Chapter Text
Clark wakes up to the curious, sinking feeling that he’s overslept. Was it Saturday? Did his mom come in and pull the blinds shut? But then his vision sharpens from sleep to full consciousness, and something becomes immediately, terrifyingly clear:
This is not his bedroom.
It’s dingy, the tiny window on the left offering a beautiful view of another brick wall, with barely enough room for his own bed. Nothing in it looks familiar save for a framed photo of his parents on the nightstand.
Panic surges through him, fingers tightening on the bedsheets until they punch holes through the fabric.
The last thing he remembers is falling asleep in his bed, reading through Romeo and Juliet, and wondering how he was going to navigate going to the dance with Chloe while keeping the weirdness out of their friendship.
Was he kidnapped? But he’s not tied up. He doesn’t feel drugged, either, so they must not care if he gets loose. Maybe they realized it’s pointless to try, but then how did they kidnap him in the first place?
God, his parents are going to freak . His dad is going to homeschool him in the barn and he’s never going to be allowed to leave the farm again—
Something chimes and buzzes next to him. Clark jerks from the bed and hits the opposite wall, sending a spider’s web of hairline fractures on the plaster from the back of his head. The noise comes from a glowing rectangle nestled in the sheets on the other side of the bed. Clark slowly peers over and sees Lois Lane flash up on the screen for several seconds before the rectangle goes dark.
Several agonizing seconds pass, but no one comes to the door to check on him, so Clark starts to explore the room. The rectangle glows again, Lois Lane flashing like a signal light, and Clark stashes it under the pillow. It looks sort of like a miniature TV, but he’s learned from Lex not to touch technology he doesn’t understand because it’s expensive and fragile and things tend to break in Clark’s hands.
The closet is full of men’s clothes: dress shirts and slacks that remind him powerfully of Lex’s wardrobe save for the fact that all the labels are from stores at the mall and not whatever bespoke designer in London that Lex ships his clothes from. Squeezed in the back of the closet, almost like an afterthought, are the jeans and cotton shirts Clark is used to wearing.
He recognizes the Smallville high logo on one bright red shirt, but the writing on the back says Class of 2005. He’s never owned a shirt like that. The seniors don’t get them until the year they graduate.
Outside the door is a tiny hallway that opens up to a combined living room and kitchen. The only other door in the hallway opens to a bathroom. All in all, the entire apartment could fit in the bottom floor of the barn with room to spare. And even though he’s never been here in his life, it feels oddly familiar. The couch, rug, and trunk from the loft sit in the living room, along with the desk and lava lamp from his bedroom.
But there’s no phone anywhere.
An eerie feeling grips him, makes his spine shudder. It’s like someone constructed a TV set of a place where he could live in the future. Because this is definitely an adult’s space. His backpack, textbooks, school supplies are all absent, not to mention any sign of his parents whatsoever besides the occasional photograph on the fridge.
Well, if whoever was stupid enough to kidnap him has left him free roam of the place then there’s nothing stopping him from running away. He should go home, check on his parents, and then straight to Lex, because if anyone had the power to deal with whatever the hell this was, it would be him.
Something pounds on the front door, loud enough to make Clark jump. He takes a sharp breath, steels himself.
“Clark? Hello? Are you still asleep ?”
A woman’s voice he does not recognize speaks through the wood, and then the next thing he knows keys jingle and the door swings open. An older woman in a dark ponytail, smart business suit, and a pissed-off expression steps inside with the kind of entitlement that would make his mother cringe.
“What the hell , Clark! I called you like three times!” she says, eyes narrowed. “I waited over twenty minutes at the subway! It’s eight-fucking-thirty in the morning, and you’re still in your boxers . I thought you didn’t get sick.”
The eerie feeling returns, that sense of familiarity he shouldn’t have. Because he doesn’t know this woman from Adam, but she knows him . Well enough to chew him out, at least. Well enough to think they have a routine together, to know his name. To have a key to this apartment.
“Where am I and who are you?” he demands.
She stares at him, her gaze hawk-like and frankly kind of scary. Like Chloe on steroids.
“We’re at the North Pole and I’m Santa Claus — what the hell kind of questions are those?” She snaps her fingers. “Get dressed, get moving, and hopefully Perry won’t fire us for being almost an hour late!”
“I’m not doing anything until you tell me what’s going on!” he says, starting to feel the panic crawl up his throat.
The woman stares at him again, but this time her eyes flit over him as if taking careful inventory, as if she had the x-ray vision. Worry starts to drag the lines of her brow.
“My name is Lois Lane,” she says slowly, “ and you are in your apartment in Metropolis.”
Metropolis ?
“Clark . . . can you tell me the year and the president?”
Her worry makes his own throat tighten. “It’s two thousand two and, um, Bush?”
Lois closes her eyes.
“Shit. Shit .”
So it’s not 2002, it’s 2017. And he’s not fifteen, he’s thirty. And Lois isn’t a random woman, she’s his ex-girlfriend and current coworker.
Oh, and apparently he works for the Daily Planet, uses his powers in public now in a costume, and calls himself Superman.
Clark sits on the edge of the couch, unable to tear his eyes from the date on the bottom ticker of the Metropolis News Network channel — April thirtieth, twenty seventeen. Lois makes several phone calls in the hallway, one of which is to the editor in chief at the Planet and Clark’s boss.
Clark has work. Clark has a job he’s supposed to know how to do. The panic hitches up a notch, and it gets harder to swallow it back down.
What happened? How does someone fall asleep as a teenager and wake up fifteen years later? People in movies hit their heads and forget stuff, but that’s not supposed to happen to Clark.
His mind feels like he shoved it into the woodchipper.
“Okay, so here’s the thing,” says the woman — Lois — leaning in the doorway. “Your mom is in London and Chloe’s with Ollie in Singapore, and I can’t get a hold of either of them right now. J’onn is off planet so no one can reach him. But I did get a hold of Bruce, and he’s gonna be here in an hour, so you might want to, like, put some pants on.”
Clark looks down and realizes, for the first time, that he’s still barefoot in his boxers. His ears get hot, and he can feel the flush work its way up his neck.
“Oh! Oh my God. I’m so sorry!” He jerks to his feet, hands clenched in front of his crotch.
Which is stupid because she’s his ex which means she must have seen something at least and—
Clark swallows back a wave of dizziness.
“Why are you sorry?” Lois cocks her head. “Wait, are you a virgin at sixteen?”
A wicked grin crosses her face, but it's also so full of fondness and love and a whiff of something unhinged, and it scares the shit out of him because he doesn’t know anything about her except her name.
She doesn’t let him answer that, but the smirk says she doesn’t need to.
“Were you also this slow at sixteen?” she asks. “Did the super speed not come till later?”
It’s so ingrained in him to lie, to keep his mouth shut, to cover his secret with his body like it’s a grenade, that a lightning strike of panic hits his gut at such a casual mention of it. And yet she doesn’t seem phased by it in the slightest.
“No,” he says faintly. “I have it.”
“Well chop chop, Smallville,” she says with a clap of her hands. “I’ll be in the kitchen, giving the virgin some privacy.”
She heads to the coffee pot on the counter, her back pointedly at him, so Clark can shuffle back to the bedroom — his bedroom — and shut the door firmly behind him. In three seconds he has on a pair of jeans and the Smallville Class of 2005 t-shirt and then spends the next minute and a half sitting on the edge of the bed, trying not to have a massive freak out.
He’s only had one before — on the river bank after he saved Lex. It had hit him with the velocity of that stupid Porsche that he was supposed to be dead. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe and then blackness ate at his vision and Lex had to catch him from collapsing onto the beach. And then, while they waited for paramedics, Lex had talked him through it with a calm hand on his back.
Clark would give anything to have Lex next to him with a hand on his back right now.
In fact—
“Lois?” he calls as he steps into the hallway again.
She’s measuring coffee grounds into the filter with what looks like a serving spoon. “Yeah?”
“Where’s the phone? I need to call someone.”
“ . . . Who?” she asks, instantly suspicious.
A lick of frustration hits him. “Does it matter? It’s a friend of mine. I think he could help me.”
“He?”
“His name is Lex.”
Her hand jerks, and coffee grounds scatter like glitter all over the counter.
“Shit! Lex— Lex is a bad idea,” she says, dropping the spoon and trying to scoop the grounds into her hand. Half spill onto the floor, causing her to curse again.
“Why?” he asks slowly.
That’s what everybody says, and some days Clark almost believes it but— Lex has always come through for him, has always tried to help him. No matter what was happening, no matter how many times Clark denied it.
“He’s— busy!” Lois yanks a paper towel off the roll and wets it in the sink. “You know Luthor, he’s got a million fires in the iron.”
“Irons in the fire,” Clark corrects.
“Whatever. I tried him earlier, and he didn’t pick up so . . .”
“You have Lex’s number?”
Doubt starts to creep in. Lex carries two phones — one for business and one for personal. And only three people have his personal cell number, and two of them are Kents.
“You didn’t mention calling him earlier,” Clark adds.
Lois bends down and starts mopping up the coffee grounds on the floor rather than answer him. Which tells him all he needs to know.
“You’re lying to me.”
Lois sighs and then drops her head. “Look, the thing with you and Luthor is complicated, okay?”
“Complicated? He’s my best friend. How is it complicated ?”
“Whatever you think he is . . . he’s not that person anymore.”
Dread starts to sink in him like a stone. “What do you mean?”
“It’s too long and complicated to explain right now.” Lois drops the paper towel and coffee grounds into the trash before leaning against the counter to consider him. “I’ll show you how to work a cellphone if you promise that you won’t call anyone until at least Bruce gets here and explains some things.”
Two stubborn gazes clash over the formica table, and Clark has a funny feeling he’s argued with this woman a lot.
“Fine,” he grounds out because, well, he knows nothing and she’s holding all the cards anyway. “Who the hell is Bruce, anyway?”
His mother would smack him for his language, but apparently his parents are in London.
“He’s a friend. A, um, special friend. You’ve known him for a few years now.”
“Special friend? How is he special? Is he . . . like a boyfriend,” Clark finishes in a whisper.
It still feels illegal to even say that kind of thing. Just being attracted to a boy would earn you both social suicide and an ass beating in school. Which is why Clark kept his mouth firmly shut and kept his lingering stares at Lex out of the public eye. But dating one? Was this normal in the future, or did Clark lose his freaking mind as an adult? Is this why he and Lois broke up? Shit, what do his parents think about that ?
“No!” Lois cackles. “ God , no. He fights bad guys. Like you, except only in Gotham. He’s got his own . . . thing that he dresses up as, secret identity, the whole shabang.”
Relief breaks open inside him. Just being around one stranger who has known him intimately feels uncomfortable. And neither of them are Lana, which is just . . . all kinds of depressing to think about.
“Does Bruce have powers?” he asks with a sudden hope. “How— how much of me is he like?”
What if he isn’t the only alien? What if there are more? What if other spaceships fell around the earth and he just never found out because he lives in “bumfuck” Kansas? Joy starts to flood inside him, thudding in his chest, almost identical to the panic.
Lois’s face softens, and her arm jerks towards him, as if reaching out to touch him, before tucking it back to her side.
“He’s not an alien, Clark. And he doesn’t have any powers, though you’d think he did since he seems to just fucking know everything. And he never tells me his sources,” Lois adds, grumbling.
“Oh.” The joy deflates, a popped balloon. “Wait, you know I’m an alien?”
“Yeah.”
“And you . . . you still dated me?”
The smile that breaks over her face holds none of the previous mischief. It’s just soft.
“Yeah. Crazy huh?”
“Yeah,” he agrees faintly. “ . . . Was it why we broke up?”
A flash of pain crosses her face before she buries it. “No! No, we were just too different in other ways. Believe it or not we were friends for a long time before, and it's just easier to go back to that.”
“I just . . . can’t believe I even had a girlfriend. I’m kind of a . . . dork in high school.”
Another wicked smile. He’s starting to see why he might have wanted something more with her. “Oh, I’m well aware, Clark. Well aware.”
They sit on the couch while Lois shows him the joys of the magic rectangle that had glowed and buzzed that morning. It makes Lex’s top-of-the-line cellphones look like cringy old Star Trek tech. She pulls up a website called Youtube and shows him video after video of cats or stand up comedy or old music or clips of TV shows. It’s endless. And it all works by just touching it with your finger. There are no buttons.
Lex would shit himself.
Eventually her own cell buzzes, and she pulls it out to check.
“It’s go time, Smallville. That’s Bruce. We’re gonna meet him at his office.”
Metropolis is so noisy . He’s been here barely a handful of times, and each time the sheer amount of activity is overwhelming. Lois ends up holding his hand because he tends to careen around like a tranquilized grizzly bear (Lois’s words), tugging him expertly between people at a pace that he has trouble keeping up with despite her much shorter legs.
Eventually they stop at a gleaming tower with Wayne Enterprises emblazoned at the top.
“Bruce Wayne Bruce?” Clark hisses.
He’s heard the name from Lex, who drops it with begrudging, resentful respect.
“Yeah. Keep your mouth shut about it.”
Fingers still gripping tight, Lois pulls him into the building and towards an elevator with all the confidence of someone who actually worked here. Once inside, she pulls down a number pad, punches in something long and complicated looking, and the elevator shutters to a start.
But it doesn’t go up. It goes down.
It goes way down.
“Where does this thing stop?” Clark asks. “The underworld?”
Lois snorts. “You’re not that far off.”
The elevator opens to a beautiful, wood paneled hallway similar to Lex’s mansion, sans stained glass. Only the absence of windows at all indicates they are underground. Lois guides him past two doors before ducking into a third, as if she’s been here many times before.
The room is lit with dim lanterns that make the stone walls glow. A desk and a computer — with three monitors and sleeker than anything he’s ever seen — sit off to the right. Dark leather couches dominate the left. And in the back — a hospital bed?
“What is all this?” he asks, the hair on the back of his neck standing up.
“It’s just a recovery room,” says a deep voice behind him.
Clark jumps nearly out of his skin. He whirls around, glaring at the slighter man behind him. He’s also dressed like Lex, in an impeccable, unbearably expensive black dress shirt and slacks. His dark hair is swept back, tiny streaks of gray at his temples. Brown eyes look at Clark like they have their own x-ray vision.
“Clark,” he says with a nod. “Do you know who I am?”
“I can guess,” Clark says slowly. “You’re Bruce Wayne? Like the Bruce Wayne? Lex talks about you sometimes. I can’t really tell if he hates you or respects you. Maybe it’s both.”
Bruce’s eyes dip over Clark’s shoulder to meet with Lois.
It’s not a look that bodes well.
“ No! ”
The rejection is immediate, a donkey kick of an instinct, and so loud that it makes Bruce blink in surprise.
“Clark, it’s perfectly safe,” he explains slowly. “You’ve been there before — at your request, I might add.”
“No doctors, no labs,” Clark insists. “No experiments.”
“You’re not an experiment,” Lois says softly, a hand on his shoulder. “But if you don’t remember anything from the last fifteen years, something is wrong and we have to find out what it is.”
“At the very least I’d like to scan for head trauma, if nothing else,” Bruce adds.
It’s like his parents’ every nightmare come true. It doesn’t matter that these people know him and his secret, that they have no knowledge to gain from anything. The fear chokes out all rationality and leaves him with one thought only: the second he steps into a lab, he’s never going to step back out.
“I don’t have head trauma ,” Clark says mulishly.
“As far as you know, which is nothing from the last decade and a half .”
“Bruce . . . we might need to wait for J’onn,” Lois says.
“Who is John ?” Clark snaps. “You want me to trust you yet you won’t tell me anything. My parents are in London — where’s your proof for that? My father hasn’t taken so much as a sick day in twelve years. You think he would just leave the farm for a jaunt across the ocean? How could we have even paid for it?”
He nudges Lois’s arm from his shoulder and steps back from the both of them.
“And where’s Pete? Where’s Lana? What happened to Lex? Apparently I shouldn’t talk to him, and it’s really freaking convenient that all the people I would actually recognize are unavailable to me, isn’t it? I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about either of you, and you think I’m just going to follow you to some hospital, some secret lab, to look for head trauma. ”
Bruce gives him an unimpressed stare, as if waiting for a toddler to be done with his tantrum.
“You want answers?” he asks. “I’ll give you answers. Martha Kent is in London because she’s a senator for Kansas and she flew in for a summit. Jonathan Kent died of a heart attack in 2006. Peter Ross lives in New Jersey and has since 2003. Lana Lang does charity work in various countries in Africa, currently in Ghana. And Lex Luthor has succeeded his father in money, power, and sociopathic tendencies. He is your most dangerous enemy, he’s tried to kill you multiple times, and he has no memory of your friendship together in Smallville when you were a child.”
Each answer hits Clark like a meteor rock, a shockwave of impact detonating in his chest, over and over again. None of them make any sense. His dad is not dead . His mother would never leave the farm to be a senator. Why would Pete move away to New Jersey, and Lex—
“That can’t be true,” he says, staggering back. “None of that can be true.”
“Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s false.”
The denial curls like a fist in his gut, a hard pit that makes him want to throw up. He does the only thing that makes sense to him in that moment:
He runs back home.
The barn is empty. There’s no tractor, no mangled woodchipper his father has yet to disassemble. None of Clark’s furniture in the loft. The farmhouse itself looks like a staged museum piece — all the furniture neat and clean and unlived in. There’s no food in the cupboard or fridge, no laundry hanging out to dry. No cows or crops in the fields. It’s like a ghost town. Clark zips through the property and then town with his speed and then walks through it again the slow way, taking everything in.
He takes out the cellphone with shaking hands, standing in the living room, and dials a number he only recently learned to memorize.
Someone picks up on the third ring.
“Who is this and how did you get this number?”
Lex’s voice is a wall of cold suspicion, but it’s familiar , and Clark’s knees nearly buckle in relief.
“Lex? Oh thank God . Lex, it’s Clark.”
“Clark . . . Clark Kent ?”
Lex spits his name out the way Clark spit out caviar in the trash after Lex dared him to try some.
“Do you know any other Clarks? Look, I— something really weird is happening, and I need to see you—”
“ How did you get this number ?”
“I— You gave it to me?” Clark stutters.
Lex sounds pissed — beyond pissed actually. Anger that has slid into cold, hard rage that burns through the telephone lines. Like Clark had committed the ultimate sin just by calling.
“Don’t ever call this number again,” Lex hisses. “Do I make myself clear?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer — just hangs up with a click.
Clark stands in numb disbelief for a long moment. And when he looks up, his eyes finally catch a new photo on the mantel: a framed memorial picture of Jonathan Kent, along with the program of his funeral.
A dark figure cuts through the graveyard, expensive suit like a stain among the golden grass and glittering shadows of the trees. Clark can’t even muster the energy to groan at the sight of Bruce Wayne making a bee line towards him. The marble of his dad’s tombstone is a warm embrace against his back.
He expects a lecture — Bruce looks the lecturing type, all dark eyes and gruff voice, the kind that would tell you pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get a move on. Or a speech on not running out on your responsibilities.
Instead Bruce sits down on the grass next to him and leans his head back on the marble.
“I made a mistake,” he says.
“I asked you to tell me and you told me,” Clark says tonelessly. His hand picks at the grass next to him, wearing out a bald patch in the dirt. “Not that you could keep it from me. I would have come here and learned it anyway.”
“It’s not that I told you. It’s the way that I told you.”
Clark snorts. “My dad died . There’s no way to break that to me gently .”
A beat of silence.
“I could have tried. I’m not good at gentle, and you’ve never needed it from me. But . . . an attempt could have been made.”
“Thanks. I guess.”
Martha Kent would be appalled at the flat tone in Clark’s voice. Bruce doesn’t seem like someone used to making apologies so Clark should show more grace. But Clark doesn’t feel grace or compassion or gratitude. He just feels . . . empty.
“I lost my parents as a child,” says Bruce quietly. “I know it hurts.”
Clark can practically hear the unwarranted advice before it happens. Like every ineffectual guidance counselor in school. “But I can’t let that stop me from my responsibilities, right? Life moves on and you have to move on with it. It's what he would have wanted for me. Blah blah blah.”
“No. It just hurts.”
Underneath the stark delivery is a thread of raw pain. It reaches out and twists around Clark, this awful brotherhood that people shouldn’t have to share.
“I’m sorry,” he offers, tilting his head to the side to look at Bruce.
Bruce keeps his gaze locked on a tree several feet away. “So am I. It’s not a feeling you should know at fifteen.”
The sun starts to dip lower on the horizon, and Bruce makes no motion to leave. He’d probably wait all night if Clark made him, grass stains on his pants be damned. Clark could run away again, but he has a funny feeling that Bruce would find him, no matter where he went.
“So what now? I go back and get strung up in your lab?”
“Strung up in my lab,” Bruce repeats with a raised brow. “What am I going to sedate you with? Needles break in your skin and you can hold your breath for over a month.”
“I can do what ?”
“Not to mention that no material made on Earth can hold you down, and I don’t have enough Kryptonite to strap you to a table.”
“What’s Kryptonite?”
That does get his attention. Bruce stares at him for a long moment before sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose. Clark thinks he catches a softly muttered “Jesus Christ” under his breath.
“There’s something really wrong with me, isn’t there?” It’s not a question Clark wants to admit to, but . . . nothing that’s happened today has made any sense .
“What was your first clue, Kent?”
“I don’t know. I guess . . . It just kind of felt like a bad dream.”
“ . . . I suppose I’d want to believe that too.”
“What would you be doing . . . if I went back with you?”
“I would like to check you over for signs of concussion and run an MRI, then take a sample of blood through a tox screen as a precaution. Other tests would depend on those results.”
“Doctor things,” Clark says.
Not scientist things. Not Lock Him In A Lab Forever Things.
“Doctor things,” Bruce confirms. “Which, I repeat, is a liberty you have allowed me to take before.”
Clark nods. “Alright. I’ll . . . I’ll go back with you.”
Bruce stands to his feet in one graceful motion before holding out a hand for Clark. As calloused fingers wrap around his wrist, he has a funny feeling that they have done this sort of thing a lot.
Bruce leads him back to the helicopter parked in Shooter’s hay field nearby, navigating through the trees as if he’s the one who lived here all his life. At the sight of it, crouched like a crow or maybe an oversized bat, Clark’s heart locks up in his throat and his feet stall out.
This does not go unnoticed by Bruce, who stops and looks behind his shoulder with faint impatience.
“Sorry,” Clark says, flushing. “I . . . I don’t do so well with heights.”
A quirk of an eyebrow, barely a fraction of movement. “You’re kidding me.”
Clark gives a helpless shrug. “It’s not very heroic, I know.”
Bruce gives him an inscrutable look. Well, most of his expressions so far have been inscrutable. “You can meet me back at Wayne Tower. If you like.”
The offer tempts Clark, but pride keeps him from accepting it. It’s a helicopter ride, not skydiving. Lex did it all the time. And he’s already embarrassed himself enough as it is with childish behavior.
Trepidation churning in his gut, Clark wills himself up on the footholds and into the leather passenger seat. Bruce already sits in the pilot’s side, headset on, flipping switches and looking reassuringly competent. He double checks Clark’s harness for security, a gesture that doesn’t feel patronizing for all its uselessness. The harness is formality, a visual cue for Clark’s peace of mind, and the fact that it holds secure under Bruce’s fingers makes him feel irrationally calmer.
It doesn’t stop his heart from flying up into his throat when the helicopter takes off, his eyes firmly fixed to his shoes pressed tight against the floorboards, as if trying to touch an invisible brake.
“What happened to Lex?” he asks because he would take any distraction over looking at the flat of Kansas farmland stretched beneath him like a quilt.
“You would know more than I,” says Bruce, his gaze flickering to Clark. “Whatever friendship you shared was long over by the time you and I met.”
Clark bites at his lip. “I don’t understand how. He’s my best friend. You said he’s tried to kill me ?”
Bruce goes silent for a moment before answering. “He’s ambivalent on Clark Kent — doesn’t really see you outside of press releases. But he views Superman as the ultimate threat against humanity, and he has acted accordingly.”
Something twists in Clark's stomach, like wringing out a dish rag, making him feel sick. “He thinks I’m a threat ? That I would hurt people? I saved his life! He’s risked his own life for mine! How does that change?”
“Clark . . . whatever happened in Smallville . . . he doesn’t remember it,” Bruce reminds him, almost gently.
Out of all the revelations he’s had today, that one hits the hardest.
Lois is gone by the time they make it back to the underground section of Wayne Tower. Clark hadn’t expected her to wait — he hadn’t expected to come back — and he can’t tell if the loss of her brings relief or worry.
Not that she would have been allowed to follow Clark anyway. Bruce takes him to a sleek black car that looks like something straight from a Need For Speed game parked at the edge of an underground tunnel that leads all the way to Gotham two hours away.
The way Bruce drives, they make it in under an hour, and Clark has uncomfortable flashbacks to being in Lex’s new Lamborghini last month as he broke almost every traffic law in Kansas.
(Everything reminds him of Lex today, and the thought that nothing reminds Lex of Clark — nothing — is starting to chew him from the inside out.)
The car screeches to a halt in some huge underground cave, and that’s where Clark learns that Bruce calls his alter ego Batman and he dresses in a cowl with pointed bat ears and they are now in the Batcave .
And he thought Superman sounded stupid.
The Batcave also comes equipped with a miniature hospital room and surgical bay. Another wave of nausea rises up in him at the sight of it, but Bruce curls a stabilizing hand over Clark’s shoulder as he guides them both to the examination chair.
Judging from the light flecks of gray at the temples, Bruce probably isn’t that far in age from Clark’s dad. Grief, a fresh spike of it, drives into his heart at the thought. But it also makes Bruce more oddly comforting. He has the same quiet stability as Clark’s dad, the same air of safety. You could put your trust in him and be protected.
So Clark slides up onto the chair and leans back.
Bruce has to walk him through relaxing “the barrier of his skin” in order for the needle to pierce it. Apparently Clark’s invulnerability can be flipped on and off like a switch and he’s just done it instinctively all this time. It’s much harder to will yourself to relax when faced with a needle rather than, say, your dad’s hand on your shoulder. They go through four broken needles before the fifth one slips through his skin barrier and only because Bruce distracted him with ignorant questions about farm life.
The trip through the MRI machine is also not fun, but that at least is a discomfort shared by everyone else. Bruce drives Clark back to Metropolis the old fashioned, above ground way, dropping him back off at the apartment, handing over a key on a red and gold S keychain.
“You probably left yours back in the apartment,” he explains. “Make sure I get this back. I’ll call you when I get the results.”
Clark nods, his hand on the door handle — and hesitates. The voice in his mother is admonishing him in the back of his head.
“Listen . . . I was a jerk to you earlier, and I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that. You’ve done nothing but help me. I may not know you but . . . you’re a good friend. Thank you for looking out for me and for— for listening.”
Bruce gives him a long, calculating stare. It's unnerving, like so much else about this man, but strangely not threatening. Then he gives a little shake of his head, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters under his breath. Then, louder, “You owe me nothing, Clark, not apologies nor gratitude. Go and get some sleep.”
Cold containers of Chinese take out sit on his kitchen counter, along with a scribbled note from Lois that said she put in five of his vacation days to HR and he’s off the hook for a little while. Also how dare he just take off like that without telling anyone where he went, who the fuck did he think he was (her words).
Another lance of guilt hits him. He pulls out his phone, pokes the screen until the text messages come up and types something that takes five minutes because he has to keep erasing and retyping because clunky large finger tips and sensitive touch screens do not mix well.
Sorry I ran. I didn’t mean to worry you.
Nothing for several minutes. He sets the phone down and starts digging into cold lo mein, too hungry to bother putting it in the microwave. Then his phone buzzes several times in a row, like an angry bee.
Look I get it
But dont ever do that shit again
But also im sorry
Cause today probably sucked for you
Also call your mom cause shes blown up my phone after she couldnt get a hold of you
You want mom cell in your contacts list btw
It takes a couple minutes for Clark to find his contacts list in the mess of apps that Lois tried to explain to him this morning. As he scrolls past names he doesn’t recognize, Lex’s absence is notable.
As is Pete’s.
He pushes that thought away as he scrolls back up and taps Mom Cell.
His heart pounds in his throat for several rings and then—
“Hello? Clark?”
“Mom?” His voice cracks immediately.
“Oh, Clark , sweetheart. Are you okay? Tell me what’s happening. ”
It’s cold comfort — he would give anything to hug her, to have her hold him — but the relief of just her voice makes his knees buckle, and he has to collapse on the couch before he falls to the floor.
“ Mom —”
It’s hard to speak over the sudden lump in his throat. He explains as best he can over the constant swallowing back of tears, trying hard to be brave because no one frets and worries like his mom does.
“You don’t remember anything past fifteen years old?” she asks.
“Nothing. I feel like I’m in a nightmare. Nothing is familiar.”
“I’m getting on a plane tomorrow morning,” she says. “First thing. I’d get on one now, but it’s past midnight. You’ll see me in less than a day.”
“You don’t— you don’t have to do that,” Clark says, lying his ass off, and it doesn’t work now any more than it did in two thousand two.
“Clark,” her mother says firmly. “It’s going to happen.”
“But the— the summit thing—”
“I don’t care. They can live without me for a couple days.”
“You sure?”
“You are not going through this alone.”
“I have Lois and— and Bruce,” he says, a last ditch effort to feel like he’s the adult he’s supposed to be.
“And otherwise I would say you were in good hands, but you don’t know them at all, do you?”
“No,” he admits softly.
“Then it's settled. I’ll see you sometime in the next sixteen hours.”
“ . . . thank you, Mom.”
“Anything for you, Clark. You know this,” she says, her voice so full of love he could cry. “I’m going to get off and pack. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He hangs up the phone, feeling her absence so much keener than he did before the phone call. Sixteen hours. He could handle himself for that long. Feeling suddenly exhausted, like a wrung-out dish rag, Clark slips off the couch and heads towards the bathroom without much thought, the habit to brush his teeth before bed so ingrained he didn’t think twice about stepping through the bathroom door.
The figure to the left startles him so greatly that Clark throws his fist forward without thinking. He stops just before his knuckles collide with the glass of a mirror, the sight of his own wide-eyed stare looking back at him.
It’s him and it’s not him. It’s Clark Kent slantwise.
It’s Clark with shorter, neater hair — the kind his mother has always wanted for him instead of the shaggy cut that comes from avoiding his mom’s scissors for as long as possible. It’s Clark with a wider-set jaw and broad shoulders, like he has a real gym membership instead of using PE and bales of hay. It’s Clark with the shadow of stubble on his face.
But there’s another difference that Clark can’t put his finger on at first. It takes several long moments of looking, of running his hand over his face, pushing and pulling at the skin for him to see it.
It’s weight.
Not physical, though clearly Clark has put on a lot more muscle than his high school self.
Lana had said once he looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and that’s what Clark sees in the mirror. It’s a heaviness in the planes of his face, a seriousness he only sees in his parents. In Lex sometimes, after a visit from Lionel.
It hits Clark, with a sudden clarity that not even the grave of his father could give him, that Clark is an adult. Clark has aged . Time has passed , fifteen years of it, that he is never getting back.
Fifteen years. His entire lifespan worth of memories. Gone.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
That’s all he can think about as he flees to the bedroom and burrows under the blankets — all the things that are gone.