all each riddles, when unknown - susiecarter (2024)

Chapter Text

Sure enough, Kent appears not an hour later—Bruce can hear him through the door, chatting warmly with Ginger for almost a full minute before a knock comes.

Ginger sticks her head in and says, "It's Mr. Kent for you, sir," and almost before she's finished saying it, Kent's right there at her shoulder.

"Sure, right," Bruce says, as though he'd forgotten, and shoots them both one of Bruce Wayne's most annoying smiles. "Sorry for missing you the other day," he adds, as Kent steps in and reaches out to shake Bruce's hand.

"And the day before that, and the day before that," Kent observes, but he doesn't sound pissed about it; his grip is firm and warm, neither punishing nor fleeting, and he raises an eyebrow at Bruce over those terrible glasses and then smiles back before he sits down.

Bruce waves a hand. "Well, you know how it is, busy busy busy—never rains but it pours."

"Yes, that is the kind of thing businesspeople say," Kent agrees innocently, and Bruce is so startled by the jab that he almost laughs for real. "I do want to thank you, Mr. Wayne, for arranging for me to meet with Cyndia Syl and her staff—it was wonderful to have the opportunity to talk to her directly about the project."

"Oh, it was no trouble at all," Bruce says. "Must have kept you out of Jenna's hair for at least a couple days."

"Miss Lao and I are professionals," Kent says almost primly, "and we've reached an understanding." He pauses for a beat, shifting his weight, and then adds, "I've started bringing her coffee."

"Ah," Bruce says, nodding sagely. "Bribery. It's a classic for a reason."

For a split second, Kent grins wide—and it changes his whole face, that smile; turns those blue eyes warm as summer sky, and Bruce feels dimly as though he's had the breath knocked out of him.

And then Kent clears his throat and looks down at his notepad—actual paper, the man's so analog it's almost charming—and says, "There's just a couple things I want to follow up on, Mr. Wayne, but I promise not to take too much of your time—"

"I think we should trade," Bruce says.

Kent blinks at him. "What?"

"Questions," Bruce elaborates, leaning forward. Kent's made it easy for him: he's seated himself in one of the chairs by the worktable, which means Bruce can slouch against it with his hip at an extremely Bruce Wayne angle and stay very much in Kent's space. "I think we should trade. I ask one, you ask one."

"Mr. Wayne—"

"Because there's something I'd very much like to know about you," and Bruce's tone suggests the potential insinuations of that remark so well that he'd have been more surprised if Kent's ears hadn't gone pink. "Why are you doing this?"

Kent's gaze had wandered back down to his notepad, steeling himself to wait out whatever torrid line he'd expected Bruce to deliver next and then get this conversation back on track; surprise brings his eyes snapping back up to Bruce's. "What?"

"Why are you doing this?" Bruce keeps his expression easy, pleasant, Bruce Wayne's all the way through—the idle curiosity of a man who's never been driven to accomplish much of anything. "A building going up downtown isn't exactly the stuff of hard-hitting investigative journalism. This would be easy enough to half-ass—"

Kent's already frowning. "Mr. Wayne—"

"—or whole-ass," Bruce concedes, holding his hands up defensively, "you could whole-ass it if you wanted—I don't mean to impugn your work ethic, Mr. Kent. But you already have most of what you'd really need. A couple inspiring paragraphs a week about the city healing, what we can accomplish when we work together, how we get knocked down but get back up again; a few decent pictures. Nobody's expecting any more from you than that."

"I think my editor's expecting a little more from me than Chumbawamba lyrics, Mr. Wayne," Kent says dryly. But then he looks at Bruce a moment longer and then away, draws in a slow breath and adjusts his glasses. "You were right last time when you said I wasn't from around here. I haven't been living in this city long; I don't know it the way you do—"

"Well, I don't actually live here," Bruce feels compelled to point out.

"—or Gotham," Kent duly amends, "I don't know it or Gotham. But I want to. I want to understand it, I want to—whatever it is that's left when you knock a building down, the thing that makes people stay and put it back up; I want to understand that. If Gotham were razed level, Mr. Wayne, would you go? Would you shrug and jet off to—"

"No," Bruce says, immediate, helpless against the profound bone-deep certainty of the answer.

And Kent looks at him so strangely then, so wistfully. "I didn't think you would," he says softly. "After what you said about it last time, about it mattering—I didn't think you would. And I want to feel like that, Mr. Wayne. I want to—I want to be a part of that."

"Well," Bruce says lightly, and looks away. "That's a much better answer than anything you're going to get out of me, Mr. Kent. Maybe you should be interviewing yourself."

Exactly the kind of glib crap that Clark should be expecting from Wayne, at this point; but instead it feels like a failure, like a misstep Clark should apologize for. He was—they were talking for real for a second there, just two people in a room reaching out for each other. And then it slipped away somehow, Clark loosened his grip and lost hold of it, and now Wayne's smiling at him and doesn't mean it and Clark doesn't know why.

Maybe he can get it back if he just—

"It means something to you, too, Mr. Wayne," he presses. "I know it does. I've been talking to Miss Lao about more than just coffee, you know. You weren't kidding about how close you were to that building when it came down."

Wayne doesn't falter: he leans back a little, shifts the easy line of his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug, and says, "There were plenty of people on that street, Mr. Kent—"

"But you were going toward that office, Mr. Wayne," Clark says.

It's true; he's checked. Just the facts, because he still doesn't want to find himself down the rabbithole of cataloguing Bruce Wayne's wildly variable standing in public opinion. But that was enough. Wayne had been in Gotham on the morning of Black Zero—safe. But he hadn't stayed there. Plenty of people had seen a Wayne Enterprises helicopter land, and Ginger had been able to point Clark to more than one employee downstairs who'd been perfectly willing to tell him what they'd seen.

"You went toward it and you stayed. You were helping emergency services, you carried people to safety and then went back to keep looking." Clark glances down at the sound of his pen creaking, watches distantly as his knuckles turn white. "You were—you saved people."

Wayne doesn't say anything for a long moment, and Clark discovers that he can't quite convince himself to look up and find out why. But then Wayne's hand lands on Clark's knee: not a come-on, not a smokescreen. Just—reaching out.

"Some of them," Wayne says quietly.

Clark does look at him then, and his face is—

"You made a difference," Clark insists.

Wayne is silent for a long moment. "Not enough," he says at last, very low.

And then it happens again: he slips away without moving an inch. He meets Clark's eyes and smiles, and the whole sensation of the weight of his hand changes; it feels like it's higher on Clark's leg than it was before, somehow, like Clark's about to have to shove it off.

"But never mind that, Mr. Kent. This feature of yours is supposed to be about the building, not me," and his tone has gone light, a little chiding.

"It's a human interest piece, Mr. Wayne," Clark says softly. "And you're—"

Wayne grins wider and leans in. "Interesting?" he suggests, and then winks.

Which actually was exactly what Clark was going to say. And he'd have said it because it's true: Wayne is interesting. Clark's only met with him twice and that's already obvious. He's clever, he's funny; he's awful but at the same time he's kind, and he pulls off the contradiction of it with a combination of grace and misdirection, so smooth going down that the burn after takes you almost by surprise.

But now Wayne's made that word mean something else Clark hadn't intended. Not that it isn't still—he certainly is—

But if Clark says yes now, then that's all it will mean, and that isn't right.

Clark clears his throat and sets his hand over Wayne's on his knee—and carefully lifts it off, ignoring how cold his leg feels when it's gone. "Mr. Wayne, you're my interview subject—it would be inappropriate to—"

"That's not a no," Wayne says, undeterred, still grinning. He hasn't tried to pull his hand free from Clark's.

(about aliens—about Superman—)

Clark looks away and clears his throat again. "I—don't think I'm your type, Mr. Wayne."

It doesn't seem like a good idea to push, after that. Clark tries to keep them on track and get his questions answered, and Wayne tries to push them off track and make Clark blush. Which is frustrating, but not—Clark can't really claim to mind. Wayne refusing to take anything seriously makes for a pretty good floor show, and with everything else that's going on, it's not a bad way to spend a few hours. Clark can shake Wayne's hand at the end and smile, and not regret the lost time.

He gets back to the Planet office in the midafternoon, which leaves him enough time to do some more followup; four families have already agreed to talk to him. Perry wants the first section of the feature to drop the same day as the official groundbreaking for the new Wayne building, and that isn't for a couple of weeks. All in all, Clark's made a pretty good start—and Wayne wasn't wrong: if he wanted to, he could probably string background information about Wayne Enterprises and what he got from Cyndia Syl into a reasonably solid introductory piece. It's just—

It just doesn't feel like enough.

And then, finally, the office starts to empty for the evening, and that means a completely different folder can come out.

What Clark's managed to pull together about the Gotham Batman would make Perry laugh and then yell at him, if he tried to present it as the basis for any kind of actual exposé. It's all—crime statistics and police reports, coincidences of timing; eyewitness accounts from people who were drunk or high or both, who were screaming about it until they were sedated by a medical professional, who've since gone to Arkham or Stryker's and mostly aren't up for parole.

But Lois hadn't exaggerated: it is persistent. The mentions go back years, and the similarities at the heart of the most coherent reports are hard to dismiss. Hard for Clark to dismiss, anyway, because he saw it too, the figure in the dark—he heard that voice, I want you to remember.

And it's probably good that he's sitting in the office by himself these days because he's doing Bat research, instead of because he's thinking of—because he—

I want you to remember, Clark thinks again, and laughs a little even though it's not really funny. If only the Bat had known who was listening to him; if only he'd known he didn't need to say it.

And maybe that's the one thing that's missing from the folder: Clark's own eyewitness account. He's got an opportunity the Gotham PD never had with any of the other incidents. He knows exactly where it happened and when, and who was there. And he's got supersenses. He still doesn't know exactly who it was who'd been branded, or what the guy had been doing in that warehouse; but maybe he can make the time to go back and find out. As Clark Kent, even—Lois hadn't been wrong about that either, Superman does have a way of drawing attention. Maybe this weekend, when there's nowhere else Clark Kent needs to be.

He's sitting there thinking about it, staring down at a years-old aggressively noncommittal quote from one Lieutenant Gordon, and that's when the phone rings.

For a second, Clark feels like he's been caught—like he ought to cover everything up and shove it under the desk before he answers. If this were the noir film it suddenly feels like, a man alone in a badly-lit office with a mystery, he'd pick up that phone and it would be the Bat, with a—a threat, or an ultimatum, or an offer to meet him somewhere dim and rainy—

Clark shakes his head at himself and picks up. "Good evening, Daily Planet, this is Clark Kent—can I help you?"

"Oh, thank goodness," Mom says sternly. "Clark, honey, your phone is dead, and you really need to empty your voicemail."

Clark winces and gropes for his pocket. "I'm sorry, Mom, I was telling myself I had to remember to plug it in earlier, but then it slipped my mind." He'd meant to do it when he got back from Wayne's office, but he'd been—

Well, he'd been thinking of Wayne, actually. He'd been trying to picture it: one of those crackling beams from the ship slicing through the air, that thrumming pulsing sound in the background, and Wayne on the ground. Nothing like where Clark had been, half a mile up grappling with Zod; on the ground, on the street, in one of his perfect suits, looking up at the financial tower and realizing what was about to happen.

(Had it been easier, for him—being human, being small, knowing there was nothing he could do about it? Instead of thinking that if he'd only been faster, stronger, if he'd only done better—

Except he had been thinking that. Some of them. Not enough. It had been written all over his face.

So maybe it's never just been Clark after all.)

"Tell me you've at least been remembering to eat," Mom is saying.

"Oh, come on, Mom, how could I forget?" Clark says. "I'm still working my way through all the leftovers." Mom's had him back for dinner not once but twice, and made him take stacks of tupperware with him when he left both times.

Mom hums, grudgingly accepting. "I don't mean to nag you," she allows. "I just—I just want to be sure you're all right. That piece you're working on, it's going okay?"

Which is a fair question, considering she's found Clark in the office at this hour. "Yeah, yeah, it's going fine. I'm—I have this other thing I'm working on too, that's all."

And of course she's going to ask what, and then Clark's going to have to explain. But Mom's been there for everything, for all of it; Clark's not going to start lying to her about Superman stuff now.

"Oh?" Mom says. "What's that?"

Clark grins down at his desk and shakes his head, and then explains.

It takes a while to get through it all—the incident at the warehouse, and the high points of Clark's research so far, the smoke-elusive trail the Bat has left behind him. The contradiction of it, the terrible soft menace in that voice—

"—and the guy seemed convinced that the Bat was going to kill him," Clark explains, "except—"

"Except what, honey?" Mom says.

Clark presses the phone a little closer, and stares down at the file, at everything he's collected. "Except I don't think he ever has," he admits. "Killed anyone, I mean. Everybody I can find who's ever claimed to have seen him seems terrified of him, but he's—he's never killed anybody, as far as I can tell. Not once."

Mom is silent for a long beat. "But you have," she says at last, very gently.

Clark presses a hand to his eyes and swallows, and can't figure out what to say.

"Clark, honey, I don't mean to—" and then Mom cuts herself off; she moves the phone away from her mouth, an absent, unthinking lifetime's habit, because of course Clark can still hear it anyway when she mutters, "Oh, damn it all, Martha, you're only going to make this worse if you don't figure out what the hell to say before you open your mouth."

Clark leans over to rest his forehead on the edge of his desk, and even though his eyes are stinging, he can't help laughing into the heel of his hand.

"Mom—"

"No, no," Mom says, the handset apparently back in place, "please, I just want to say—I know it looks bad. What you saw at that warehouse, that's not the kind of thing anybody ought to be doing, and you don't need me to tell you that. And it's good that you want to find out what was really going on—I think you should.

"But I also think you need to know that it doesn't say anything about you. This—Batman fellow, if he's done every bad thing you can think of short of killing somebody—you're not down there next to him just for what you did, Clark."

"I know that, Mom—"

"I'm not sure you do, honey," Mom says firmly. "And if he hasn't, if it's been a lot of scared people saying cruel things without thinking—or if it was that, and it's gotten hard for him, it's started feeling easier to just be what people are already saying he is—" She stops again, sighs through her nose, and Clark hears the faint whisper of her hair moving; she's shaking her head. "If you find him and you want to talk to him about it, that's fine. You understand what that's like, and so does he; and it's good for people not to be alone.

"But this isn't like lifting a car off somebody, honey. If you can't help him, it doesn't mean you didn't try hard enough, and it doesn't mean he didn't need it. It doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying. And it doesn't mean nobody can help you."

Clark squeezes his eyes shut. "Yeah," he says, half into his palm, and the word scrapes out of his throat so harsh he's almost surprised he doesn't taste blood. "Yeah, Mom, I'll—I'll remember that. I promise."

Mom makes a soft hurt noise and says, "Oh, Clark, sweetheart—"

And then Clark jerks upright so fast he might have used the speed a little, and locks eyes with the woman who's just knocked on the frame of the office door.

"Sorry, Mom," Clark says slowly, "I think I'm going to have to call you back."

He didn't hear any footsteps—but then he'd been listening pretty hard to Mom's end of the phone line, so maybe he'd just missed them. She's smiling at him disarmingly, but something in the way she's standing, the confident angle of her shoulders, says she isn't lost.

"I'm so sorry to interrupt," she says, once Clark's finished up his goodbyes and set the phone down. "You are Clark Kent, aren't you?"

Clark blinks. Maybe he really is in that noir film—if she asks for a light and then for his help, he's going to feel underdressed. He should at least find himself a fedora.

"Yes, that's me. Is there something I can do for you?" Belatedly, it occurs to him that this time it makes sense to close his little Batfile; he does it and stands, trying not to draw any particular attention to it, and then holds out a hand.

The woman crosses the office and takes it, still smiling. "I've come a very long way to find you, Mr. Kent," she says, and then pulls.

It's so sudden, so unexpected, that Clark doesn't even have a chance to suppress the reflex to pull back—and for an instant, feeling himself really yank, he thinks he's blown it: he's about to throw this lady through the Planet's office window—and he can catch her before she hits the ground, but that won't do her very much good if she's already got a shattered pane of glass in her face—

But she doesn't move. Nothing happens. They stand there on opposite sides of Clark's desk, braced in the weirdest slow-motion arm-wrestling match ever; and then the woman eases up and Clark carefully matches it, and nobody gets thrown anywhere.

Which is, Clark thinks distantly, impossible.

She isn't Faora—he would have recognized Faora. A very long way; that could be code for "from space", and there are no more Kryptonians, but there's also no reason to think Kryptonians are the only species out there who might be able to—

"And I should apologize again," she says, "for not introducing myself right away. I am Diana Prince, and I want to know about Black Zero."

And it's stupid, she obviously knows who—what—he is, but Clark doesn't know what else to try. "And what makes you think that I—"

She doesn't look upset with him for trying to cover. "There's no need for that, Mr. Kent," she says gently. "I know."

She still hasn't let go of Clark's hand.

"You don't have anything to fear," she adds, in the same tone. "It wasn't easy to be sure, and I had—advantages, as you see."

Clark swallows. "Look, you—you've got all the footage everybody else has, all the coverage. What do you need me for?"

"I just want to know what happened," Prince says, "and why. Where the ships came from, and the shaking of the earth. Whether it will happen again—"

"It won't," Clark says, looking away. It can't, after all—not like that. There are no more Kryptonians, except him. Whatever Diana Prince is, it's not that; and the way she talks about it, the shaking of the earth—she's not some other kind of alien either, Clark would guess.

Prince is quiet for a long moment, and then shifts her grip: from Clark's hand up his wrist, a careful clasp of the forearm.

(It's a little like Mom's lemonade: she knows she can't hurt him. And she probably has to be careful with other people, just like he does; but she's choosing to be careful with him.)

"My sisters will be relieved to hear that," she says, and when Clark meets her eyes, startled, he knows it wasn't a mistake. She let that slip on purpose, to give him something—she wants him to feel like he can trust her, in some small way.

And she showed him her strength, too. She could have found some other way to test him, but she'd picked one that told him almost as much about her—that she's superpowered somehow, at least. That whoever she is, wherever she's from, she's a little bit like him.

But he opens his mouth, and can't make any of it come out. Not anything—not a single piece of that entire awful day, not the parts she wants to hear; not even the parts she doesn't—

(—the strange cold way he'd felt himself holding his face, and Lois falling, not being sure he'd be fast enough to catch her before she burned—the house, the truck going into it, that terrible frozen split second where he didn't know whether Mom had been inside, and—

—and a train station; a soft cracking sound, and the feeling of—)

"I can't," Clark hears himself say. "I can't—I can't talk about it right now. I'm sorry, this is a—bad time—"

It sounds just as thin as it is. As if he's so busy, here in this empty office by himself, that he couldn't take half an hour to talk to her about who she is and why she's here, and decide what to say. It isn't even that complicated, really—she must have seen Zod's message about Clark, right? Nobody had actually been able to record it, the way everything had stopped working right before it started. But no one on Earth who owned anything with a screen could have missed it.

Whatever she knows or doesn't know, though, Diana Prince is merciful: she lets him get away with it. "Of course," she says, without even giving him a funny look, and then, gently, "I understand."

She pauses for a moment, and then finally lets go of his arm, to fish something out of a sleek little purse she has tucked against her waist—a card.

"I'll be in touch, if that's all right with you," she says, holding it out. Clark takes it; it has her name printed on one side, and a number, an email, on the other. "If you need me—" She pauses again, and then, with perfect, obvious deliberateness, says, "Your mother is a wise woman."

Which—means she could hear at least part of Mom's half of that conversation. From the wrong side of the door, or maybe even further down the hallway.

Good to know.

"Yes," Clark says, only a little faintly, and Prince smiles and touches the back of his hand one more time before she turns and walks out of the office.

The ship had, as best Bruce can tell, fulfilled not only the letter but the spirit of his request to the best of its ability. In addition to a staggering amount of information about Kryptonian biology, geology, and ecology—most of which is fully translated, if sometimes clumsily—and all sensor logs from all three ships with even a half-second's footage of Superman, there is in fact a full rundown of the ship's systems and their functions and capabilities.

It isn't perfect. A little garbled, some strings of Kryptonian characters left intact—as with some of the sections on Kryptonian mining practices and equipment, Bruce suspects that portions of it delve too deeply into technical areas where the ship has no equivalent English vocabulary. Or, of course, where there is no equivalent English vocabulary, for all Bruce knows.

But he has enough to make a reasonably solid assessment. The damage to the ship adds a variable where Bruce would rather there weren't one; but if there is a section that's intact enough to be sealed, it does indeed appear as though Bruce would be able to flood that section with Kryptonian atmosphere. Judging by the logs, the effect won't last forever—Superman might have collapsed, but he'd also gotten back up again after, and hadn't seemed much the worse for wear. And maybe the adaptation process permanently changed the structure of his lungs; but maybe it was temporary, his body jury-rigging itself until he could get off Zod's ship. Bruce can't be certain—but it's the best chance at an ace in the hole that he's turned up so far.

And that best chance stands to improve further still if he can run some tests. Perhaps the ship could even tell him one way or another whether it will work, what it will do. He should phrase his questions as abstractly as possible if he does ask, in case it has some kind of hard-wired attachment to Superman—in case knowing what he intended to do would lead it to choose not to answer—

"Sir."

Bruce, a step away from leaping off a roof, immediately redirects as much of his weight as possible into a crouch, and comes to a stop with the toe of one boot just scraping over the edge. Alfred hadn't been in the Cave when he'd left, and Bruce had—decided not to bother him. This had never been intended to be a true patrol session, just a trip back to the ship, and Bruce had already set things up to allow his five-second window through the research installation's security to be activated by voice command. Troubling Alfred—hadn't been necessary.

But Bruce had turned the comms on anyway.

Unthinking habit, that was all.

"Sir, I believe you may be laboring under a misapprehension—"

"Is this necessary?" Bruce says.

But Alfred has his location; Alfred must be able to see perfectly well that Bruce is stationary and not currently engaged in combat. Which means he's about to say—

"Yes, sir, it is." Alfred's tone is mild, in that way he seems to have mastered that makes it utterly impossible to contradict whatever he's just said.

"Fine," Bruce allows.

"Your forbearance is appreciated," Alfred murmurs, bone-dry.

They are silent together for a moment.

And then Alfred says, clear and careful, "Even when I am angry with you—and please do not mistake me, sir, I am exceedingly angry with you—you do not ever act alone. In this, as in all things. You are not ever alone."

Which is ludicrous, Bruce thinks distantly. For all intents and purposes, it's an obvious falsehood—it isn't as though Alfred is out here crouching on this roof. And it certainly isn't as though Alfred had been holding the brand.

But it's a pleasant enough sentiment. And it's—kind of Alfred, to say it.

"And, more to the point," Alfred adds, much more briskly, "you are certainly not ever to go patrolling alone, which is something I had foolishly assumed could go unsaid."

Bruce huffs. "I'm perfectly fine."

"Yes," Alfred says, "but I must take this opportunity to note that you have in the past proven unable to keep yourself that way. Let us save that argument for another time, however, and remain for the moment 'in the now': that troublesome berth at the docks?"

"Yes?"

"Activity is registering yet again. Someone has set off your monitors, sir."

Bruce considers. The Batwing's not far behind him; he'd only just crossed the bay heading for the ship. Not so very far out of his way—and he's been on alert to an even greater degree than before, but there hasn't been a single sign of Superman tonight.

"Well, in that case," Bruce murmurs, and whirls around.

Whatever readings Alfred is getting, they appear to have understated the matter. When Bruce directs the Batwing lower over the docks and swings out, ready to drop from there to a nearby rooftop, he can already hear shouting. There's a particular tone that tends to enter people's voices when a gun is around, when it's out in the open with someone's finger on the trigger—and if Bruce had to guess, there are several guns being quite prominently waved around in that warehouse.

Bruce gauges the remaining distance and performs a slow four-count before he drops; he lands with a roll to minimize the sound of impact, even though it loses him a few seconds. The guns might be out, but there's a whole different tone people get when someone's been shot, and no one in there has been shot yet. Bruce can afford a little caution.

It's the work of thirty-six seconds to climb around and down to a suitable vantage point. Bruce settles into position and focuses, and then can't restrain the barest intake of breath. He knows one of those voices.

He knows one of those voices, because it belongs to Clark Kent.

Bruce immediately discards a half-dozen partially-formed tactical approaches and just moves in closer instead, with the help of an eave and a well-placed drainpipe. What the hell is Kent doing here? He hasn't mentioned any investigative projects to Bruce, or even to Ginger where Bruce can hear them—not that there's any reason he'd talk about something like that with Bruce Wayne, but he's seemed so focused on his reconstruction feature—

"—and you just keep your hands where we can see them, you understand?"

"I understand," Kent agrees, sounding incomprehensibly comfortable.

Bruce swings down and across, toward a window—the one Superman broke the other night. He's had plenty of strategic reasons to be glad this warehouse has windows, but he's particularly grateful for it now.

This one has been boarded up, but imperfectly. Bruce digs his fingers in at the edge of the sill until he's sure he can maintain his position with only one hand, and then reaches out with the other to ease a cracked chunk of plywood out of his way.

Three of the men who are pointing guns at Kent are familiar to Bruce from the files he's put together while in pursuit of this ring of Thrill dealers—one isn't, but the cowl is recording, and one wink, another, will capture stills at an even higher resolution. (For the video, compromises had to be made; Bruce had opted for increased battery life over quality.) And Kent—

Kent is standing there facing them, not quite smiling but with a blandly pleasant, attentive expression that's nearly as incongruous. He is at least holding his hands up like a good hostage, but there's an air of—of forbearance to it, mild indulgence, as though he's doing it because he was asked and wants to be polite. He looks exactly like what he is, Bruce thinks in a brief fierce swell of irritation: a naive busybody who doesn't know when to quit.

Which is precisely why the last thing the Batman should do is charge in there and save him. Kent came back to Bruce's office nine days in a row over nothing but a human interest puff piece. If he finds out the Gotham Bat is real, Bruce is never going to get rid of him.

But—

But there are already too many people Bruce hasn't saved—couldn't save. Kent isn't one of them. This is a situation Bruce can do something about.

And he will.

Kent is the priority, not capture or interrogation; this particular time, it doesn't matter if the bad guys get away.

Bruce will catch up with them sooner or later.

Alfred has been experimenting with a combination smoke bomb/aerosolized tranquilizer—at the moment, it doesn't last long enough to be much use except under limited circ*mstances. But if he times it just right, it'll do.

He crashes through the plywood two seconds after the first curl of smoke rises; the gunmen startle halfway through the act of toppling. One gun goes off and Bruce doesn't hear a ricochet, but Kent still has a heartbeat when Bruce wraps an arm around his torso. If the bullet did hit him, even somewhere important, there's probably time to deliver him to a hospital. Bruce is thinking this and considering routes, shifting his grip in an effort to better distribute Kent's weight even as momentum propels him and Kent behind a stack of crates, because he won't get far otherwise—and that's when Kent makes a startled noise, belated, and clutches at him.

Maybe the tranquilizer is a little less effective than Alfred had realized; or maybe Kent was standing further away from the source than Bruce thought.

"Don't panic," Bruce growls, because sometimes it works.

Kent makes a soft gasping sound—was that a laugh? Maybe he did get a partial dose.

But the salient results are these: he doesn't scream, he doesn't thrash. He lets Bruce yank him back further into the dark and then shoot up a magnetic grapple at the metal warehouse roof; Bruce tightens his arm around Kent and then activates the line, and they zip upward at a partial angle and then swing back toward the window. Bruce makes sure he's the one who hits what remains of the plywood, and—as physics decrees—their combined mass at that speed is more than enough to break it.

Bruce lets the line play out a moment longer before he hits the release and puts them in free fall. They're not all that high anymore, and he keeps a good grip on Kent—who still isn't panicking—and definitely doesn't grunt when Kent lands on him.

"I knew it," is the first thing Kent says, even as he's rolling off Bruce. He ends up on the cape instead, which is fine. If he did get shot, better that he bleed on the cape than leave any substantial traces on the ground. "You—"

He stops, blinking, before Bruce can even interrupt him. But Bruce doesn't miss the opportunity. "Are you hurt?"

"What? No, no, he missed," Kent says quickly, "I'm fine. And you—" He swallows, one of his hands tightening around the edge of the cape. "You saved me. I didn't think you—"

"Well, did your due diligence, at least," Bruce murmurs. "What are you doing in Gotham, Mr. Kent?"

Kent goes still. "How do you know my name?"

"I know a lot of things, Mr. Kent," Bruce says. "You don't work for a Gotham paper. Why were you in that warehouse?"

Kent hesitates, adjusting his glasses—he must have been holding on to them, Bruce can't imagine how they'd have stayed on his face otherwise. And then he narrows his eyes and tilts his chin up and says, "I was looking for you."

Bruce almost snorts. Of course he was. Whoever told Clark New-in-Town Kent about the Gotham Bat, Bruce hopes they learn to regret it. "Bad idea," he says aloud, and then, even though he's already pretty sure it won't work, "You should go back across the bay and forget this ever happened."

It's the right thing for Batman to say, and—and Batman doesn't know Kent from Adam, so he'd try it. Right?

"And if I don't?" Kent says, eyebrow raised.

"You'll wish you had," Bruce tells him. It's not even a threat, he thinks; more of a prediction.

But Kent's unmoved. Kent is—Kent is downright deranged: Kent is out here in the dark at the Gotham docks with Batman crouched over him, and all he's doing is sitting quietly, Bruce's cape still tangled halfway around him, squinting at Batman through those goddamn glasses and biting his cheek.

"They won't stay down long," Bruce says. "We should—"

"You hurt people," Kent blurts.

"Sometimes," Bruce agrees flatly, and he hopes Kent picks up on the underlying suggestion that right now might be one of those times.

If he does, it doesn't show. "You haven't always," Kent says. "It's been—sightings of you go back years. I did my due diligence," he adds, with a self-conscious little quirk of his mouth. "But the branding—"

Bruce goes still. "That's above and beyond due diligence." How could Kent possibly have found out about that?

Kent swallows, but his gaze doesn't waver. "I have my sources. The branding doesn't fit; you've never left evidence before."

"Hardly conclusive," Bruce says evenly.

But Kent brushes this aside without letting it slow him down. "What changed? Why are you—what happened?"

"What a singularly excellent question," Alfred murmurs over the comm, barely more than a whisper.

Kent's stare sharpens, presumably at the lack of response. "You show up when things get out of control," he says slowly, after a moment's silence. "You've got rules for yourself—you've never killed anyone, even though it's obvious you could. Not everybody in your position can say that. But that man you branded, you wanted to hurt him.

"Is it—it must get hard for you, doing what you're doing. There must be things you can't fix; things you try to do something about, but it doesn't work and there's nothing left to do except fail—"

"You don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Kent," Bruce grates out.

"Yes, I do," Kent says, unhesitating; and a look flashes across his face that Bruce has seen there before.

Batman shouldn't have a single clue what the f*ck Kent means by that. But Bruce—

(You were in the city. On the day.

Yes. I was.)

—Bruce is suddenly sure he knows.

Where had Kent been? The Planet offices? Had he even been hired yet? Maybe he'd been walking back from an interview with Perry White, half-sure he'd get the job—or applying for the first time, delivering his portfolio material in person; that's the kind of thing Kent would do. Analog.

What had he been doing, when the ship settled over the city? Had he seen it coming—or not known until the first rumbling thrum of sound, until he'd felt the first blow, heard the first scream? Had he felt in his gut how bad it would get, and started running right away? Or had he looked up and been awed, until the first sizzling blast of energy sent a thousand panes of skyscraper glass raining down on his head?

And who was it he'd been standing next to? Who was it he thought he should have saved? What had it taken to make tracking down the Gotham Bat seem like the right way to understand it?

"I don't have what you're looking for," Bruce says, and it's for the best that the modulator's there to stop it from coming out too gentle.

"But you know what I'm talking about," Kent insists, pleading and a little hoarse. "You know what it's like to run out of options, to—to be angry and afraid, to not know what else to do except the worst thing you can think of. But it doesn't have to stay like that. It won't always be like that—"

Bruce doesn't flinch. Kent's statements have no relevance to him. Superman is a potential threat; developing countermeasures is the only responsible course of action, and Bruce does not shirk his responsibilities.

But there's something about Kent that's hard to turn away from.

"Mr. Kent," he says carefully, and touches Kent's shoulder. "I don't have what you're looking for. No one does."

Kent stares at him helplessly for a moment, and then all at once relaxes under Bruce's hand, shoulders dropping. Giving up—or maybe just letting go. "Yeah," he says softly, "I guess not," and then he clears his throat and fiddles with those awful glasses again. "You—is the saving people new, too? Because if it isn't, I have to tell you, that's not making it into the paper anywhere near as often as the—"

"They don't see me do it," Bruce interrupts, a little more wryly than he means to. "You weren't supposed to see it either."

Kent blinks, and then seems to catch on. "Oh, the gas. Yeah, I guess I was out of range." He shrugs, brief and stiff, and then clears his throat. "Just your luck, saving a reporter."

"Yes," Bruce says, and then offers Kent a hand. "A reporter who won't stay saved for long if he doesn't get out of here before the men who were in range wake up."

"Right," Kent says, "good point," and he clasps Bruce's glove without hesitation and eases himself to his feet.

The Gotham Bat is more of a mother hen than Clark had expected.

Clark promises he's okay to get himself back to Metropolis, but Batman doesn't disappear the way Clark thought he would. He does melt back into the shadows, so quick it would probably unsettle a human; but it turns out to be so he can climb up the next building over and then follow Clark almost the whole two miles to the Metro-Narrows Bridge.

It's kind of nice of him. Especially after Clark called him a sad*st and then asked him to explain what was wrong with him. That couldn't exactly have put him in a charitable mood.

But for a creepy shadow in the dark, he'd been—he'd been almost kind. And Clark hadn't actually been in any danger in that warehouse, but of course Batman hadn't known it. He'd thought Clark was just a person in trouble, and he'd helped.

By trying to gas Clark unconscious, granted.

But he—he wasn't just going around hurting people because he could. Before the guys with guns had interrupted, Clark had gotten a chance to look around a little bit. Closely enough to tell there was something in the air that shouldn't have been there; drugs, he'd been thinking, and then—well, guys with guns. People with legal business at the docks didn't carry around small arms like that, Clark was pretty sure.

He can't make the leap to saying the man who'd been branded had deserved it. But if that guy hadn't deserved it, he also hadn't been some innocent bystander, somebody Batman had just decided to torture on a whim.

So maybe Batman isn't all that far gone—or at least not so far he can't come back.

Clark sighs and steps out onto the bridge, and once Batman's breathing, his heart, have faded into the distance, it's safe for the smashed bullet to come out of Clark's pocket.

The guy in the warehouse hadn't missed. Clark stares down at the uneven disc of metal, and then flips it off his thumb like a coin and catches it in his opposite hand.

A human might have been dead, just like that. Killing people is so—so easy.

But even Batman's never done it; Batman, who's struggling with something that's put burning people on the table when it hadn't been there before. And Clark—

Clark has.

He closes his eyes and wraps his hand around the bullet, and wonders what Batman would have to say about that.

There's not too much traffic along the Metro-Narrows at this hour—not a lot of people want to be in Gotham at night, and the ones who do have other ways of getting there. But Clark doesn't take off. He walks.

He walks the whole way back, across the cool breezy dimness of the bay and down the bright nighttime streets of Metropolis, with the bullet warm and smooth in his hand. When he gets to his own building at last, he doesn't even pause at his own door—he just goes on up the stairs, all the way to the good old roof.

He stands there in the dark for a while, listening; just normal listening, like anybody might, instead of the way Superman would. Listening and looking out at the city. Like anybody might.

The deepest part of night starts to give way, in a dim slow fade; and Clark stays where he is and watches it go.

The sky's gone pale at the horizon by the time he decides to say, "Diana."

He feels a little silly for it a moment later—that wasn't much louder than conversational volume, and he doesn't actually know how good her hearing is, aside from "better than human-normal". But if she didn't hear him, she just won't come; and if she did hear him, then he must have said it loud enough.

He doesn't have to wait very long to find out: it's only about fifteen minutes before the door to the roof opens.

"Mr. Kent," she says.

"Clark," Clark corrects, and then winces a little. "I mean, as long as Diana's all right—"

"Clark," Diana agrees, face perfect and sober; and then she lets her expression crack apart into a smile, and it's impossible not to smile back.

"Diana," Clark repeats, just to be sure, and she doesn't take it back—she crosses the roof and stops just close enough to reach out and touch his elbow.

"You wanted to talk to me about something?" she prompts gently.

"You want to know about Black Zero Day," Clark says, looking down.

"Yes," Diana says, but it's not expectant; just a statement of fact.

And oh, Clark wants to say it, wants to tell somebody. Lois was right there next to him, she knows it all already, and Clark hasn't been able to work out where to start with Mom; somehow it feels like it would be easier with Diana, who seems to know at least half of Clark's secrets but is still a stranger—who will probably go back to wherever she came from, to her sisters, and then Clark will never have to look her in the eye again.

He wants to say it; but he opens his mouth and then stops. He thinks of the World Engine, over the ocean, the way the smooth gleaming shell had split and all those tentacles had burst free of it, sharp-edged and strangling—the way the ground had changed in that dream Zod had built in his head, grass giving way to an endless field of skulls, picked clean. It feels like that, he thinks. Like something huge and ugly hidden just under the surface of him, something he can't let out.

"You and—and your sisters," he manages instead. "Nobody knows about you."

"A few people," Diana corrects. "Not many. My home is a secret place, safe."

"But it wasn't always," Clark guesses. "It couldn't always have been like that. You must have had to make it that way."

"Yes," Diana says.

"Did you have to kill anyone to do it?"

"Yes."

It's unhesitating and unapologetic. Clark looks at her, thrown, and in the dim gray-gold light she's almost inhuman: her face sober and still and utterly flawless, like something carved or cast, unliving.

Sort of how he makes Superman's face look, sometimes.

"I make decisions," Diana says. "In the moment that it must be done, knowing what I know, valuing what I value, I make each one as well and as mercifully as I can. I do not want to kill, and I do not like to. But when it seems to me that I must, when I see no better choice, neither can I falter." She pauses. "I often—sorrow for it, afterward. But I do not regret it."

And looking at her right then, it's easy to believe it—that she trusts herself, and understands herself, and doesn't make decisions she wishes she hadn't.

Clark lets out a long slow breath, and shakes his head. "I don't think it's ever going to be like that for me."

"Perhaps not," Diana agrees.

But she doesn't seem to think less of him for it. She doesn't go, or say anything else, or tell him he ought to be better; she touches his elbow, and stands there with him in the weak pale dawn.

And then, after a few minutes, she says, "Would you like to get breakfast?"

Clark blinks at her.

"Just down the street," she elaborates. "They have very good croissants," and she leans in and adds soberly, "My sisters and I—none of us know how to make croissants. Especially not like these."

Clark laughs without meaning to, startled by it; and feels his face settle into something that's nearly a smile afterward. "Yeah," he says, "that would be great. Thank you."

It's lucky Clark doesn't need much sleep; if he were human, he's pretty sure he'd be in no fit state to do much of anything. But he has breakfast with Diana—the croissants are really good—and then he goes back to his apartment, belatedly changes his clothes, and all told, isn't that much worse off than usual when he gets to Bruce Wayne's office.

Ginger grins and says, "Congratulations, Mr. Kent, he's in today," and opens the door for him.

Clark's smiling over his shoulder at her for a second before he goes through, and so it takes a moment for him to actually look at Wayne—to look and see, and realize that something's off.

"Mr. Wayne—good to see you again," Clark says slowly, trying to figure out exactly what it is that's caught his attention.

Wayne's sitting the same way as always, slouched sideways; he actually does have his feet up this time, heels propped carelessly against clean glass in a way that makes Clark want to scold him and wipe the whole desk down before a janitor sees him. There's something particularly louche about the way he's leaning back in his chair, the lines of his arms as he links his hands behind his head, the angle of his mouth.

Not that Clark's made a habit of looking at his mouth.

Anyway, it's not any of that, not really. Clark watches him a moment longer and thinks—maybe the eyes? Maybe the focus in them, maybe the steadiness of the stare; maybe that's it. Wayne usually flickers like a bad string of Christmas lights, every ounce of him fixed on Clark for the ten seconds it takes to make Clark as uncomfortable as possible, and then he's gone just as fast, throwing his stupid stapler around and sighing at the ceiling like Clark's the one being difficult.

But right now, despite the casual nonchalance writ large over every other part of him, Wayne is watching Clark right back. Not fiddling with his phone, not scribbling idly on paperwork somebody else is going to have to print all over again, not wheeling around in that ridiculous chair like a kid. Just looking, with careful unwavering attention.

"A pleasure, Mr. Kent," Wayne agrees with a smile. "Back for more, then?"

He sounds normal enough—then, and when he smugly turns Clark's first question into innuendo, and when he answers the second with vague bland truisms. (Clark doesn't even write them down; if he did and then tried to use them, Lois would only edit them out. And make faces at him while she did it.)

There's nothing else strange about him at all. But he doesn't take his eyes off Clark.

And then, after maybe forty-five minutes, just when Clark's starting to relax into the rhythm of being alternately hot in the face and straight-up frustrated, Wayne tilts a little further backward in his chair and says, "Now I think I get to ask one, Mr. Kent."

Clark bites his cheek. On the one hand, he can only imagine the sort of thing Wayne might take the opportunity to ask; on the other hand, Wayne has been reasonably cooperative today. For him.

Besides, Clark can always reply with an answer just as useless as some of the ones Wayne's given him.

"I'll allow it," he says aloud. "This once."

Wayne grins at him; and then the grin eases down into a studied look of concentration—an impression of Clark's own face, Clark realizes, as Wayne picks up a stray sheet of paperwork and props it up across his forearm the same way Clark's holding his notepad. "Mr. Kent, I believe the fine people of Metropolis deserve to know the truth: what are you still doing here?"

Clark blinks. "What?"

"Simple enough question," Wayne says airily, setting the paper down again—but his eyes are still, still, trained close on Clark's face. "Not that I don't enjoy these little sessions of ours; if nothing else, the view is certainly better than it ever is at board meetings," and the wink he gives Clark makes it clear what he means by that. "But surely you have enough from me. No one's going to be reading this feature of yours looking for the latest on Bruce Wayne. They have the gossip rags for that."

"I don't intend for the feature to focus on you in particular," Clark agrees, though for a moment he almost wants to claim otherwise—almost wants to make a point of insisting that it isn't only gossip magazines that care about what Bruce Wayne gets up to, or at least that it doesn't have to be. "I actually have time set aside this afternoon to sit down with Mrs. O'Dwyer, and the Estevez and Liebman families have both agreed to speak to me later this week—"

He trails off: Wayne's eyebrows have gone up, so quickly Clark thinks he might actually be surprised instead of just putting on a show of looking like he is. "Jemima gave you all of our employee bios, didn't she?"

"Yes, of course," Clark says, because she did, and the last thing he wants is to get Ginger in some kind of trouble. "Yes, I just—I want to get this right. As you've said yourself, this is a human interest piece, Mr. Wayne; the official employee bios are very—uh—"

"Boring."

"Focused on one particular type of personal achievement," Clark suggests.

"Boring," Wayne says again. "So what? They've got the milestones, and I doubt you'd have any trouble filling in the rest yourself, if you wanted to."

"But I don't want to," Clark says, a little more sharply than he means to. It's just—Wayne isn't actually stupid, Clark is pretty sure; it's like he's willfully misunderstanding this, for some reason. "I don't want something anybody could say, some sort of bland—'She was great, really sweet, everybody loved her; he was such a smart guy, he did good work'." Clark shakes his head. "I want to say something real about these people, Mr. Wayne. About who they were—if they were frustrating, or had bad tempers, if they were stubborn; if she had a sweet tooth or loved it when it rained, if he was a skinflint or always wore the same tie because his daughter got it for him for Father's Day.

"The space they left is already real for everybody who knew them. But I want to make it real for everybody else—or, well, everybody else who reads this piece, anyway. I want to make everybody look at it and see it, really feel it. Even if it's only for a couple minutes.

"And," Clark finds himself adding, "that's why I keep coming back. That's what I want from you, Mr. Wayne. Something real."

He falls silent a little awkwardly, and Wayne just sits there looking at him for a long moment, face unreadable. "Well—in that case, Mr. Kent, you'll be coming back here for a very long time."

A joke: he says it like a joke, his tone, the sudden smile he's cracked. But there's no amusem*nt in his eyes, and Clark looks into them and can't laugh.

"As long as it takes," Clark says softly, because he means it—because it matters to him, maybe a little more than it should; and because the man he met that very first time, who tracked him down in the bathroom just to tell him he'd be all right, deserves to hear it.

And then he realizes how weird it sounds and jerks his gaze away from Wayne's, clearing his throat.

"And I realize this may feel like quite a lot of time out of your busy schedule, Mr. Wayne," he adds, "but this is hardly the only assignment on my plate."

There. That sounds—normal, right? Like something reporters with more than about six weeks of experience might say? This is hardly the sort of laser-focused months-long investigative work Lois does; human interest pieces, city politics, sports, all sorts of things get done a few at a time.

"Oh?" Wayne says, with an exaggerated look of concern. "I'm hurt, Mr. Kent—I thought what we had was special."

"Yes, well—"

"And what is it exactly that I'm competing against in the cage match for your attention?"

"It's not a—there's no cage match, Mr. Wayne, I—"

"Care equally about every assignment you undertake," Wayne says for Clark, waving dismissively, "yes, yes, of course, I would never dare think otherwise." He raises his eyebrows, leaning forward across his desk, allowing the silence to repeat the question for him.

And Clark, mind blank, finds himself saying, "Well, lately most of my research time has been devoted to investigating the Gotham Bat."

It isn't even a lie. He has been researching the Batman in his spare time. It's just making it sound like an actual assignment, like Clark's planning to generate something publishable from it, that's—deceptive.

And he hasn't even decided how he feels about it. Wanting to understand the Bat, what he does and how he goes about it, does mean something to Clark, but it's—he's trying to remember what Mom said. Batman isn't some kind of glimpse into Superman's future, the inevitable end of a path Clark has already set his feet on. He might turn out to be enlightening, illustrative of mistakes Clark shouldn't make; he might turn out to be someone Superman needs to keep an eye on; or—

(It's possible, isn't it? However differently they've handled themselves so far, they're—they're the same, a little bit. Trying to do what needs doing, because they might be the only ones who can. Yeah, Clark needs to remember that Superman doesn't have to end up a monster alone in the dark, but the flip side of that is: Batman doesn't have to stay that way. He saved Clark even though he didn't have to, even though the gas didn't work—he could have dumped Clark on the floor the moment he'd realized it and zipped on out of there, but he hadn't. He'd gotten Clark out safely.

They're the same, a little bit. They could get to know each other, they could help each other. They could be—)

—or maybe it'll turn out another way entirely. Clark doesn't know what to hope for, and he hasn't figured out what to think.

But Wayne doesn't seem to be suffering any indecision.

For a split second, he just looks incredulous; and then he tilts his head and laughs outright. "The Bat? I didn't realize the Planet had a fiction section. What in the world made your editor saddle you with that?"

Clark can't help frowning. He shouldn't say anything that isn't already in public circulation—Batman wouldn't thank him for it. And no, seriously, he's real, I sat on him isn't going to sound right. Especially not if he says it to Bruce Wayne.

But—well. There is one reasonable rationale, after all.

"My editor wants to stay on top of whatever's on the public's mind, Mr. Wayne," Clark says, looking down at his notes like it's no skin off his nose. "What with Superman and all—interest in mysterious caped figures taking matters into their own hands is on the rise."

He looks up, once he's pretty sure he's got his expression in the realm of "matter-of-fact"; he's quick enough to see Wayne's mouth twist, a strange sharp angle to it, before Wayne holds up his hands and says, "Well, far be it from me to criticize anything that might make the Planet a little extra money. May your rumor-chasing sell many additional issues, Mr. Kent."

"Thanks," Clark says mildly, and then he clears his throat, adjusts his glasses, and flips to a fresh sheet in his notepad. "Now, I think you mentioned the actual construction is starting before the groundbreaking ceremony?"

What a fine mess this is.

Bruce stares grimly at the bank of monitors without actually looking at any of them. He's got work to do—there are still plenty of files from the ship to go through, after all. He'd assigned them priority grades, and he hasn't even touched C or lower.

But somehow that doesn't seem like much of a problem compared to the snarl he's in courtesy of Clark f*cking Kent.

Bruce Wayne can start dodging Kent again, of course. Though at the very least he's going to have to show up for the groundbreaking, and Kent's going to be there for sure. But is that the best strategy? After all, Bruce Wayne could keep an eye on Kent's progress with his Bat investigation, and maybe even lead him down the garden path—or is that too much? Should Bruce Wayne discuss Batman with Clark Kent as rarely as possible? Or as often? Which is more suspicious?

Bruce grits his teeth. The human mind is so irrational; usually that works in Bruce's favor, but in this case it's only a confounding factor. It would be completely illogical for Kent to draw any sort of line between Bruce Wayne and Batman just because he saw one and then the other vanished from his life—but he might do it anyway. Apophenia at its most frustrating precisely because it wouldn't be apophenia at all, even though by all rights it ought to be.

So perhaps no change to the current routine is the better option after all. Bruce Wayne played hard-to-get with Kent for a while, but he's given it up. Kent was never supposed to see Batman, that had been made perfectly clear; so Kent won't be surprised if another sighting isn't in the cards. And then he'll finish the damn Wayne Enterprises feature, and this will stop being Bruce's problem.

Right.

Bruce sighs and lets his eyes fall shut for just a moment, rubbing one knuckle briefly against his temple. He can't even claim a mistake was made; he can't even tell himself he regrets it.

He couldn't have let Kent die. Even if he'd known the gas wouldn't work, he'd still have done it.

And if Kent were his biggest problem, that would be more than enough. But there's also Superman—who hasn't shown himself again since he stumbled onto Bruce giving Joe Rabbit something to think about, but that doesn't mean he won't catch up to Bruce one of these days. Probably biding his time. Bruce can just imagine the story Kent could make out of it, if he managed to catch Batman and Superman at each other's throats. And with Kent's luck, it's entirely possible.

Bruce settles his hands onto the closest keyboard, and then pauses. He's also started to think he's let Superman overshadow a third problem, just a little bit. And it's Kent, of all people, who's made him think it: You've never killed anyone. Not everybody in your position can say that.

Kent had probably just been thinking—people who had the ability, like Bruce, and the opportunity, like Bruce. But then today, he'd said mysterious caped figures taking matters into their own hands; Superman and Batman, he'd meant, and he'd put them in the same category, and—

Bruce has made Superman the sole focus of his efforts because Superman is the only Kryptonian left. Except that isn't quite true. He's the only living Kryptonian left, at least in this dimension—because he'd killed the other.

And of course it makes sense for Bruce to have prioritized the Kryptonian who was still flying around with lasers shooting out of his eyes; but it suddenly feels like an increasingly egregious oversight that Bruce finds himself with no idea where General Zod's body ended up.

As long as Bruce is already planning to spend the evening with the C-level files—what could it hurt? He won't be running any conflicting searches, won't need the processor power; he can afford to be thorough. He still has the raw results of his social media scrape, and he knows approximately where Superman's altercation with Zod appears to have come to an end. He can run a few analyses, try to track down any records. Zod had probably been taken to one city morgue or another, along with the rest of the casualties—

(crushed bodies, alone in the dark)

—but Bruce has no idea where he might have gone after that.

Perhaps it's time to find out.

Bruce is so deep in the ship's files—he got a little sidetracked by the untranslated portions, and he thinks he's almost worked out a complete inventory of Kryptonian grammatical particles—that he doesn't notice the first few results being returned. When he does, he almost doesn't do anything with them: Deep Dawn Ltd., purchaser of a particular unidentified biological material sample whose weight matches the statistics taken by the city morgue perfectly, is so obviously a shell company that it makes Bruce sigh. Unraveling the multilayered ownership of shells who've founded shells who've bought shells is one of the most tedious activities on earth.

But in its tedium it can be almost relaxing. Not a bad way to get in the mindset for patrol, after spending a few hours test-conjugating.

So in the end he settles in and peels his way through Deep Dawn, and the fifteen camouflaging bonus corporations entangled with it, and their owners and subsidiaries, the bank accounts their filing fees were drawn from, anything that can be traced as a potential connection.

And he should be more surprised than he is, he thinks, when he overturns the final stone and finds the CFO of LexCorp scuttling around underneath it.

He looks thoughtfully at the screen and sits back in his chair, linking his hands behind his head. Luthor. Again. Luthor trying to get access to the ship; Luthor buying Kryptonian corpses. The first made Bruce wary, but the second—he feels the hair at the back of his neck trying to prickle up over the second. Alexander Luthor Jr. and a dead body is already a combination Bruce doesn't particularly want to think about. When that dead body is a Kryptonian's—

Bruce stays as he is for a moment, considering the full array of deeply unpleasant options; and then he lowers his hands back to the keyboard. Whatever else Luthor might be up to, Bruce is starting to think it's important that he know about it.

In the morning, he's still turning over the problem of what, if anything, to do about Bruce Wayne. Avoiding Kent is still a tempting option—but Luthor has generously proven that a lack of attention, of oversight, cannot provide security. If Bruce steers clear of Kent entirely, all that means is that Kent will reappear when he's least expecting it and therefore unprepared for it. And it seems downright wasteful to to spend time and effort independently surveiling Kent when he could just ... keep showing up to Kent's appointments instead.

Besides, that's about as far from Batman as he could hope to get, isn't it? Being in one place, predictably—being talkative and deliberately engaging and well-lit. Drowning Kent in as much of Bruce Wayne as he can stand is bound to push Batman into the periphery, especially if Kent doesn't manage to track Batman down again.

So showing up at the office for Kent is all right. Opening the door for him, smiling at him; coming up with jokes that will make him grimace and delivering them with all the aplomb Bruce Wayne can muster; rounding the desk to sit a little too close to him, just to see whether he'll move or stand his ground.

It's all justifiable.

Getting Kent talking about his visit with Mrs. O'Dwyer, what he's going to write about Jack—whether he's afraid to look Miriam Liebman in the face and ask her about her dead daughter—

Bruce doesn't have much of an excuse for that. But it's all right: Bruce Wayne's already demonstrated concern for that kind of thing in Kent's direction. Kent won't think it's odd. It's difficult; it hurts. Hearing about it, thinking about it, cuts so deep that Bruce finds it's almost hard to breathe. But he can tell that it does the same thing to Kent, the way he lowers his eyes and rubs at his mouth, the catch it puts in his voice. And the few times Kent does meet Bruce's gaze, Bruce thinks Kent can tell, too.

So it's all right. That part's not a mistake. There's no reason to suspect that Bruce's chosen strategy is in danger of failing.

Until, as they're winding down, Kent fiddles with those horrible glasses, clears his throat, and says, "Mr. Wayne—do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?"

Bruce spreads his hand to indicate the room, and, in the abstract, the ninety minutes he's just spent being asked questions by Kent. "That's why we're here, isn't it?"

"No, I mean—not for the feature."

"Oh?" Bruce says, with a truly spectacular leer.

Which either goes unnoticed by Kent, or is roundly ignored. "About the Gotham Bat," Kent clarifies earnestly.

And that's when Bruce discovers he has a problem his chosen strategy isn't equipped to deal with; because not one of the rationales he's been turning over all morning justifies his response.

"Off the clock."

Clark blinks. "What?"

"Off the clock," Wayne repeats, tilting his head, tone low and suddenly warm in a way that makes Clark's shirtcollar feel a little too tight. "These appointments of ours are meant to be about your feature, Mr. Kent. It would be unprofessional on both our parts to deliberately spend that precious time—"

"Going wildly off-topic whenever the urge strikes us?" Clark suggests pointedly.

Wayne smiles winningly. "You said it, not me."

Clark sighs; but he can feel the corner of his mouth trying to slant up without his permission. "Off the clock?" he says, narrowing his eyes at Wayne dubiously.

"Seven," Wayne proposes. "I bet you're in the office that late most days, aren't you, Mr. Kent?"

Clark squirms a little in his chair, helplessly. It's not exactly to do work, but then Wayne's under the impression that his Bat research is work, so he can't quite say no—

"I thought so," Wayne murmurs. "Seven, then. I'll send a car. Oh, and Mr. Kent? Consider changing your tie."

Consider changing your tie. What does that mean? Besides the obvious.

Seven o'clock—dinner, probably. Which is fine. There's nothing weird about getting dinner with somebody you're maybe sort of friends with, who touches you a lot, whose mouth you look at sometimes. It's fine. It's just a dinner. A work dinner, even, or at least it must look that way to Wayne, because he already knows what Clark wants to talk to him about.

No big deal, then.

"You're having dinner with Bruce Wayne?" Lois hisses. "Why? Did he offer you some kind of exclusive—"

"What? No! He didn't barter for it, Lo, jesus." Clark shifts uncomfortably and avoids her eyes. "There's some things I want to talk to him about, that's all. Off the record. He said he'd send a car to the office, and that I need to change my tie—"

"Yes," Lois says instantly. "Yes, you do," and then she turns and shouts over her shoulder, "Ron? Ron, do you have any spare ties in your desk? Ron, tell me you've got something that goes with plaid—"

"What on earth goes with plaid?" Ron yells back, from somewhere down the hallway. "I'm good, but I can't work miracles."

It's just a dinner anyway, Clark reminds himself. It's fine.

A different tie is secured well before the car arrives for Clark, though he still isn't sure why it was necessary. The car's really nice, but it belongs to Bruce Wayne. That doesn't mean anything. It's not like Wayne would send an awful ugly car if it were a dinner, and a really nice car if it were—something else.

So it's fine.

He doesn't know what he was expecting, but he finds himself a little surprised when the driver doesn't head toward the bay or the bridge; he supposes he was thinking Wayne would take the opportunity to drag Clark over onto his turf.

But instead the car takes Clark to Park Ridge—to LeMarvin, Clark realizes, because there's nothing else over that way that springs to mind, and okay, maybe it is for the best that he swapped ties. If only Ron had had a nicer suit stuffed away in his desk, too.

He tells the maître d' his name, and gets led up to a private room. Wayne's already there; he rises, smiling, and comes over and puts his hand on Clark's arm, leads him back to the candlelit table and says smooth and complimentary things about Ron's tie, and—

And yeah, Clark thinks despairingly, this is absolutely a date.

The problem should be that Wayne walked him into this without being clear about it; that Wayne's playing a trick on him, or maybe trying to embarrass him.

But it isn't. Clark could have asked for clarification or said seven didn't work for him, but he hadn't—it hadn't even occurred to him. Bruce doesn't do anything visibly obnoxious like pull Clark's chair out for him, even if he does slide one foot between Clark's the second Clark sits down; and it's not an accident, not the way Bruce is looking at Clark when he does it.

The actual problem is completely different. The actual problem is the way Clark rolls his eyes at Bruce to express his disapproval, but doesn't move his feet. The actual problem is the way Clark finds himself staring across the stupid candlelit table at Bruce and thinking on an inane loop, This is a date, feeling something flicker bright and warm in his chest.

The actual problem is how easy it all is.

"What looks good?" Clark says, belatedly forcing his eyes off Bruce's face and down to the menu.

But his resolve is wasted. "Everything," Bruce says, in a terrible smoky voice that makes Clark's head jerk up; and Bruce doesn't even have his own menu open, he's just leaning across the table and watching Clark intently. "Or did you mean on the menu?" he adds, raising his eyebrows.

"Yes, on the menu," Clark says, but he can't help shaking his head and laughing. "Jesus, you're shameless."

"I make an effort to live down to expectations," Bruce agrees solemnly, eyes sparkling, and then he reaches across the table and takes Clark's menu out of his hands. "You're having the salmon steak plate."

"Am I?" Clark prods.

Bruce nods—and then, gaze still intent on Clark's face, adds just a little too low, "You won't regret it."

Clark ignores the embarrassing way that makes his heart thump, thinking dimly that he's probably going to regret absolutely all of this, and says, "Well, if you can't trust a man's word when it comes to the salmon steak plate, when can you?"

The food arrives more quickly than Clark was expecting—but then again, maybe food has a tendency to arrive pretty quickly when Bruce Wayne orders it. The salmon is exactly as good as Bruce implied it was, and possibly even better. Between the meal and the endless entertainment of Bruce's idea of "classy flirtation suited for LeMarvin", Clark almost manages to forget why they're supposedly here at all.

But then he looks across the table at Bruce and feels a brief stab of guilt for enjoying himself so much when any other night he'd be working; when he should be working, really, and that inevitably reminds him what he would have been working on, if he hadn't come.

So he takes one last incredibly delicious bite of salmon, pats his mouth carefully with his napkin, and then takes a deep breath and says, "So what do you know about the Gotham Bat, anyway?"

Bruce spears a piece of salmon on his fork and doesn't look up. "Are you honestly still looking into that nonsense?"

"It's not nonsense," Clark says patiently, "and you're the only person I know who lives in Gotham, Bruce. Have you ever—you know, heard anything? Seen anything? Even if it is just urban legend," Clark adds, "it's still interesting, and I'd love to be able to trace its origins, figure out when and where it might have started."

Bruce gives him a long steady look, and Clark isn't sure what's prompted it until he says, "Well, Clark," in that terrible insinuating tone—and oh, damn, Clark somehow forgot to call him Mr. Wayne. He's never going to let that go, Clark thinks sulkily. "I'm not sure 'interesting' is really the word for the idea that there's some vigilante in a mask out there taking the law into his own hands. I mean, there's a reason most people don't do that, right?"

Clark swallows, feeling suddenly and unpleasantly clear-headed. "Well, there's—sometimes the system doesn't work the way it should, or there's something going on that no one else can do anything about. If the Bat were real, if there were someone out there with his capabilities—surely taking action when he can would actually be the most ethical course, even if it's not strictly—"

"Clark Kent, boy scout, arguing in favor of breaking the law," Bruce murmurs, in a tone that suggests he's thinking about buying a calendar-printing company just so he can make sure this date is marked on every single one of its products. He takes a luxuriously slow sip of wine, and then shrugs, one-shouldered. "I've never heard anything that made the Bat sound like anything more than a nutjob with a chip on his shoulder and a lot of time on his hands. I doubt he can do anything SWAT couldn't, if they hired a few ninjas—and anybody who'd rather skulk around in the dark beating up criminals than do, oh, anything else with his life? Probably isn't the kind of person who's stable enough to be trusted with skulking around in the dark beating up criminals. If you follow me." Bruce shakes his head, and stabs another chunk of salmon. "As if one freak in a cape isn't enough—"

Clark focuses his eyes on his plate. "So you feel the same way about Superman?"

"Oh, I'll admit I'm willing to grant a little more leeway there," Bruce says, with easy unconcern. "When there's aliens who can fly and spaceships shooting lasers, it's pretty hard to argue that it's not for the best to have your own guy who flies and shoots lasers.

"But at the end of the day, that's the problem, isn't it? Like that—" Bruce waves a hand vaguely. "—Latin thing people say, you know. Who guards the guardians. If this Gotham Bat ever turns into something substantial enough to cause trouble, well, at the end of the day he's just like anybody." Bruce shrugs again. "Track him down and shoot him in the head, and that's the end of it. But now we've got a guy who flies and shoots lasers, and he killed everybody else who flies and shoots lasers for us—so if he decides to shoot lasers at us, what are we going to do about it?"

"You think he would?" Clark says quietly, and he doesn't even know what he thinks Bruce might say—he doesn't even know what answer it could possibly be fair to expect Bruce to give.

Bruce meets Clark's eyes, and it occurs to Clark that it's the first time that's happened in a couple of minutes. Bruce smiles and says, "Hey, I don't know the guy—you tell me," and it's tempting to marinate in the perfect terrible irony of it, except—

Except Bruce's eyes are saying something else, the look in them one Clark recognizes from a dozen meetings, a dozen moments.

I was just down the street when it came down.

And you're all right now?

No, Mr. Kent. I think that ship has sailed.

And he isn't wrong, or at least there's nothing Clark can say that can change his mind—because what does Bruce even know about Superman, anyway? That General Zod came after him, that there were ships and a fight and a lot of explosions. That Superman hadn't been able to save everyone; and for Bruce, standing there on 4th watching two hundred people die, what reason would there be to even think Superman had tried?

He had tried; he'd even saved some people, but—

You made a difference.

Not enough.

Clark clears his throat, and then takes a sip of wine himself. "Well," he says when he's set the glass back down, "I don't think anyone will ever need to shoot the Gotham Bat."

"No?" Bruce says, eyebrows raised. "You've been reading up—you must have heard all the worst stuff there is to say about him."

"Yeah," Clark agrees, "I have, and I still think you're wrong."

Because for all those worst stories—for all that Clark heard Batman hurt someone with his own ears—the fact remains: he'd saved Clark when he hadn't had to, when it would have been safer not to. Sometimes being okay is hard; sometimes Clark can't do it, after all, and he can't hold it against Batman if sometimes Batman can't do it either. Maybe Batman's too angry—but maybe Superman's not strong enough, not fast enough. Maybe nobody can do it all, or be in the right every time.

"Well," Bruce says, and smiles again. "Let's hope we don't have to find out."

LeMarvin's desserts are just as good as its entrées, and Bruce doesn't even make fun of Clark for immediately going straight for the chocolate cake. Or, well. Not very much fun, anyway.

Clark tries to insist on splitting the bill, and Bruce agrees without arguing and then doesn't even wait for it to arrive—he just hands the waiter a gleaming black card with a wink.

"Oh, come on, Bruce—"

"Don't worry, Clark, I'll let you get it next time," Bruce says blithely, patting Clark on the back of the hand, but that's a total lie. Clark can tell.

(The part where he's going to let Clark pay, that is. Clark's kind of hoping the existence of a "next time" is the truth.)

Bruce walks him out, naturally, with a hand at the small of Clark's back that feels much warmer than it should through Clark's suit jacket; and the moment they step out the door of LeMarvin, a car is pulling up that looks identical to the one that brought Clark here in the first place.

"How did you even do that? Do you have some kind of hidden radio?"

Bruce grins. "A magician never reveals his secrets, Clark."

And then—then they're trapped there, for a weirdly elastic moment that Clark recognizes. He knows what he'd do now if this had been a—a real date; he knows what he wants to do now—

Bruce's fingers find the end of Clark's sleeve, and then glide gently across the back of Clark's hand, around the edge of his wrist. "Clark," he repeats, very low.

"Still not a good idea," Clark says, a little less sternly than he'd intended.

For even more reasons than it seems: because Clark is responsible for one of the worst days of Bruce's life and Bruce doesn't even know it; because Clark's done things he's not sure a man like Bruce Wayne will understand. Because Clark's not sure it's fair to ask him to understand.

But he can't say any of that to Bruce—at least not yet. He's still got to finish the feature, after all.

(Once that's done with, then maybe he could tell Bruce, or at least start working his way around to it; and if Bruce never wanted to see him again, then at least it wouldn't cause a problem at work. At least the only thing it would do is hurt.)

Thankfully, though, there's still one reason that he can give out loud.

"You're one of my sources, remember? As long as I'm working on a feature that requires the cooperation of Wayne Enterprises, it—"

"—wouldn't be ethical?" Bruce fills in.

His tone is so dry that Clark winces a little; but when he looks up, Bruce isn't frowning. Bruce isn't frowning at all—Bruce is grinning, with a helpless warmth that almost looks like fondness.

"Then I suppose I'll just have to be patient," he says.

He's—he seems to be standing even closer than before, though Clark can't remember either one of them having moved, and his fingers are a light warm weight against Clark's wrist. His gaze is flicking back and forth across Clark's face, and then it drops to Clark's mouth and Clark bites his lip, unthinking.

"Christ," Bruce mutters.

"Sorry," Clark says, dimly uncertain as to what exactly he's apologizing for. "Sorry, I—" and then he makes himself rock back a step and look away so he actually has half a chance of finishing the thought. "I can't really guarantee you'll decide it was worth the wait—"

He's brought his hearing up without meaning to: he can hear Bruce's weight shift, the creak of his shoes and the thud of his heart, and is almost prepared for Bruce's free hand to catch his jaw and tip his chin up. And it's a really bad idea to meet Bruce's eyes again, but Clark does it anyway.

Bruce isn't grinning anymore. He isn't smiling at all—it makes him almost unfamiliar, the usual easy levity all absent. He looks serious, heart-stoppingly intent; and his eyes have gone very dark. "Oh, Clark," he says, low and a little hoarse. "I have no doubt at all that it will be."

Somehow Bruce manages to pry his hands off Clark—off Kent, Christ—and put him in the goddamn car where he belongs. Bruce taps the roof and the driver obediently rolls away, and then it's safe to stand there on the clean stone curb outside LeMarvin and say, "sh*t."

sh*t. Bruce digs a thumb in just under his brow, right next to the bridge of his nose, and makes himself take a deep breath.

That wasn't supposed to happen. None of that was supposed to happen. The dinner could have become tactical, if Bruce had handled it right—it could have been recovered from. If Kent's seriously considering writing up something on the Bat that might get published, it's worth knowing how he feels about what he has so far—what his interpretation's shaping up to be, what angle he's likely to take.

So allowing himself to talk to Kent about that—it could be considered strategic.

What's not strategic is everything else about it. Kent is a terrible idea, by any and every possible metric: yes, this once it had potentially made actual sense for Bruce Wayne to be drawn into discussion of Batman, but that can't happen on a regular basis. Kent is a reporter. A stubborn one, a curious one, and one who already has an established interest in the Bat. Inviting him any further into Bruce Wayne's life would be a mistake so catastrophic Bruce can't begin to imagine how he'd contain the damage. It's not even worth thinking about.

But it can still stay unmade. Bruce centers himself and takes another deep breath, lets it out more slowly. Bruce Wayne makes promises he can't keep all the time; he says things he doesn't mean, or goes back on his word, or forgets he ever gave it. It's another week before the groundbreaking ceremony, and Clark's—Kent's—feature is intended to be ongoing from that point, for at least a few months. Even if he'd had the best of intentions tonight, it's conceivable that Bruce Wayne will be bored by then, that his attention will have wandered.

Bruce just has to keep Kent at a reasonable distance until this—this distraction has passed. That's all. This can still be managed responsibly.

Except a reasonable distance from Kent is a difficult thing to attain.

Bruce still has to meet with him during the day, and is prepared for that. Kent sticking to his guns over the ethics of human interest journalism actually makes it easier: Bruce can make a show out of staying on the farther side of Bruce Wayne's desk, can jokingly measure the distance between their knees and tell Kent he needs to move his chair back if he wants to keep his virtue intact. And Kent will snicker and tell Bruce he's an ass, and then do it just because he thinks it's funny.

If that were all, it would be bearable.

But it isn't.

Kent is—Kent is everywhere. In Bruce's office in person half the morning; the ghost of him before, in the knowledge that he'll be there soon, and the traces of him after, the chair out of place or the cheap pens he sometimes leaves behind without meaning to. In Bruce's head, inescapable, every moment he's out on patrol—because who knows when Kent might show up again, poking around and stumbling across Batman's trail?

Going over the remaining files from the ship and keeping an eye on all the pies Luthor's got his fingers in turn into a relief: together they comprise the one arena where all things Kent can safely be set aside. Bruce's grindingly slow progress on the Superman problem becomes a pleasant break in the pattern.

(Though Bruce can admit it would be more of one if the alien didn't have dark hair. At this point, that can't help but make Bruce think of Kent. Which is ridiculous and irrational, and Bruce has to tell himself very firmly to ignore it.)

He becomes almost impatient for Luthor to make another move, so he can justify altering his current patrol routines—and after a few days, it happens.

In point of fact, two things happen, though at first they seem unrelated. One is that the government research contract Bruce identified as likely to involve the ship is awarded to Wayne Enterprises over LexCorp. Bruce had been reasonably certain it would be, after pulling a few strings, but it's always best to wait for independent confirmation. Bruce can admit it's a pleasure to get one over on Luthor; and of course R&D will be thrilled, which should make Lucius happy.

And the second is that one of Luthor's five dozen shell subsidiaries appears to have hired several freelance contractors in Madagascar. Which is just unusual enough to catch Bruce's eye.

Bruce frowns at the screen. He hasn't been able to ascertain exactly where the wreckage of the World Engine lies; but it stands to reason that it had been positioned at the precise antipode of the Black Zero over Metropolis, which points to somewhere in the Indian Ocean—

Bruce goes still.

He'd asked the ship for all its data and logs that were related in any way to Superman. And it had given him precisely that, including sensor information from the Black Zero—and, presumably, from the World Engine, because the ship had called it "paired", had gathered up every scrap within reach. Because that was protocol when a Kryptonian ship died.

Which the World Engine had done somewhere over the Indian Ocean, because Superman had flown there and destroyed it.

And if Lex Luthor is sending people out to dredge the Indian Ocean—is it because of the research contract? Has Luthor, cut off from one Kryptonian resource he'd hoped to access, already taken steps to secure himself another? Or are these two separate stages in whatever grand plan Luthor has in motion, and Bruce has only managed to interfere with one?

Either way, what matters most is what's down there and where. If there's nothing to be found beyond perhaps some formless slag, then Bruce might as well let Luthor waste as much time and effort as he cares to. But if there's anything Luthor can actually make use of, then—well.

Then it would be preferable if someone else found it first.

Bruce sits back in his chair and considers. It's never been field-tested at depths exceeding those that can be found in the bay, but the Batwing was technically designed to be fully submersible for limited periods. It's not out of the question.

But he's getting ahead of himself. Perhaps the sensor files will yield a location, or at least allow Bruce to narrow the field a little. The wreck of the World Engine might even contain some sort of beacon or give off a signal that the ship in the park can pick up.

Whatever the case may be, Bruce thinks, it can't hurt to check.

"You're only doing this because the ship is fond of you and you like it," Alfred murmurs, accusing.

"We've established a rapport," Bruce allows, sweeping down the hallway.

It's easier than he had expected to find the room he'd used before; and he's not sure whether that's because his sense of direction within the ship is improving, or because the ship's helped him by limiting the number of visible doors at any given intersection.

Either way, he reaches what feels like a familiar expanse of bare decking and gently curved walls. And then he takes another step and feels the floor ripple faintly under his feet, and that calm disembodied voice says, "You have returned."

It's nothing but a statement of fact, and yet Bruce can't ignore an impression that the ship is mildly pleased. He wonders whether any of the researchers have tried talking to it, or whether their current protocols include refraining from engaging the ship. He wonders whether, if the latter, the ship gets bored. Or—

It had had two others like itself to talk to, once. Perhaps it has in its own way registered the loss. It could be—lonely. Not impossible.

"Yes," Bruce says to the ship, and then pauses. "Ship, the files you provided included a number of measurements of the location where the World Engine—died. But I don't understand your system of notation. Could you show me?"

"Yes," the ship says, and out of the floor a globe forms, glittering gray-bronze: Earth, perfect in every detail, at least to Bruce's eye, and seemingly to scale. More of that flickering through the cowl's lenses appears to indicate relative ocean depth; and a point that does indeed fall within the Indian Ocean has been highlighted with soft light, seemingly coming from the interior of the globe.

"Your files also indicate that at full operational capacity, your sensors are more than capable of readings at that distance."

"Yes," the ship says, and maybe it's Bruce's imagination or maybe that was just a bit smug.

"Are sensors at full operational capacity now?"

"No," the ship concedes. "However, current damage is limiting range to—confirm referent: .25 AU?"

"Confirmed," Bruce says, and a quarter of an AU is definitely good enough.

"Sufficient?"

"Sufficient," Bruce agrees. "Please provide an overview of the present conditions of—"

He pauses, and glances at the featureless ceiling. Alfred's going to make fun of him; but he'd prefer that to an accidental snub of the ship.

After all, it's worth staying on good terms with the alien artificial intelligence that controls the vessel he's currently standing in.

"—of the World Engine's resting place."

The ship is silent for a moment. And then it says slowly, "Assessment of prospects for recovery and repair has—been run several times, independent of request. All simulations and readings indicate that the World Engine will not revive. Nor can it be reborn; damage to the core was extensive."

"I'm sorry," Bruce finds himself saying.

"Progress of the transformation sequence was aborted at a point which can only be expressed as a percentage using negative powers of ten. 1.738 square miles of planetary crust, to a depth of .125 miles, was successfully altered in accordance with the parameters set—"

Bruce frowns. That progress of any kind can be quantified is disturbing—Bruce had assumed that the kryptoforming process had been interrupted so early that whatever those gravitational pulses had been doing, it hadn't stuck. But apparently that's not the case.

"Please describe the progress of the transformation qualitatively."

"Basic elements characteristic of Krypton remain, in stable form," the ship says. "In addition, the death of the World Engine and its final impact constituted a release of energy sufficient to form several unstable radioactive compounds—"

"Hazardous radioactive compounds?" Bruce interrupts.

"Yes," the ship says, and surely its default must be to make that evaluation with Kryptonian biology in mind—but it does know it's talking to Bruce—

"Hazardous to Kryptonian lifeforms?"

"Yes," the ship confirms.

"Well," Alfred says in Bruce's ear. "Hazardous and radioactive. That does sound dreadfully promising, doesn't it, sir?"

Bruce huffs, dimly irritated by the distraction; and then pauses. "Ship," he says carefully, "were any of these unstable radioactive compounds also formed by the—by the death of the Black Zero?"

"Yes," the ship agrees, "though in far less substantial quantities—"

"How much less substantial?"

"Current readings indicate that approximately 6.228 ounces of unstable radioactive material were generated by the parameters defined."

"Current readings?" Bruce demands. "Where is it located?"

He's grimacing almost as soon as he says it, because what kind of thing is that to ask? It's probably distributed in—in minute fractions of an ounce; and he really ought to check whether the ship has cultivated a familiarity with metric units instead, because it would probably make these scientific discussions a little easier—

"Here," the ship says.

The globe flattens. More material rises up from the floor, the surface facing Bruce heaving and swirling uncertainly; and then all at once it forms up into—into shapes, rectangular prisms.

Buildings, Bruce thinks distantly. Bird's eye view.

"Where is it, sir?" Alfred asks, and Bruce must have let the pause stretch more than he's realized, if it's trying Alfred's patience.

"Luthor," Bruce says, still staring at the eminently recognizable group of buildings the ship has highlighted, and the point of light within them. "It's Luthor. He's got it."

Clark doesn't exactly mean to go back to the warehouse.

Or—well. He doesn't plan on it, at least. It's just that talking to Bruce about it has made it occur to him: there isn't going to be any article about Batman, but Batman might not know it. Clark hadn't meant that last crack about being a reporter in any way other than the abstract—that the first time in a long time that Batman's been seen by anyone who wasn't a criminal, it should be a reporter, when he's kept such a low profile for so long.

But lying to Bruce about the nonexistent piece only worked because it was plausible. A little too plausible. The Bat's stayed in the shadows as long as he has by being careful, and he should know it hasn't gone to waste just because he saved Clark. He should know he doesn't need to regret it.

Plus if Clark's taking a trip to Gotham, that means he's not going to spend half the night sitting on the roof of his apartment building, staring into space and thinking about Bruce. Which will be a nice change of pace.

Clark snorts to himself and shakes his head, and keeps walking. As if Bruce hadn't already occupied a little too much of Clark's attention. And not even because of the moments when he's been loud and engaging and unmissable; just talking to him is a ride and a half, but somehow it's the times when he's said just a few words, or nothing at all, that Clark can't stop replaying. The expressions that flash across his face sometimes, almost too fast to see—or maybe they are too fast to see, if you aren't Superman. The way his tone of voice can change, go sly and light or low, rough-hot like friction; the angles of him, how he leans all the time, the deft teasing way he touches people. The look in his eyes when he's being kind.

And maybe Clark can stare into space and think too much about Bruce no matter where he is. He blinks and realizes the walk light's come on, and belatedly steps off the curb.

Tonight's not about Bruce, it's about Batman. And if Clark's going to find the Bat without giving himself away, he's going to need to concentrate.

The warehouse is the obvious place to go. Clark's already found the Bat there twice—and the second time, he'd showed up at just the right moment, even though Clark knew for a fact he hadn't been staking the place out. Clark had checked when he'd first arrived. And maybe it was coincidence; maybe the Bat's evening had only just gotten started, and the warehouse had been his first stop.

But there's also a chance he's monitoring the place. And if he is, then maybe Clark can find whatever he's using to do it and set it off.

Clark's zigzagging down the alleys close to the docks, scanning as he goes—just in case the Bat's monitors are set up at some kind of obscure perimeter instead of in the warehouse itself. But he doesn't see anything obvious, and he's starting to think maybe he should just speed the rest of the way; and that's when he becomes aware of the sound of cloth.

Nothing loud, obviously. Just a little bit of a rasp, the kind of noise people's clothes make as they move. And Clark might think somebody else were out for a walk, except this isn't really the right part of town for that—and also the sound is coming from overhead.

Clark keeps walking, and opens himself up: enough to make the sound louder, to confirm it's there, and then further, far enough to get breath and a heartbeat, and something that might be the vague scratchy white noise in the background of an open radio channel.

It's incredible how quiet the Bat is, he thinks. Especially like this, when he's not in a hurry—Clark has to really work to catch the sound of his boots on the rooftops.

And it's not a good idea to just turn around and say hi. Clark Kent, Daily Planet reporter, shouldn't be able to tell Batman is there.

But sometimes humans can tell when they're being watched, right? Or they think they can—and every now and then they must turn out to be right. And Clark Kent, Daily Planet reporter, has one up on everybody else who's never seen the Bat coming: he's out here looking for Batman, and already knows Batman's real; and Batman's aware of it.

So Clark walks a little further and then slows, starts to hesitate now and then partway through a step. He looks around, overhead and to both sides when he gets to an intersection, with the uncertain air of somebody who can't see very far past the paltry space that's lit by the dim yellow streetlights. And then he stops, one hand rubbing uneasily at the back of his neck, and says, "Is somebody there?"

The Bat doesn't answer—but then he wouldn't, would he? At least not the first time Clark asked.

"Seriously," Clark calls down the apparently-empty street, "you're giving me goosebumps." He tilts his head sideways, waiting a beat, like he's expecting an answer; and then he lets his eyes narrow, and says, "Or—wait. It's you, isn't it?"

Nothing.

"Look, I already know you exist," Clark says, exasperated. "What exactly is the point of pretending you aren't—yikes!"

The startlement isn't entirely fake. Clark knew Batman was up there, but that doesn't mean he was expecting the Bat to just drop out of the sky.

Batman lands in a crouch at the far side of the next streetlight along, a darker swathe of shadow and a sideways slash of—the cape, Clark thinks, it must be the cape, trailing off to one side.

"You shouldn't be here," Batman growls.

"Nice to see you, too," Clark tells him. "Look, I'm not trying to cause any trouble—I didn't even get taken hostage this time." He gestures around him at the pleasant and unconditional lack of men with short tempers and big guns.

Batman's silence manages to sound unimpressed.

Clark clears his throat. "Actually, that's sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. Me not causing you any trouble, I mean. You said you knew I was a reporter, and you must be thinking I'm planning to write some kind of—exposé or something. But I'm not."

"You're not," Batman says, inflectionless.

"I'm not," Clark agrees. "I was looking for you, but I just wanted to find you. I just wanted to talk to you, and understand a little about who you are. I'm not going to write up anything on you, or try to uncover your identity, or anything like that. But I didn't actually tell you that the other night, so." He shrugs. "I wanted to make sure you knew."

"So you came to Gotham," Batman says. "Alone. At night. In the alleys off the docks. To apologize to me."

Clark grimaces and stuffs his hands in his pockets, scuffing a shoe against the dirty pavement. "When you say it like that, it sounds like a bad idea," he muses.

"And you're going to go back to Metropolis," Batman continues, "to your brand-new job as a reporter, where you ... won't pursue or make a story out of a sensational scoop a lot of people would be very interested in."

"Right," Clark says, and then hesitates, because that sounded kind of flippant and it wasn't supposed to. "I—can imagine what it must be like for you," he clarifies, "trying to keep yourself safe; or if there's anyone you care about, or anything like that. It would pose a pretty serious problem for you if anybody knew your real identity—and even if I didn't find that out or publish it, a lot more people would start trying for themselves if they knew you were real." Superman's got an advantage, with the flight and the speed he can move at. No one can find him or follow him unless he lets them. But Batman—Batman's obviously exceptional, but he's also human. And it would be all too easy for something to happen to him—

(track him down and shoot him in the head)

—that would slow him down enough for someone with a camera to catch up to him.

"So you're going to let it go," Batman says flatly.

"Yes."

Batman stares at Clark for a long moment.

"I realize you are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of 'letting things go'," someone murmurs, from somewhere on Batman's person, "but I can assure you it has been done before, sir, if not by you—"

"We'll see," Batman says abruptly, and then all of a sudden he's up—springing out of that crouch and toward the corner of the wall next to him, which he scrambles up with a hissing rustle, a tiny scrape; to human eyes, Clark thinks, it must be the next best thing to disappearing.

Clark, of course, can tell that there's still somebody up there, watching with unbroken attention and wry British commentary being radioed into his ear.

Which means he can't fly away. He stifles a small sigh and starts walking toward the Metro-Narrows all over again.

At least he can be pretty sure he's going to have company on the way.