Bruce doesn't want to talk. At all. He would like to not be in this position-- he feels like a coward wishing the incident with the Joker hadn't happened, so does that mean he has to wish Clark hadn't opened this pandora's box? Yeah, sort of. That doesn't make him feel great either, though, and there's only feelings now. Problems he can carefully unlock or punch to death are a distant fantasy.
"I don't know what to do," he admits after a while. It's hard for him to say it.
Ugh, questions that force him to cut through his own bullshit. This is why he talks to Clark about these kinds of things. It's terribly inconvenient of Clark to have made himself this kind of thing, really. Bruce is suspicious of this plan to explain even in broad terms, though, and for a while he doesn't answer.
"I can decide not to tell you, and leave," he says slowly. "Or I can tell you, and ultimately leave anyway."
He doesn't bother splitting it up into four options, because he doesn't think the other possibilities attached to those two are viable. Not telling Clark and staying isn't going to work as Bruce will drive himself insane and bail, and he's not ... he just. He can barely stand himself, he doesn't deserve to live after what he's done. Clark's here to fix an entire timeline thanks to a loss of control. There's no way.
Edited (things things things) 2015-12-04 00:25 (UTC)
The change in phrasing is what he picks up on, because 'ultimately' feels like Bruce feels that he knows what will happen. And Clark is well aware that Bruce is a damn pessimist. And when it involves the two of them, he... can't really understand why. He wonders if Bruce knows how much hope, how much... how much drive comes from what they share? From his relationship with the other man? He's reasonably certain that if he has an inkling, he probably gives him, Clark, too much credit.
"What does 'ultimately' mean here? Why do you think you'll 'ultimately leave anyway'?"
Do you think I'd ever kick you out? Do you think there's anything you could ever do to make me turn my back on you?
"I did something. I did..." he trails off, because he doesn't want to talk about it. He wants to walk three paces closer and say Can we try the other day again and kiss him, and this time they can be aware of themselves and present, and Bruce can actually react. He wants the relief he felt when he slept next to him.
"There's no exit I can see. I'm not who I was before."
Bruce doesn't know if he'll feel the same about Clark if the other man can forgive him, he tries to argue with himself. He doesn't know if that's true, but it's something, and his insides are too tangled for him to make sense of. If Clark accepts him, what's he supposed to do? He has to go back and go through with everything. It's too late.
The omelette is plated, the stove is turned off, and Clark turns his attention entirely on Bruce where it'd been only a paltry 99% his before.
"Bruce?" and his voice is gentle as he walks a little closer, keeping his movements slow and his steps obvious, "if you can't see one, trust me to look for you?"
A faint smile, wry and oddly self-depreciating as he continues--
"I figured out a way out of death. I'm craftier than you think."
That aside, though, he reaches forward slowly, carefully, to take Bruce's hand in both of his. It's a mirror, he realizes, and perhaps it's because he's functional and Bruce is... Bruce is having trouble (Bruce Wayne is always functional, even when he's not) but he needs to hold some part of him. Connect with touch, even if it's small.
Please, Bruce, he says with the gentle stroke of his fingers over Bruce's hand, over the knobs of his knuckles, the lines of tendon under the skin, let me help you. Let me love you.
His insides twist. He stares down at their hands, his in Clark's. Superman could not have helped in in Gotham, not the night he came here, not in the months leading up to it. Those wounds inside and out were all New Jersey machinist noir, all darkness and rain and blood. His Kryptonian strength couldn't have cured Bruce, or fixed Jason, or purified the air. He knows that when he goes back, he won't speak to Clark ever again.
"...I need to sit down."
Bruce will. Will he? Tell him. Maybe. He'll see. But he's not going to do it standing here while Clark's eggs are going cold. It feels like reality playback on pause, and makes him want to ninja out the damn window. He squeezes Clark's hand.
He nods and puts a bowl over Bruce's eggs (because they were for Bruce, who had a headache and probably needed to eat something; Clark had been in the sunlight so he was pretty much just fine). Then he walks back over to the couch where Bruce had been sitting last night.
He keeps to one side. Because if Bruce wants to sit against him, take the comfort he's desperate to give him, he can do that. But if he's decided, as he does so often, that he's not allowed such things, the other side is open.
It's just as well; he doesn't know if he'll be able to keep anything down if they go through this. Truly a mirror of the other day-- what the hell is wrong with them, honestly. Bruce sits on the sofa next to him, but not close enough to touch. He wants to but at the same time, he doesn't. He doesn't know how, physically, to be casual about it - he knows how to sit next to a woman and hold her, but this is new territory. And he doesn't know if he can handle Clark's touch while he's thinking about this. Any touch, but he doesn't want to associate it.
(At least Joker was shorter and much thinner, a pragmatic voice in his head says. A very good point, though he would have preferred to simply think nothing.)
"You're familiar with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prion infections. Correct?" It's a blunt, cold opener, and not a great sign for anything that's to come.
It's easy enough to nod, and he's not lying. He's familiar enough. He doesn't have the in-depth medical knowledge that Bruce does, but he's done his share of research on more unique diseases. It always ends up being pertinent at the worst times.
And he nods, because he doesn't want to break Bruce's stride.
"Joker had become obsessed with obtaining immortality," because of me, he leaves out, trying to keep this contained on one horrible trajectory at a time, "and in a last-ditch grab for it after experimenting on himself to the point of a significantly quicker death anyway, started shooting up a super-steroid called Titan, a failed attempt to re-created Bane's Venom. It reacted with whatever was already in his blood, and created something unthinkable. Not unlike a prion infection. Transformative and fatal."
Bruce keeps his voice clinical. He doesn't look at Clark. The transformative nature of Creutzfeldt-Jakob and other prion diseases is not so much that; it only looks that way, as the brain begins to melt away cell by cell. The behaviors that develop as the disease progresses are nightmarish, and coupled with the most common form of transmission - consumption of human spinal fluid - gave rise to the mythos of zombies.
He knows Joker is dead. He knows this, but he's not sure if this is why or how. He's actually doing his best not to put the pieces together, to let Bruce tell his tale. He needs to make sure that he hears what Bruce says and not what he expects Bruce to say, that he's listening more actively than he's trying to make it better.
Bruce deserves that. And Clark won't give him less.
"A cure had to be found. Not for him," and there he sounds tired at having to clarify-- not because of Clark, just. He knows what people think, and it turns his stomach. "He infected others. Some personally, some by secreting in his blood to hospitals to be used in transfusions. We found one. We thought. It turned out to only strip the disease of the fatal element. The transformative remained."
And so what he'd said before is pieced here: the Joker was dying on (a kind of) Venom, there was a cure, but he decided to stab Bruce and laugh. Now, hopefully, it makes sense why he wanted to cure him. The original living DNA would have helped. Honestly, Bruce thinks it would have been fine to lobotomize him.
"It sent messages to the brain, triggering a complete overhaul into the 'correct' structure it was birthed with. Personality, memory, physical features. And after it sent that message it broke down into protein, nothingness, incurable because there was nothing to cure, it just was."
His voice shakes. Anger. Bruce stands up and paces, goes to the window and stares. Getting his temper back in check, or trying to.
Clark lets him go, because now that Bruce is moving, now that he's angry, Clark allows himself to put the pieces together. Realistically, it only takes a few milliseconds for him to come to his conclusions, but he's well-practiced with taking the right amount of time. Knowing the ebb and flow of conversation so that Bruce has had enough time to breath before having to listen to him or consider his words.
"Well," he says quietly, nothing in his voice to indicate any kind of response (because he needs to know the answer before he knows what kind of response to make)... "what I'm getting from all that is... either you're dying... or you're more worried about coming in green than coming in grey.
More worried about coming in green than coming in grey.
He turns from the window and walks into the bathroom. Shuts the door behind him. It's good he didn't eat anything after all and is only retching up coffee and stomach acid.
As far as he's concerned, that's an answer. And for the first time since that ill-considered kiss (had it really been considered? that's a very charitable way of putting it), Clark forces the issue.
He opens the door, walks in, and leans down to put his hand to Bruce's back, rubbing up and down.
He's here. He's not going anywhere. He loves you, Bruce. And he is so so sorry that you've had to go through this alone.
This is where Batman flips out, where Bruce shoves Clark away and hits him, breaks his hands, screams at him for mocking what he went through, by extension what Jason went through--
No. Bruce sits on the tile floor and doesn't shudder away.
He can't help that his fingers pause. They pause because those words hit him harder than anything else. But this time, it's his job. And he won't fail Bruce. He will not fail Bruce.
He wants to ask. He wants to ask if he's told his Clark, if his Diana has tried Amazonian technology. If he's bothered to contact Ray Palmer to see if he can get in there and start repairing things. He wants to ask all of these things, but he ultimately knows it's a fool's errand, and one that will only put the blame for what he's suffered on Bruce. And he won't do that. He won't.
"I'm sorry."
He's sorry for everything he's done since they met here and he's sorry for the Clark in his world who wasn't psychic enough to know and he's sorry that the world is shit sometimes and it's one of the few times, the very few times, he'll ever admit that. The world is sometimes shit and it makes him so very angry because there is nothing fair about that fact expressing itself on the heart and mind of Bruce Wayne.
He lets himself lower to his knees and gets in close to Bruce and presses a kiss to his temple.
It wasn't so bad, for a while. Because for a while, he didn't know he wasn't entirely cured. Bruce mourned Talia, and the signs of illness - almost mimicking the warnings signs of impending schizophrenia in its application - were simply ignored and passed off as his normal, disconnected behavior. When he began to notice, and began to isolate the reason, the real medical reason and not just a plain old psychotic break (and who'd be surprised? the Joker's blood was not first on his list of suspicions, when he sat down at last), he worked to contain it. Bruce compartmentalizes like no other, and so he did. But he took the shutdown further. He severed contact with the outside world so that the box he made for himself in his head couldn't take anything else in, just as much as it couldn't get out. The Joker shouldn't know who Superman is, or how to operate the Watchtower, or know what Diana's hand on his feels like. Risking his family and Gotham was awful enough as it was.
"I thought I had it under control."
But wait, the announcer said. There's more.
"I thought.. a lot of things. In those months." Bruce closes his eyes. Forces himself to open them again, even though it's obvious he's not looking at anything. Staring at nothing, barely registering Clark's physical presence. "I had to drown to get back up. And for too long.. there was a window of time, where I should have terminated myself. It was my responsibility and I'd arranged it, in a holding cell in the inner city base, but the window closed and suddenly I was convincing myself it was fine when it wasn't, god, it was so far from fine."
He won't argue. He won't blame, he won't judge. He doesn't know what else was going on in that world. He doesn't know if he and that Clark had some manner of falling out. He doesn't know if something was keeping the others busy, if Bruce had had to deal with legislation or financial issues. Clark is as good as he is because he applies his abilities with the knowledge obtained through a ridiculous amount of information intake and processing that very few people are aware of. Without that information, he knows his touch could be too firm. Whatever butterfly of hope or faith or courage Bruce has worked up to tell him this... he won't crush it.
There's no victory in his voice. He sounds hollow.
"I beat it. There is no cure. It's just forcing your mind to turn the program off, and then it's gone. The others failed. Dead. I won but not before. I can't remember everything I did."
Bruce lets that stand, thinking. Trying to see past the edges of his distorted memory, where his brain just can't fill in the blanks because he was pushing his mental faculties so hard to keep from slipping under.
"Sometimes I remember flashes of the things he.. I remember, and I can't tell if I'm just remembering, or if it's coming back."
His hand reaches up, reaches over, and he starts running his hands down Bruce's back again. Down, lift, shoulders, down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
"What can I do?"
There's no other question here. None.
"I'm not leaving you alone with this. Not another minute. Not another second."
Bruce was not shouldering this any more alone than he has to. And Clark knows he's only taking the barest edges of the burden, but he'll take as much as Clark will let him.
"Don't. Clark." Bruce exhales a humorless laugh, a helpless, bleak sound. He covers his face with his hands, bent forward. "Not after what you saw in that other world, not after what I've done. You can't. I can't.."
I can't take this kindness. Bruce hasn't spoken to anyone, hasn't let any of this go and for fuck's sake it's been a year. The idea of this is-- he can't, he can't even entertain the notion of it. He's been isolated with it for so long. There's no exit I can see.
Clark heard what Bruce said, heard it. Even understood it. Because that's Bruce. It's Bruce all the way to see this as something he let happen, the result of some weakness or fault instead of the side effects of being a human being.
The thing is, though, that while Bruce is Bruce, Clark is Clark. And part of being Clark is that he reaches out to take Bruce's hand again, wrap his fingers around Bruce's fingers, give the faintest of squeezes.
He can.
He can move planets. He can create worlds. He can save cities. He can stop tsunamis. He can pull a kitten from a tree and still be taken seriously. He can look at a pair of potential criminals and send them home without a punch thrown or a bullet fired because Superman knows they can do better, knows they can find another way. He can hear the suffering of the whole world every day of his life and still believe in the basic goodness inherent in every human being enough to go out and risk his life and the lives of the people he loves to try and bring that hope to everyone else.
He can love Bruce Wayne, regardless of the world he came from. He can see that the man he loves was as much a victim as anyone else. Is as much a survivor as anyone else. Is his hero for beating himself and dragging himself kicking and screaming through that hell to the other side.
It's overwhelming. It doesn't seem real-- but at the same time, this is not a result Bruce has ever even daydreamed of. Never considered within the realm of possibility, and no hallucination would ever try and trick him this way, because it's so impossible and his brain would simply never buy it.
He could scream. How dare Clark do this to him and turn everything on its head, do something he can't process, that he's never been able to handle. Bruce is so uncomfortable with unconditional love being handed to him that he's built cornerstones of his personality around being simply ineligible for it.
Of course this is what Clark is offering him, of course it would be the impossible thing he won't hesitate, won't even consider hesitating over. Fuck you, he thinks viciously. Hate me like everyone else, you son of a bitch.
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"I don't know what to do," he admits after a while. It's hard for him to say it.
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"Well," he ventures gently, "what do you feel are the options?"
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"I can decide not to tell you, and leave," he says slowly. "Or I can tell you, and ultimately leave anyway."
He doesn't bother splitting it up into four options, because he doesn't think the other possibilities attached to those two are viable. Not telling Clark and staying isn't going to work as Bruce will drive himself insane and bail, and he's not ... he just. He can barely stand himself, he doesn't deserve to live after what he's done. Clark's here to fix an entire timeline thanks to a loss of control. There's no way.
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"What does 'ultimately' mean here? Why do you think you'll 'ultimately leave anyway'?"
Do you think I'd ever kick you out? Do you think there's anything you could ever do to make me turn my back on you?
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"There's no exit I can see. I'm not who I was before."
Bruce doesn't know if he'll feel the same about Clark if the other man can forgive him, he tries to argue with himself. He doesn't know if that's true, but it's something, and his insides are too tangled for him to make sense of. If Clark accepts him, what's he supposed to do? He has to go back and go through with everything. It's too late.
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"Bruce?" and his voice is gentle as he walks a little closer, keeping his movements slow and his steps obvious, "if you can't see one, trust me to look for you?"
A faint smile, wry and oddly self-depreciating as he continues--
"I figured out a way out of death. I'm craftier than you think."
That aside, though, he reaches forward slowly, carefully, to take Bruce's hand in both of his. It's a mirror, he realizes, and perhaps it's because he's functional and Bruce is... Bruce is having trouble (Bruce Wayne is always functional, even when he's not) but he needs to hold some part of him. Connect with touch, even if it's small.
Please, Bruce, he says with the gentle stroke of his fingers over Bruce's hand, over the knobs of his knuckles, the lines of tendon under the skin, let me help you.
Let me love you."And who are you?"
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"...I need to sit down."
Bruce will. Will he? Tell him. Maybe. He'll see. But he's not going to do it standing here while Clark's eggs are going cold. It feels like reality playback on pause, and makes him want to ninja out the damn window. He squeezes Clark's hand.
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He nods and puts a bowl over Bruce's eggs (because they were for Bruce, who had a headache and probably needed to eat something; Clark had been in the sunlight so he was pretty much just fine). Then he walks back over to the couch where Bruce had been sitting last night.
He keeps to one side. Because if Bruce wants to sit against him, take the comfort he's desperate to give him, he can do that. But if he's decided, as he does so often, that he's not allowed such things, the other side is open.
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(At least Joker was shorter and much thinner, a pragmatic voice in his head says. A very good point, though he would have preferred to simply think nothing.)
"You're familiar with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prion infections. Correct?" It's a blunt, cold opener, and not a great sign for anything that's to come.
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And he nods, because he doesn't want to break Bruce's stride.
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Bruce keeps his voice clinical. He doesn't look at Clark. The transformative nature of Creutzfeldt-Jakob and other prion diseases is not so much that; it only looks that way, as the brain begins to melt away cell by cell. The behaviors that develop as the disease progresses are nightmarish, and coupled with the most common form of transmission - consumption of human spinal fluid - gave rise to the mythos of zombies.
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He knows Joker is dead. He knows this, but he's not sure if this is why or how. He's actually doing his best not to put the pieces together, to let Bruce tell his tale. He needs to make sure that he hears what Bruce says and not what he expects Bruce to say, that he's listening more actively than he's trying to make it better.
Bruce deserves that. And Clark won't give him less.
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And so what he'd said before is pieced here: the Joker was dying on (a kind of) Venom, there was a cure, but he decided to stab Bruce and laugh. Now, hopefully, it makes sense why he wanted to cure him. The original living DNA would have helped. Honestly, Bruce thinks it would have been fine to lobotomize him.
"It sent messages to the brain, triggering a complete overhaul into the 'correct' structure it was birthed with. Personality, memory, physical features. And after it sent that message it broke down into protein, nothingness, incurable because there was nothing to cure, it just was."
His voice shakes. Anger. Bruce stands up and paces, goes to the window and stares. Getting his temper back in check, or trying to.
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"Well," he says quietly, nothing in his voice to indicate any kind of response (because he needs to know the answer before he knows what kind of response to make)... "what I'm getting from all that is... either you're dying... or you're more worried about coming in green than coming in grey.
"Is it up in the air? Or do you know?"
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More worried about coming in green than coming in grey.
He turns from the window and walks into the bathroom. Shuts the door behind him. It's good he didn't eat anything after all and is only retching up coffee and stomach acid.
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He opens the door, walks in, and leans down to put his hand to Bruce's back, rubbing up and down.
He's here. He's not going anywhere. He loves you, Bruce. And he is so so sorry that you've had to go through this alone.
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No. Bruce sits on the tile floor and doesn't shudder away.
For a long time.
"A year."
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He wants to ask. He wants to ask if he's told his Clark, if his Diana has tried Amazonian technology. If he's bothered to contact Ray Palmer to see if he can get in there and start repairing things. He wants to ask all of these things, but he ultimately knows it's a fool's errand, and one that will only put the blame for what he's suffered on Bruce. And he won't do that. He won't.
"I'm sorry."
He's sorry for everything he's done since they met here and he's sorry for the Clark in his world who wasn't psychic enough to know and he's sorry that the world is shit sometimes and it's one of the few times, the very few times, he'll ever admit that. The world is sometimes shit and it makes him so very angry because there is nothing fair about that fact expressing itself on the heart and mind of Bruce Wayne.
He lets himself lower to his knees and gets in close to Bruce and presses a kiss to his temple.
"I am so, so sorry Bruce."
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"I thought I had it under control."
But wait, the announcer said. There's more.
"I thought.. a lot of things. In those months." Bruce closes his eyes. Forces himself to open them again, even though it's obvious he's not looking at anything. Staring at nothing, barely registering Clark's physical presence. "I had to drown to get back up. And for too long.. there was a window of time, where I should have terminated myself. It was my responsibility and I'd arranged it, in a holding cell in the inner city base, but the window closed and suddenly I was convincing myself it was fine when it wasn't, god, it was so far from fine."
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But here... he can deal with here.
"And now?"
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Of course he did.
There's no victory in his voice. He sounds hollow.
"I beat it. There is no cure. It's just forcing your mind to turn the program off, and then it's gone. The others failed. Dead. I won but not before. I can't remember everything I did."
Bruce lets that stand, thinking. Trying to see past the edges of his distorted memory, where his brain just can't fill in the blanks because he was pushing his mental faculties so hard to keep from slipping under.
"Sometimes I remember flashes of the things he.. I remember, and I can't tell if I'm just remembering, or if it's coming back."
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"What can I do?"
There's no other question here. None.
"I'm not leaving you alone with this. Not another minute. Not another second."
Bruce was not shouldering this any more alone than he has to. And Clark knows he's only taking the barest edges of the burden, but he'll take as much as Clark will let him.
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I can't take this kindness. Bruce hasn't spoken to anyone, hasn't let any of this go and for fuck's sake it's been a year. The idea of this is-- he can't, he can't even entertain the notion of it. He's been isolated with it for so long. There's no exit I can see.
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The thing is, though, that while Bruce is Bruce, Clark is Clark. And part of being Clark is that he reaches out to take Bruce's hand again, wrap his fingers around Bruce's fingers, give the faintest of squeezes.
He can.
He can move planets. He can create worlds. He can save cities. He can stop tsunamis. He can pull a kitten from a tree and still be taken seriously. He can look at a pair of potential criminals and send them home without a punch thrown or a bullet fired because Superman knows they can do better, knows they can find another way. He can hear the suffering of the whole world every day of his life and still believe in the basic goodness inherent in every human being enough to go out and risk his life and the lives of the people he loves to try and bring that hope to everyone else.
He can love Bruce Wayne, regardless of the world he came from. He can see that the man he loves was as much a victim as anyone else. Is as much a survivor as anyone else. Is his hero for beating himself and dragging himself kicking and screaming through that hell to the other side.
"I can," he says, firm. Warm. Present.
"Will you let me?"
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He could scream. How dare Clark do this to him and turn everything on its head, do something he can't process, that he's never been able to handle. Bruce is so uncomfortable with unconditional love being handed to him that he's built cornerstones of his personality around being simply ineligible for it.
Of course this is what Clark is offering him, of course it would be the impossible thing he won't hesitate, won't even consider hesitating over. Fuck you, he thinks viciously. Hate me like everyone else, you son of a bitch.
He's so angry.
He wants this so damn much.
"I don't know how."
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