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.
He doesn't let go of Bruce's hand, won't let go until he is blatantly, pointedly, deliberately told to. Might not even let go then, because Clark has so many rules, but if he's honest with himself, he'll bend every one of them until they break for Bruce. Just like Bruce would for him.
"We'll figure it out."
We. They're the goddamn World's Finest. There is no other superhero team in their world, in any world, to match them.
"I love you. I'm not going anywhere. And we'll figure out how to do this."
Bruce almost snaps You love someone who sounds like me, somewhere else, because it's true, but it's also stupid and petty and pointless. And he decides he doesn't want to say that, because he doesn't fucking care.
He releases a shuddered, choking breath-- nothing more than that. He was a sensitive kid, and while some of his all-consuming emotions have carried over into adulthood, the last time he's cried was after Jason. (That it's anymore, not after Jason's death, just, Jason.) His body's forgotten how, and so he doesn't. What he does do is lean into Clark, and all the tension and fight bleeds out of him. Letting him... anything. Letting him figure it out.
It's true and it's not. Because the second that Clark confirmed histories with Bruce, Clark loved him the same way. Because if he remembers those whispered words and Bruce remembered those whispered words... if he's felt Bruce die in his arms, walked with him into Crime Alley and watched him rediscover himself... if they've battled gods and monsters and demons, said the same words with, if anything, a breath or two different?
Then the difference is semantics. Because Clark loved the man who'd done those things. And this Bruce had done those things too.
And unlike the Bruce from home, the one who'd lived through that terrible alternate world with him... this one still trusted him. Believed in him. Bruce loved someone else, somewhere else too. Bruce had shared those moments with another Clark. But that other Clark hadn't kissed him. And his other Bruce hadn't trusted him enough to let him love him.
They'd done that with each other. The important pieces, the vital pieces, had happened here. And that made them no less real, made what they shared no less real, than anyone else. It made them love at first sight all over again, in a way, and there was something magical to that.
As soon as he feels Bruce lean in, feels the tension in him fade away, he settles on the floor and pulls Bruce into his arms. The man's empty at the moment, metaphorically perhaps but definitely physically. He hadn't had much and he'd retched it up pretty quickly.
Clark grabs a wash cloth and reaches up to wet it before wiping away a few specks from Bruce's mouth. Tosses it back into the sink when he's done and gets both arms around the other man. He'll just let Bruce sit, curled up against him for a few moments to settle out. He'd almost want to move them, but Bruce had chosen the bathroom (one of the most defensible spots in any home) and Clark is fine sitting there with the other man in his arms for the moment. He runs one hand through Bruce's hair, slow and even and soothing and he doesn't say anything because there's nothing that needs saying.
If he could hear all that narration, he'd probably puke again. So it's for the best that he doesn't, because he instantly wants to die all over when that wash cloth happens. Definitely more than enough vomit for one day. Wow, awesome, very smooth, Wayne. Master of seduction. Maybe he'll publish a book. How To Fuck Up Spectacularly In Every Way Imaginable And Still End Up With The Guy. Its single chapter will be advice on finding aliens with deeply warped standards.
He's not ungrateful. He's not unmoved. He is so grateful and moved he's collapsing in on himself in flippant defensiveness. It's better to stay absolutely silent, as he is nothing if not-self aware. At times.
Bruce does what he's wanted to do since he showed up in the middle of the night, and curls himself against Clark. The both of them are too well-built to have a single inch of comfortable softness, the tile sucks, and they're too tall to be on the floor of this cramped bathroom. Somehow, that's all fine.
Clark will stroke his back and kiss his hair. He'll hold him here on the bathroom floor and ignore the scent of vomit. He'll close his eyes and listen to Bruce's heart, feel it against his own skin, thump thump thump, and he won't smile, but he will feel all right, genuinely all right, truly content and safe and good in a way that only Bruce can do.
That hadn't always been the case. Once upon a time, what felt like a lifetime ago, he'd had that with Lois. And then he'd seen what a madman would do to her to hurt him. Then he'd seen what he could become when she died. The love was still there but the trust, the safety, was broken. Shattered forever. They'd separated because they loved each other, because they couldn't be what they'd been. Separated because they'd decided that if this experience healed what'd been broken, they hadn't wanted to close the door.
But if being here had done anything, it was to make him more certain.
And that sounded so terrible, sounded like Bruce was the second string, his fill in choice, a substitute when that couldn't be further from the truth. Because he'd always loved Bruce the same way he loved Lois. Always. He'd made his choice because Lois had been ready and Bruce had not, because Lois had wanted it and Bruce... had been Bruce. And he'd never thought for an instant that he'd 'chosen' between them any more than he'd choose his Kryptonian side over his human upbringing. He was both, and he loved them both.
And now, the man that he was now, would always love Lois. But that man needed Bruce. Because Bruce understood the darkness. Bruce understood fear. Bruce was capable in ways that Lois, bless her, bless her, was not. Bruce would never fall prey to the same terrible things Lois had and he needed that. He needed to know that. He didn't think Bruce knew that, couldn't imagine Bruce knew that. And he would never, ever tell him. Because he couldn't ever let Bruce think he was responsible for him. Because love wasn't about need. Love was about choice. And even though he'd needed, he could have lived happily with the two of them as friends. He could have because that relationship had always been amazing, had always been as intense and deep and tight as it was now. It would have been enough.
But Clark chose. Clark chose to love this way too. And now that he had, now that he knew what it was to love Bruce Wayne this way, to let down every defense and bare himself. Now that he knew what it was to kiss him, to sleep beside him, to hold him in his arms and stroke his hair and kiss his temple and even to wipe the vomit from his lips...
He couldn't imagine wanting anything else. Anyone else. And that was just the way it was. Come hell, come high water, come low water. Come the end of the world. He had the most... amazing man in the world with him. And that meant that everything would be fine.
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no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
"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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
But here... he can deal with here.
"And now?"
no subject
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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
"We'll figure it out."
We. They're the goddamn World's Finest. There is no other superhero team in their world, in any world, to match them.
"I love you. I'm not going anywhere. And we'll figure out how to do this."
no subject
He releases a shuddered, choking breath-- nothing more than that. He was a sensitive kid, and while some of his all-consuming emotions have carried over into adulthood, the last time he's cried was after Jason. (That it's anymore, not after Jason's death, just, Jason.) His body's forgotten how, and so he doesn't. What he does do is lean into Clark, and all the tension and fight bleeds out of him. Letting him... anything. Letting him figure it out.
no subject
Then the difference is semantics. Because Clark loved the man who'd done those things. And this Bruce had done those things too.
And unlike the Bruce from home, the one who'd lived through that terrible alternate world with him... this one still trusted him. Believed in him. Bruce loved someone else, somewhere else too. Bruce had shared those moments with another Clark. But that other Clark hadn't kissed him. And his other Bruce hadn't trusted him enough to let him love him.
They'd done that with each other. The important pieces, the vital pieces, had happened here. And that made them no less real, made what they shared no less real, than anyone else. It made them love at first sight all over again, in a way, and there was something magical to that.
As soon as he feels Bruce lean in, feels the tension in him fade away, he settles on the floor and pulls Bruce into his arms. The man's empty at the moment, metaphorically perhaps but definitely physically. He hadn't had much and he'd retched it up pretty quickly.
Clark grabs a wash cloth and reaches up to wet it before wiping away a few specks from Bruce's mouth. Tosses it back into the sink when he's done and gets both arms around the other man. He'll just let Bruce sit, curled up against him for a few moments to settle out. He'd almost want to move them, but Bruce had chosen the bathroom (one of the most defensible spots in any home) and Clark is fine sitting there with the other man in his arms for the moment. He runs one hand through Bruce's hair, slow and even and soothing and he doesn't say anything because there's nothing that needs saying.
no subject
He's not ungrateful. He's not unmoved. He is so grateful and moved he's collapsing in on himself in flippant defensiveness. It's better to stay absolutely silent, as he is nothing if not-self aware. At times.
Bruce does what he's wanted to do since he showed up in the middle of the night, and curls himself against Clark. The both of them are too well-built to have a single inch of comfortable softness, the tile sucks, and they're too tall to be on the floor of this cramped bathroom. Somehow, that's all fine.
no subject
Clark will stroke his back and kiss his hair. He'll hold him here on the bathroom floor and ignore the scent of vomit. He'll close his eyes and listen to Bruce's heart, feel it against his own skin, thump thump thump, and he won't smile, but he will feel all right, genuinely all right, truly content and safe and good in a way that only Bruce can do.
That hadn't always been the case. Once upon a time, what felt like a lifetime ago, he'd had that with Lois. And then he'd seen what a madman would do to her to hurt him. Then he'd seen what he could become when she died. The love was still there but the trust, the safety, was broken. Shattered forever. They'd separated because they loved each other, because they couldn't be what they'd been. Separated because they'd decided that if this experience healed what'd been broken, they hadn't wanted to close the door.
But if being here had done anything, it was to make him more certain.
And that sounded so terrible, sounded like Bruce was the second string, his fill in choice, a substitute when that couldn't be further from the truth. Because he'd always loved Bruce the same way he loved Lois. Always. He'd made his choice because Lois had been ready and Bruce had not, because Lois had wanted it and Bruce... had been Bruce. And he'd never thought for an instant that he'd 'chosen' between them any more than he'd choose his Kryptonian side over his human upbringing. He was both, and he loved them both.
And now, the man that he was now, would always love Lois. But that man needed Bruce. Because Bruce understood the darkness. Bruce understood fear. Bruce was capable in ways that Lois, bless her, bless her, was not. Bruce would never fall prey to the same terrible things Lois had and he needed that. He needed to know that. He didn't think Bruce knew that, couldn't imagine Bruce knew that. And he would never, ever tell him. Because he couldn't ever let Bruce think he was responsible for him. Because love wasn't about need. Love was about choice. And even though he'd needed, he could have lived happily with the two of them as friends. He could have because that relationship had always been amazing, had always been as intense and deep and tight as it was now. It would have been enough.
But Clark chose. Clark chose to love this way too. And now that he had, now that he knew what it was to love Bruce Wayne this way, to let down every defense and bare himself. Now that he knew what it was to kiss him, to sleep beside him, to hold him in his arms and stroke his hair and kiss his temple and even to wipe the vomit from his lips...
He couldn't imagine wanting anything else. Anyone else. And that was just the way it was. Come hell, come high water, come low water. Come the end of the world. He had the most... amazing man in the world with him. And that meant that everything would be fine.