So obviously these two losers could just go on like this for a while ... and as much fun as that 600-part disaster might be, I'm going to try to keep this a reasonable length. ;D
Clark goes home. He eats something, even though he can't quite convince himself he feels hungry. He goes up to the roof of his building and just sits, watches the sun go down and tries not to think about the anxious unhappy weight in his chest.
Does that matter? Will Bruce feel it anyway? ... Or is it Bruce's, too? Clark closes his eyes and prods at it carefully. He'd thought he had a handle on all this, right after they'd made it back from the ship—he'd been able to sense that that strange feeling of stillness, interior motion so precisely suspended, had been Bruce and not him. But then—
But then he and Bruce had been feeling such different things, that time. He'd been upset, sick and sad and feeling sorry for himself, and then he'd become aware of that carefully deliberate steadiness. Easy enough to tell what didn't belong. And after that, Clark is starting to think Bruce's little linguistic world tour routine had distracted him even better than Bruce had intended. With the anger, it was—it had been easy to say to himself that the stream of Mandarin in his head was Bruce, that everything else must not be. After Steppenwolf and all, it hadn't seemed out of the question. Clark had felt that kind of roaring helpless rage on Black Zero, and after; when he fought Batman, and when he came back from the dead. It could have been him.
Every time Clark's felt it, it's eaten him up. He's never been able to stop himself from acting on it, even when he tries. Strange, to think that Bruce could feel it and just stand there all expressionless. Clark hadn't even considered the idea that it might be coming from him. It just hadn't seemed possible.
But this dull-edged discontent—this feels like Clark's, even if it's Bruce's too. And it certainly could be. Bruce isn't happy right now, he's made that perfectly clear. He's so unhappy about this that he hasn't slept for two days, because he thinks he can't. He thinks he needs to stay awake, or he won't be able to keep Clark out of his mind.
He probably hadn't lied. It certainly is possible that shared sleep could change something; they definitely don't know enough about what the mother box did to them to say one way or the other. But the way Bruce had talked about it, I'll suspend myself from active duty—he's thinking about this as something that might go on so long he'd be genuinely impaired by it, so long he'd have to stop being Batman for a while. Stop being Batman. He'd give that up, over this. Clark can't even get his head around it. There has to be something more behind it than Bruce being unwilling to take a calculated risk.
And Clark's pretty sure he knows what that something is.
(It appears your species does. That's how Bruce still thinks of him, then: an alien, an other, unknown.
No wonder he can't stand the thought of staying like this, of having Clark in his head for one single moment longer than necessary.)
"It's fine," he tells the sky, lying back on the roof. "It's okay. I understand."
He does. And the least he can do is be reasonable about it, and take Bruce at his word. Trust him, even if he can't bring himself to trust Clark. And whether that's out of sheer contrariness, or—or because Clark wants to demonstrate it's possible, wants Bruce to know it, or even just the plain-old petty passive-aggressive desire to make a point out of it—Clark can't be be sure which.
But he has to try. Bruce says he knows where the line is, and
(—when has that ever been true? When has Bruce ever known when to stop?
Except that isn't fair. Once, at least. He'd made that spear, he'd set those traps—he'd cut Clark's cheek; but not, in the end, his throat—)
the least Clark can do is believe him.
*
It works, for another day or two.
Clark finds a radio station he doesn't mind too much, and makes sure it's playing on something he can hear as often as possible. It doesn't make for quite as big a roadblock as Bruce's strategy, but it gives him words, music, to fill his head with—and something to think about besides Bruce.
Besides Bruce, and besides the creeping fatigue trickling through the back of Clark's mind. Because that's definitely Bruce's. Before this, Clark had only the vaguest idea what it was like to be tired. He does sleep, because he can and because he likes to, because it gives him one more little thing in common with everybody else around him—but he probably doesn't need to. As long as he gets enough sunlight and no one's waving kryptonite at him, he's fine.
But Bruce is introducing him to a whole new spectrum, a vast rainbow of endlessly varied shades of exhaustion. And it can't feel all that unusual to him, but to Clark it's—it's almost frightening, the way it deepens so gradually, the way it makes him feel slow and weak and weighed-down. He goes and finds a half-dozen parking meters with crooked posts he can bend straight again, just to remind himself that he can: it's not him, he isn't losing his powers or slowly dropping dead again by degrees. It's not him, it's Bruce.
(As if that's any better. As if it helps, to know that Bruce would rather feel like this than just—)
He lingers in the sunshine, that afternoon, like maybe a little of his own sense of physical well-being can make its way back across to Bruce. And he has to admit that in its own way, it's—it's almost sort of nice. Usually when he has a reason to be concerned about Bruce, there's nothing he can do about it. Bruce wouldn't take well to being checked up on, wouldn't want Clark asking after him and wouldn't answer if Clark did ask. But this way, it's—Clark just knows. He can't help but know, and Bruce can't even get mad at him for it.
Even the language thing isn't so bad; Clark's getting sort of used to it, and
(—it's like he can almost hear it in Bruce's voice, now, that close soft murmur; like Bruce is sitting beside him all day and—reading to him, or something, even if Clark can't understand the words—)
it doesn't bother him as much anymore. Having Bruce there all the time is—well, Clark thought it once already: it makes a difference, not being alone. Clark had compared it to having someone around in person, at first, but the longer it lasts, the more he starts to think it's not really like that at all. He'd been thinking of it in terms of having to be—to be conscious of himself, his actions, in a way he didn't have to when he was by himself; but this thing, this bond they have, is anchored so deep that the whole idea of self-editing, self-restraint, is laughable. Bruce hadn't let one ounce of that anger show on his face, had been so careful, and it hadn't mattered at all. Clark had felt it anyway.
So there's no need to worry about it. In a funny way, it's freeing. Clark can't help but be honest, in there; there's no other option. His concern is bleeding just as freely into the back of Bruce's mind as Bruce's tiredness is bleeding into his, and Bruce can't even dismiss it by claiming to be fine, because he knows as well as Clark does that he isn't.
They don't talk to each other. They don't exchange any actual thoughts on purpose—or, well, mostly they don't. Bruce slips, once, and answers a question Clark had idly marked as something to look up later; and Clark deliberately passes Bruce the sensation of sunshine on his face.
(He knows Bruce hasn't left the Cave all day. And Bruce feels wry, amused, when he does it, but not annoyed. Bruce can't even pretend to be annoyed, because Clark can already tell he isn't.)
But they're together the whole time anyway. Clark would almost be enjoying it, if it didn't also mean he could feel Bruce starting to come apart at the seams.
(Sometimes he thinks that's why he's getting a little more now, why Bruce is coming through more clearly. Bruce's concentration is faltering, that iron self-restraint finally failing him, the edges of his mind no longer as sharply defined. Not coming apart: being pulled apart, by this.
By Clark.)
And then he gets a text—from Diana, this time—with a set of coordinates and the words Definitely not subtle prey, and—
He should be glad they've got another chance to fix this. He tells himself that, focuses on the part of him that is glad, and ignores everything else.
*
Clark beats Barry to the site, this time, and he's not surprised to see another tower rising: clumsy, a little lopsided, but further along in its construction, with a few smaller piles building up nearby. They're somewhere in the northeast of Iceland, a wide flat stretch of scrub and gravel between—well. Clark would call them mountains, but he's not sure they're all that high. They look like it, peaks above the treeline, but that's because there is no treeline, no trees at all.
This time the parademons have had to use more rock than metal—there's probably not quite as many dumpsters or construction sites to forage for scrap here as there were in Saskatchewan. They come at Clark with defensive hisses, and there's more of them this time. A lot more.
But Clark can freeze them, knock them out of the air, zap them with the laser vision. He's doing fine, right up until the Fox arrives.
He doesn't even have to turn and look. He lets his hearing blow wide, and he finds Diana, the creak of leather, the soft sound of her hand tightening around the grip of her shield; Barry murmuring, "You got this, you got this, you're sort of a superhero," to himself, the faint sharp smell of far-off lightning; the whisper of metal on metal, Victor shifting his weight, a crackle of circuits priming themselves; the clink of Arthur's glittering armor, a thunk of contact between his trident and the floor; and—
And nothing. Bruce isn't there.
He probably notified them. Clark would've seen it himself, if he hadn't been so busy breaking the sound barrier somewhere over the Atlantic. And Bruce is still there, Clark can tell as much, but for an instant—
For an instant, his stomach drops. For an instant, he's listening to all the empty space where Bruce isn't, and somewhere deep in the heart of himself, he's flooded with a sudden icy terror at the thought that it's so much worse than he understood, that this has broken Bruce irrevocably.
Terror—fear. And all at once a hundred pairs of glowing red eyes are fixed on him.
He's stronger than they are. He's faster. He's got two dozen different ways to take them down without even raising his fists. But for the first time, it doesn't matter. They have what they need—they've got a hook in him. All they have to do is pull.
He can't breathe, he can't see; he can feel them in there, splitting him open like a landed fish so it'll all spill out, a steaming feast they can pick through. His fear not just of this, of this connection and what it will do, what it has done—but of how it was made, Steppenwolf and mother boxes and power Clark doesn't understand, of kryptonite and spikes, the wet soft sound of being run through; of failure, of weakness, of coming up short—of loss he can't prevent, loss he can prevent but doesn't, of watching himself stand by while everything in him is screaming—and the oldest of them all, the deepest: an eternity of bleak endless rejection, the lightless soundless void of being alone—
Bruce.
It happens so fast Clark almost can't understand it, the whole inside of his head reorienting itself—because he thought they'd been connected, that he'd known what it was like to have Bruce in his head, but he was wrong. Bruce isn't there anymore, but here, here, right where Clark is, sweeping in like—like Batman. Because that's where he's really been, perched up on the edge of some far-off rooftop, present but distant, and now he's not. He's pressing in close, hot white attention swung around, urgent as a searchlight; no Italian, no Arabic, no Khmer, no fifteen-hour operas. Just Bruce, all of him, as much inside Clark's skin as Clark is.
Clark realizes, dimly, that he can hear himself gasping for air, that he's on the ground and shivering, seizing. It's—where the parademons have flayed Clark open, in there, it's not that Bruce can see it; it's just present to him, he knows it. And it's not that he's touching Clark, that he's laid hands on the wound, that it's healing up underneath his fingertips
(—like the ship, the ship, waking with blood on his throat where he hadn't bled, and Bruce's hands—Bruce shouldn't have touched him, it had been clear Clark would be all right, but the unreasoning bone-deep fear hadn't listened—no, no, it wasn't a bad thing; he'd been taking care of Clark, just like he is now—)
but Clark doesn't have any other way to think about it, any words for what it is. A stack of thought-impression-sensation: Bruce crouched over Clark in the Batsuit, cape flared (protectiveness); Bruce's hand on Clark's throat (relief), with the mirror-shadow of Bruce's boot on Clark's chest (guilt, guilt, guilt) trailing a half-step behind; Bruce's hands around the spear, the look on Lois's face (realization); Bruce standing in a graveyard in the wind, the cold (I shouldn't be here, I shouldn't have come)—
And Clark, sense returning, grasps it all at once. Bruce had reacted, reflexive, stepping into him like this—he couldn't stop himself, when he'd felt that dizzying blast of terror from Clark. But he's remembered himself now; trespassing again, Christ, as if he hasn't already done enough—
"Clark? Clark!"
Clark blinks, once and then again, and discovers he's looking into Diana's face: that she's kneeling beside him, Victor at her shoulder, Arthur smacking one last parademon away with a casual swing, Barry just flickering into place opposite, and Bruce—
—quoique ce détail ne touche en aucune manière au fond même de ce que nous avons à raconter, il n'est peut-être pas inutile, ne fût-ce que pour être exact en tout, d'indiquer ici—
"For crying out loud," Clark mutters.
"Are you all right?" Diana says.
"Went down like somebody hit you with a rock," Arthur calls, turning to stride closer.
"Well, not a rock," Barry says. "I mean, he's Superman. If you hit him with a rock, the rock breaks, right? Like, it would have to be a kryptonite-geode kind of rock—"
"A really big rock," Arthur offers placidly, in amendment.
Clark clears his throat and sits up. "I'm fine."
"Yeah?" Victor says. "Because you didn't seem fine."
"They were seriously swarming you there," Barry agrees, eyes wide and sincere. "All over you. And you weren't doing anything about it, just standing there with this look on your face like—well. It seemed bad."
"No, I'm—I'm okay," Clark says. "I—Bruce helped me."
Barry's eyebrows draw down sharply. "Uh, so I know the thing I just said about the rock, but are you sure you didn't hit your head on the way down? Because—oh! Oh, wait, you mean in your mind, Bruce helped you! Because of the thing! Okay, sure. That is so cool. And also weird."
"Yeah," Clark murmurs.
Except the weirdest thing about it was—Bruce hadn't regretted it, hadn't retreated away into himself so quickly, for his own sake. He'd done it for Clark's. Clark had thought he was doing all this, pushing himself and not sleeping and throwing up whatever walls he could, because he resented the intrusion of it, because he hated the idea of someone he didn't like or trust being so wholly connected to him.
But Clark had gotten a clear look at all of Bruce, for the first time since this started, and it hadn't felt like that at all. Which means Bruce is going to the lengths he's going to for some other reason entirely—some reason Clark doesn't know about.
Yet, Clark decides, and takes the hand Arthur offers to pull himself to his feet.
FILL: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (6/?)
Clark goes home. He eats something, even though he can't quite convince himself he feels hungry. He goes up to the roof of his building and just sits, watches the sun go down and tries not to think about the anxious unhappy weight in his chest.
Does that matter? Will Bruce feel it anyway? ... Or is it Bruce's, too? Clark closes his eyes and prods at it carefully. He'd thought he had a handle on all this, right after they'd made it back from the ship—he'd been able to sense that that strange feeling of stillness, interior motion so precisely suspended, had been Bruce and not him. But then—
But then he and Bruce had been feeling such different things, that time. He'd been upset, sick and sad and feeling sorry for himself, and then he'd become aware of that carefully deliberate steadiness. Easy enough to tell what didn't belong. And after that, Clark is starting to think Bruce's little linguistic world tour routine had distracted him even better than Bruce had intended. With the anger, it was—it had been easy to say to himself that the stream of Mandarin in his head was Bruce, that everything else must not be. After Steppenwolf and all, it hadn't seemed out of the question. Clark had felt that kind of roaring helpless rage on Black Zero, and after; when he fought Batman, and when he came back from the dead. It could have been him.
Every time Clark's felt it, it's eaten him up. He's never been able to stop himself from acting on it, even when he tries. Strange, to think that Bruce could feel it and just stand there all expressionless. Clark hadn't even considered the idea that it might be coming from him. It just hadn't seemed possible.
But this dull-edged discontent—this feels like Clark's, even if it's Bruce's too. And it certainly could be. Bruce isn't happy right now, he's made that perfectly clear. He's so unhappy about this that he hasn't slept for two days, because he thinks he can't. He thinks he needs to stay awake, or he won't be able to keep Clark out of his mind.
He probably hadn't lied. It certainly is possible that shared sleep could change something; they definitely don't know enough about what the mother box did to them to say one way or the other. But the way Bruce had talked about it, I'll suspend myself from active duty—he's thinking about this as something that might go on so long he'd be genuinely impaired by it, so long he'd have to stop being Batman for a while. Stop being Batman. He'd give that up, over this. Clark can't even get his head around it. There has to be something more behind it than Bruce being unwilling to take a calculated risk.
And Clark's pretty sure he knows what that something is.
(It appears your species does. That's how Bruce still thinks of him, then: an alien, an other, unknown.
No wonder he can't stand the thought of staying like this, of having Clark in his head for one single moment longer than necessary.)
"It's fine," he tells the sky, lying back on the roof. "It's okay. I understand."
He does. And the least he can do is be reasonable about it, and take Bruce at his word. Trust him, even if he can't bring himself to trust Clark. And whether that's out of sheer contrariness, or—or because Clark wants to demonstrate it's possible, wants Bruce to know it, or even just the plain-old petty passive-aggressive desire to make a point out of it—Clark can't be be sure which.
But he has to try. Bruce says he knows where the line is, and
(—when has that ever been true? When has Bruce ever known when to stop?
Except that isn't fair. Once, at least. He'd made that spear, he'd set those traps—he'd cut Clark's cheek; but not, in the end, his throat—)
the least Clark can do is believe him.
*
It works, for another day or two.
Clark finds a radio station he doesn't mind too much, and makes sure it's playing on something he can hear as often as possible. It doesn't make for quite as big a roadblock as Bruce's strategy, but it gives him words, music, to fill his head with—and something to think about besides Bruce.
Besides Bruce, and besides the creeping fatigue trickling through the back of Clark's mind. Because that's definitely Bruce's. Before this, Clark had only the vaguest idea what it was like to be tired. He does sleep, because he can and because he likes to, because it gives him one more little thing in common with everybody else around him—but he probably doesn't need to. As long as he gets enough sunlight and no one's waving kryptonite at him, he's fine.
But Bruce is introducing him to a whole new spectrum, a vast rainbow of endlessly varied shades of exhaustion. And it can't feel all that unusual to him, but to Clark it's—it's almost frightening, the way it deepens so gradually, the way it makes him feel slow and weak and weighed-down. He goes and finds a half-dozen parking meters with crooked posts he can bend straight again, just to remind himself that he can: it's not him, he isn't losing his powers or slowly dropping dead again by degrees. It's not him, it's Bruce.
(As if that's any better. As if it helps, to know that Bruce would rather feel like this than just—)
He lingers in the sunshine, that afternoon, like maybe a little of his own sense of physical well-being can make its way back across to Bruce. And he has to admit that in its own way, it's—it's almost sort of nice. Usually when he has a reason to be concerned about Bruce, there's nothing he can do about it. Bruce wouldn't take well to being checked up on, wouldn't want Clark asking after him and wouldn't answer if Clark did ask. But this way, it's—Clark just knows. He can't help but know, and Bruce can't even get mad at him for it.
Even the language thing isn't so bad; Clark's getting sort of used to it, and
(—it's like he can almost hear it in Bruce's voice, now, that close soft murmur; like Bruce is sitting beside him all day and—reading to him, or something, even if Clark can't understand the words—)
it doesn't bother him as much anymore. Having Bruce there all the time is—well, Clark thought it once already: it makes a difference, not being alone. Clark had compared it to having someone around in person, at first, but the longer it lasts, the more he starts to think it's not really like that at all. He'd been thinking of it in terms of having to be—to be conscious of himself, his actions, in a way he didn't have to when he was by himself; but this thing, this bond they have, is anchored so deep that the whole idea of self-editing, self-restraint, is laughable. Bruce hadn't let one ounce of that anger show on his face, had been so careful, and it hadn't mattered at all. Clark had felt it anyway.
So there's no need to worry about it. In a funny way, it's freeing. Clark can't help but be honest, in there; there's no other option. His concern is bleeding just as freely into the back of Bruce's mind as Bruce's tiredness is bleeding into his, and Bruce can't even dismiss it by claiming to be fine, because he knows as well as Clark does that he isn't.
They don't talk to each other. They don't exchange any actual thoughts on purpose—or, well, mostly they don't. Bruce slips, once, and answers a question Clark had idly marked as something to look up later; and Clark deliberately passes Bruce the sensation of sunshine on his face.
(He knows Bruce hasn't left the Cave all day. And Bruce feels wry, amused, when he does it, but not annoyed. Bruce can't even pretend to be annoyed, because Clark can already tell he isn't.)
But they're together the whole time anyway. Clark would almost be enjoying it, if it didn't also mean he could feel Bruce starting to come apart at the seams.
(Sometimes he thinks that's why he's getting a little more now, why Bruce is coming through more clearly. Bruce's concentration is faltering, that iron self-restraint finally failing him, the edges of his mind no longer as sharply defined. Not coming apart: being pulled apart, by this.
By Clark.)
And then he gets a text—from Diana, this time—with a set of coordinates and the words Definitely not subtle prey, and—
He should be glad they've got another chance to fix this. He tells himself that, focuses on the part of him that is glad, and ignores everything else.
*
Clark beats Barry to the site, this time, and he's not surprised to see another tower rising: clumsy, a little lopsided, but further along in its construction, with a few smaller piles building up nearby. They're somewhere in the northeast of Iceland, a wide flat stretch of scrub and gravel between—well. Clark would call them mountains, but he's not sure they're all that high. They look like it, peaks above the treeline, but that's because there is no treeline, no trees at all.
This time the parademons have had to use more rock than metal—there's probably not quite as many dumpsters or construction sites to forage for scrap here as there were in Saskatchewan. They come at Clark with defensive hisses, and there's more of them this time. A lot more.
But Clark can freeze them, knock them out of the air, zap them with the laser vision. He's doing fine, right up until the Fox arrives.
He doesn't even have to turn and look. He lets his hearing blow wide, and he finds Diana, the creak of leather, the soft sound of her hand tightening around the grip of her shield; Barry murmuring, "You got this, you got this, you're sort of a superhero," to himself, the faint sharp smell of far-off lightning; the whisper of metal on metal, Victor shifting his weight, a crackle of circuits priming themselves; the clink of Arthur's glittering armor, a thunk of contact between his trident and the floor; and—
And nothing. Bruce isn't there.
He probably notified them. Clark would've seen it himself, if he hadn't been so busy breaking the sound barrier somewhere over the Atlantic. And Bruce is still there, Clark can tell as much, but for an instant—
For an instant, his stomach drops. For an instant, he's listening to all the empty space where Bruce isn't, and somewhere deep in the heart of himself, he's flooded with a sudden icy terror at the thought that it's so much worse than he understood, that this has broken Bruce irrevocably.
Terror—fear. And all at once a hundred pairs of glowing red eyes are fixed on him.
He's stronger than they are. He's faster. He's got two dozen different ways to take them down without even raising his fists. But for the first time, it doesn't matter. They have what they need—they've got a hook in him. All they have to do is pull.
He can't breathe, he can't see; he can feel them in there, splitting him open like a landed fish so it'll all spill out, a steaming feast they can pick through. His fear not just of this, of this connection and what it will do, what it has done—but of how it was made, Steppenwolf and mother boxes and power Clark doesn't understand, of kryptonite and spikes, the wet soft sound of being run through; of failure, of weakness, of coming up short—of loss he can't prevent, loss he can prevent but doesn't, of watching himself stand by while everything in him is screaming—and the oldest of them all, the deepest: an eternity of bleak endless rejection, the lightless soundless void of being alone—
Bruce.
It happens so fast Clark almost can't understand it, the whole inside of his head reorienting itself—because he thought they'd been connected, that he'd known what it was like to have Bruce in his head, but he was wrong. Bruce isn't there anymore, but here, here, right where Clark is, sweeping in like—like Batman. Because that's where he's really been, perched up on the edge of some far-off rooftop, present but distant, and now he's not. He's pressing in close, hot white attention swung around, urgent as a searchlight; no Italian, no Arabic, no Khmer, no fifteen-hour operas. Just Bruce, all of him, as much inside Clark's skin as Clark is.
Clark realizes, dimly, that he can hear himself gasping for air, that he's on the ground and shivering, seizing. It's—where the parademons have flayed Clark open, in there, it's not that Bruce can see it; it's just present to him, he knows it. And it's not that he's touching Clark, that he's laid hands on the wound, that it's healing up underneath his fingertips
(—like the ship, the ship, waking with blood on his throat where he hadn't bled, and Bruce's hands—Bruce shouldn't have touched him, it had been clear Clark would be all right, but the unreasoning bone-deep fear hadn't listened—no, no, it wasn't a bad thing; he'd been taking care of Clark, just like he is now—)
but Clark doesn't have any other way to think about it, any words for what it is. A stack of thought-impression-sensation: Bruce crouched over Clark in the Batsuit, cape flared (protectiveness); Bruce's hand on Clark's throat (relief), with the mirror-shadow of Bruce's boot on Clark's chest (guilt, guilt, guilt) trailing a half-step behind; Bruce's hands around the spear, the look on Lois's face (realization); Bruce standing in a graveyard in the wind, the cold (I shouldn't be here, I shouldn't have come)—
And Clark, sense returning, grasps it all at once. Bruce had reacted, reflexive, stepping into him like this—he couldn't stop himself, when he'd felt that dizzying blast of terror from Clark. But he's remembered himself now; trespassing again, Christ, as if he hasn't already done enough—
"Clark? Clark!"
Clark blinks, once and then again, and discovers he's looking into Diana's face: that she's kneeling beside him, Victor at her shoulder, Arthur smacking one last parademon away with a casual swing, Barry just flickering into place opposite, and Bruce—
—quoique ce détail ne touche en aucune manière au fond même de ce que nous avons à raconter, il n'est peut-être pas inutile, ne fût-ce que pour être exact en tout, d'indiquer ici—
"For crying out loud," Clark mutters.
"Are you all right?" Diana says.
"Went down like somebody hit you with a rock," Arthur calls, turning to stride closer.
"Well, not a rock," Barry says. "I mean, he's Superman. If you hit him with a rock, the rock breaks, right? Like, it would have to be a kryptonite-geode kind of rock—"
"A really big rock," Arthur offers placidly, in amendment.
Clark clears his throat and sits up. "I'm fine."
"Yeah?" Victor says. "Because you didn't seem fine."
"They were seriously swarming you there," Barry agrees, eyes wide and sincere. "All over you. And you weren't doing anything about it, just standing there with this look on your face like—well. It seemed bad."
"No, I'm—I'm okay," Clark says. "I—Bruce helped me."
Barry's eyebrows draw down sharply. "Uh, so I know the thing I just said about the rock, but are you sure you didn't hit your head on the way down? Because—oh! Oh, wait, you mean in your mind, Bruce helped you! Because of the thing! Okay, sure. That is so cool. And also weird."
"Yeah," Clark murmurs.
Except the weirdest thing about it was—Bruce hadn't regretted it, hadn't retreated away into himself so quickly, for his own sake. He'd done it for Clark's. Clark had thought he was doing all this, pushing himself and not sleeping and throwing up whatever walls he could, because he resented the intrusion of it, because he hated the idea of someone he didn't like or trust being so wholly connected to him.
But Clark had gotten a clear look at all of Bruce, for the first time since this started, and it hadn't felt like that at all. Which means Bruce is going to the lengths he's going to for some other reason entirely—some reason Clark doesn't know about.
Yet, Clark decides, and takes the hand Arthur offers to pull himself to his feet.