OH LOOK ONE LAST HIGH-STAKES CONVERSATION WHERE PEOPLE FINALLY MANAGE TO FIGURE OUT THE CRUCIAL THING THAT NEEDED FIGURING OUT #sopredictable
Clark stands quietly in the Fox's bay the whole way back, and tries not to look at the mother box.
It's good that they managed to track it down—just getting it out of the parademons' hands, securing it before Steppenwolf can come back for it, is important in and of itself. Even if there weren't anything else they wanted to do with it.
It's just that there isn't anything else Clark wants to do with it. He sighs and rubs at his face, and then catches Barry's concerned look and manages to pin on a smile until Barry glances away again.
He told Mom the truth, before. Yeah, this situation has been weird and complicated and caused a bunch of problems, but—
But complicated things can be good things; complicated things can be the best things. The bond's become more important to Clark than he'd ever have guessed it would, and getting rid of it is about the last thing he wants to do. Even beyond all the ways it's helped him understand Bruce better, everything he's learned from it—he wants to wrap his hand around it and hang on just out of sheer selfish want, childish singlemindedness.
(He's always been strange. He's always been set apart. He didn't have to know why he was the way he was to know that it needed to be kept secret, that he needed to hold himself back just a little all the time. Even with Lois, it was—old habits die hard. He'd been shut up inside himself alone for so long. He didn't know how else to be.
But then Bruce got shoved in there with him, and he didn't know how much he needed that until it happened—he didn't know how much he'd love that until it happened, and now that it has, he never ever wants it to stop—)
But that wouldn't be right. It wouldn't be fair. He can't make Bruce stay like this when Bruce doesn't want to. Bruce is still thinking of this as a problem that needs fixing, and now they have the solution. That's all there is to it.
He closes his eyes and doesn't open them again until the Fox settles into place in the hangar.
For a moment, no one else is moving either—not even Barry, though Clark can still hear his heart, distinctive and rabbit-fast. And then Victor says gently, "You need me to stick around?"
Clark lifts his head and locks eyes with Bruce, standing at the other end of the bay.
"No," Bruce says, and then looks away to nod at Victor. "We'll see how far we can get by ourselves."
"Okay," Barry says, and then glances down at the box—still in his hands. He'd looked at Bruce and then at the rest of the bay, and had clearly decided that not leaving a mother box to rattle around during the flight was the best way to avoid having Batman glare at him. "I'll just—set this down somewhere safe, then." He flickers off, and reappears, box gone, on the floor of the hangar a few strides away from the Fox. "Well, uh. Good luck?"
"Thanks," Clark says, and doesn't take his eyes off Bruce.
Arthur claps Bruce on the shoulder; Clark can feel the impact for himself. "Try not to do anything stupid," he murmurs, to Bruce, and then he glances at Clark, looks at him for a long second, and just nods once, abruptly serious.
Diana is closer to Clark than to Bruce, and she doesn't say anything to either of them—only touches the back of Clark's hand as she passes and smiles at him, small but brilliant, in a way that makes him feel suddenly steadier on his feet. And Bruce—
Bruce just looks at him and then away again, silent. The grim certainty inside him is like bile at the back of Clark's throat: that this has to happen, it has to, and that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. This will be one more weight for Bruce to shoulder, one more consequence to endure.
"Ten minutes?" Clark says aloud, instead of arguing.
And it won't take Bruce ten minutes to get the suit off, not if he doesn't want it to; but he just nods, and then steps away.
*
The thing is—
The thing is, there's nothing to say.
Clark takes about fifteen seconds to change out of his own uniform, zipping across the bay and back, and then sits in the Cave and looks at the mother box, hands clasped, elbows on his knees, for nine minutes and forty-five seconds. It feels like he should be doing something, but there's—there's no arguments to make, nothing to tell Bruce, nothing he needs the time to figure out how to say. Bruce knows it all already, or will the moment he goes looking for it. He's just not going to listen to any of it, because he thinks Clark is compromised.
Clark lets out a long slow breath and rubs his eyes.
God. He shouldn't hate the idea so much. He's made it more than thirty perfectly decent years of his life without being joined mentally and emotionally to anybody. He's barely even had time to get used to having this; he can get used to not having it again. Pretty soon he probably won't even remember what it was like. What's so great about it, anyway? What has this been except a pain in his ass? Getting all of Bruce's exhaustion and irrational anger, having to put up with his stubbornness and his paranoia, with the bonus experience of actively disagreeing with him 24/7 instead of just when they're face-to-face.
Undoing it will just make things go back to normal. The idea that he's going to have his mind to himself again should make him happy. People aren't supposed to be able to just—share themselves like that, perceive and understand and accept the whole of someone else and be perceived and understood and accepted in their turn. He should be glad to think he'll be himself again, individual, separate. It shouldn't feel like a prison sentence; solitary confinement, trapped alone in all the dark clinging space inside his skin with no one to hear him—
(—an eternity of bleak endless rejection, the lightless soundless void—)
"Clark," Bruce says quietly, and Clark jerks, stands and wipes hastily at his wet face. Bruce must have felt all that, but—but in a minute it won't matter.
None of it matters. Because the point at the heart of all this is simple: if the bond stays, Bruce will never trust him. Bruce will never believe that Clark's acting of his own free will, that Bruce isn't—hurting him. And Clark can't let it stay that way.
He can't.
He clears his throat, sets his jaw, and steps toward the table. The mother box is sitting in the middle of it, looking deceptively ordinary but for the tiny flickers of light escaping here and there around its edges, and Clark reaches for it and it—opens. Metal shifts and slides, delicate fractals reorganizing themselves, a distinct glow spilling out. It looks a lot like it did last time, except the whole process is probably going to be a little more comfortable when Clark's not impaled in place by spikes.
"So if I just—let it look at me," Clark says aloud, "and then ask it, will that be enough?"
Bruce doesn't say anything. Clark doesn't want to look at him; but when he reaches inside himself instead, past the whole maelstrom of everything he's feeling on his own, what he finds doesn't make any sense. He blinks and does look, and Bruce is staring back at him: mouth half-open, eyes wide, brows just beginning to draw down into what would have been a frown.
And all at once, Clark understands. "You wanted me to say no."
Bruce closes his mouth and swallows. It's not that he'd wanted it, or at least not just that. He'd expected it. He'd been ready for it; he'd been prepared, with all the weary resignation in his heart, to deal with it. Because he knew the bond needed breaking, he'd been arguing as much this entire time—and yet he was equally well aware that somewhere deep and wordless and greedy, that was the last thing he wanted. And how else would that manifest, except in Clark? That's how this appears to work; all the other evidence suggests as much. Clark's the one who's been acting on all Bruce's most selfish desires, by—
—what? Clark laughs aloud, sharp, and it sounds strange in the otherwise silent room. By what? By touching Bruce? Sleeping in his bed? Taking off his tie? Caring about him? Bruce doesn't have to mind-control Clark to get those things, Clark does them already—or at least the ones he can get away with, and he would have done the rest a thousand times a day if he'd only known Bruce would let him.
On the outside, Bruce squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head, throws out a hand in instant unthinking denial—no. No, stop, please stop saying it, I'll forget—
—Bruce—
—I'll forget that it's not true. I'm not like you, you can't trust me. I'll let myself pretend—
And Clark can't just see it or hear it but can feel it, on every possible level: colliding certainties, mutual contradiction. Because Bruce is sure this isn't all right, that he can't possibly touch Clark like this and not leave a stain, to exactly the same degree that he's sure Clark could not, could not, feel what he does of his own volition. This bond has to be responsible for Clark's behavior, it's the only way to reconcile Clark's actions with reality; except that if it were then Clark would have refused, would never have agreed that this can't be permitted to last—
—precisely because Bruce desperately wants it to. Clark laughs again, helpless, eyes stinging, because of course Bruce is just as hopelessly weird as he is; of course Bruce is fucked up in exactly the right ways to like this as much as Clark does. They'd shared it, even, in Bruce's bed—how many lies each of them is always telling, what a relief it is to lose the option. Clark just hadn't realized how far it went.
But then Bruce has never settled for less than matching up to Superman in every respect, has he?
"Bruce," Clark says aloud, hoarse and uneven.
"No. No, Clark, don't—"
"Bruce, please," Clark says. He still has his hand half-extended toward the box. He turns, moves, reaches for Bruce instead; dares to curl his fingers around Bruce's wrist, and feels Bruce shudder—inside, outside, everywhere. "Please, just let me—"
Because Bruce is casting around, out of sheer desperate reflex, for strategems, tactics. Something hateful to say, something cruel to do—insult Mom (but Clark would know he doesn't mean it), hit Clark (but he'd only break his own hand), dig out that good old kryptonite blade (he'd collected it after Doomsday, couldn't have let anyone else get their hands on it—as if there were anyone Clark had less reason to trust than Bruce himself, but he'd needed to know no one else would be able to hurt Clark again); anything, anything, to make Clark stop looking at him like—
—like what, Bruce? Like what? How am I looking at you?
—like that, damn you. Your face, your eyes, I can't stand it—you think you want me? Fine, go ahead and fuck me, then, get it out of your system; but don't try to tell me that you—
—that I—
—you can't—
—Bruce—
And suddenly they're both unmoored, swept up in a dizzy-hot spiral: the memory is Bruce's, and yet it's of Clark's thoughts, the way they'd wandered that night as he drifted in and out of sleep. How it had felt to lie against him; to wake in the morning and think of kissing him, of rolling over underneath his hands in that sunny bed and pressing him down into the mattress, of hearing him laugh.
Clark discovers, distantly, that he's gasping, gulping down air—that his heart is hammering, even though they still aren't touching anywhere except Clark's hand on Bruce's wrist.
"Bruce," he says. And he says it with his mouth, with his voice, with his whole self, reaching for Bruce with his hands at the same time as he does it in his head: for the sheer selfish joy of experiencing the rose-gold sunrise-wide burst of light in Bruce's mind when Clark finally, finally kisses him.
FILL: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (12/13)
Clark stands quietly in the Fox's bay the whole way back, and tries not to look at the mother box.
It's good that they managed to track it down—just getting it out of the parademons' hands, securing it before Steppenwolf can come back for it, is important in and of itself. Even if there weren't anything else they wanted to do with it.
It's just that there isn't anything else Clark wants to do with it. He sighs and rubs at his face, and then catches Barry's concerned look and manages to pin on a smile until Barry glances away again.
He told Mom the truth, before. Yeah, this situation has been weird and complicated and caused a bunch of problems, but—
But complicated things can be good things; complicated things can be the best things. The bond's become more important to Clark than he'd ever have guessed it would, and getting rid of it is about the last thing he wants to do. Even beyond all the ways it's helped him understand Bruce better, everything he's learned from it—he wants to wrap his hand around it and hang on just out of sheer selfish want, childish singlemindedness.
(He's always been strange. He's always been set apart. He didn't have to know why he was the way he was to know that it needed to be kept secret, that he needed to hold himself back just a little all the time. Even with Lois, it was—old habits die hard. He'd been shut up inside himself alone for so long. He didn't know how else to be.
But then Bruce got shoved in there with him, and he didn't know how much he needed that until it happened—he didn't know how much he'd love that until it happened, and now that it has, he never ever wants it to stop—)
But that wouldn't be right. It wouldn't be fair. He can't make Bruce stay like this when Bruce doesn't want to. Bruce is still thinking of this as a problem that needs fixing, and now they have the solution. That's all there is to it.
He closes his eyes and doesn't open them again until the Fox settles into place in the hangar.
For a moment, no one else is moving either—not even Barry, though Clark can still hear his heart, distinctive and rabbit-fast. And then Victor says gently, "You need me to stick around?"
Clark lifts his head and locks eyes with Bruce, standing at the other end of the bay.
"No," Bruce says, and then looks away to nod at Victor. "We'll see how far we can get by ourselves."
"Okay," Barry says, and then glances down at the box—still in his hands. He'd looked at Bruce and then at the rest of the bay, and had clearly decided that not leaving a mother box to rattle around during the flight was the best way to avoid having Batman glare at him. "I'll just—set this down somewhere safe, then." He flickers off, and reappears, box gone, on the floor of the hangar a few strides away from the Fox. "Well, uh. Good luck?"
"Thanks," Clark says, and doesn't take his eyes off Bruce.
Arthur claps Bruce on the shoulder; Clark can feel the impact for himself. "Try not to do anything stupid," he murmurs, to Bruce, and then he glances at Clark, looks at him for a long second, and just nods once, abruptly serious.
Diana is closer to Clark than to Bruce, and she doesn't say anything to either of them—only touches the back of Clark's hand as she passes and smiles at him, small but brilliant, in a way that makes him feel suddenly steadier on his feet. And Bruce—
Bruce just looks at him and then away again, silent. The grim certainty inside him is like bile at the back of Clark's throat: that this has to happen, it has to, and that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. This will be one more weight for Bruce to shoulder, one more consequence to endure.
"Ten minutes?" Clark says aloud, instead of arguing.
And it won't take Bruce ten minutes to get the suit off, not if he doesn't want it to; but he just nods, and then steps away.
*
The thing is—
The thing is, there's nothing to say.
Clark takes about fifteen seconds to change out of his own uniform, zipping across the bay and back, and then sits in the Cave and looks at the mother box, hands clasped, elbows on his knees, for nine minutes and forty-five seconds. It feels like he should be doing something, but there's—there's no arguments to make, nothing to tell Bruce, nothing he needs the time to figure out how to say. Bruce knows it all already, or will the moment he goes looking for it. He's just not going to listen to any of it, because he thinks Clark is compromised.
Clark lets out a long slow breath and rubs his eyes.
God. He shouldn't hate the idea so much. He's made it more than thirty perfectly decent years of his life without being joined mentally and emotionally to anybody. He's barely even had time to get used to having this; he can get used to not having it again. Pretty soon he probably won't even remember what it was like. What's so great about it, anyway? What has this been except a pain in his ass? Getting all of Bruce's exhaustion and irrational anger, having to put up with his stubbornness and his paranoia, with the bonus experience of actively disagreeing with him 24/7 instead of just when they're face-to-face.
Undoing it will just make things go back to normal. The idea that he's going to have his mind to himself again should make him happy. People aren't supposed to be able to just—share themselves like that, perceive and understand and accept the whole of someone else and be perceived and understood and accepted in their turn. He should be glad to think he'll be himself again, individual, separate. It shouldn't feel like a prison sentence; solitary confinement, trapped alone in all the dark clinging space inside his skin with no one to hear him—
(—an eternity of bleak endless rejection, the lightless soundless void—)
"Clark," Bruce says quietly, and Clark jerks, stands and wipes hastily at his wet face. Bruce must have felt all that, but—but in a minute it won't matter.
None of it matters. Because the point at the heart of all this is simple: if the bond stays, Bruce will never trust him. Bruce will never believe that Clark's acting of his own free will, that Bruce isn't—hurting him. And Clark can't let it stay that way.
He can't.
He clears his throat, sets his jaw, and steps toward the table. The mother box is sitting in the middle of it, looking deceptively ordinary but for the tiny flickers of light escaping here and there around its edges, and Clark reaches for it and it—opens. Metal shifts and slides, delicate fractals reorganizing themselves, a distinct glow spilling out. It looks a lot like it did last time, except the whole process is probably going to be a little more comfortable when Clark's not impaled in place by spikes.
"So if I just—let it look at me," Clark says aloud, "and then ask it, will that be enough?"
Bruce doesn't say anything. Clark doesn't want to look at him; but when he reaches inside himself instead, past the whole maelstrom of everything he's feeling on his own, what he finds doesn't make any sense. He blinks and does look, and Bruce is staring back at him: mouth half-open, eyes wide, brows just beginning to draw down into what would have been a frown.
And all at once, Clark understands. "You wanted me to say no."
Bruce closes his mouth and swallows. It's not that he'd wanted it, or at least not just that. He'd expected it. He'd been ready for it; he'd been prepared, with all the weary resignation in his heart, to deal with it. Because he knew the bond needed breaking, he'd been arguing as much this entire time—and yet he was equally well aware that somewhere deep and wordless and greedy, that was the last thing he wanted. And how else would that manifest, except in Clark? That's how this appears to work; all the other evidence suggests as much. Clark's the one who's been acting on all Bruce's most selfish desires, by—
—what? Clark laughs aloud, sharp, and it sounds strange in the otherwise silent room. By what? By touching Bruce? Sleeping in his bed? Taking off his tie? Caring about him? Bruce doesn't have to mind-control Clark to get those things, Clark does them already—or at least the ones he can get away with, and he would have done the rest a thousand times a day if he'd only known Bruce would let him.
On the outside, Bruce squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head, throws out a hand in instant unthinking denial—no. No, stop, please stop saying it, I'll forget—
—Bruce—
—I'll forget that it's not true. I'm not like you, you can't trust me. I'll let myself pretend—
And Clark can't just see it or hear it but can feel it, on every possible level: colliding certainties, mutual contradiction. Because Bruce is sure this isn't all right, that he can't possibly touch Clark like this and not leave a stain, to exactly the same degree that he's sure Clark could not, could not, feel what he does of his own volition. This bond has to be responsible for Clark's behavior, it's the only way to reconcile Clark's actions with reality; except that if it were then Clark would have refused, would never have agreed that this can't be permitted to last—
—precisely because Bruce desperately wants it to. Clark laughs again, helpless, eyes stinging, because of course Bruce is just as hopelessly weird as he is; of course Bruce is fucked up in exactly the right ways to like this as much as Clark does. They'd shared it, even, in Bruce's bed—how many lies each of them is always telling, what a relief it is to lose the option. Clark just hadn't realized how far it went.
But then Bruce has never settled for less than matching up to Superman in every respect, has he?
"Bruce," Clark says aloud, hoarse and uneven.
"No. No, Clark, don't—"
"Bruce, please," Clark says. He still has his hand half-extended toward the box. He turns, moves, reaches for Bruce instead; dares to curl his fingers around Bruce's wrist, and feels Bruce shudder—inside, outside, everywhere. "Please, just let me—"
Because Bruce is casting around, out of sheer desperate reflex, for strategems, tactics. Something hateful to say, something cruel to do—insult Mom (but Clark would know he doesn't mean it), hit Clark (but he'd only break his own hand), dig out that good old kryptonite blade (he'd collected it after Doomsday, couldn't have let anyone else get their hands on it—as if there were anyone Clark had less reason to trust than Bruce himself, but he'd needed to know no one else would be able to hurt Clark again); anything, anything, to make Clark stop looking at him like—
—like what, Bruce? Like what? How am I looking at you?
—like that, damn you. Your face, your eyes, I can't stand it—you think you want me? Fine, go ahead and fuck me, then, get it out of your system; but don't try to tell me that you—
—that I—
—you can't—
—Bruce—
And suddenly they're both unmoored, swept up in a dizzy-hot spiral: the memory is Bruce's, and yet it's of Clark's thoughts, the way they'd wandered that night as he drifted in and out of sleep. How it had felt to lie against him; to wake in the morning and think of kissing him, of rolling over underneath his hands in that sunny bed and pressing him down into the mattress, of hearing him laugh.
Clark discovers, distantly, that he's gasping, gulping down air—that his heart is hammering, even though they still aren't touching anywhere except Clark's hand on Bruce's wrist.
"Bruce," he says. And he says it with his mouth, with his voice, with his whole self, reaching for Bruce with his hands at the same time as he does it in his head: for the sheer selfish joy of experiencing the rose-gold sunrise-wide burst of light in Bruce's mind when Clark finally, finally kisses him.
—Bruce, I do; I do, I do—