Given the date this was prompted, you can't possibly have been looking for a post-JL fill, OP ... but, uh, that's what this is. SORRY, PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THIS DOES NOT SUIT YOUR SOULBONDING NEEDS. /o\
"—and I will destroy you—"
The sound of tearing metal briefly drowns out Steppenwolf's voice—which echoes, reverberates, from wherever he is behind Bruce. Bruce can't spare the attention to check; the deck of the ship lurches sharply underneath him, and he has to leap over one toppling support strut, roll clear of another before it can land. He must be almost there. He must be. The rest of the League can't hold off Steppenwolf forever, but they won't need to, as long as Bruce can find—
"Superman."
He allows himself to say it, half a test; but Clark is unresponsive. Clark is—Clark is restrained, a sickly greenish glow suggestive of the mechanism behind this feat, and he looks like he's a million miles away. His eyes are open, but he hasn't looked at Bruce, didn't so much as twitch at the sound of Bruce's voice; and his mouth is open, too, ragged panting breaths just a little too evenly spaced. Like he's breathing through something, Bruce thinks, and it only takes him a moment to evaluate what.
The bands of metal locked around Clark's arms, his legs, his waist, aren't the only thing keeping him in place. He's—he's bolted in, gleaming black spikes of some alien material driven through both wrists, both ankles, and, with grim and exacting precision, into the space between two ribs.
Not just to hold him, but to hold him still: to keep him from doing anything to shift the position of the hand he's been forced to extend toward the mother box hovering beside him.
Bruce ignores the taste of bile rising at the back of his throat, and forces himself to focus on evaluating his options. There's no obvious mechanism by which the spikes can be removed quickly; but as soon as Clark is away from the kryptonite, the damage should undo itself. Even if the damage involves Bruce breaking his wrists to tear the spikes out sideways.
Bruce would do worse to get Clark out of here.
From a certain perspective, it's the mother box that's the most concerning. The box is doing something, Bruce can tell that much, but the light coming from it is more of a shimmer than the great blinding blaze of a fully-activated box. One side of it has—has opened, so to speak: the delicate metallic patterns have cracked apart, light leaking through, and something is extending out of it, silvery and glowing, twining through and around the curves of Clark's slack fingers.
Bruce has absolutely no way to tell what its purpose is, but under the circumstances he's not inclined to give that purpose the benefit of the doubt.
"—and he will kneel at my feet, he will be my creature, and you will tremble—"
Diana's war cry gives Bruce warning enough to let him dart out of the path of Steppenwolf's flail—apparently his choice of replacement for the axe Clark shattered last time around. It strikes the ship's wall over Bruce's head with a crunch as he skids away, and then a pair of parademons come buzzing over Steppenwolf's head and dive, reaching out with eager grasping hands for Bruce's arms.
Three quick blows send one to the deck beside him, insensate; Bruce slams his fist into the other to knock it off him, and just as it's gathering itself for another round, Arthur's trident sings out of nowhere and impales it against the strut behind it.
And then is gone, in a faint blue-white flicker. "You're welcome!" Barry yells, from another direction entirely, and Arthur's acknowledging grunt is almost drowned out by the flutter of a dozen more wings—
But Bruce can't let himself get distracted. He reorients: Clark, the box—Steppenwolf, and Diana's lariat is wound in a steadfast golden blaze around one of Steppenwolf's arms, a trailing loop just settling over the head of the flail to bind it to the handle. But he's reaching out with the other arm, in the direction of the box. Still bellowing, in that mineshaft of a voice, and straining to get to the box.
The ship bucks again, the deck shuddering under Bruce's boots, and Bruce has already started to move. Putting himself between Steppenwolf and the box—Steppenwolf and Clark—would be the height of stupidity. With or without a weapon, Steppenwolf is more than capable of crushing the Bat into highly-equipped bulletproof paste.
But Steppenwolf's fragmented monologues are more than enough to paint an unpleasant picture. He intends to use the box to do something to Clark—or to complete whatever it is that the box is already doing to Clark, issue an instruction or close a circuit. And Bruce, alone, has absolutely no hope of stopping him from doing so.
What he can do, however, is get there first.
A handful of seconds. That's all he needs. He can hear the snap of leathery wings behind him, Steppenwolf's distorted roar, and there's a discernable and increasing warmth—because they've struck the atmosphere, they must have, and this looming brick of a ship no longer has active shields and is hardly aerodynamic. All of it contributes to a certain indefinable impression that hell itself is at his heels.
Which, in a sense, it is, because if anything happens to Superman—
(—to Clark, Clark, pinned out like a lab specimen, half-gutted, as if seeing him lying vacant-eyed with a hole punched through him once hadn't been enough—)
—Bruce has a feeling "hell" will become an increasingly accurate descriptor for the situation.
One stride, two, three, and he's past Clark, the box in reach. The side directly across from Clark's hand is open, too, he sees, dim scattered light spilling out, patterns arranging and rearranging themselves. He's not even sure what he intends to do once he has it—pull it away from Clark, hoping it won't do any damage? Throw the box to Victor, in the hope that he can shut it down? Or to Barry, because Bruce has every confidence that Barry's both willing and able to play one hell of a game of keep-away—
But whatever he does do with it once it's in his grasp, there's no time to hesitate: he hurls himself the last stride and a half, arm outstretched, and feels the pulse of textured metal shifting underneath his gloved palm.
And then everything explodes.
Or—does it? Bruce only knows he can't see, can't hear, that he's lost all sense of his body's position in space; he can't tell whether he's falling or standing, whether he's moving or still. He has the split-second impression of some kind of intense velocity, a vast distance abruptly crossed with such rapidity as to render that vastness strangely small, and he wonders if that's what it feels like to be Barry, and then—
*
He wakes in silence.
For the first stretched beat, there's an odd quality to it: Bruce has a distinct sense that there had been a great deal of noise only a moment ago, that this silence is the sudden negative space left by its absence.
Steppenwolf, he thinks, and then he feels his body jerk, listens to himself gasp in a ragged breath, and oh. That's part of the reason the silence had felt so mufflingly complete. He hadn't been breathing.
His chest, his arms, his legs, ache fiercely—throbbing points of sharp pain that probably indicate severe bruising at the absolute least. He forces himself to blink, to breathe in slow and deep and steady, to make an evaluation. Nothing is broken so badly he can't stand. He should, therefore, get up.
This is a difficult and multi-step process; a quick roll to his feet is beyond him, at the moment, and not just because he has to lift one of the goddamn struts off himself first. If nothing else, it does give him the opportunity to make certain observations. He is still on the ship. Steppenwolf isn't, or Bruce would probably already be dead—and Bruce can almost, almost remember the sound, the rush of air, Steppenwolf's snarl of frustration and thwarted anger as he transported himself away. Just before the ship could crash, which Bruce suspects it has now done. And—
Clark. He doesn't say it; he's not confident the tightness of his throat would allow it. But for an instant, it's the only thing in his head—and, as if in response, what he can see of Clark's arm shifts the barest fraction.
Bruce forces himself to move with precision, and doesn't allow himself to stumble. The mother box is gone, which may be a problem depending on what it did, whether whatever effect it was exercising on Clark is still active. But, much more importantly, the crash broke half of Clark's restraints—and appears to have triggered some kind of automatic release for the other half.
Bruce evaluates the remaining obstacles. The support that had been suspending Clark has toppled, sloping at a drunken angle. He's bleeding freely from the punctures in his ankles, one wrist—the kryptonite is still much too close for him to heal. The other wrist is still trapped, the spike bent, and one of the spikes going through Clark's chest broke off near its base; the other withdrew correctly.
Bruce blinks, swallows, and centers himself. He's in pain, unsteady on his feet, and his head feels strange, light, his thoughts echoing in a too-large space—concussion probable. He acknowledges each of these things and sets them aside, and settles a hand carefully against Clark's ribs. As long as he pulls the spike straight outward, he shouldn't cause any additional damage, and once Clark is removed to a safe distance, he'll heal; there won't be time for him to bleed out.
Bruce tells himself this again, again, as his gloves grow stickier, wetter, and almost manages to believe it.
The wrist is easier. Bruce has recovered sufficient strength to force the mangled restraint up and sideways and pull the spike out. He doesn't have to break Clark's arm after all.
And after that it hardly qualifies as effort, to drag Clark out of the bay where Steppenwolf had secured him and into the ship's corridor. Bruce knows when he's gotten far enough; the flow of blood slows so much he can swipe it away and see the flesh knitting itself back together underneath.
He lowers Clark carefully to the floor and settles two fingers against his throat
(—just to be sure, just in case, and he's smearing Clark's own blood across Clark's skin in doing it, but oh, underneath that he can feel it: Clark, alive—)
and then there's a crackle in his ear. "Bruce?" Diana says, and before Bruce can even open his mouth to reply, Barry is there, in a rush of breeze.
"Found them!" Barry says, to Diana; and then, to Bruce, "Steppenwolf tubed on out of here, but he didn't take all the parademons with him, and Diana wanted me to go see if there was anything I could do about the whole, you know, ship falling out of the sky thing—which I pretty much couldn't, but I had enough time to sort of figure out how to read the displays? And then Victor did his whole techno-mind-meld thing, and—I guess the point is we didn't hit anything important on the way down. So that's good!" He pauses, and then, in one of those brief flickers of blue-white, is abruptly across from Bruce, kneeling by Clark's shoulder, instead of standing over them. "How's Clark?"
"He'll be fine," Bruce says, and as if in support of this statement, Clark grimaces a little—eyes still closed—and turns his head toward Bruce.
"Great!" Barry says. "Because that was incredibly gross, and also looked like it hurt."
And at that, Clark does crack an eye. "It did," he murmurs, and gingerly rotates one wrist, testing, before he lays a hand tentatively against his chest, over what is now a lot of blood, a hole in his uniform, and the perfectly whole skin underneath.
"And the box?" Bruce says.
"I believe the parademons took it," Diana says—and Bruce can hear her twice over, in his ear and echoing along the corridor. He twists, ignoring a lingering twinge in his chest, and yes, there she is, with Arthur at one shoulder and Victor at the other.
"The hull was breached," Victor adds. "In about sixteen places. Once Steppenwolf was gone, they swarmed for a minute and then just took off."
"Confused," Arthur offers. "Nobody giving orders anymore."
If the box did do something to Clark—will any other mother box be able to undo it? Or will they need the same one? They might be able to track it; but Bruce remembers how it looked just before he'd touched it, that dim glimmer. If it isn't fully active, it won't be throwing off the same kind of energy—
"We'll figure out another way, if we have to," Clark says, voice rough, easing himself up to a sitting position.
Bruce feels himself go utterly still.
"Uh, what?" Barry says.
"To find the box." Clark grimaces again, rubs unsteadily at the back of his neck, and only then looks up—at Barry, first, and then at Diana, Arthur, Victor—Bruce. "What?"
FILL: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (1/?)
"—and I will destroy you—"
The sound of tearing metal briefly drowns out Steppenwolf's voice—which echoes, reverberates, from wherever he is behind Bruce. Bruce can't spare the attention to check; the deck of the ship lurches sharply underneath him, and he has to leap over one toppling support strut, roll clear of another before it can land. He must be almost there. He must be. The rest of the League can't hold off Steppenwolf forever, but they won't need to, as long as Bruce can find—
"Superman."
He allows himself to say it, half a test; but Clark is unresponsive. Clark is—Clark is restrained, a sickly greenish glow suggestive of the mechanism behind this feat, and he looks like he's a million miles away. His eyes are open, but he hasn't looked at Bruce, didn't so much as twitch at the sound of Bruce's voice; and his mouth is open, too, ragged panting breaths just a little too evenly spaced. Like he's breathing through something, Bruce thinks, and it only takes him a moment to evaluate what.
The bands of metal locked around Clark's arms, his legs, his waist, aren't the only thing keeping him in place. He's—he's bolted in, gleaming black spikes of some alien material driven through both wrists, both ankles, and, with grim and exacting precision, into the space between two ribs.
Not just to hold him, but to hold him still: to keep him from doing anything to shift the position of the hand he's been forced to extend toward the mother box hovering beside him.
Bruce ignores the taste of bile rising at the back of his throat, and forces himself to focus on evaluating his options. There's no obvious mechanism by which the spikes can be removed quickly; but as soon as Clark is away from the kryptonite, the damage should undo itself. Even if the damage involves Bruce breaking his wrists to tear the spikes out sideways.
Bruce would do worse to get Clark out of here.
From a certain perspective, it's the mother box that's the most concerning. The box is doing something, Bruce can tell that much, but the light coming from it is more of a shimmer than the great blinding blaze of a fully-activated box. One side of it has—has opened, so to speak: the delicate metallic patterns have cracked apart, light leaking through, and something is extending out of it, silvery and glowing, twining through and around the curves of Clark's slack fingers.
Bruce has absolutely no way to tell what its purpose is, but under the circumstances he's not inclined to give that purpose the benefit of the doubt.
"—and he will kneel at my feet, he will be my creature, and you will tremble—"
Diana's war cry gives Bruce warning enough to let him dart out of the path of Steppenwolf's flail—apparently his choice of replacement for the axe Clark shattered last time around. It strikes the ship's wall over Bruce's head with a crunch as he skids away, and then a pair of parademons come buzzing over Steppenwolf's head and dive, reaching out with eager grasping hands for Bruce's arms.
Three quick blows send one to the deck beside him, insensate; Bruce slams his fist into the other to knock it off him, and just as it's gathering itself for another round, Arthur's trident sings out of nowhere and impales it against the strut behind it.
And then is gone, in a faint blue-white flicker. "You're welcome!" Barry yells, from another direction entirely, and Arthur's acknowledging grunt is almost drowned out by the flutter of a dozen more wings—
But Bruce can't let himself get distracted. He reorients: Clark, the box—Steppenwolf, and Diana's lariat is wound in a steadfast golden blaze around one of Steppenwolf's arms, a trailing loop just settling over the head of the flail to bind it to the handle. But he's reaching out with the other arm, in the direction of the box. Still bellowing, in that mineshaft of a voice, and straining to get to the box.
The ship bucks again, the deck shuddering under Bruce's boots, and Bruce has already started to move. Putting himself between Steppenwolf and the box—Steppenwolf and Clark—would be the height of stupidity. With or without a weapon, Steppenwolf is more than capable of crushing the Bat into highly-equipped bulletproof paste.
But Steppenwolf's fragmented monologues are more than enough to paint an unpleasant picture. He intends to use the box to do something to Clark—or to complete whatever it is that the box is already doing to Clark, issue an instruction or close a circuit. And Bruce, alone, has absolutely no hope of stopping him from doing so.
What he can do, however, is get there first.
A handful of seconds. That's all he needs. He can hear the snap of leathery wings behind him, Steppenwolf's distorted roar, and there's a discernable and increasing warmth—because they've struck the atmosphere, they must have, and this looming brick of a ship no longer has active shields and is hardly aerodynamic. All of it contributes to a certain indefinable impression that hell itself is at his heels.
Which, in a sense, it is, because if anything happens to Superman—
(—to Clark, Clark, pinned out like a lab specimen, half-gutted, as if seeing him lying vacant-eyed with a hole punched through him once hadn't been enough—)
—Bruce has a feeling "hell" will become an increasingly accurate descriptor for the situation.
One stride, two, three, and he's past Clark, the box in reach. The side directly across from Clark's hand is open, too, he sees, dim scattered light spilling out, patterns arranging and rearranging themselves. He's not even sure what he intends to do once he has it—pull it away from Clark, hoping it won't do any damage? Throw the box to Victor, in the hope that he can shut it down? Or to Barry, because Bruce has every confidence that Barry's both willing and able to play one hell of a game of keep-away—
But whatever he does do with it once it's in his grasp, there's no time to hesitate: he hurls himself the last stride and a half, arm outstretched, and feels the pulse of textured metal shifting underneath his gloved palm.
And then everything explodes.
Or—does it? Bruce only knows he can't see, can't hear, that he's lost all sense of his body's position in space; he can't tell whether he's falling or standing, whether he's moving or still. He has the split-second impression of some kind of intense velocity, a vast distance abruptly crossed with such rapidity as to render that vastness strangely small, and he wonders if that's what it feels like to be Barry, and then—
*
He wakes in silence.
For the first stretched beat, there's an odd quality to it: Bruce has a distinct sense that there had been a great deal of noise only a moment ago, that this silence is the sudden negative space left by its absence.
Steppenwolf, he thinks, and then he feels his body jerk, listens to himself gasp in a ragged breath, and oh. That's part of the reason the silence had felt so mufflingly complete. He hadn't been breathing.
His chest, his arms, his legs, ache fiercely—throbbing points of sharp pain that probably indicate severe bruising at the absolute least. He forces himself to blink, to breathe in slow and deep and steady, to make an evaluation. Nothing is broken so badly he can't stand. He should, therefore, get up.
This is a difficult and multi-step process; a quick roll to his feet is beyond him, at the moment, and not just because he has to lift one of the goddamn struts off himself first. If nothing else, it does give him the opportunity to make certain observations. He is still on the ship. Steppenwolf isn't, or Bruce would probably already be dead—and Bruce can almost, almost remember the sound, the rush of air, Steppenwolf's snarl of frustration and thwarted anger as he transported himself away. Just before the ship could crash, which Bruce suspects it has now done. And—
Clark. He doesn't say it; he's not confident the tightness of his throat would allow it. But for an instant, it's the only thing in his head—and, as if in response, what he can see of Clark's arm shifts the barest fraction.
Bruce forces himself to move with precision, and doesn't allow himself to stumble. The mother box is gone, which may be a problem depending on what it did, whether whatever effect it was exercising on Clark is still active. But, much more importantly, the crash broke half of Clark's restraints—and appears to have triggered some kind of automatic release for the other half.
Bruce evaluates the remaining obstacles. The support that had been suspending Clark has toppled, sloping at a drunken angle. He's bleeding freely from the punctures in his ankles, one wrist—the kryptonite is still much too close for him to heal. The other wrist is still trapped, the spike bent, and one of the spikes going through Clark's chest broke off near its base; the other withdrew correctly.
Bruce blinks, swallows, and centers himself. He's in pain, unsteady on his feet, and his head feels strange, light, his thoughts echoing in a too-large space—concussion probable. He acknowledges each of these things and sets them aside, and settles a hand carefully against Clark's ribs. As long as he pulls the spike straight outward, he shouldn't cause any additional damage, and once Clark is removed to a safe distance, he'll heal; there won't be time for him to bleed out.
Bruce tells himself this again, again, as his gloves grow stickier, wetter, and almost manages to believe it.
The wrist is easier. Bruce has recovered sufficient strength to force the mangled restraint up and sideways and pull the spike out. He doesn't have to break Clark's arm after all.
And after that it hardly qualifies as effort, to drag Clark out of the bay where Steppenwolf had secured him and into the ship's corridor. Bruce knows when he's gotten far enough; the flow of blood slows so much he can swipe it away and see the flesh knitting itself back together underneath.
He lowers Clark carefully to the floor and settles two fingers against his throat
(—just to be sure, just in case, and he's smearing Clark's own blood across Clark's skin in doing it, but oh, underneath that he can feel it: Clark, alive—)
and then there's a crackle in his ear. "Bruce?" Diana says, and before Bruce can even open his mouth to reply, Barry is there, in a rush of breeze.
"Found them!" Barry says, to Diana; and then, to Bruce, "Steppenwolf tubed on out of here, but he didn't take all the parademons with him, and Diana wanted me to go see if there was anything I could do about the whole, you know, ship falling out of the sky thing—which I pretty much couldn't, but I had enough time to sort of figure out how to read the displays? And then Victor did his whole techno-mind-meld thing, and—I guess the point is we didn't hit anything important on the way down. So that's good!" He pauses, and then, in one of those brief flickers of blue-white, is abruptly across from Bruce, kneeling by Clark's shoulder, instead of standing over them. "How's Clark?"
"He'll be fine," Bruce says, and as if in support of this statement, Clark grimaces a little—eyes still closed—and turns his head toward Bruce.
"Great!" Barry says. "Because that was incredibly gross, and also looked like it hurt."
And at that, Clark does crack an eye. "It did," he murmurs, and gingerly rotates one wrist, testing, before he lays a hand tentatively against his chest, over what is now a lot of blood, a hole in his uniform, and the perfectly whole skin underneath.
"And the box?" Bruce says.
"I believe the parademons took it," Diana says—and Bruce can hear her twice over, in his ear and echoing along the corridor. He twists, ignoring a lingering twinge in his chest, and yes, there she is, with Arthur at one shoulder and Victor at the other.
"The hull was breached," Victor adds. "In about sixteen places. Once Steppenwolf was gone, they swarmed for a minute and then just took off."
"Confused," Arthur offers. "Nobody giving orders anymore."
If the box did do something to Clark—will any other mother box be able to undo it? Or will they need the same one? They might be able to track it; but Bruce remembers how it looked just before he'd touched it, that dim glimmer. If it isn't fully active, it won't be throwing off the same kind of energy—
"We'll figure out another way, if we have to," Clark says, voice rough, easing himself up to a sitting position.
Bruce feels himself go utterly still.
"Uh, what?" Barry says.
"To find the box." Clark grimaces again, rubs unsteadily at the back of his neck, and only then looks up—at Barry, first, and then at Diana, Arthur, Victor—Bruce. "What?"
"It appears we have a problem," Bruce says.