admits. "Of all the things I remember about that guy, his sense of restraint isn't high on the list."
He catches another robot just starting to lunge at him and heaves it overhead and around, into—but very carefully not through—the wall of the building next to them. It strikes almost high enough along the side to knock a second robot off where it's started to climb up.
Almost. But not quite.
"Go on," Diana says, and throws him a grin over her shoulder before driving her sword into a robot so far that it comes out the other side. "I can hold the street for a minute or two without you."
It's a pleasure to lift off, to get to use at least one power fully—they've been trying to handle the robots without causing too much extra damage, focusing more on keeping the situation contained than on fighting quickly.
Batman is already three-quarters of the way up the building next door; which is taller, so he's actually at about the same height as the roof Clark and the robot are headed for.
"How did you get up here faster than it did?" Clark says into the radio.
(Batman had insisted. Super senses were all well and good, but it didn't matter how well Clark and Diana could hear him if he couldn't hear their replies.)
"I had a head start," Batman says, and then, almost to himself, "They seem to like roofs."
"And?"
"And that could be important—"
Clark lands on the roof, and the robot goes for him all at once: metal clanging, gyros whirring somewhere inside it, electrical connections snapping and hissing and vibrating.
So he almost doesn't hear Batman say, low and sharp, "Scope."
"What?" Clark says, holding one of the robot's grappling arms out of the way while he tries to remember what Batman had said about their power sources. Under the panel with the grille, right?
"Scope," Batman says.
For a second Clark's hearing blows wide, an almost reflexive attempt to figure out what the hell Batman's talking about; and mixed in with the whole sudden glorious rush of sound, there is something unusual: the lightest, gentlest little click, off up somewhere where nobody should be, where no one else is except one person—
And then it's like he hears it all at once. The flat sharp crack, and the thud, the impact itself and then a shudderingly loud echo, when Clark is listening like this, as Batman hits the roof.
The panel's already come away in Clark's hand, another moment and the robot is down—but it's a moment too long. Batman came tearing through the air at a desperate flat angle, not straight along the line of the roof but rather cutting across a corner, and at the speed he's going, there's not enough roof left for him to skid to a stop. Clark sees one gloved hand fly out, and then he drops, and Clark's already in the air.
At first he thinks it's worry, the way he's shaky when they land—the way he wobbled in the air, how hard he had to concentrate to come down without his feet going through the pavement by mistake.
But then he sets Batman down, kneeling over him, and Batman shoves him, pushes him away; and Clark is about to yell at him to just let Clark help already, and that's when he catches a glimmer of green.
He just stares for a second, catching up: the robot leading him away, and—and scope, Batman had said, like a rifle scope, like a sniper scope, and a kryptonite bullet—?
There's a crash somewhere, and Clark's ready to ignore except a moment later he realizes that it was the last robot dropping at Diana's hand. "What happened?" she says, kneeling into place across from Clark, clear concerned gaze on Batman's face.
"Bullet," Batman says. "Kryptonite."
(At least he's not any more generous with his words for Diana than for Clark. Very even-handed of him.)
"Lodged in the rib," he adds.
"Did you get shot on purpose?" Clark demands. If this is Batman's idea of a "sorry I tried to murder you" present—
"Not worse than any other bullet," Batman says. "Not for me."
"I could have dodged it—"
"And let it hit someone in the building across the street?" Batman murmurs.
"—or caught it—"
"All right, all right," Diana says, and then reaches out: blood is seeping out of Batman's armor in a steady dark trickle, a faint green light flickering out here and there underneath. She presses her hand over it, pushing down harder than any human could. And under the cowl, Batman's chin goes white and tense; but no more blood is leaking out from under Diana's palm. "I think it would be best if you weren't carrying him, Clark," she adds, working her free hand around and under Batman's shoulders.
And Clark wants to argue—it's not that much kryptonite; it might have been a problem if it had hit him, but buried in Batman's side like that, he can hardly even feel it, and he's less than a foot away.
But Batman just saved him, and the last thing Clark should be doing about that is misjudging himself and dropping him.
"Okay," Clark says. "Okay. I'll—uh, clean up these robot bits. Wait for the police."
"The fun part," Diana agrees, gentle.
Clark looks down at her hand, at Batman's blood on her knuckles; and then at the cowl, the dark eyes. That blank face still makes him think of nightmares—but there's somebody under it who just got shot for him. "Thank you," Clark says, touching Batman's shoulder. And then he gets up and turns away and makes himself not watch, not listen, as they leave.
I am totally aware that there's, like, decades of debate on the subject of kryptonite bullets and Superman, and all I have to say is: I choose to believe Bruce wouldn't risk being wrong. As the man himself says, if there's even a one percent chance—and the consequences are serious enough—the only responsible thing to do is treat it like a certainty ...