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Clark was in uniform. Bruce had gone looking for him in the cave, because he wasn't upstairs in Bruce's room, or in the guest room he was ostensibly-but-not-really sleeping in, or in the kitchen with Alfred and Dick. Damian was doing homework, and had said, "no, Father, I haven't seen Superman, I'm doing algebra," with the affronted tones of a boy who had just hidden his Gameboy under his textbook. Tim and Jason were... somewhere. Out, probably. Not together, also probably, although who could say with those two.
Clark had taken a kryptonite slug to the gut two days ago, and now he was standing in the cave in uniform. The slug had entered his body just to the right of his belly button and exited on an angled trajectory, two inches to the right of his spine. Bruce knew this, because he had stolen Leslie's file after she'd rushed Clark into surgery to make sure there were no other fragments inside of him before the wound closed. If the bullet hadn't exited cleanly, Clark would have died. It was nearly impossible to do surgery on him without kryptonite-bladed scalpels, and using those when he was already suffering from kryptonite poisoning could have stopped his heart. Bruce thought that the sight of Clark, ashen and sweating on the operating table, would end up being a regular feature in his fear gas rotation.
Clark had grabbed his hand and squeezed it with all his strength to control the pain. It had barely made the bones of Bruce's hand creak. That was when Leslie had shooed him out of the operating room– he wasn't scrubbed up, for one thing, still filthy from battle. Clark's blood was on his gauntlets. He'd just stood there, stupidly, in the tiny waiting room of Leslie's clinic, staring at the old issues of House Beautiful on the side table and failing to register anything that was happening around him.
"Go home, old man, you look like shit," someone had said. Jason was leaning against the corner of the room with his arms crossed in a posture that was probably meant to look nonchalant but was clearly keeping pressure on a wound in his side. He couldn't see Jason's face. He was wearing the helmet. Bruce wasn't sure if Jason really liked the helmet, or if he just liked that it meant that Bruce only ever got to see his face in passing. Jason had had such an expressive face. The fierce joy he'd felt when jumping from roof to roof, his pride in a fight well-fought, his anger at the way Gotham was always two steps from crumbling around them– it had all shone from him even beneath the domino.
"Jason," Bruce had said, in lieu of any of that. "Go to the Cave." The fact that Jason was here at all meant that the wound must be pretty bad, but Leslie wouldn't be able to treat him tonight.
Jason sighed. "I don't go there, remember?"
"Leslie's in surgery," Bruce said. "She might be a while." His voice had done something he didn't like to examine on those words.
"He's going to be fine," Jason said.
"Alfred can stitch you."
"I can stitch myself. I just came by to brighten Leslie's day."
"Jason–"
"I don't take orders from you," Jason said, low and even, and Bruce had known this was as much of a 'back off' as he was likely to get.
"Alfred would like to see you," Bruce said, trying a different tack. "He'd be happy to make sure you were safe."
"You can tell 'Alfred,'" Jason says, his gloved hands in mocking air quotes, "that he can use his words himself like a big boy." And then he'd stalked out, one hand still clutched to his side.
Clark had come out of surgery not long after that. He'd looked gray, under the fluorescent lights of the clinic, and he'd leaned heavily on Bruce on the way to the Batmobile. That had been two nights ago.
And now he was standing in the center of the cave fastening his cape. He turned as Bruce approached, and his face was cheerful and open. He clapped a hand on Bruce's shoulder and held it there, that kind of casual grounding touch he was so fond of. "There you are," he said. "Thanks for the hospitality, but I've got to run. There's a huge blaze near the chemical plant, and it could get bad very quickly."
"You're not leaving," Bruce said, which was his first mistake.
Clark smiled, like Bruce was a child who'd said something sweet but misguided. "Sure I am."
"That wasn't a question," Bruce said. "You can't leave. You were in surgery two nights ago. You're not healed yet, and it isn't safe. The city of Metropolis has fire departments. Let them handle it."
"Are you going out tonight?" Clark asked. The smile had fallen away from his face.
"Of course," Bruce said.
"And were you injured two nights ago?"
"No."
"Liar," Clark said, and his tone was low and dangerous now.
"Scrapes, bruises, nothing major. Nothing that keeps me from patrolling. You just sustained a major injury–"
"Can you understand," Clark interrupted, "that every time you go out you could die. And I have to live with that. I have never once tried to stop you from doing what you feel you need to. I need you to extend me the same courtesy."
"What I feel I need to," Bruce said flatly, shrugging Clark's hand off. He could feel the anger rising in him like a tide. Clark took on the whole world, and yet being Batman was not Bruce's calling but something 'you feel you need to.' "You think this is because we fucked. And now you want to stand there and condescend to me, because I had the audacity to tell you that you might not be completely invulnerable." His fists were trembling, and he squeezed them against his thighs so tightly he knew that when he eventually unclenched them his palms would be bloody. "Well, newsflash, asshole. Your cock in my ass did not in fact rewrite my world. I was capable of basic concern for the members of my team before you deigned to stick your dick in me, but I'd like to remind you that I'm not the inhuman one here."
Clark went white. He was holding himself so still Bruce wasn't sure he was actually breathing. "I see," he said, and then his jaw clamped shut, like he didn't trust himself to say anything else. A quick breath of air, and he was gone.
So that was what it felt like, to see Clark hurt, when he was the one to hurt him. Bruce had always wondered, and now he knew. It was a hollow and horrible realization.
Bruce sank down onto a stool and buried his face in his hands. Congratulations, you colossal fuckup, said the shitty little voice in his head. You've managed to piss off the best man in the world.
It had taken him the better part of a decade to earn Clark's trust. People thought Clark was open, because his facade was so cheerful. But he kept the secret parts of himself locked as tightly as Bruce did– tighter, perhaps, because unlike Bruce he had not accumulated a bevy of horrible and beloved children. Ten years' work for Clark to let Bruce know him, destroyed in 15 seconds of hot-headed temper. God, Clark's face, when Bruce had thrown that word at him. Inhuman. How could he have done it?
He had always known he was a vicious, rabid little animal, that when he felt himself threatened he lashed out with precision and brutality. It was what made him a good Batman. It was why at any given time only 20% of his children were speaking to him.
And he had lured Clark in and sunk the knife home with the unerring aim of an assassin. He could not look at himself. He could not sit here in the dark and think about the colossal effort it must have taken Clark not to throw him through the wall. He pulled on the gauntlets and the heavy armor plates. He would run from himself until he was covered with night, the thing he always did, the thing he could never quite succeed in.
Clark would be out there too, a city away, angry and hurt and throwing his vulnerable invulnerable body in front of danger. Bruce slotted batarangs into place, checked the clasp on his belt, ran the long lines of his grapples over his palms to check for weaknesses. There were none. There never were. All of this was a ritual too automatic to distract him from his own failure. He had been cruel to Clark. And his cruelty had not kept Clark safe, and thus it had been pointless, and that he could not forgive himself.
"Bruce, are you taking Damian on patrol tonight?" Dick was clattering down the stairs, taking them two at a time and then vaulting over the railing when he got too impatient for the last five. "Because he hasn't finished his math homework, and he's got a test tomorrow– oh." Bruce squeezed his eyes shut.
Dick had skidded to a halt, stopped short by whatever he could see on Bruce's face. Why hadn't he put the damned cowl on.
"What happened," Dick said, very softly and gently. He had learned that voice from Bruce. It was the voice Bruce had used on him as a child.
"Nothing," Bruce growled. "It's fine." He should take Damian out. It had been several days since they'd been on patrol together, and Damian was still moving like he expected his partner to do flips. If Damian was going to continue to be Robin, they needed to adjust his movesets to partner Bruce's. Also, Damian got antsy when he hadn't been out for longer than a week, and an antsy Damian was not pleasant to share a house with.
And Damian was his son. His son, and Dick had known about his math test when Bruce had not.
"I'll take him," Dick was saying, still in that too-soft voice. "Don't worry about it. You– maybe you should get some rest, yeah?" He clapped Bruce on the shoulder, and Bruce tried and mostly succeeded in not flinching.
"Do you think–" he began, and then fell silent. Dick's hand was still resting on his shoulder. Just a gentle pressure. Am I a bad father, was what he wanted to ask, and would not, because there were many things he would do to Dick. Had done to Dick. But this was where he could draw the line. Am I a bad person was an even more impossible question.
"Let's go together," he said, instead.
"Are you sure?" Dick looked taken aback. "I thought you said it would be too confusing for Damian, to have an unclear chain of command in the field."
"I think it would be good for him to see us work together," Bruce said. "He should know what good teamwork looks like."
Dick's face did something complicated. "Yeah, B," he said, and his hand tightened on Bruce's shoulder. "That sounds good."
So it was not until the next day that he fired up the jet and landed in Metropolis. He had tried to call first, but upon being confronted with the cheerful tinny sound of Clark's voicemail– "hello you've reached Clark Kent, leave your name and number at the beep and I'll get right back to you!"– he had hung up.
With some distance from the fight, he could name the bone-deep terror that had sunk into his bones the night before for what it was. It was just paranoia, just his mind seizing on the worst possible outcome and convincing him it was going to happen, was in fact happening right now. Clark was not going to die, was not going to fall afoul of more kryptonite that would bring him down choking on his own insides. Clark was not going to die with Bruce's horrible words still sticking out of him like a blade.
But he couldn't leave things the way they were.
He slipped into Clark's building by holding the door for a woman laden with groceries, and then it was up the five flights of stairs to Clark's apartment. Clark had a doormat printed with a little cartoon sun, and a bunch of dried flowers hanging from a nail on his door. Probably Clark knew exactly what each of the flowers were; probably they were wildflowers from somewhere near Smallville. Probably he had collected them himself, his face turned up to the wide broad sky, his hands full of sunlight.
No one answered when Bruce knocked. Clark could certainly hear his heartbeat through the door, could see through it from across the room. He would know that it was Bruce. "Clark," Bruce said anyway, after several more rounds of knocking. He rested his forehead against the door with a quiet thunk. "You have every right to shut me out. I didn't come to apologize, because I don't think there's an apology I can give that would make up for–"
"Uh, excuse me?" There was a fucking kid on the landing behind him, blinking owlishly from under a mop of bright red hair. "Are you here for Clark?"
"I–" Bruce was wrong-footed enough that he didn't slide into the persona he should. "Yes, I am. Are you a neighbor?"
"Nah, I'm a coworker." Great, they were hiring fetuses at the Planet now. "Clark said he'd be out of town for a day or two and asked me to water his plants." The infant jingled the keys. "You look super familiar. Are you–" but the rest of his sentence, whatever it was, rang out into an empty stairwell, because Bruce was running down the stairs at full speed. If there hadn't been civilians around, he would have gone out a window and grappled down the side of the building. He knew where Clark was, and even with the zetas it was not a short trip.
The first impression he had upon exiting the zeta tube was the slap of blinding light and freezing cold. Clark had set the zeta a few hundred feet outside of the Fortress, so that anyone attempting to enter would have to brave the Antarctic weather for a few short moments first. Bruce was distinctly aware that this was not a place that he was meant to be. In the batsuit, it might have been fine. But he hadn't bothered to change; he was still wearing his civilian clothes, dressed for a light Metropolis spring. His loafers skidded on the frozen ground.
The doors of the Fortress did not slide open at his approach. Why would they? Clark wasn't expecting him. He wasn't even sure if Clark was here. He had come here, stupidly, on a whim. He didn't even know what he wanted to say to Clark, only that he was filled with the blind need to see him. To try, in his fumbling, desperate way, to make sure that Clark never looked at him that way again.
He shoved one tingling hand into his armpit and hammered on the door. "Clark!" he called, and he had to strain to be heard above the roar of the wind. But Clark had superhearing. If he was here, if he was willing to see Bruce, he would open the door.
He switched hands and banged again. He was shivering violently now, his whole body shaking in a way he had not felt since a particularly horrible night with a bad batch of fear toxin. He knew he could not stay out here much longer. If Clark didn't answer, he would have to go back to the zeta tube, and try again later. Only he could not tell where the zeta tube was. The light off of the ice was disorienting, and he could feel the cold taking hold of his thoughts and smudging them, as though he was thinking through a fogged window. It was only a few hundred feet away. He had five minutes before hypothermia set in, in these temperatures. He could try to find his tracks, surely. The sun was blinding off the snow despite the howling wind, but there had to be tracks.
"Clark," he called, hoarsely. He wanted to sit down, but he knew he could not do that. He needed to stay upright. He needed to keep moving. This was possibly the most idiotic thing he had ever done. If he died here, because he had stepped into the Antarctic fall without a coat, Dick would never forgive him. And Clark– he couldn't think about what finding his frozen body outside of the last fragment of Krypton would do to Clark.
He tried knocking again. The shivering was slowing, which he knew was a bad sign. "Clark," he shouted, again, or maybe it was a whisper. It was hard to tell, over the roaring of the wind and the rush of blood in his ears.
The door slid open, and Clark was standing there, his face ashen.
"Hi," Bruce said, through numb lips. "Can I come in?" And then he crumpled onto the icy threshold of the Fortress of Solitude.
So not a great beginning, as far as "please forgive me for digging my claws into your most vulnerable underbelly" went. Clark was white-faced and tight-lipped as he bustled around the Fortress, heaping Bruce with blankets of some shimmering, slippery fabric. There was no tea kettle here, because this was not Clark Kent's apartment. This was Kal-El's Fortress of Solitude. But Clark produced a mug of something hot and steaming anyway, and when Bruce's hands proved too useless to hold it he held it to Bruce's lips himself. It tasted astringent, with a cloyingly sweet aftertaste that lingered on Bruce's tongue, almost like licorice.
"You're angry with me," Bruce said, when he could feel his lips again.
"Yes," Clark said. He'd turned away to put the empty mug down and make another. His shoulders were so stiff they were architectural.
"You should be," Bruce said. "I didn't come here to ask your forgiveness. What I said was unforgivable."
"You only said the truth." The crystalline sound of that Kryptonian tea pouring. "I'm not human. I never have been. That doesn't mean I don't feel things."
"I know," Bruce said. "I–"
"Do you? Because sometimes it seems like you get so wrapped up in the overwhelming tide of your own emotions that you forget other people have them too. Separate from yours, even." Clark sagged. "I don't want to fight about this right now."
There was nothing Bruce could say to that. Clark handed him another mug of the licorice drink and Bruce sipped it silently.
"I didn't hear you," Clark said, when Bruce was halfway through the drink. "I was trying to tune you out. I'm angry. But I wouldn't have left you out there."
"I know," Bruce said again.
"Can you please stop saying that," Clark said, exasperated. "It's like trying to have a conversation with the farmer's almanac."
"I–" Know, he had been going to say, because it was the same thing Dick had told him, that trying to argue with him was like arguing with either a bomb or a dictionary. He clapped his mouth shut with embarrassment.
"It's just," Clark began, having seemingly decided that he did in fact want to have this fight right now, "I tell you what it's like for me to love you, and you call me inhuman for asking for the same consideration. And then, after blowing up at me for daring to put myself in extremely mild danger, you come out here and almost freeze to death to, what, yell at me some more?" His voice thickens. "You could have died on my doorstep."
To love you, Clark had said. To love you. "I didn't come here to yell at you," Bruce said, trying to force his stuttering mind past what were ultimately fairly inconsequential words. Except that they weren't. Bruce knew that his mind was like a dog with a bone. It did not let things go; it worried at them and worried at them and worried at them until there was nothing left but shreds. To love you.
"Why did you come here, then?"
It was the cold, probably. His brain was still sluggish, his walls not yet fully up. "I couldn't bear the thought of you dying still angry at me."
"Dying," Clark said flatly, his brow darkening. "Bruce, I'm not going to die. What are you talking about?"
"I know you're not, but." Bruce shrugged. "Everything else I love does."
The Fortress was very, very quiet. Bruce thought perhaps he could hear the creak of ice somewhere, but maybe that was only his own breath, coming too fast. He hadn't meant to say it. Not in the aftermath of an argument, not when Clark was still taking care of him.
Clark was scrubbing his hand across his face. He looked up at Bruce and his face was both very tired and very afraid. Bruce realized he didn't remember the last time he'd seen Clark look afraid. It was a heady feeling, to know that he could cause Superman fear. The brief thrill of it disgusted him.
"You can't say that to me right now," Clark said. "You can't-- Jesus."
Bruce held the mug in between his two hands and tried to breathe through it. So that was what it felt like. Clark loved him, but could not be loved by him. And he was right, because Bruce's love was a terrible clawing thing. "Ah," he said, finally, inarticulately. His lips felt numb again, but he couldn't stomach the thought of drinking more of the last tea of Krypton, or whatever the hell this was. "I thought I could."
Clark looked like he wanted to physically shake Bruce and was barely restraining himself. "I didn't mean never," he said, more gently. "I only meant– you can't tell me you love me for the first time when you're still hypothermic, the day after you call me an alien because I won't let you tell me how to run my hero work."
"Was it really the first time?" Bruce says. They had fought alongside each other for so long. The way Clark looked at him, the way he looked at Clark. The way he had touched Clark the first time, his hands shaking with the feeling that he was holding something unimaginably precious. He had held thousand-carat diamonds and megaton bombs and his hands had never wavered, but Clark beneath his touch reduced him to something fragile and trembling. And Clark's gaze, warm and dark. He had taken Bruce's trembling fingers in his and pressed a kiss to them. It had unraveled Bruce. All the way down to his bones, he had shaken apart.
"You can't concede a single point, can you?" Clark sounded fonder than he should. "No," he said. "I suppose it wasn't really the first time."
Bruce sipped his drink. It still tasted like melted licorice, but it was helping; his muscles were slowly unlocking. "What is this called?" he asked.
"I don't know," Clark said. "It's probably on one of these holographs somewhere. Good though, right?"
"Yeah," Bruce said. Parts of Clark's life were hard to hold. The thought of Clark sitting alone in this echoing cavern of ice sipping a drink his parents probably loved but that he had no name for caught in Bruce's throat.
Kara probably knew what it was called. He could ask her, and then tell Clark. But then again, in his mother's untouched dressing table was a diary he had never read; he could also let it lie, and just enjoy the drink.
"If you ever want to bring some of those archives to the cave," he said, when he'd reached the bitter dregs, "and see if we can get them to interface with Earth tech, we could make them more searchable. Babs could help, or maybe Tim. Or Kon."
"Kon would hate that," Clark said, "but it's not a bad idea." He smiled a bit. It was easy to forget, when you saw Superman smile, the way that Clark Kent smiled. Not the reporter, but the man. Superman's smiles were brilliant and dazzling, and the reporter's smiles were awkward, apologetic things. But Clark smiled deep and warm, with his whole face, even when all that really changed were his eyes. "I'll think on it," he said. He looked down at his hands. "What you said earlier."
Bruce swallowed, his hands tightening on his mug.
"Tell me again later," Clark said, looking up. His eyes were the color of the inside of an iceberg, a blue too clear and deep to be human. He was beautiful. Bruce would have followed him anywhere.
"I will," Bruce said.