Chapter Text
There’s too much noise. The refrigerator’s electric hum, the fluorescent light’s lemon whine, the crawl of worms. The screech of glass compressed, breaking, a million feet on a million miles of concrete, words both English and incomprehensible. The air in people’s lungs, and the screams they let out. The high pitched ones are the worse. Clark screams back.
The carpets hurt.
His mother says, "Be an island."
But no man is an island and he doesn’t know how to block it out.
“Stay with me Clark,” she says and hugs him to her and tells him to listen to just one thing.
One thing. Pick one, any one.
Maybe he had a choice. Maybe there was no choice, because he focuses on her heartbeat like any child would, seeking something safe and familiar.
The noise falls finally away.
(he doesn't really remember this happening, later on, so much that it happened so often it became habit)
*
(clark please try it out? it'll be good for you, you'll need to be independent)
The problem is he can't live or go to school wrapped up in her hugs forever.
(let go clark, you gotta get on the bus)
Even though his senses are powerful he doesn't have fine control; it's like asking a toddler to hold a pencil. His motor skills aren't refined yet, not without practice or the muscle or long enough fingers. Fat crayons held in small hands, sidewalk chalk, scrawled messily over large surfaces like tables and walls.
It feels a similar sort of messy in his mind.
(it's ok honey, look it'll be ok)
Clark tries, is the thing, he keeps trying to find something to ground him when he doesn't have her. Something that’ll help him pull focus on the wild scenery of his life. His attention keeps flying around, latching on this sound or that sensation and usually the one most attention-grabbing. The most annoying. Or most unpleasant.
Or the one that hurts.
(why is he rocking. make him stop, ms brown make him stop)
When he tries to push the sounds away, as his veins pound with his fear, he could make it silent.
But everything else stops too.
It’s like he managed to somehow press ‘Pause’ on the world and Clark has never heard of other people doing anything like this. People’s mouths would be hanging open in mid-shout, a ball frozen mid-flight hanging in the air, plates mid-fall hanging in the sludge that air has become, caught by an invisible hand. And it would be quiet. Clark would stare. Everything becomes unearthly silent.
But everything is worse when sound starts up again, the terrible crash of plates breaking, the ball slamming against his face, the shouts of teachers and passerby. Life skitters around him like a railless train.
(what's wrong with him)
And then.
Then: he hears this heartbeat.
It sounds like the earth itself, deep and slow and cavernous. Round and smooth like river stones.
It sounds like those cathedrals he sees in pictures, the echoes of it, the strength, the feeling of light; languid and unhurried even when it runs quick.
It sounds safe.
Leaning against the heartbeat lets him go about his life; to dress himself without wincing at the texture, taste food without tasting the bugs or the rot or the char, see only at the surface instead of all details inner and outer.
The sound lets him be in the moment. Clark paces his own heart to it and finally time speeds up even as the world slows down. Becomes manageable.
“—ark, Clark, are you there?" his ma would ask.
And finally Clark could breathe, curl his toes up against his socks in his shoes, and say, "Yes."
(an island, alone, but surrounded)
*
A minute becomes parsed out into roughly 30 segments: a sigh in and a whoosh out. A heartbeat. A simple ba-thump on the surface melded into a multi-layered chorus, a four-part harmony. Two atrium, two ventricles, aorta and arteries and valves and—
Clark reads about heartbeats and he thinks the one he hears must be an athlete's, to go so slow. The world record holder goes as little as 26 per minute, who is a retired runner.
Athletes tend to be famous and maybe Clark could figure out who it is.
The Summer Olympics were taking place. He watches eagerly and tries to listen for the heartbeats because it surely has to sound different, easy to locate, all those slow beats gathered together. Like a grouping of stars. (which he'd always liked to watch, sitting on from the highest tree he could find.)
And Clark was right, he does find a distinct group of very slow hearts. Watching the live competitions helps him focus on when to listen. Watching them set up and prepare for events lets him pay attention to which hearts should be going faster as they compete, when those slow hearts beat closer to a normal speed.
But he can’t find his heartbeat among them.
They all sound tinny in comparison. Like the difference between hitting a spoon and hitting a bell. Like the difference between store-bought strawberries (plump but watery sour) and the ones that sprout on their porch, sweetened by sunlight. Like the difference between the world seen from behind his glasses and how color and clarity bloom without them.
Maybe the heartbeat Clark grounds himself on participates in a different sport, or just not at these events. It's not like Clark stops wondering or searching after the Olympics, even if it doesn't matter knowing who it is. He’s not planning on meeting this person.
It would be creepy. It would make no difference to them if Clark matches his breathing to that beat, that the pace of it reminds him to walk slow, that the thrum of it reminds him to touch soft, that it curls up around his ears like one of those giant delicate seashells.
People say that you can't really hear the sea when you listen to a conch, that the sounds are just reverberations and resonance of yourself. That it’s fake.
But is it really, Clark wonders.
What if it's like the sun and the moon? In a perfect eclipse they completely cover each other, but they match so perfectly only because gravity is in balance. They match because their gravity makes them balance, and fall into place.
What if it's like the butterflies? Like how orange and black appears in both Monarchs and Viceroys, in similar patterns. Scientists had originally thought that only the Monarchs were poisonous and mild Viceroys simply hid themselves in similar coloring. They’ve now found out that the Viceroys were also toxic, in their own way. It’s unclear who lead and who followed.
What if, Clark thinks, it's not that a seashell's echo is fake or false. But that the shell exists to echo, to carry the sea around even where the sea doesn't exist.
To carry a home for the echo that would live in the shell.
(is he the shell, or the echo that seeks a home?)
*
“Clark, honey, you know we love you right?”
"Yeah? What's up, are you ok? Why do you look like that, ma? Pa, what's—"
“We’ll always love you, son. Even if...”
"Even if what, pa?"
"Let's go to the shed, there's something to show you."
*
Oh.
Is that why everything is always so much? Clark wonders. Is that why he could never seem to fit, that things are never easy, that he's always too fast or too slow. That people stare at him like he's—
like he's—
(missing something, incomplete)
Other.
*
(he's not from their world. alien.)
It still…
It.
Still, there is a wretchedness to the knowledge. That he had been 'found.' That he was not of this planet. That he's alone.
It’s too big for his chest to contain. Too hollow. Too empty.
Clark can’t breathe past it, as if lost in the dark. Flailing, trying to reach the opposite wall across a yawning pit, while holding onto the one wall that he knows (family, but they're not really—), boxed in but still afraid to move, the sky a dark container above, trapping him next to farm and field and—
And then:
The sound of the earth, a round cathedral, spanning from end to end. An echo off an unknowable unseeable untouchable edge that sets Clark’s limits.
An opposite. (a light. a heartbeat)
Clark breathes, in and out, to the sound. Finds his edges, his boundaries, his floor.
And feels human again.
*
It's not that the heartbeat stays always slow. It sometimes chimes high, curious interest, sometimes jumps an annoyed tch, like tongue against teeth. It very very often runs almost the speed of a normal person, or past it, usually at night. But even at twice its usual rate, it is resonant; an orchestra in a concert hall, flute and brass and timpani in a controlled crash, an 1812 Overture with cannon fire.
Clark wonders if they have nightmares. Sometimes he gets mistaken that they’re his own. He wakes up on certain nights heart pounding with the sensation of needing to be somewhere. Of needing to chase or to flee. He finds himself trying, sometimes, when darkness is draped around him and the moon is high, to breathe in deep with all his lungs to try and slow his heartbeat down. (but it's not his heartbeat he would realize, as his own falls out of sync)
It makes Clark want to find this person, and call them, and breathe with them until their nightmares leave.
It makes Clark try to expand his hearing and try to get context clues, but it doesn't much work. In the beginning all he heard was air, as if from a mountaintop, something about it sounding like the scream of ice cracking apart.
But Clark thinks he'd probably just had shit control when he was little because it never much sounded like that once he started really trying and succeeding at controlling his powers (once he realized they’re his powers, and that he has a responsibility to control them): it was air, but like it was rushing by, like you were moving fast, and the scream was that of rope, of ziplines, not ice. Or of people. Of sirens. Of the city.
His focus must be too wide.
He doesn't want to hear an entire city, not even a few city blocks. Clark just wants to hear the heartbeat’s immediate surroundings. Maybe a name, a location, some context clues. A hint perhaps of what the nightmares are about. Did they fear the same things Clark fears?
(are they as hollowed? do they echo too?)
He keeps trying, with more or less success. Mostly less.
And gets frustrated with how little he succeeds because he's so old now, almost ten, and he should be better at this right?
*
Sometimes though? Sometimes the beat rises, but sings sweet. The first time Clark heard it sing, he found himself staring up through the ceiling.
Watching the night sky.
Because that? That wasn't the heartbeat of the earth, smooth and steady.
It was the siren call of the stars, leading you right off a cliff.
Trust me, it sang.
I will catch you.
He was unresponsive for about half an hour.
His parents made worried faces for the entire evening, after that heart slowed down, and questioned him over it the entire week.
Clark couldn't have said for the life of him what it was about, until very very much later. When he finally managed to control his hearing enough to widen out to the sound of lungs, widen out even more cautiously to the sound of breath, to the shape of air as it left the mouth, to the press of it against skin.
There's a sound, wet. And then another one, obscene, a moan catching itself on all sorts of hooks and knives and teeth as it fought its way through.
Oh, Clark thinks, as his control breaks and his hearing snaps back. He finds his hand already down his pants as his heart catches up and finally learns how to sing that song, too. Oh.
*
Clark learns how to do laundry that summer.
*
Clark is torn between listening more, and listening never. He's completely embarrassed. Which makes for a nice change from being completely afraid, dealing with: powers that increase by the day, his place in the universe, homework and class presentations and public speaking.
But humiliation isn't fun. Even though his Pa says that's all a part of growing up.
"Pa, I'm an alien.” Clark reminds him.
"And yet you mess the sheets and try to hide it like any other teenage boy." Pa grins and tries to ruffle his hair.
Clark watches the hand creep towards him with agonizing slowness. The little expressions on Pa's face as the milliseconds tick by. A fly is passing by them, stuck mid-air as if in amber. Clark looks at that broad hand, a farmer's hand, his father's hand, and knows it will feel warm. None of the many expressions on his Pa's face announce anger or confusion, and if anything, he seems relieved. He keeps on seeming relieved as the tiny moments pass by, as the fly floats its way through, its wings a slow backstroke, Pa’s hand inching ever closer to Clark's hair.
Pa means it, that it's ok, Clark thinks, and finally believes.
He lets the words comfort him. Listens as that heartbeat finishes its reverb. Pretends to duck and paces the speed of it to that echo.
Clark lets his Pa ruffle his hair, and knows he is loved.
*
It's Martha that eventually pries the truth from him.
"It's been a year, and you're still getting that look on your face." She says gently, scalloping a pie’s edges with her fingerprints.
Clark blinks back to the room, the heartsong ramping down. It’d been singing again. It sounds aglow now, and Clark's cheeks are too, because he’s not listening to anything but that heart, but he knows what that pace means, because it’s almost Pavlovian now to blush at it, because it's the afternoon and he spaced out right in front of his mother—
"It's not anyone around here, or I would have known." Ma sounds playful, "Did a celebrity catch your eye?"
Clark stammers and is caught. Nobody's name comes to mind even though he screams at himself to just say a name, any name, a random name he's heard. None seem right. What falls out of his mouth is, "I don't know their name."
"Someone passing through then?" Ma laughs, "It's been known to happen."
Clark is struggling with a response, but his mind is still caught in the place it’s been curled around all these years, and that place is indolent and unresponsive like a cat's slow blink.
She bumps her shoulder against his, where he's doing the dishes, "Well? What does she look like?"
Trying to center himself, Clark shakes his head, mind still stuck in syrup and other sticky fluids. "I don't know."
"You don't know?" Ma pauses.
"Just their heartbeat," falls out of his mouth, and the dust motes freeze in the golden air, sink water stops mid-fall, Ma's eyes starting to widen.
Clark jerks back from her and wants to tug a sheet over himself.
He wants to hide under his bed.
He wants to fly away.
He knows, however, that even if he flies away, she will question him when he comes back: he has already spoken. He knows the sound of it is already flying through her synapses, like a blooming explosion. Each revealing word.
He can’t run from this. From her knowing, from this conversation happening.
The heartbeat ba-dums back into its usual slowness, like the ground settling into place. Clark meets her eyes, ready to be hurt.
"I don't know who it is. I think it’s—" He swallows. This is so hard. "I've been listening to them for years now and I still—" He inhales and it's like swallowing lightning, sharp, burning. He's not sure why he's so breathless and ashamed but he feels like ma would say she taught him better. That he shouldn't want. And shouldn't stretch himself using abilities no one else has to have and to take. (put it down)
Even if it's only a sound that already exists in the world. It's not his to have. (clark you can't crush all the corn cobs even if the pop they make is fun, you can't lift the tractor even though we make funny faces, put it down, put it down)
"Oh Clark," she says.
“It's, it's invasive, I know,“ he stumbles through the words and the hot shame, "You've taught me that I should be better than that but it’s such a nice, I mean it's pretty. I...I mean it— I didn't want to stop. I’m sorry. I know it’s wrong."
“That’s not what we meant. You’re not ‘wrong,’ I think… I think there’s been some misunderstanding? Clark, tell me more.” She brings him into a hug, and his Ma's heart drowns out everything else. It was only her embrace that that allowed Clark to work his way through his words, letting him explain how that one steady sound pulled meaning into place against all his sensory overload.
A heartbeat like the entire width of the world.
"Clark, honey," she says finally after he's wound down, "I'm sorry it's been so difficult and I wished we'd known sooner how much but..." she pauses, clearly searching for words.
“You don’t like this.”
“Not exactly...”
"You're scared," Clark mutters.
"Not of you," she insists.
"I can hear so much, how can you not, I can tell when you—"
"But you don't," Martha says, steady as the earth, "You try your best not to, you try to hear only this one person's heartbeat, or did I understand that wrong? It's the same person?"
"Yeah? But then what...?"
"It's," she sighs. Looks past him, then meets his eyes, "It's a lot put on a single person."
"My listening to them?"
"Your leaning on them for control," she says.
Clark blinks.
“What if you don’t use that heartbeat?”
He freezes.
“Is it possible? For you to step away?”
“Uh…” He tries to keep his breathing even, and warm.
"I know that was how it started but, let’s think about this, you say they’ve always been there?"
He nods.
"So they're older than you," she holds him tighter, "What if they die first? Or have an accident? Do we… is there reason to be afraid if that happens? It’s something we should know."
(afraid of you, if that happens)
Clark shakes his head in denial and has to stop himself from vibrating out of his ma's arms.
He curls his toes in his socks and doesn't match it to that slow heartbeat just to prove that he could. Times himself to the schhhnickt! of the various farming equipment in their area, harvesting grain. It's strange. Discordant.
But he manages to do it.
“I can go without it,” Clark breathes, relieved. (gutted, cored.)
His ma stares him down.
“Try, then, for a month,” she finally asks.
“And then?”
“Then we’ll decide what to do.”
“Huh?”
“Clark,” she strokes his hair, “You may be only seventeen but all of the town trusts you more than most in their twenties. You’re a grown young man and I trust you, I didn’t think for a moment that I couldn’t. But I want you to try. Do it on your own.”
He looks at her in confusion.
“So you can trust yourself,” she says, letting him free of her hug.
Clark understands, after a moment of panic when his mind raced so fast time froze again.
Ma thinks I don’t trust myself?
It froze so thoroughly that when he walked outside, the towering corn stalks shattered at his touch instead of bent, and he forced himself to turn back and sit on the porch so that he wouldn’t ruin the crop.
Clark wants to hide himself in the fields but it’s not like anyone could come find him. Time has stopped. Even the heartbeat has all but completely stilled to his hearing, and Clark fights against himself from reaching for the rest of that melody.
He sits there, in a long subjective moment, working through his ma’s logic. It’s not like Clark does not trust himself but— He has never been without the sound and—
He is so powerful that—
what if—
Clark thinks up different ifs, ands, and buts, but they all sound like weak excuses. He lies to himself in that picosecond in over a thousand ways, sometimes repeating himself, looping on his thoughts over and over. He thinks of the careful way she had been speaking, of her careful use of pronouns, and his mind whirled itself around again as he realized that she was only echoing his own.
Why would pronouns even matter, Clark wonders, squirming and not knowing why, what difference does it make, he's just, he's just listening. What does it even have to do with trusting himself and why is Ma being so vague?
But Clark knows that he's resistant for some reason, even if he doesn't have the words for what it is. The world has stopped while he's working this problem but he's realizing he's arguing himself in circles. There's only himself in this frozen moment in time and he doesn't have enough to work with. He doesn't know what's missing, what he's missing, except that his ma's request sounds impossible.
But Clark, himself, is 'impossible'. His grades are terrible in his Physics classes, because none of the answers are intuitive. He regularly breaks the laws of what he's supposed to take as constant.
Alright Ma.
(his parents are constant)
He spends another endless subjective moment fighting against using the heartbeat to calm himself down.
Just pick one thing, he thinks as he stands up and walks back to his ma, anything else. Something close by.
The seashell sound of the wind through the corn. He lets it in and settles against the hush and the swish and the murmur. (better, at least, than that of the harvesters. worse, than a heart he's not letting himself reach)
“Ok,” he says, breathing in and out to its echoes, “I’ll try.”
“Thank you Clark.”
He loves her hugs, and lets himself lean into her just a little.
(no clark, put it down)
*
Clark stumbles through a wretched month.
But all that past effort spent on attempting to focus on sounds so far away, to find sounds in and around that heartbeat— (and it must be far away. like trying to gauge the distance of stars from you and from each other, Clark knows the heartbeat is far, but not how far, nor exactly where)— It’s done miraculous things for his control over his powers when he’s simply focusing on objects around him.
However using most close-by objects or people as a focus was not a very comfortable state of existence. Clark never fits quite right. He keeps trying to modulate his own beat but his own heart seems not quite sure what to do with itself. The speed it should go at. What to pace itself against to blend in. In desperation he tries various peoples heartbeats for awhile, like Lana’s, but hers flutter like hummingbird wings. Going that fast makes Clark feel like he’s inducing a panic state and the world slows down to an unreal crawl.
Is this what caffeine is like, he wonders.
It’s nice for getting homework done. Maybe. And maybe for reading through all the books in the bookstores and libraries without having to pay or check them out. Hauling the crop in. Mending his socks. Learning how to whittle. Carving an entire tiny castle out of a pencil stub and then pressing on it carefully, until it crumbles underneath his thumb. (put it down)
He always regrets it after, even though it’s what his father would have wanted, to keep Clark safe.
In this bubble of false time, Clark feels very alone. This is what he tells his ma at the end of that month, grounding himself with the susurrus of grass and the slight groan of their windbreaker trees. The corn had all been harvested, but he’d quickly found other things to anchor on, ill-fitting like someone else’s clothes.
Martha Kent only nods.
Jonathan scratches his nose and catches her eye in that way that Clark knew he was saying, Fine, Martha, you’re right.
“You’re ready, Clark.”
“Pa?”
“To fly from the nest,” Martha’s smile is a bit sad, “You were always too big for Smallville.”
“But I love it here,” he says.
She eyes him shrewdly, “Do you love it, or just feel like you can't leave?”
“But the farm!“
“We pulled in the last of the harvest already, and we handled it fine before you started helping out.” His pa laughs, “We let you work so that you know how to work, not because we needed it.”
“You ‘let’ me?”
“It was nice, don’t get me wrong. But yes, ‘let’. Knowing how to work will only help you out there in the world.”
“But—”
“Don’t you want to find that heartbeat?” Martha asks.
And Clark stares out at the empty fields. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Pick a direction,” Martha’s eyes twinkle, “use those scouting skills for some good. Find a map and actually ask for directions.”
Clark covers his face, “It was one time!”
“Go on eHarmony.”
“Ma!” his face is hot, “It’s not like that!”
She nods in acceptance but her eyes are laughing too much. His pa looks at him in that commiserating way that tells Clark he’s not going to win this, she’s gonna tease him come hell or high water.
And since they were both being so— (and they were being so much: accepting and understanding and loving and trusting and willing and) Clark seeks out that heartbeat again, he—
The sound is somehow even more immense than he remembered, deeper, broader, richer. Devastating. He closes his eyes against it for an infinite moment and then grabs it again, experiencing the heartbeat complete its pulse, tremoring through him like an earthquake. Nearly shaking loose his skin.
It’s a close thing.
These words fall out of him, “Maybe next Monday then.” He watches himself talk as if from a great distance because it feels like the whole of him is tuned towards that slow, steady, sound. “Let me go around and see what else I can help with around here. It’s the least I can do.”
Pa nods, “Seems fair.”
And that was that.
*
His parents, of course, are lying about how much they could use him around the farm. Clark thinks about this when he lets the world pause around him, watching the vee of birds migrating south. Looking for a warmer home, temporary though it might be.
They hang in the sky, wings stilled between one beat and the next.
Clark struggles with it, lost in a sped-up moment his parents can’t see, can’t take part in. He knows they want this for him. (because they think— they know they are not enough) They want him to find his place, find belonging. Maybe people like him.
They are gifting him the ability to travel.
It would be rude to return a gift. Even if he thinks they can’t afford it.
Especially if they can’t afford it.
He promises himself to come back during plantings and harvest.
*
Tornado ‘season’ doesn’t really account for climate change. Nobody was prepared.
(no clark, don't)
Pa dies.
*
He’s more than fast now; planting and harvest takes barely a day. Ma works at a diner more to keep in touch with friends than out of need for money, and he keeps an ear on her heart to make sure she's safe. It would take less than a second for him to reach her from any part of the globe.
So Clark spends the next several years traveling and learning. They seem, subjectively, like decades. He tries to balance himself on all sorts of sounds, all sorts of pulses, as he thinks (and avoids thinking, and avoid as much as he can the castle of that echo and the wish to shelter there) of what it is he's searching for.
He searches (and avoids searching, feeling with every passing day the delicate shell of the world around him) for the person that sounds like the earth itself.
He knows the heartbeat is in a city, but he doesn't know which one. And half the time cities are too much for his control, still, its towers, its halls, the bustle of its people; it's too much. He finds himself traveling empty spaces every month or so just to recover, far flung towns and tribes and farms and other such little nooks of civilization, to recenter himself and keep from being overwhelmed.
Clark listens to a great many heartbeats in all these places, certain of those heartbeats from up close, a couple that he makes sing.
None of them fit quite right.
He gets some experience in a very many things. Some of them heroic. (some of them erotic, and Olympic. and, well, at one point he stumbled into a Village.)
Some of them just him, up in a tree, sitting with a cat. They would meow at him piteously and he would think, same. Together they would watch the sky from above the places they’ve both stopped in, for an hour or two, the city smelly and loud and too much and wonderful and never quite the right size or shape. Some days he couldn't bear to set his feet on the ground; there was this one beach, sand entire covered with translucent shells, sparkling like stars.
They broke beneath his weight.
How do you walk in the world, he asks those cats.
Watch, they say, as they pick themselves through branches both thin and trembling. Watch.
He helps them down when they’ve both had enough of being apart from the world. He discovers for himself the bounds of his own skin.
It slowly gets easier.
*
And then Zod calls for him.
*
The zzzzz-whoomp of the World Engine sounds nothing like a heartbeat. The blue light is an incomprehensible hammer banging on the nail’s head that is Earth, attempting to reform and reshape everything that makes their blue marble livable. It’s a jackhammer, magnified, a high-pitched screech against crust and mantle, a deep bone-shaking bass that on impact counterpoints the sound of castles, crumbling beneath a thumb.
Zod hits him.
Clark feels glass and concrete and steel shatter against his back, smells all the detritus of dust and blood and insides torn apart, hears the dying around him and hears the overlapping cries for help from television and radio and phone and people. People praying. There are children, nearby. Bodies that sound old. Bodies that sound crushed. Bodies that—
stop
—and the heartbeat that sounds of wide spaces and caverns, that sounds of safety and home, is racing. It sounds like it’s experiencing a nightmare.
It sounds like it is getting nearer.
The owner of that heartbeat is, to Clark’s horror, in this city. Somewhere below him.
And Zod keeps fighting.
Clark tries all that he knows to de-escalate, time skipping both fast and slow as he works through his options, as he tries to plan.
But it’s hard to plan when Clark never learned how to fight. It’s hard to counter Zod when Zod seems to anticipate him. It’s hard to keep him in his grip when everything he does only seems to exacerbate the damage.
There is a moment, both of them midair, after Clark has been struck, Zod following close behind, and Clark looks around. Destruction is blooming around him. The city is smoking, people are running on the street far below, stonework hang in the air waiting for gravity’s hand, dust billowing around him but far more beneath, and Clark knows there is a building behind him that he doesn’t have the momentum to avoid.
It will fall.
It might even fall on the person with that heartbeat. Clark wouldn’t be able to prevent it.
He can watch and think as much as he wants but there is nothing he can do because the punch has already landed and he can’t react fast enough.
Pandora’s dark box has been opened and he can’t shove anything back in.
Is it ironic that people from a place he might have called home seek to kill him? Clark had been searching for belonging, for home, and here in front of him is Zod, of Krypton. Genetic family. A possibility of connecting both past and future. A ready-made role with people who know him, who could stand with him, who would welcome him with open arms and a purpose.
But Clark could only have it if he lets Zod destroy Earth. And Zod refuses to stop unless Kal-El stops him. Power blasts from the other Kryptonian’s eyes. (around him, a tower breaks.)
The heartbeat is one of many at its base.
Clark has spent years searching. He’d spent so much effort and time and hope on the possibility of finding connection... but, no.
No. Clark thinks as they grapple in the train station. He will not barter his past for his present, he will not throw away the home that took him in for a future that seeks to crush it; no matter how certain the future, no matter how powerful it will make him, no matter the easy belonging it promises.
He sets his weight.
Snaps Zod’s neck.
(he doesn’t know if there’s enough hope left. he feels like a mimic made of poison because—)
A family is alive, near him, but— there are people alive in the station but— there is a city, a planet full of life but—
When the dust settles, when the government comes, when the rescue workers arrive... they lift Zod away from him.
Zod, who is dead. And there are too many quiet places around the city.
Nothing sounds like it will be easy. Clark hears that heartbeat. It’s racing, as if still stuck in a nightmare.
Me too, Clark thinks.
*
The next few days finds himself a bit hollowed out (a displaced seashell, an empty box) that he fills with the minutiae of settling things with the government, and with a new job, and with Lois. He wonders idly what it would’ve been like to meet Lois and know her heart first, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a relief to have a friend who knows all sides of him, a relief to find a city to grow roots in, a relief to know that he can stop searching. He’d been forced to make a choice, so he made one, and now he throws himself into it.
He builds up a life for Clark Kent. And he helps his chosen homeworld as Superman. As he repairs, as the city repairs, the cavern of a heartbeat seems calmer too, in recognition. Or at least it’s not always so frantic.
The heartbeat is nearby, for a given value of nearby when there’s 11 million citizens within city limits. Over 25 million if you count the greater Metro-Gotham megalopolis, one of the densest concentrations of people in the world.
(so loud that it is deafening at times, pure white noise)
But Clark thinks he should get his life in order first. There’s no need to rush this.
And he should figure out how to even say…
Hi, you don’t know me but I know you and have been listening to your heartbeat for years and I know when you sleep and when you’re scared and when you have sex.
You sound great, by the way.
Yeah. Not like that.
And Superman would have to say it, not Clark. Or if Clark says it, he will in the eyes of the other person become Superman by implication, and most people only know of him through what they’re calling now the Black Zero Event.
Clark doesn’t want to be feared.
He’s not even sure what he wants from that person, but he knows what he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to overstep. He doesn’t want to coerce. He doesn’t want to be a burden on whoever’s heartbeat he’s been leaning on all these years, creepily, like a celebrity’s fan. And all of that still doesn’t help him figure out how he should approach this.
I think your heart sounds like a citadel. Do you want to be friends?
Yeah, no.
Clark writes articles and assists in natural disasters and sometimes writes articles about assisting in natural disasters. He finds enough hope left where he’d thought he'd been emptied, watching people rebuild their homes and their lives time and again. Helping them rebuild, where he can. He listens to the strength in that one human heartbeat, in its life as it goes about after Black Zero, and feels humbled. He gets an apartment, watches movies with coworkers, joins in the peanut gallery observing the back-forth between Perry and his red-headed problem child. Clark joins, but declines on betting against Lois, because that’s a sucker’s bet.
Clark works on how to word things.
Thinks about shells and butterflies and caverns and music and—
…okay I know that’s really lyrical but I’m not writing you poetry or anything. I just wanted to meet you. Don’t take this wrong.
Ok, that won’t work either. It sounds like ‘No homo,’ when
- he’s not even sure if his sexuality can even be defined by human terms
- he’s already reconciled that he’s attracted to humanity as a whole
- he’s not even looking for that? really? really. the heartbeat is terribly compelling, sure, beautiful even, but that’s incredibly shallow and not something you could base a relationship on and
- he doesn’t know if the heartbeat even belongs to a man. He’s fairly sure it’s probably a man given his estimation of the size of the heart and the attendant ribcage needed to make the sound but there are always outliers.
Then, too, the person that Clark is not exactly avoiding seems to be having more nightmares. Many of them in the daytime, heartbeat running furious, sounding terribly mortal, merging into the hum of everyone else’s hearts. He’d been able to tell himself that it was probably a natural reaction to Black Zero happening, perhaps latent traumatic effects of that day.
It’s harder to convince himself of that when it coincides with his public appearances. When Clark hears cameras on him, voices that say, Reporting live on the scene we are watching Superman...
And the heartbeat ratchets up like a warsong.
Like Clark is a living nightmare.
How do you approach someone like that? Like someone who would rather cross the street rather than walk on the sidewalk next to you? Like someone who thinks you’d want to hurt them? Like you are their worst fear?
He bleakly watches the protests against himself on TV.
“Clark, honey, I’ve been watching the news.”
Are you alright? hangs in the air that connects two phones.
“How are you Ma?”
“Worried about you, mostly.” She barrels on, “I hope you’re not taking it to heart? Don’t listen to too much of it, y’hear?”
“But I should,” Clark says to steady himself, “I should listen to their concerns.”
“Not all of them I hope,” Martha says, “You know that some people just like to yell.”
“And some people get paid for it.”
“Like so,” she laughs and Clark laughs with her, because he could be considered one of 'those people,' now that he’s a journalist.
She grows quiet. “They don’t know you.”
Clark makes a questioning sound.
“If they knew you, they wouldn’t be afraid.” He could hear her smile over the phone, “You grew up under my nose, and let me say that there’s no part of you that I’m afraid of. I’m so proud of you. They don’t deserve you.”
Clark starts to protest but she just talks right over him.
“It’s the goddamned truth!”
“Love you too, ma.” He says, always a little shocked that she cusses around him now that he’s grown.
They catch up about his work at the Daily Planet and about the new gossip about town, but her words linger.
If they knew you, they wouldn’t be afraid.
And Clark recognizes how afraid he was himself. How making contact with the person who held that heartbeat terrifies him, and that he’d let himself not listen to sounds around it. Because he might discover how else he could be hurt.
Because thinking 'Superman is a nightmare' hurts.
Clark works through his fear in the long taffy of elapsed time.
If Superman could be hurt, would that stop him? Is that all it would take to stop him? Clark thinks, and then Clark knows he can’t let that happen.
If Clark listens, if he tries to understand, he might find a point to touch base with this person, some commonality he could to use to connect with. If he works through his own fear and his own hurt, maybe he could find some way to strike up that needed conversation, past the other's fears, and perhaps a mutual understanding. A friendship.
And Clark is the one who needs to try harder and understand more; because he’s the one with power here, his own fears are not greater than those anyone else on this planet. In fact Superman's capacity to hurt others is far greater than their capacity to hurt him in return.
So, giving brief thanks to the speed that gave him the subjective time to work though his own bullshit, Clark tries to start listening.
*
It’s easier now to listen in on sounds close that heartbeat. Clark’s had more practice using his powers, and specifically in using his powers in and around the cacophony of a city.
The hardest part turns out to be actually finding a moment to spare, in between his duties as a reporter and his duties as Superman and his duties to be decent instead of a creep, when Clark could listen to sounds that might help him find context. Afternoons and sometimes evenings when he’d have the time, Clark would only hear papers rustling or what sounded like typing. Clark usually stops listening only a second or two of this, knowing how much it bothered him when anybody lurks over his shoulder at work.
Whenever he tunes in during the morning, all he hears is generally the quiet breaths and rustles of sleep. Given how often and how late the person sleeps in, Clark had thought it might’ve been a professional athlete but he tries listening during various live sports aired on TV and only rarely did the heartbeat rise. And it never slowed during any breaks or halftimes. The most he hears is the sound of glasses and a weird echo of the TV, as if the other person was somewhere watching as well.
Maybe the weird hours indicates a college student. Or there’s any number of construction workers, police, or random fitness junkies that might be a match.
Or, he thinks in shock one night, that person could be in fight club.
Clark hears fists against flesh, some yelling, bones cracking, a low groan. His hearing snaps back to himself in his surprise. He’d already been uncomfortable because the heartbeat was racing and it’s incredibly rude to listen in on someone’s nightmares. Even more, its incredibly uncomfortable for him to listen to someone in pain without being able to help them. Clark had already been half-ready to shut down his abilities when he’d been startled out of his focus.
Clark stares blankly out his window.
It was a little past midnight.
The person he’d been listening to… is in an underground fighting ring? It would explain the hours and the athleticism needed. Maybe even explain the sound of champagne and sports that he hears earlier in the evenings.
But that would also mean all those nightmares Clark thought he was experiencing as an echo… weren’t nightmares?
Had he been wrong this entire time?
Clark flops over on his mattress.
If the heartbeat is racing only because of exertion, or at least mostly, maybe he wasn’t scared of Clark? Of Superman?
How much more effective could Clark have been on that day, facing Zod, if he’d actually known what to do? Was it even possible to get advice that would work for him? How could Clark even train with a normal human? It would be difficult, maybe absurd.
But then, the owner of that heartbeat wasn’t normal. The rate of it, the sound of it, their resonance, they must be among the most highly trained people in the world; Clark had always known this.
An athlete, he’d thought, but never this type of athlete.
Underground fighting is not polished, not socially condoned, not even with the veneer of respectability given to such things as Vegas MMA or boxing matches. It’s ugly in a way that is hard to look at, in a way Clark didn’t know that he still found things ugly. He didn’t want to believe that the person the heart belonged to would be so crude and unrespectable.
It’s a small-minded thought, Clark realizes eventually as time grows elastic around him.
And feels ashamed of himself.
Who is he to judge how a person gets by? Hadn’t he travelled the world and seen all sorts of situations where a person could fall into ruts, places both city and village where people get lost in the cracks? There are very few people who run into danger, and most of them are the type who are good-hearted people, wishing to help.
Because that heartbeat, during Black Zero Day, had been getting closer. Running towards the disaster instead of running away, despite all its humanity and mortality and fears.
Maybe he ended up getting a job on the scene, Clark thinks excitedly.
The rescue workers were so short handed that day and the days following, that many people pitched in no matter their jobs. Maybe the heartbeat sounds so quick whenever Clark appears because he’d been kept on as a first responder.
And that’s why the next time the heart races, Clark has no problem with listening in, but tries to time it to when the heart is slowing down instead of racing. It’s right after lunch so maybe it’s right after an emergency. Maybe there’d be a debriefing, and Clark can get a better idea of a location and if he’s very lucky maybe a name.
Instead:
A rattle of small objects. Pills, he realizes, recognizing the distinct pop of a prescription bottle. The type of gurgle that sounds like wine.
“Don’t you dare.” The sound of a tray being set down. The chime of china and silverware.
“Alfred?”
“Take that with orange juice.”
“What if I prefer grape?”
“Fermented I suppose.” A sigh, “What if I prefer you stop chasing that early grave, sir.”
“—KENT what did I say about spacing out?”
Clark blinks at Lois, thrown. “Ah, sorry.”
Why would someone working as an EMT or other type of first responder have someone deliver breakfast to them? It can’t have been food delivered to a hospital bed; he would have heard a plastic tray, maybe the beep of machines, not china that sound expensive, not wine bottles.
Maybe the man, and Clark knows it’s a man now by the voice, doesn’t daylight as anything. Does underground fighting really pay that much? The puzzle furrows his forehead even as he goes about his day, hearing all the talk shows dissect Superman, hearing the discussion over the use of power and the need for accountability, and trying to convince Perry that chasing down the Gotham Bat was the necessary and responsible thing to do.
Clark spends long amber moments during the day turning the memory around all its angles, worrying at it. The fondness in the voice while jesting with the man named ‘Alfred’, and the paternal exasperation in how Alfred pushes back, the undercurrent of defeat in the back of both their throats. The clear habit of taking medication with alcohol, and of the presence of alcohol itself, right after waking up.
Was the prescription for an injury? Clark wonders, and presses on that thought repeatedly the way he’s seen people pick at bruises or scabs.
A bit surprised at the pain of it, as if by hurting he could be sure its real.
As if by hurting it could make the hurt less.
What if the prescription was for an ongoing condition? Some of those first responders are still suffering from conditions due to asbestos. Clark thinks that might be worse. Or at least it causes him to be more short of breath. It makes a sharp heartache turn slow and sore.
It’s so easy for the people around him to die.
It could have been so easy, he realizes, for this person to have died during Black Zero. He’d known the guy had been there on the streets. But it’d been one heartbeat of many, and it’d never left his ear. His Ma had pointed the fact out long ago, but the idea hadn’t truly touched him. He'd never truly prepared.
He'd filtered the sounds separately: There was the sound of everybody in the city. There was Zod. And then there was him and the person with that heart.
It hadn’t been a surprise, with Zod finally dead, that the heartbeat survived too. Clark survived, so of course it beat on. Clark was alive, so of course he hears it. And he didn’t even realize that he’d been unconsciously carrying the thought until today.
And the idea of that heart stopping, perhaps even because of him, makes him wheeze as if punched by Zod all over again. He’d always known of the possibility but he’d never felt it. He’d thought he’d been prepared that one horrible month his ma made him stop, but Clark had always known that the sound would be waiting, if he reached for it.
He reaches for it now, and it seems infinitely more precious.
And finding this person seems infinitely more vital.
At night, the heart races again, and Clark waits for it to slow down. This time it slows down exponentially fast, as if rigidly controlled. And when he listens, he hears a voice doubled; one familiar, and the other deeper, metallic, mechanized.
“This way.” Something heavy is pushed open.
“You are sure?” a woman asks.
Clark realized with a start that it's in Cantonese. Both parties were speaking in Cantonese. Clark had picked up the language in his travels.
“Yes, your kidnappers, I’ve stopped them at their other building days ago. The policemen were there and will come. You can wait, or follow me.”
The words were almost gentle. There’s the sound of quiet footsteps, and then many lighter ones after a pause, much more noisy. The sound of a door opening. That metal echo of alleyways funneling street noises. Hushed female whispers.
The particular buzzing sound heard near a large halogen sign.
“They are kind here, and will keep you safe.”
The ‘thank you’s that echo back have a familiar lilt to it even as they fade away.
It’s familiar more to Superman than to Clark. It’s familiar to that heartbeat too, because the beat remains in that same steady rhythm.
It’s familiar, Clark realizes in shock, in panic, because—
“It’s the Bat!” a boy’s voice yells excitedly, Clark’s hearing is jumping around uncontrolled, seeking something understandable, something sane, “Look, Will, look!”
“Shuddup Aaron,” an older voice says, “The guys say he just a boogeyman, he don’t exist.”
“What, ‘cause you scared? Momma says you do nothin’ wrong, he’ll watch over you.”
“Yeah, right, whatever.”
“Will!”
“You’ll understand when you’re older.” A door slams.
“Superman, help!” The shout interrupts his concentration.
The noise around that shout: plaster cracking and wood giving away. The rumble of an earthquake, screams, objects falling.
Widening his scope: We are just getting news of this, there has been a magnitude 6.5 earthquake in Los Angeles…
Clark shakes himself loose from his thoughts and goes to help. Tries, that is.
Tries to focus (tries to help). He is still too late to be able to save some people, especially those in buildings that aren’t up to code, fragile and dangerous, projects and apartments rented three families deep. The poorer communities tend to live in them and many didn’t survive the initial quake.
In the morning, on talk shows, “Why didn’t Superman focus equally on all neighborhoods?”
On blogs, ‘Map of Superman sightings, overlaid with the 2010 census’.
On Twitter: SUPERMAN IS A RACIST ASSHOLE #notmysavior
There has to be a better way. Superman can only help with the immediate crises. He can’t help with long term problems, systemic abuses.
But Clark Kent can.
“This Bat vigilante has been consistently targeting the port and the adjacent projects and tenements,” he argues that same morning.
But gets his story pitch shot down.
Perry speaks and Clark knows that’s not all of it.
They’re arguing past each other. Perry is dealing with the newspaper’s bottomline and Clark—
Clark is still reeling, he wants to punch something; the heartbeat Clark has been attuned to is the Bat vigilante’s. The person with that heart that he grounds himself on is causing fear, on purpose, when Clark would give everything to only give hope.
The Bat must be insane, there must be something wrong with him.
(does that make him a monarch or a viceroy? the poison or the mimic?)
Is this his line in the sand? Is this too crude, too unsavory, too ugly for him to take? (to be? to relate to?) Enough to make Clark stop listening, make him stop being enthralled by that heartbeat? He thinks about how quickly he latched onto the idea of the guy being an EMT instead of working in an underground ring, thinks of how he was more willing to consider that the prescriptions were for physical injuries than pills for a psychological condition.
Clark didn’t know he still carried this in himself.
Clark had been so desperate for some sort of connection, to get him to listen, that he’d let Zod get away with all that destruction— so what sort of heart could be one to match Clark's?
What sort of heart belongs to Batman?
‘...how could he decide which lives count, and which do not,’ asked the woman from Nairomi.
‘...to have an individual engaging in the state level interventions should give us all pause,’ said the senator.
‘...thank you.’ He remembers the women, Cantonese and cautious, saying.
He knows now that those words must be a rare occurrence because people still don’t catch sight of the the Gotham Bat often enough to disprove that he is a myth. Despite two decades worth of rumor, several years of which in the age of social media, not many have a confirmed sighting or a clear video. Thus, logically, not many to ever get a chance to say thanks. Even if enough people know so that good people feel safer.
Enough to make criminals afraid.
Maybe enough so that good people don’t turn criminal even though they’ve fallen through the cracks of the world. (the Wills, the Aarons)
Clark’s still thinking about this as he arrives at the library benefit at Luthor’s mansion. About strange awful symmetries, and the limits of governments and law and police. About the problems they might or might not solve, and brands on sex traffickers, what hides as truth and what could be justice and how Clark has relied so much for so many years on a sound that’s—
coming closer.
A car drives up, slows, and paparazzi light bloom like so many explosions. Time slows down but Clark can do nothing to stop it. A man exits from his black box of a car and Clark has the crazy urge to close that door before he could get out.
“Who’s that?”
Clark knows him to be the Bat. He knows him by his heartbeat. He feel his own heart speeding up at the proximity and when he looks at him it’s like snapshots, like layers. Fine fabrics and expensive metals, small blades tucked away in shoes, tiny screwdriver and pliers in his watch, and electronics at wrist and ear and belt.
Something of a James Bond, Clark thinks wryly, except Bond never had so many fractures or contusions in so many stages of healing. Never so many scars. And Bond was never built so much like a brick wall; which is when he takes in Bruce’s skin as a whole, and then drags his sight away before his face can get any more hot.
He is, and it is a wild shock, more attractive than Clark expected. Clark breathes in, shuts his x-ray away. (Clothed, the vigilante is somehow smaller. Or is it more contained?)
“—that is Bruce Wayne.”
And now Clark knows him by name. It doesn’t help. His thoughts unravel like a trainwreck, more unstoppable than a locomotive.
The Prince of Gotham, everyone knows because everyone else knows, is a feckless playboy and worse than a Kardashian. Careless and insulting and with someone new on his arm daily, saved only by his philanthropy. Which he uses for tax breaks. An unreliable owner and CEO, more wealth than brains, an adrenaline junkie despite multiple extreme injuries at whatever new sport he decides to fail at—
Clarks can’t unsee the array of lacerations and bullet wounds that give lie to the tale, nor the pattern of healed fractures that can’t be explained away. He remembers all the bruising he’d glimpsed. He remembers the pills. He thinks about how incredibly mortal this human is. And the hours required if a man, without powers like Clark’s, were to do all the things he’s read the Gotham Bat to have done.
The heart capacity required to be a vigilante.
To help despite the media hating you. Despite thanks given so rarely. Despite nightmares, and waking up from them.
Clark thinks about the Wayne family history.
He thinks also about those times that heart sang and how it doesn’t come close to the frequency of sex the playboy Wayne is perceived as having, unless the sex he'd been having had been singularly and consistently shitty.
He watches Bruce Wayne greet an acquaintance by the door, a model perhaps, in a low-cut sapphire dress. She’s all but falling out of it as she presses her chest against the billionaire’s arm. Clark sees him leer at her and sees him peer down her cleavage, sees his eyes crinkle and sees him lean down to whisper something into her ear, as she smirks.
The heartbeat is unmoved. Its orchestra rolls on, detached from events as if its owner was stationed elsewhere, steady and sonorous.
Clark hears it stay that way even as the man gladhands his way through the entrance hall while everyone waited for the speeches to start. The rich and the glitterati turn towards Bruce Wayne as if iron filings to a lodestone. There were all kinds, senators and old money and Fortune 500’s. And there were the athletes and celebrities and models and socialites that came as plus ones and who shamelessly threw themselves at the billionaire, no matter whose arm they were originally attached to. Hell, at times both try; there were three offers for a threesome before he made it past the atrium.
But no matter their type or gender or offer and no matter the degree Wayne flirts, no matter how much they touch him and how much he touches back, his heart stays lazy. Clark would think that he’s identified the man wrong except for how absolutely certain he is of the heart, the voice, the sound of his lungs.
He is even more certain when he hears the name ‘Alfred’. And when Bruce Wayne moves, Clark could only follow.
Because that heart? It’s moving just a little faster now. He goes down stairs, past a kitchen, dimly recognizes a wall of servers because this is as near to that sound as he’s ever been and Clark is so close now that he feels like he could pretty much touch the heartbeat.
It jumps.
It jumps both in his ear, and beneath his thumb.
Clark is staring down blankly at a wrist, trapped in his hand somehow, his thumb right on that large vein. The heartbeat starts to run, and he rubs his thumb gently along it, which is when it starts to sing.
“Well who might you be?"
Clark lets go at the saccharine tone. Darts his gaze up, flushing. Bruce Wayne’s gaze meets his, eyes dissecting and dark in contrast to the playboy leer. He wonders how many people fall for the smile that didn’t reach his eyes and fall for the voice that hides that darkness. (sings like a knife's edge, like a warsong)
“Now, there’s no need for that, son.” He reaches for Clark’s press pass and reels him in with a tug on his lanyard. “'Clark Kent, Daily Planet,’” he reads, “I didn’t see you come in.”
“I,” Clark breathes in. This was nothing like any of his plans for how this would go if they'd ever meet. The air turns sticky and sound falls away. If he moves now, even at superspeed, Bruce will feel the tug on the lanyard. This close Bruce would feel the air displacement. His clothes would rustle. This man is the Gotham Bat and he has to already suspect; Clark has surprised him already by grabbing at his wrist, a man who is used to fighting and used to people grabbing at him.
Bruce’s pulse had jumped at that moment.
Maybe Clark has already given his speed away. He doesn’t remember. The dust motes hang in the air and Clark looks past them and looks at the man’s eyes. They’re dilated. Each microexpression in those picoseconds is broken up by false placidness; the struggle of a mask attempting to stay on.
Behind it, breaking through: fear, awe, lust. Moment by moment, cycling as if simultaneous. Or indecisive.
It’s already too late. Bruce already knows.
Clark doesn’t want the fear; it may dog the Bat’s heels, it may be a bedmate of Gotham and thus of its Prince, but Clark has had more than enough of it these past months. Clark also has enough of awe, enough of people looking towards him for answers and solutions that he only has so much capacity to provide. He doesn’t want awe from someone that he wishes to be a friend.
But it’s not so much that Clark is backed into the choice so much as he lets himself choose something he’d decided probably years ago, that his mother had already seen before he’d left home, before he’d let himself know consciously.
Alright then, Clark gives himself over to the song of that heartbeat, and lets that heart pace his own. With how hard this man lives, time is precious, each beat of it.
He reaches up with both hands and lets fingertips rest at Bruce’s throat where that heartbeat thrums harder, as if reaching back, or trying to strike him. Smooths across the veins gently enough to feel the pulse and lets their connection roll across his senses. Cologne, applied at the neck, skin-warms and unfurls into Bruce’s scent; his smell as complex and subtle as the way life moves in the rooms of this man’s heart.
Clark exhales, shuddery, “It’s better hearing it up close.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Bruce murmurs, eyes a shock of black, all pupil, breaths controlled but lungs trembling with holding it level.
Clark can hear everything.
But especially that heartbeat in the cup of his hands. He lets one palm fall, drifting down closer to the sound so that he can splay all five fingers across the breadth of Bruce’s chest, beneath where the muscle works. A hand catches his wrist but doesn’t move him.
The pulse races faster as he presses careful, careful.
Taps a hello.
Clark glances up and lets himself be measured.
“...really?”
Clark nods, relieved that Bruce gets it, that he understands. “I didn’t know who you were. Not by the sound.”
“You didn’t know how to find me?” Bruce looks down, visibly discomforted. He stares as he lifts Clark’s hand from his chest, using the lightest of pressure from his fingertips to guide it away. He stares at their hands for a long, astonished moment, “you were searching for me, Clark?”
“...yeah, for years.”
Clark can see the moment Bruce realizes that he’s containing Superman with that touch as thoroughly as if he’d been pinning him down. Even more so, considering.
His heartbeat is singing. Clark’s own sings too. Flushed, overheated, overwhelmed, he looks back and sees Bruce registering it all, naked on Clark’s face.
Bruce inhales sharply.
“Speaking of time: may I say, before this goes much further and I run out of libations, that the download is complete.”
It’s like being hosed down with ice water. The voice from the earpiece is drier than a single malt.
“Oh! Sorry, um, Alfred, is it?” Clark hazards.
There’s a pointed silence.
“...Mr. Kent—”
“Mr. Wayne?” Lex’s assistant interrupts from the doorway. “This area is off limits to guests. I will have to ask you to leave.” Her voice is firm and her face set in the particular manner people have of walking in on things that are Entirely Too Much Information.
It’s a face that 'Bruce Wayne' seems very familiar with, as Bruce goes full-playboy in response, “Could you be a sweetheart and give us, say, fifteen minutes?”
Clark’s mortified and steals a glance over his shoulder.
Her eyes narrow.
Bruce’s hand slides around to the small of Clark’s back and tugs him in. “Ten,” he bargains with sleaze in his voice. “Look at him, we can make it in ten.”
Clark chokes.
“Now, Mr. Wayne.”
“Aw,” Bruce steps forward and turns them around so that Clark’s back was against the servers and he's hidden from the assistant, “Raincheck?”
Clark kind of wants the ground to swallow him whole but notices with the new angle that there’s a small device dangling on a cable. It's display is zero’d out.
‘Transfer complete.’
Bruce twitches as if he wants to reach for it, but the asian woman in the terrifying heels is taking one step into the room, clearing her throat pointedly. There’s no chance to do anything. Clark doesn't have a good angle to grab it either, not without being seen. Bruce whisks them all from the room, seeming to be trying to hide the sight of Clark from her gaze as he sets himself between them.
There’s a tenseness about the line of Bruce’s back and Alfred’s voice confirms it.
“A gallant effort, certainly, to retrieve the leech if that was your Plan B. Dare I hope you have a Plan C?”
Clark tugs them to a stop in the kitchen to help stall, asking for a drink, but all the waitstaff’s distracted by the TV.
There’s a fire in Juarez.
A girl is trapped in the building on the upper floors but the ceiling is made of wood, and on fire, weakened. They can’t land a rescue team. All the stairs have collapsed. Residents and firefighters and media alike stare at where she’s waving from a window and there’s the horror in the realization that there’s nothing anyone can do except to watch her burn.
Clark is torn, they still have to get Bruce’s leech.
It’s probably fairly vital if the Bat is willing to stall and if Alfred spoke up. Clark had interrupted them at their task, and they’d probably have gotten away with it if Clark hadn’t followed. He tightens his fingers around Bruce’s and he glances back at Lex’s assistant, who is stationed by the door to the server room still, watching them like a hawk.
50/50 chance she suspects something.
On the news, reporter’s voices are leashed under professionalism.
The anchors coldly review the information they have. It’s not clear if they maintain the cameras on the trapped girl out of respect rather than their own self-interest. She seems to be trying to shout her last words to her family. Clark is not sure if they will turn the cameras away as she dies. Death by fire is the worst; the screams are the worst. He can’t watch this.
Clark looks to Bruce.
Bruce is already glancing at him. Then he nods at the TV.
Go, Bruce mouths like he understands.
And of course he does, that solid steady heart. Clark keeps his smile inside himself but feels his whole face light up. He releases Bruce’s hand and walks out of the room.
Bruce watches him go, a side-eye.
“I need some air,” Clark tells him, Lex’s assistant in his peripheral vision. "Um, I..."
Bruce snorts, visibly feigning that it doesn’t matter, and lifts a champagne flute from a tray. He’s turning back towards the screen in the same motion, a clear dismissal. Don't call me, a clear command for anyone who could read the air.
To an outside observer, it wouldn’t be surprising if Clark made himself scarce for the rest of the night, after such a brush off. It reads like it's an assignation that turned awkward.
But they understand each other. As Clark walks up the stairs, out of the mansion, and speeds towards the fire, he knows he doesn’t have to wonder at Bruce’s look just as he knows Bruce won’t wonder at his words.
Both of their hearts sound light.