And now some Bruce angst, to match the Clark angst from last time! :D \o?
It's a skill Bruce has cultivated over years of long practice, being able to maintain genuinely separate but simultaneous trains of thought—or, in this case, a train of thought and a recitation that can roll on in the back of his mind with only a fraction of his attention devoted to it.
Clark had been confused, disoriented, when he came to on the ship. He hadn't realized what was happening until it was explained to him, and he hadn't been paying any particular attention to Bruce before that. The easy unthinking way he'd replied aloud to Bruce's unspoken thought had said as much.
So it's entirely possible that he missed—or received only the vaguest impression of—that first stark bright moment of sharp-edged horror. Bruce had felt it and it had only been multiplied by his awareness that it might be perceptible to Clark; he had scrambled for something that could distract from it, and it was painfully appropriate that he should have found Dante at his fingertips. He had been thinking of hell at his heels, before.
And now it has caught up to him.
It had been disconcerting, to feel Clark's dismay and discontent so clearly; Bruce had been startled by its intensity. Clark hadn't—he hadn't looked half as upset as he'd felt. But Bruce can't claim to have been surprised in the least by the emotion itself.
In the months since Clark's resurrection, Clark has shown an unexpected willingness to interact with Bruce. To talk to him, to smile at him, to work alongside him—and possibly even to forgive him. None of which could have prepared Clark for the prospect of carrying Bruce around in the back of his mind, ever-present and inescapable. It's no wonder he was surprised, displeased. It's no wonder he was unhappy, when he realized the implications of the connection the mother box has forged between them.
Or—some of the implications, at least. Bruce dares to hope it will be possible to ensure that he remains ignorant of the remainder.
Though, of course, if Bruce isn't careful, Clark might very well be able to simply pluck it straight out of his mind. All of it: every ugly shadowed thing Bruce has so carefully chained away in the darkest corners of himself, the whole strangling mass of it that lurks there, where no one else should ever have been able to find it. And even if Clark never delves that deeply—Bruce has abruptly become thoroughly conscious of how much more there is that lies unburied. His panting pathetic hero-worship, the sick sad obviousness with which he'd fought Diana over Clark's revival or stood there watching Superman battle Steppenwolf—watching, staring, as if there weren't a half-dozen better things Batman might have been doing. Months' worth of helpless desperate fantasizing, the full and vivid range of it, from Superman's wrathful grip grinding his armor plates together to Clark's startled uncertain warmth, the whole bank?—
Bruce lives a life of precision. People who need to see Bruce Wayne are shown Bruce Wayne; in situations that call for Batman, Batman intervenes. The measurements are exact, the borders inviolate, and Bruce has their dimensions and extents duly memorized.
Perfection is out of his reach, as always. But he has deliberately and ruthlessly minimized the potential for an unexpected breach—or he had, once, and has lately redoubled his efforts, after the unforgivable lapse that had allowed Luthor to connect one with the other and manipulate him using the knowledge. And now—
Even Alfred has never possessed such wholly unfettered access to every single part of Bruce. And Alfred has, at times, courteously refrained from pressing, when he deems it wise—but Clark, through no fault of his own, might not be able to. In the same way that Bruce may not be able to avoid having the whole of himself laid out for Clark to see, Clark may not be able to avoid looking at it.
And that, Bruce thinks, is a circle of hell beyond description.
—ch'i' non lo scrivo, però ch'ogne parlar sarebbe poco—
*
He knows he won't be able to get away with silence.
The Wayne Manor renovations are coming along well, but far from complete; Clark has nothing but his uniform, and Victor is his own equipment, but Diana, Arthur, and Barry are all still using the Cave as storage space. Which makes avoiding them somewhat difficult.
Barry keeps casting him quick uncertain glances, opening his mouth and then closing it and then opening it again; and ever since the moment Clark took off into the sky over the bay, Arthur has been watching him with those steady pale eyes.
But—of course—it's Diana who pulls him aside, before he can head upstairs. "Bruce," she says, fixing him with that patient look she gets when she knows he has a dislocated shoulder he's not telling her about. "Are you all right?"
"Of course," he says.
She's unmoved. "I know it must be—strange for you," she says delicately, "to have such a thing happen. To be joined in such a way."
Bruce looks away. "It'll take some getting used to," he allows, letting his tone slide toward wry, because misdirection is an art and he knows better than to try to lie to Diana outright. "But it's fine. I can handle it."
"You aren't the only one it happened to," Diana says.
"We can handle it," Bruce amends, and he has to be very careful not to let it come out snappish. It's already taking up so much of his concentration, keeping up the steady flow of Dante in the background, monitoring the inside of his head so thoroughly for anything trying to slide in Clark's direction. Maybe that's why "Clark is—" slips out before he can choke it off, why he has to scrabble for something else to say that isn't quel cammino ascoso intrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo—"Clark is all right. He's at home," Bruce adds, suddenly aware that this is in fact the truth. "He's all right."
"I'm glad," Diana says simply, but she keeps watching him for a long moment afterward, with a look he can't quite parse.
But it is the truth. They can handle it, and Clark is all right. Bruce—Bruce would know if that weren't so. If there were anything wrong with Clark aside from something that sounds like a sigh in Bruce's head, a soft quiet discontent, Bruce would know it. He thinks back to waking on the ship, to the sharp pain in his ribs, his arms, his legs: the spike-bolts. That's where they'd been, in Clark, and Bruce had felt the hurt.
Diana steps away with a smile and doesn't keep him. Bruce walks upstairs with a head full of all the tests he wants to run, and it's perfect timing: he hits the last canto of Inferno and allows himself to transition straight into Das Rheingold. Music is even lower-maintenance than rote recital, and Bruce will need the lion's share of his attention devoted to whatever results his self-examinations can turn up.
(It doesn't matter what he might have said. It doesn't matter that he told one truth and hid another. Clark is—
Clark is like a light, in Bruce's head. The place where he is, the sense of his presence, is—is a window thrown open in a shuttered half-burnt mansion, bright warmth shining hopefully into a vast dark place.
But it doesn't matter. Bruce will figure out how to undo this, and have his mind to himself again, and none of it has to touch Clark at all.)
*
Bruce leans back in his chair and sighs, rubbing tiredly at his eyes.
Nine hours have carried him from Das Rheingold through Die Walküre and straight into Siegfried, and he's staring down both the transition to Götterdämmerung and the looming inevitability of a conclusion he would rather not acknowledge.
Perhaps it had been foolish, but he'd been hoping against hope for some kind of—discernable mechanism behind the bond. Something that could be detected and dealt with, even without the mother box. A range of possibilities had seemed plausible, and some of them came conveniently matched with obvious solutions. Nanites in his system, in Clark's, paired and broadcasting; an EMP might have been enough to take care of it. Some sort of injection from those gleaming silver filaments, some kind of osmotic force sufficient to penetrate Bruce's gloves as easily as his skin—surely it could be flushed from their bodies one way or another, with time or fluids or some variation on dialysis.
But he's scanned and sampled and tested himself in every way he can think of, and nothing's shown itself. Obviously his brain function is deviating wildly from baseline, but he can't pinpoint the cause, can't trace those deviations back to an actionable origin.
He supposes he should have known it wouldn't be that easy. And at the very least, eliminating solutions that are not viable does technically qualify as some sort of progress.
"Perhaps a break, sir."
Bruce makes a face into his own palm, and then spins his chair around to take the cup of tea Alfred's holding out. When Alfred is mother-henning, sometimes giving in to his first few gentle sallies is enough to convince him not to escalate. At least for a while.
He takes a sip, demonstrative, eyebrows raised.
"Why, yes, Master Wayne," Alfred murmurs, "I do indeed observe your obedience and marvel. It's almost enough to make an old man think you might choose to sleep tonight of your own free will."
Bruce glances away.
"Almost," Alfred repeats.
"I have work to do, Alfred."
"I'm sure." Alfred waits a beat, and then sighs through his nose. "Do you truly expect to solve this problem tonight, sir?"
Bruce takes another sip of tea and looks at the monitors, all his test results and useless scans. "No," he says. "But I—need to try."
The weight of Alfred's gaze then is unmistakable. Need: Bruce has never used that word lightly. "Well," Alfred says slowly. "In that case, sir, might I be of any assistance?"
Bruce supposes a second pair of eyes wouldn't go amiss.
He gives Alfred the nod, and Alfred draws up a second chair, settles in beside him, and begins to review the results Bruce has already gone through anew. And Bruce—
Bruce stares grimly at the screen in front of him, and thinks about a clock ticking down. He knows from experience that he's capable of lasting at least 48 hours without suffering particularly deleterious effects, and 72 isn't out of the question. But beyond that, his judgment will be increasingly questionable, and potentially to the point where sleep would no longer constitute a truly significant loss of control. Doing this—wielding the iron-fisted precision necessary to keep his own grasping crawling shadows out of Clark's mind, while at the same time distracting Clark well enough to keep Clark from looking too closely at his—requires a baseline level of focused concentration that may simply prove impossible to maintain, whether Bruce is conscious or not.
Dealing with this within 48 hours would be optimal. Within 72 would be acceptable. But there are only so many stimulants he can take; there's only so far he can push before he'll be compromised one way or another. And if he should fall asleep—
He knows his own mind. Clark lying in those restraints, slack-faced and unseeing, with bloody holes torn all over again through that goddamn Superman uniform—yes, Bruce has some idea what will be waiting for him, if he shuts his eyes and lets it come.
There are some things Wagner can't drown out. And it would be—optimal, if Clark were never forced to find out what they are.
FILL: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (3/?)
It's a skill Bruce has cultivated over years of long practice, being able to maintain genuinely separate but simultaneous trains of thought—or, in this case, a train of thought and a recitation that can roll on in the back of his mind with only a fraction of his attention devoted to it.
Clark had been confused, disoriented, when he came to on the ship. He hadn't realized what was happening until it was explained to him, and he hadn't been paying any particular attention to Bruce before that. The easy unthinking way he'd replied aloud to Bruce's unspoken thought had said as much.
So it's entirely possible that he missed—or received only the vaguest impression of—that first stark bright moment of sharp-edged horror. Bruce had felt it and it had only been multiplied by his awareness that it might be perceptible to Clark; he had scrambled for something that could distract from it, and it was painfully appropriate that he should have found Dante at his fingertips. He had been thinking of hell at his heels, before.
And now it has caught up to him.
It had been disconcerting, to feel Clark's dismay and discontent so clearly; Bruce had been startled by its intensity. Clark hadn't—he hadn't looked half as upset as he'd felt. But Bruce can't claim to have been surprised in the least by the emotion itself.
In the months since Clark's resurrection, Clark has shown an unexpected willingness to interact with Bruce. To talk to him, to smile at him, to work alongside him—and possibly even to forgive him. None of which could have prepared Clark for the prospect of carrying Bruce around in the back of his mind, ever-present and inescapable. It's no wonder he was surprised, displeased. It's no wonder he was unhappy, when he realized the implications of the connection the mother box has forged between them.
Or—some of the implications, at least. Bruce dares to hope it will be possible to ensure that he remains ignorant of the remainder.
Though, of course, if Bruce isn't careful, Clark might very well be able to simply pluck it straight out of his mind. All of it: every ugly shadowed thing Bruce has so carefully chained away in the darkest corners of himself, the whole strangling mass of it that lurks there, where no one else should ever have been able to find it. And even if Clark never delves that deeply—Bruce has abruptly become thoroughly conscious of how much more there is that lies unburied. His panting pathetic hero-worship, the sick sad obviousness with which he'd fought Diana over Clark's revival or stood there watching Superman battle Steppenwolf—watching, staring, as if there weren't a half-dozen better things Batman might have been doing. Months' worth of helpless desperate fantasizing, the full and vivid range of it, from Superman's wrathful grip grinding his armor plates together to Clark's startled uncertain warmth, the whole bank?—
Bruce lives a life of precision. People who need to see Bruce Wayne are shown Bruce Wayne; in situations that call for Batman, Batman intervenes. The measurements are exact, the borders inviolate, and Bruce has their dimensions and extents duly memorized.
Perfection is out of his reach, as always. But he has deliberately and ruthlessly minimized the potential for an unexpected breach—or he had, once, and has lately redoubled his efforts, after the unforgivable lapse that had allowed Luthor to connect one with the other and manipulate him using the knowledge. And now—
Even Alfred has never possessed such wholly unfettered access to every single part of Bruce. And Alfred has, at times, courteously refrained from pressing, when he deems it wise—but Clark, through no fault of his own, might not be able to. In the same way that Bruce may not be able to avoid having the whole of himself laid out for Clark to see, Clark may not be able to avoid looking at it.
And that, Bruce thinks, is a circle of hell beyond description.
—ch'i' non lo scrivo, però ch'ogne parlar sarebbe poco—
*
He knows he won't be able to get away with silence.
The Wayne Manor renovations are coming along well, but far from complete; Clark has nothing but his uniform, and Victor is his own equipment, but Diana, Arthur, and Barry are all still using the Cave as storage space. Which makes avoiding them somewhat difficult.
Barry keeps casting him quick uncertain glances, opening his mouth and then closing it and then opening it again; and ever since the moment Clark took off into the sky over the bay, Arthur has been watching him with those steady pale eyes.
But—of course—it's Diana who pulls him aside, before he can head upstairs. "Bruce," she says, fixing him with that patient look she gets when she knows he has a dislocated shoulder he's not telling her about. "Are you all right?"
"Of course," he says.
She's unmoved. "I know it must be—strange for you," she says delicately, "to have such a thing happen. To be joined in such a way."
Bruce looks away. "It'll take some getting used to," he allows, letting his tone slide toward wry, because misdirection is an art and he knows better than to try to lie to Diana outright. "But it's fine. I can handle it."
"You aren't the only one it happened to," Diana says.
"We can handle it," Bruce amends, and he has to be very careful not to let it come out snappish. It's already taking up so much of his concentration, keeping up the steady flow of Dante in the background, monitoring the inside of his head so thoroughly for anything trying to slide in Clark's direction. Maybe that's why "Clark is—" slips out before he can choke it off, why he has to scrabble for something else to say that isn't quel cammino ascoso intrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo—"Clark is all right. He's at home," Bruce adds, suddenly aware that this is in fact the truth. "He's all right."
"I'm glad," Diana says simply, but she keeps watching him for a long moment afterward, with a look he can't quite parse.
But it is the truth. They can handle it, and Clark is all right. Bruce—Bruce would know if that weren't so. If there were anything wrong with Clark aside from something that sounds like a sigh in Bruce's head, a soft quiet discontent, Bruce would know it. He thinks back to waking on the ship, to the sharp pain in his ribs, his arms, his legs: the spike-bolts. That's where they'd been, in Clark, and Bruce had felt the hurt.
Diana steps away with a smile and doesn't keep him. Bruce walks upstairs with a head full of all the tests he wants to run, and it's perfect timing: he hits the last canto of Inferno and allows himself to transition straight into Das Rheingold. Music is even lower-maintenance than rote recital, and Bruce will need the lion's share of his attention devoted to whatever results his self-examinations can turn up.
(It doesn't matter what he might have said. It doesn't matter that he told one truth and hid another. Clark is—
Clark is like a light, in Bruce's head. The place where he is, the sense of his presence, is—is a window thrown open in a shuttered half-burnt mansion, bright warmth shining hopefully into a vast dark place.
But it doesn't matter. Bruce will figure out how to undo this, and have his mind to himself again, and none of it has to touch Clark at all.)
*
Bruce leans back in his chair and sighs, rubbing tiredly at his eyes.
Nine hours have carried him from Das Rheingold through Die Walküre and straight into Siegfried, and he's staring down both the transition to Götterdämmerung and the looming inevitability of a conclusion he would rather not acknowledge.
Perhaps it had been foolish, but he'd been hoping against hope for some kind of—discernable mechanism behind the bond. Something that could be detected and dealt with, even without the mother box. A range of possibilities had seemed plausible, and some of them came conveniently matched with obvious solutions. Nanites in his system, in Clark's, paired and broadcasting; an EMP might have been enough to take care of it. Some sort of injection from those gleaming silver filaments, some kind of osmotic force sufficient to penetrate Bruce's gloves as easily as his skin—surely it could be flushed from their bodies one way or another, with time or fluids or some variation on dialysis.
But he's scanned and sampled and tested himself in every way he can think of, and nothing's shown itself. Obviously his brain function is deviating wildly from baseline, but he can't pinpoint the cause, can't trace those deviations back to an actionable origin.
He supposes he should have known it wouldn't be that easy. And at the very least, eliminating solutions that are not viable does technically qualify as some sort of progress.
"Perhaps a break, sir."
Bruce makes a face into his own palm, and then spins his chair around to take the cup of tea Alfred's holding out. When Alfred is mother-henning, sometimes giving in to his first few gentle sallies is enough to convince him not to escalate. At least for a while.
He takes a sip, demonstrative, eyebrows raised.
"Why, yes, Master Wayne," Alfred murmurs, "I do indeed observe your obedience and marvel. It's almost enough to make an old man think you might choose to sleep tonight of your own free will."
Bruce glances away.
"Almost," Alfred repeats.
"I have work to do, Alfred."
"I'm sure." Alfred waits a beat, and then sighs through his nose. "Do you truly expect to solve this problem tonight, sir?"
Bruce takes another sip of tea and looks at the monitors, all his test results and useless scans. "No," he says. "But I—need to try."
The weight of Alfred's gaze then is unmistakable. Need: Bruce has never used that word lightly. "Well," Alfred says slowly. "In that case, sir, might I be of any assistance?"
Bruce supposes a second pair of eyes wouldn't go amiss.
He gives Alfred the nod, and Alfred draws up a second chair, settles in beside him, and begins to review the results Bruce has already gone through anew. And Bruce—
Bruce stares grimly at the screen in front of him, and thinks about a clock ticking down. He knows from experience that he's capable of lasting at least 48 hours without suffering particularly deleterious effects, and 72 isn't out of the question. But beyond that, his judgment will be increasingly questionable, and potentially to the point where sleep would no longer constitute a truly significant loss of control. Doing this—wielding the iron-fisted precision necessary to keep his own grasping crawling shadows out of Clark's mind, while at the same time distracting Clark well enough to keep Clark from looking too closely at his—requires a baseline level of focused concentration that may simply prove impossible to maintain, whether Bruce is conscious or not.
Dealing with this within 48 hours would be optimal. Within 72 would be acceptable. But there are only so many stimulants he can take; there's only so far he can push before he'll be compromised one way or another. And if he should fall asleep—
He knows his own mind. Clark lying in those restraints, slack-faced and unseeing, with bloody holes torn all over again through that goddamn Superman uniform—yes, Bruce has some idea what will be waiting for him, if he shuts his eyes and lets it come.
There are some things Wagner can't drown out. And it would be—optimal, if Clark were never forced to find out what they are.