Chapter Text
Bruce is prepared for the approximate shape of things, after Steppenwolf.
It's a little uncomfortable. There's a distance that neither he nor Clark are prepared or equipped to close; they're capable of cordiality, when the circumstances require it, but they simply don't have all that much to say to each other.
It's fine. This much is, frankly, better than Bruce had any right to expect, and it certainly isn't a surprise. Far from it. The surprise—
The surprise is the day that all of that changes, somehow.
The day: one day, from Bruce's perspective.
From Clark's, technically, it takes significantly longer.
Once the Hall has been rebuilt to Bruce's specifications, is fit to house the Justice League at last, Bruce no longer spends his mornings lurking in the Cave.
Not because he doesn't care to, nor because he prefers the Hall over it. On the contrary: there's something that feels disconcerting, somewhere approaching farcical, about—sitting aboveground, in a clean, bright, sunlit space with multiple entrances and exits, where half a dozen people who are not Alfred could find him if they wished to do so. As if he is playacting the version of himself to whom such a morning routine could legitimately belong, and not even well enough to fool anyone.
But he wants the Hall to be used for the purpose for which he intends it; and so the least he can do is use it. He doesn't want any of the rest of the League to come to the Hall any given day only to find it empty; and so the least he can do is—be present, as often as possible, though it's an overstatement to claim he is capable of filling it.
So: the surprise isn't that he's there, in the security room. The surprise isn't even the faint sound of footsteps in the hallway, nor Bruce's immediate assessment that they are almost certainly Clark's—Clark, too, seems to be making an effort to show up at the Hall as often as he can, though Bruce hadn't felt able to ask him to.
Bruce glances up, when he judges the timing right to do so, and meets Clark's eyes. He expects a nod, the minimum Clark's sense of courtesy and generosity will allow him to get away with; perhaps the olive branch of a polite but perfunctory smile, at the absolute most.
But Clark—Clark stands there in the doorway, looking at Bruce, and it's—
The light, the warmth, starts in his eyes; crinkles the corners of them, before the line of his mouth has moved at all. He's—he—beams, the expression overflowing with a degree of gladness, of fondness, that Bruce cannot by any definition be said to have earned.
It's startling, staggering. Bruce sits there, hand spread across the surface of the security desk as if to steady himself against it, and—should smile back, probably; should try to. Should pretend this is nothing out of the ordinary, until he can work out what it is he's even looking at. Shapeshifter? Projected hard-light disguise? Cloned replacement; mind control, under the direction of someone with no real grasp of the specific flavor of clumsy uncertainty that has governed Bruce's relationship with Clark to date—
Clark huffs a breath through his nose, half a laugh, and shakes his head a little. "No," he says aloud, and his tone is as inexplicably warm as his expression. "I'm not a shapeshifter, and I'm not an impersonator, and I'm not a cloned replacement for myself, and I'm not being mind-controlled. I haven't developed telepathy, either," he adds after a moment. "I'm stuck in a time loop."
Bruce blinks.
"I was trying to figure it out by myself for a while," Clark admits, "but after the first time I told you it was happening, you made me promise to tell you every time, right away. So—here I am."
Improbable, Bruce thinks distantly. But—how much more wildly unlikely, that Clark would try to tell him such a baffling lie?
"A time loop," he repeats aloud.
Clark's still smiling. He tilts his head. "Yeah," he says, and then, "Go ahead, call the rest of the League. I know you want to."
Bruce, given permission, reaches for the keyboard and does exactly that.
And then he looks up, and Clark raises his eyebrows and says, "Main meeting room?"
Which is, in fact, exactly the destination Bruce had been about to suggest.
He takes refuge, inevitably, in self-control; allows none of his disorientation to show on his face, says, "Yes," in a mild tone, and rises from his chair, sliding his hands into his pockets.
The explanation Clark offers him as they walk isn't actually all that complicated, and does verge on plausible.
There had been a sorceress, about six weeks ago. Diana had managed to stop her—had, in fact, been forced to strike her repeatedly with divine lightning, in order to prevent her from wiping Gotham off the face of the earth. According to Clark, she has found her way out of the underworld, and as much as she resents Diana for killing her, she is apparently more furious still with Clark, for having helped Diana: an interloper, with the gall to stand beside her enemy, meddling in matters he should not have interfered in.
She hasn't recovered enough of her power yet to kill him. She had settled instead for trapping him in a Tartarus of his own.
"And you're sure it wasn't a mistake," Bruce says. "That it wasn't—supposed to have some other effect that she lacked the power to achieve."
It's only intended to clarify; to suggest possibilities Clark may have failed to consider, to help Bruce determine the parameters of the scenario they're dealing with.
But Clark—
Clark loses a little brightness, for the first time since he stepped into the doorway upstairs. He looks away, and says, "Yeah, she was—pretty clear about it. I managed to track her down, for a couple of loops in a row. It's—deliberate. Punishment."
Punishment, Bruce thinks, watching Clark's face: turned away, half-shadowed, gaze distant.
But then they reach the doorway of the meeting room—ridiculous, almost, to call what used to be the formal dining hall by a name that makes it sound so much smaller than it is—and a flicker of white lightning passes them, seats itself in a chair and vibrates into focus.
"Hey," Barry says, mouth half full, bagel clutched in his hands. "What's up?"
Clark glances at him. "Retie your shoe before we leave," he says.
Barry blinks. "What?"
"Seriously," Clark says. "You'll regret it if you don't." He stops, and turns his head—because that soft click is Diana's heels against the floor as she comes toward them down the hallway.
"Clark," Diana says warmly. "Bruce."
"Diana," Clark says, and then his mouth twists, wry. "You're going to have to postpone those meetings. And before you go back to the museum, buy a sandwich for Julie. Roast beef on sourdough. She forgot her lunch."
Diana draws a quick breath, and then lets it out. "Oh," she says softly.
"Yes," Bruce agrees.
Clark can, of course, pull the same trick with Victor, with Arthur, once they arrive. There's very little purpose in trying to—actually have a meeting, given that Clark knows exactly what they're all going to say; what they're going to say, what they say if they're interrupted before they have the chance to say it, what they say if he tells them what they're going to say. Every possible iteration, the endless dizzying fractal.
Fortunately, in a sense, there's also very little to discuss.
The situation is significantly less dramatic than it might have been. Clark's had enough time, like this, to be able to stand there and calmly explain to them all that the spell has been anchored to an object that's somewhere in Metropolis—that the solution is as simple and yet as daunting as finding it, a labor of Hercules only slightly less tedious than tackling the Augean stables without any convenient rivers nearby.
"Once we figured that out," he adds, "about sixty-four loops ago, you," and he points to Bruce, "proposed that, since technically we have all the time we could possibly need, we just—look for it."
And then he reaches underneath the meeting table, for—for the half-finished interface Bruce had only just begun to install yesterday, and pulls it out from beneath the edge; unfolds it and flips it smoothly open to access the keyboard, draws the screen out flat in front of them all, and pulls up a map of the city of Metropolis. A handful of quick strokes of his fingertip across the touchscreen, and he's drawn a grid over it, divided it up neatly. He taps, rapid, without hesitation: marks off, Bruce grasps belatedly, sixty-four grid squares. The ones they have, presumably, already searched.
"This loop," he says, "we're looking here."
"And when you say 'look'," Arthur says, "that means—?"
"Barry uses the superspeed to look for anything that seems out of place," Clark says, "you check the pipes in all the buildings in the search area for anything the water 'doesn't like'—yes, that is how you put it when I asked—Victor scans in case his systems can pick up a reading, and Diana keeps the lasso around her arm in case that will force the truth of the spell's anchor to reveal itself to her once she's close enough to it. Again, her words. And Bruce has been—bossing us all around, mostly," he adds, with a sudden bright laugh; amused, grinning, wildly fucking disconcerting when he doesn't even like Bruce—
When he didn't, Bruce forces himself to amend, a minimum of sixty-four days ago.
"Well," Victor says, "I guess we got it all figured out, huh? In that case, let's go." He pauses. "Do I always say that?"
"Yeah," Clark says, warm; and then he stops and bites at his mouth, something deeper, oddly fraught, flickering across his face. "But you—all of you, you—you always help me, too. You always want to help me."
And at that, Diana reaches across the table, across the interface; takes his hands firmly in her own, and says, "Of course we do."
In the end, it takes five and a half hours for them to find it.
Bruce struggles with a sense of anti-climax. He's been preparing himself helplessly for the prospect of another loop's failure
(—sixty-four, Clark had said, and that was only the minimum.
Sixty-four. Sixty-four versions of this day that Bruce cannot and will not ever remember; sixty-four versions Clark can remember. At minimum: how to even guess how long it took them to get as far as they had, working one day at a time, starting from scratch again and again except for whatever Clark could tell them?
—sixty-four days where Bruce doesn't know what happened, cannot retroactively control or correct or compensate for whatever it is he may or may not have done—)
because the odds that this should be the loop where they manage to break the spell hardly seem worth betting on.
But then it happens. Diana stops short in the middle of a block and says, "There. There it is. Clark—"
It's a goddamn bottlecap, Bruce sees, as she kneels down and picks it up.
It feels ridiculous. It feels untrustworthy. It feels far, far too easy; until Bruce turns and sees Clark's face.
And it wasn't five and a half hours. It was never five and a half hours. It was weeks, months; it wasn't easy to get here at all, he understands, in that instant.
Diana wraps the bottlecap in the lasso. None of them could see whatever it was she could see, whatever it was that had drawn her attention to that bottlecap, when it was just lying on the sidewalk—but the moment the golden brightness of the lasso touches it, it sparks with an unnatural violet light. Diana grimaces, hands tightening around it, knuckles standing out sharply; and the light flares, a feeling almost of—a wave passing, Bruce's ears popping in the wake of it.
And then, according to Diana, the bottlecap is just a bottlecap.
"Here," she says, gentle, holding it out.
Clark takes it. His throat is working. He shakes his head, once and then again. "I—that's—I can't believe that was it, I—"
"Nor will you, perhaps, until tomorrow," Diana says.
Clark looks at her sharply, at—the word, Bruce realizes. Tomorrow.
And then—
Then, face twisting, anguish and yearning chasing each other, he looks at Bruce. Looks for Bruce; seeks, blatant, unrepentant, a kind of reassurance he should know better than to ask Bruce for.
A kind of reassurance he did know better than to ask Bruce for. But somewhere in all of those todays, something must have changed, somehow.
Bruce heads back to the Hall, afterward, to write up some notes.
Notes; analysis. Impossible not to wonder how many times he may have done the same thing—how many times it has undone itself, rewound, and he has gone, all unknowing, to do it again—
Enough, he tells himself.
It was a good day. It can be defined no other way, when they have every reason to believe they've succeeded in their goals; when there is no means by which to be truly certain except to wait and find out. No one needs to be fought, or killed, or resurrected—no one died. Therefore: a good day.
It's late afternoon, now. There's still sunlight spilling into the security room, but from a new direction, and there's something in the color of it, a particular golden-tangerine quality to the light, that suggests the hour, the fact that the sun is steadily sinking.
Bruce goes to the desk, and sits.
And then, of course, as if on fucking cue
(—how many times has this happened? How many ways has this conversation played out? Precisely how agonizingly transparent is he, to Superman's perfect fucking memory, until this goddamn day is over—)
there is a soft even sound of footsteps; and Clark comes into the doorway.
Bruce doesn't look at him, fights the surreal and vertiginous feeling of awareness that Clark knows what he'll do next better than he does.
Clark doesn't go away.
(—perhaps—
—perhaps he knows Bruce doesn't want him to—)
He comes in. Comes in, snags a chair from the auxiliary security desk and drags it over; seats himself next to Bruce, and sets a gentle elbow against the surface of the desk. And then he says, soft, "It's okay. I know. You hate this."
Bruce shuts his eyes.
"You don't think you should say so," Clark adds, inexorable, "since I'm the one it's been happening to. But you hate it. Not knowing what happened, not knowing what you did or didn't do, not knowing what you might have told me." He stops; breathes out, slow, through his nose, and then, in Bruce's peripheral vision, tilts his head. "You always make us stop before the sun sets. Magic's usually worse, more dangerous, at night, and you never want to take chances with it if we don't have to.
"You made me promise to tell you about the looping. But you made me promise to tell you about the loops, too. Every day, I come find you in here, two minutes earlier than I did the last time, and I tell you as much as I can. And then—"
He stops again, abruptly half-choked, though his tone had been nothing but warm, sweet. His breath picks up, faintly strained.
"And then," Bruce says for him, "I—stay with you."
There is no reason to avoid articulating it. Clark knows. Clark knows.
He turns his head, and meets Clark's eyes; and Clark sits there, and doesn't tell him he's wrong.
"Punishment," Bruce repeats. "That's what you said. Punishment, for you—psychological torture. Experiencing things no one else experiences, except it isn't just your senses or your powers, it's every single thing you do. None of us remember. You're alone; you've been alone, more alone than you ever have been before in your entire life, since the moment the looping started."
"And you figure it out," Clark says, hoarse. "How do you always figure it out? You want to know. Of course you want to know. But that isn't why you ask. And every time I tell you about the loops, then it's—you're in it with me, almost, for a while."
Christ.
"When does the day reset?" Bruce asks.
Clark's mouth twists. "3:52 in the morning," he says quietly. "And I come two minutes earlier, each time, because there's one more loop to tell you about."
Bruce resists, iron-fisted, the urge to look for the nearest clock, and involuntarily does the math anyway. Two minutes earlier, and the sun hasn't even set yet; hundreds—
He opens his hands against the surface of the desk. They don't tremble.
"Tell me about the first loop," he says. And then, very deliberately, he clarifies: "Tell me everything."
Clark looks at him, uncertain.
"Take all the time you need. And then tell me about the second loop tomorrow."
Clark shuts his eyes, swallowing. Half desperate to believe it could be true, and half afraid to; as transparent to Bruce, in that instant, as Bruce must have been to him all day.
And there will be no way for him to set that uncertainty aside until—3:53 in the morning.
"Tomorrow," Clark repeats unsteadily.
"Tomorrow," Bruce agrees. "So—tell me. The long version; everything you remember."
And Clark draws a long slow breath, and looks at him, eyes wet, and starts to talk.