Archive of Our Own

"Descending," the ship says.

It doesn't need him to acknowledge it; under other circumstances, he might anyway. He doesn't.

It would be—difficult, right now. Difficult, as sharply focused as he feels, as tautly strung. His jaw is tight; he has no more attention to hand to apply to relaxing it than he had to respond to the ship. His own breath is loud in his ears—though perhaps that's attributable to the way his head and throat are enclosed by the half-visible Kryptonian helmet. On another level entirely from the cowl, given that it isn't just airtight but can undoubtedly pass through alien atmospheres and vacuum with equal ease; and therefore unfamiliar.

The open viewing panes the ship has provided to him begin to glow faintly orange—above and beyond the endless red cast of the nearby star. Bruce had already assumed this moon was more likely than not to possess an atmosphere, but he isn't inclined to turn down confirmation.

The pace of their descent appears to increase briefly, that orange heat flaring brighter, and then decreases again. The surface of the moon—broadening now, widening, what had been a curving horizon flattening out—comes into focus. In the distance, there is something, something that isn't the pale stretching mineral flats, alien scrub, or rocky bluffs that seem to make up most of the moon's topography. The compound, presumably, and the small city that surrounds it.

Bruce doesn't direct the ship closer to any of it. "Assess nearby landing zones," he grits out instead.

The ship's sensors are able to identify multiple options; the most promising is a depression between two of those rocky bluffs, edge-on to the city in the distance, high enough to conceal the ship from casual observation temporarily.

Good enough.

"Land," Bruce says.

The ship does it. The wait feels unreasonably long. Bruce shuts his eyes, focuses on his own relentlessly unignorable inhales and exhales inside this goddamn sealed helmet, and forces himself not to look again until he perceives the inertially dampened motion of the ship settling to the surface beneath his feet.

"Atmosphere?"

It has to be breathable. It has to be, because the alien piece of shit who took Clark had known to carry kryptonite, had known to bring him to a system with a red sun—has to, has to, have been aware that without his powers, Clark wouldn't survive unless—

"Sufficient oxygen," the ship assesses; almost funny, to think the AI's managed to take Bruce's measure well enough to understand that right now he doesn't want a complete rundown, the full composition with percentages included. "Not ideal for your species' comfort; after 48 to 72 hours, you may experience headaches and mild disorientation."

"Fine," Bruce says. "Let me out."

He turns to one side, toward the hull. It opens immediately, metal shifting out from in front of him until he's facing one of those bluffs, pale jutting rock cast in sharp red light.

The armor had been—almost ignorable, inside the ship. But the moment he steps out, it seems to activate itself: suddenly there's a display projected around the edges of his vision, shifting letters Bruce can't read.

"Engage translation system," Bruce says, because he's about to need it anyway.

And after a moment, the text of the display changes, curling Kryptonian lettering melting away—the armor's systems were running the same assessment the ship had, Bruce understands after a moment, OXYGEN helpfully highlighted for him at the top of a list.

He looks away from it, and it blinks out, taking the shift in the direction of his gaze for the dismissal it is. Almost unsettling, that intuitive responsiveness, but—the easier it is for him to use this armor, right now, the better.

He assesses the options the display is giving him; enables MAXIMUM SPEED ASSIST, MAXIMUM STRENGTH ASSIST, FLIGHT ASSIST, by looking at them long enough for the armor to measure the direction and intensity of his gaze. The display can also be convinced to show him a schematic of the basic controls—a combination of haptic and kinaesthetic, simulating sensations he wouldn't be able to feel on his own through the armor so his intuitive shifts of the weight and angle of his body in response to those sensations can be interpreted by the armor in turn as instructions.

He sinks down into half a crouch; it seems like it shouldn't be easy, when he knows how powerful this armor is, but the suit as a whole just—doesn't feel heavy, bends with him easily as he moves.

He looks up, and braces himself, and leaps into the air. And the armor—lets him, responds: propels him, as if effortlessly, almost a hundred feet above the surface of the moon, and then he turns in the air, twists himself toward the shape of the city, the compound, in the distance, and goes.

*

He doesn't just punch his way inside through the wall.

He wants to, and he could. The temptation is immense. The urgency had already been overpowering, all-consuming, and yet there is an extra white-hot edge in being so fucking close. But—

But he doesn't know where Clark is being held, doesn't know where this—Yantha Xid might be keeping him. He doesn't know what physical or mental condition Clark is in, nor whether he would be putting Clark in greater danger than he is in already by acting in haste; whether any form of attack on Yantha Xid's compound might result in every captive inside, including Clark, having their throat slit immediately to prevent their escape.

So he aims himself for the building, massive dark walls rising from the middle of the alien city, but slows as he draws closer. He can see people in the streets beneath him, faces upturned toward the shape of him moving overhead—faces that are furred, or covered in massive compound eyes, or seem not to have any eyes at all.

He comes down in the middle of the broad avenue that surrounds the compound itself, and he takes no care to be subtle in doing it because there is no reason to—because the more attention he can draw to himself, the more significant he can make his presence seem, the better.

So he makes no effort to slow his descent, lands on his feet with the full force of the armor's weight; its assistive systems make it feel light to him, but that doesn't mean it is, and the paving stone beneath him cracks sharply.

There are guards. Of course there are. There must be some kind of system in place here—because this compound is hosting a black-market auction being held by one of this sector's most powerful crime lords, because not just anyone would be allowed to walk in. There must be something, an access code passed from one trusted buyer to the next, some form of authorization to enter that Bruce doesn't have and has no way to obtain.

Fortunately, his cover doesn't require him to pretend to be someone who cares.

The guards nearest the entryway to the compound are both especially massive; one is furred, six-armed, heavily muscled, and the other has a large dark carapace of a body, chitinous spikes jutting from the edges of each overlapping plate. They each have some kind of device attached to one upper limb, and when Bruce stalks too close for their comfort, they must activate the devices somehow, though Bruce doesn't see them move—there's a brief soft buzzing sound, a flicker of red light in the air in front of them tracing a shape approximately as tall and wide as they are. Some kind of personal shield, plausibly.

They also have weapons, slim and approximately rifle-shaped, with glowing white cartridges that suggest the weapons are likely to shoot some sort of energy or plasma bolt. And they both aim those weapons at Bruce as he strides closer.

It is a grim, cold sort of satisfaction, to have the armor's sensors make a rapid assessment that results in the display telling Bruce: ENERGY SIGNATURE MATCHED. SHIELDING RECALIBRATED. CHANCE OF ARMOR PENETRATION—ZERO.

The carapaced guard hisses. Whatever language it is, it must already be somewhere in the Kryptonian archives, because the delay is minimal, the translation system in the armor engaging almost immediately, a simulated voice in Bruce's ear saying, "Stop! Retreat now or die, in the name of Yantha Xid."

"No," Bruce says, flat. "I represent the Kryptonian House of El, and I am here to reclaim their rightful property."

The carapaced guard clicks a pincer repeatedly, a sharp and stuttering rhythm. The furred guard's body language is easier for Bruce to parse, because their features are arranged in a more familiar way—their face isn't unlike a baboon's, two eyes and all, and those eyes widen. A hoot, and a new voice; clever design for the system, to have a way to distinguish between nearby individuals even in its internal simulations. "You—Kryptonian? But—"

"Impossible!"

Precisely the response he'd been counting on. Bruce stands there, and maintains an expression of profound disinterest, the same vaguely arrogant disdain he had seen on the face of every single Kryptonian who'd come to Earth with Zod.

That had been the hook, after all. Every piece of chatter the Lanterns had picked up, after Clark had been taken, had been focused on the same thing: an exceedingly rare piece of merchandise, on offer from the collection of Yantha Xid himself—one of a kind, the only example of its species in all the universe, and the opportunity to bid on it personally could be yours.

And Bruce, on a world illuminated by a red sun, is indistinguishable from a Kryptonian. Will not be expected to demonstrate any particular powers or abilities; would be able to arrive in a Kryptonian ship, wearing Kryptonian armor, and appear, for all intents and purposes, unquestionably Kryptonian in every superficial respect.

"I," the furred guard says, and shifts their weight, weapon drifting upward but not quite aimed at Bruce. "But you—do you—we have no proof of your—"

Bruce meets their eyes levelly, and raises one arm out to the side.

He had asked the ship for clarification, when it had first located the armor for him. And it had explained: Zod and his followers had salvaged their armor, their ships, from the remains of abandoned Kryptonian colonies. Their suits had served their purposes—had seemed as astoundingly powerful, then, to Bruce, as everything else about them.

But those had been, in some sense, the most basic model of armor; unmodified, baseline, unexceptional. The suits of armor the ship had had in its cargo storage area, by contrast, had been highly specialized, divided into types specifically designed to account for the needs of the guilds represented by the crew members. There had been armor with particularly advanced sensors and analytical capabilities, for use by the science guild, and armor with greatly enhanced movement assistance of various kinds, for the laborer guild.

And the suit Bruce had selected had been prepared for use by the warrior guild.

So there had been no need for him to supply himself with Kryptonian weapons, carry or install a separate blade or projectile system. He certainly could have; but on balance, considering the staggering power of the armor on its own—he had decided he preferred to be able to rely on equipment that could not be dropped or knocked from his hands or taken from him, and it had seemed he could afford to do so.

So: raising his arm is all he needs to do. He allows the armor's sensors to check for him, waits the split second that it takes for the display to confirm there is no one standing between him and the area thirty feet down the avenue that his extended arm is pointed toward, no one within the radius of the strike; and then there is a brief hum, the barest vibration of the armor over his arm as the weapons port forms above his wrist. A flare of blue light Bruce is careful not to react to or flinch from, and then the burst of energy—snaking, twisting, with a streaming trailing quality not unlike the tail of a comet—strikes the empty avenue, blasts chunks of stone twenty feet into the air with a satisfyingly powerful thrumming sound.

Lingering blue light that curls away like flame, a cloud of dust, temporarily obscure the crater Bruce has left in the street. But not for long, and it's easy enough to stand there, without looking away from the guards, until they see it, look at him and then at each other and appear to reach approximately the same conclusion at the same time.

"Far be it from us to inconvenience the House of El," the carapaced guard says slowly. "If you believe the property you seek is here, and can prove it is rightfully yours to retrieve, then perhaps you can—come to some sort of arrangement with Yantha Xid."

"Undoubtedly," Bruce says, with a small thin smile.

And this time, when he steps toward the entryway behind them, they make no attempt to stop him.

*

Sales have technically already started, by the time Bruce makes it inside.

Not a surprise. Certain fundamentals approach universal, or at least the logic underpinning them does: lower-ticket items have been put on offer first, with the wait, the anticipation, intended to build toward the rarer and more valuable offerings—and the highest-rolling buyers are thereby given the chance to swan in fashionably late, to impress their superiority on other attendees by virtue of their disinterest in the less remarkable pieces for sale, implicitly declared beneath their notice.

It's easy for Bruce to tell where he should go; there is a relatively short corridor between the entryway to the compound and the chamber that is evidently being used for the auction, and he can hear a staggering variety of alien sounds ahead of him, can see light and movement, even before the helmet's display helpfully highlights and devotes an inset portion of its area to a zoomed-in view of—a cage, on the far side of the audience from where Bruce is.

At the bare minimum, the creature inside it doesn't immediately give evidence of sapience; it's scaled, but it prowls back and forth like a big cat, long spiked tail lashing back and forth, and when it growls, lets out a low displeased roar, the armor's systems don't translate the sound into words.

But whatever it is, it must be—rare in some way, legally protected on whatever world it comes from, poached and dragged off anyway, if it's being offered here to the highest bidder.

Bruce swallows his disgust and frustration, uses a quick eye movement to request that the armor's sensor data be recorded and stored for later analysis, and strides into the back of the room.

A few nearby individuals glance at him. Most give him no extra attention; only one or two linger, as if puzzled, perhaps finding themselves unable to identify his species, the design of his armor.

And that isn't going to help him find Clark.

He doesn't allow the expression on his face to change, keeps it bland and disinterested, and bends an arm at the elbow, takes aim at the chamber's ceiling. The armor's analysis confirms that he's got the right angle to drop a chunk of the dark alien stone right into the center of the room—at a safe distance between the front row of bidders' seats and the cage.

He does it. Even without the armor's help, he can interpret the rush of sound as shock, screaming, however unfamiliar the actual noises themselves may be. There are more guards lined up along the walls of the chamber, and all of them turn toward him at once, two or three loosing shots of white energy that are easily absorbed by the Kryptonian armor. Quite a few of Yantha Xid's guests rise out of their seats, turning as if to rush for the entryway—and stop short, on feet or coiled tentacles or whatever else it is they have, when they see Bruce's armored shape standing there, a blue glow lingering around the mouth of the weapons port over his hand.

They begin to fall silent; the ones who've spotted him first, and then the rest, a bit at a time, more and more of them turning whatever sensory apparatus is available in his direction, following each other's attention to him.

And then Bruce offers them all a perfunctory sort of smile, even if they won't be able to tell that's what it is, and says aloud, "I am Bru-Zek. I have been sent by the Kryptonian House of El to retrieve their property from Yantha Xid. Where is he?"

The armor is equipped with the same kind of dynamic translation system Zod had used to broadcast his message to Earth—a single transmission, but everyone who had seen it had heard the words in their own language. Impossible to even begin to guess how such a thing could be accomplished, Schroedinger's translation; incomprehensibly advanced is a continual understatement in the face of Kryptonian technology.

But if it weren't working, the guards outside wouldn't have understood him—whatever translation equipment they had, it was vanishingly unlikely to include Kryptonian in its database, and Bruce had set the armor to default to Kryptonian output if the dynamic translation system were to suffer any error.

So after a brief stretch of general quiet, one of the aliens nearest the caged creature steps cautiously forward, tilts their head and examines Bruce with four large dark eyes, and says haltingly, "That certainly sounds like—that is to say, he'll want to—this way, if you would?"

"Much appreciated," Bruce says, and crosses the full width of the chamber without a glance to either side, ignoring his silent audience entirely as he follows the four-eyed alien out of the far side of the room.

*

Another corridor. This one is longer, curving, and it's impossible to break the habit of keeping approximate track of where he is in the building, even though a corner of the armor's display is doing the same thing for him, a tiny map forming out of impossibly thin glowing lines as he moves through the compound, details filling themselves in as the armor's sensors take in his surroundings.

This can't possibly be the shortest path available from the auction chamber to Yantha Xid, Bruce decides, and by the time the four-eyed alien pauses outside a large arching doorway, inclines their head and says, "This way," someone else must have been able to reach Xid, even if only with a message; Bruce strides through the doorway, and Xid himself is seated, perhaps two dozen spiderlike limbs folded up, large dark body tipped sideways at an indolent incline on the rounded piece of furniture, and doesn't look up for a long moment.

He wouldn't have wanted to seem taken by surprise, after all. And one of his underlings must have known it. Bruce can, however grudgingly, appreciate the evidence of coordination.

But Bruce has also dealt with what sometimes feels like an infinite number of crime bosses, at various levels of any given organization, and not only within Gotham but in cities all over the world. There are certain constants—the need not to lose face, the inevitable attempts to intimidate, the relentless abuse of the defenseless—and Bruce looks at Yantha Xid, his deliberate posture, ten sloping black eyes aimed pointedly away from where Bruce is standing, and feels a grim and irreverent impatience. As if anything about this alien, his grasping pursuit of power and wealth, his casual disrespect for the lives and intrinsic value of others, is exceptional, even if the forms they take, the details, are in some respects unfamiliar. As if there is anything here Bruce hasn't seen ten thousand times before.

He finds himself grateful, again, that the cover he chose to get himself here means he doesn't need to waste time pretending otherwise.

"Yantha Xid," he says aloud, without preamble.

Xid looks up, blinking, a clear set of eyelids preceding another that is opaque. A rasping of mouthparts, and the translator kicks in: "Ah, yes. The—Kryptonian. Is that right?"

"I am Bru-Zek," Bruce agrees. "The House of El has learned that a piece of their property, which they had at first thought lost, has in fact been offered for sale here, by you. It is my duty to retrieve that property, if it is indeed within your possession, or to learn where it may now be, if it is no longer here."

Xid tilts his head, all ten eyes narrowing slightly. A disconcertingly familiar movement, when everything else about him is so thoroughly alien. "And you chose to come here in search of it, red sun and all?"

Bruce shrugs. "It is, as I have said, my duty," he repeats. "The Kryptonian Empire discovered long ago how to compensate for the—inconveniences of colonizing certain star systems."

And then he moves.

To approach where Xid is seated, and nothing more. But he does it the way Faora-Ul had moved, in the shaky smartphone footage Bruce had once tracked down of the Kryptonian attack on Smallville—with the armor's speed assistance fully activated, even though she hadn't been exposed to the sun, to Earth's atmosphere, long enough to have developed full super-speed of her own.

And when the world has come to a stop around him, has settled back into place after the split-second blurring of the speed, Xid's ten eyes are all equally wide.

"The slave could not do this," he says, after a moment.

Bruce ignores the hot rush of fury through his gut, his chest, his face, and raises his eyebrows. "The slave is a slave. He had been lent to allies of the House of El, on a world with a white star. He had no need to do it; there was no reason to permit it."

And it's necessary, the most straightforward path to getting Clark the fuck out of here—to create an out, to give Xid the opportunity to save as much face as possible. Bruce has already undercut him in front of plausibly some of his most important contacts, has blithely tanked the value of his supposedly one-of-a-kind acquisition by repeatedly asserting that there are plenty of Kryptonians out there somewhere, and therefore, implicitly, that Xid was full of shit when he claimed to have the last one left in his possession. And anyone out there who might still have been thinking about purchasing Clark, who could perhaps have been convinced there remained some novelty and cachet to be had in adding such a being to their collection, has also just had it explained to them that the House of El is looking for him, and that Bru-Zek is currently Xid's problem but could just as easily become their problem instead.

The best way to get someone to cooperate with you is to give them a reason to, and a reason dependent not on the uncertain and impermanent motivations of fear or pain but on self-interest. Bruce has to lay out a path that allows Xid to profit off this.

But that doesn't make it any easier, any more tolerable, to say, "If he—attempted to run, then of course he will be punished, and the House of El would be nothing but grateful for your assistance in locating him."

Strategically unimpeachable. Tactically, the right play. But it fucking burns anyway, to have to pretend to let this piece of shit off the hook.

Almost as bad, to have to stand here waiting for Xid to reach the same conclusion. But he does, he must, because at last, he says, "And what sort of reward is it the—House of El might be willing to offer, for the return of their property?"

"A generous one," Bruce says evenly. "Prove you have him here and he is intact, and it is yours."

And Xid watches him with all those eyes, for a long moment; and then, without looking away, lifts one of those spidery legs and curls it just a little.

A beckoning gesture, toward the four-eyed alien who guided Bruce here and is still standing at the door. And they incline their head hurriedly, vanish into the corridor, and come back, within perhaps thirty seconds

(—Christ, he was that close, the entire fucking time—)

with—Clark.

Clark, with some pale alien fabric wrapped around his waist to form a short plain skirt, a dark flat collar around his throat. Clark, shackled at the wrists and ankles, chains worked out of a silver-white alien metal, and the sun in this system might be red, but Clark couldn't have been kidnapped off a planet with a white sun without kryptonite. Blue, Bruce assesses distantly, set into each shackle. A relief, in a sense, because at least it isn't some brand-new kind the League's never encountered before, with some brand-new effect Bruce would need to find a way to deal with—blue doesn't even make Clark feel sick, in pain, the way the green kind does.

Except there is something off, Bruce understands almost immediately, about the way Clark is moving. There's always a strangeness there, an extra little clumsiness and uncertainty, whenever Clark has lost his powers—because he's so used to being able to catch himself, to keep his balance, so used to nothing really costing him any serious effort. But this is different: the odd strained way he's breathing, the way he stumbles and flinches and stumbles again, the way he swallows a cry in the back of his throat as he's pushed to his knees on the stone floor beside Xid.

Xid reaches for him without looking away from Bruce, slides a leg into his hair and curls the end of it there, twists to drag Clark's head up.

And Clark—Clark must not even have understood there was anybody else in the room, not really, because without his senses, so many of the cues he would usually have used to observe an extra presence aren't there anymore.

But when Xid pulls his head up, he does see Bruce.

And, thankfully, his completely artless and utterly genuine response—recognition, his sudden full attention aimed at Bruce and nothing else—are exactly what would be expected of him if he were, hypothetically, instantly able to recognize Bruce as a representative of the Kryptonian house that owns him.

Xid is talking. Bruce should probably make some effort to listen to him.

Bruce forces himself to look away from Clark's face, to stop pointlessly drinking him in—he gives Clark a bland quick onceover, assessing his physical condition, and at the bare minimum he can identify no open wounds.

"—you see?" Xid is saying. "Completely intact."

"Indeed," Bruce allows. "The House of El appreciates your care and consideration toward their property. I have been authorized to offer you this in return," and again, for all that is so literally otherworldly about this situation, there is, he thinks, some sense in which he might as well be lifting up a briefcase of hundred-dollar bills, about to open it on the table in front of some Gotham mobster.

Except instead of a briefcase, he has the small sealed container the ship gave him, filled with a sparkling Kryptonian element the ship's database had identified as having once been in wide use as a high-value currency.

The database had also indicated that its availability in the wider galaxy had plummeted as the old Kryptonian Empire had begun to contract in on itself. But Bruce keeps his tone level, casual, as he opens the container, shows its contents to Xid, and says, "It can, of course, be converted into whatever form of compensation will be most useful to you in this sector—"

Xid doesn't do anything as obvious as sit up, or snatch it out of Bruce's hands. But Bruce is developing the beginnings of a sense for Xid's body language, and the way his eyes have anchored themselves on the element, the soft violet glow of it—the way they stay there, fixed—is telling in and of itself.

"Oh," he says, very softly; and then, "I, ah. No need, no need. I—will accept it as-is."

Bruce shrugs. "As you say."

He holds it out, braces himself for the touch of one of Xid's legs as Xid takes it, and with his free hand gestures carelessly to Clark without actually looking at him.

Clark draws a sharp breath, jerks forward. He's still moving in that odd way—stiffly, almost gingerly. But he's able to rise from the floor on his own, and he isn't stupid; he keeps his head down, moves in a quick deferent shuffle until he's standing at Bruce's shoulder, a little behind.

"Well," Bruce says, without urgency, refusing to betray even the slightest sign of impatience; Bru-Zek has no reason to care about this slave in particular, is doing his job, is at most grateful it hasn't turned out to be as difficult a task as it could have been. "That concludes our business, I think. The House of El extends their appreciation for—"

"Oh, please," Xid says, leg curled around the container, holding it close against his thorax. "Please, allow me to extend my hospitality to the House of El. Perhaps they would be interested in some additional acquisitions?"

Fuck.

"I represent the House only insofar as the task assigned to me was to retrieve their rightful property," Bruce says. "I cannot speak or act for them in any other respect—"

"Then rest," Xid proposes immediately. "You must have come a long way, yes? Rest here, in comfort, and be entertained, even if none of the items on offer should happen to catch your eye. Tell, perhaps, of the wonders you see in the palace of Yantha Xid, and your house may come to bid another time, hmm?"

Bruce indulges the urge to grit his teeth, for an instant. The double-edged sword, inevitably: because the entrance he'd made, the technological capability he'd demonstrated and the casual show of Kryptonian wealth, couldn't help but represent an opportunity, too—an opportunity no one else in the wider galaxy had had in a good ten thousand years, an opportunity Xid would be a fool to let slip away.

And, the corollary, a cruel irony—if Xid had tried to trap him alone, he could have smashed his way out easily enough. But now, he has Clark. Clark, dripping with blue kryptonite, on the moon of a world that orbits a red sun. Clark, terrifyingly vulnerable, unthinkably easy to kill.

Bruce will fight his way out, if it should become necessary. But as long as it isn't necessary, it is his responsibility to do everything he can to keep it that way—to make it so they can walk out of here unimpeded instead, to do absolutely anything he needs to do to minimize the risk to Clark.

"I appreciate the offer," Bruce makes himself say. "I suppose it would do no harm to rest here for a time, before I return to the House with my quarry."

"Wonderful, wonderful," Xid says, with an extra emphatic rasping of his mouthparts. "Perfect. Here, Sssyin—show Bru-Zek here to a set of quarters he may use, until he is ready to depart."

*

The path to the quarters they're given isn't technically significantly longer than the path from the auction chamber to Xid.

But if Bruce had felt impatient to reach Xid—Christ, this is beyond interminable. He is, helplessly, agonizingly, aware of Clark; Clark, at his shoulder, less than a foot away, but Bruce can't talk to him, can't even look at him, can give no visible sign that he has any investment in Clark's presence beyond that of what is essentially a bounty hunter who's located his target.

He can do nothing at all except keep walking and ignore Clark entirely, until they finally fucking reach the right doorway.

The four-eyed alien—Sssyin, at least as the armor's translation system chose to render it phonetically—shows them inside, lingers until Bruce claims to be pleased with the quarters and gives them a dismissive nod. There isn't a door as such, or at least not one that swings; but a moment after Sssyin leaves, there is a shimmer in the space of the doorway, a shimmer that turns duller, increasingly more opaque, until it's as good as an ordinary closed door would have been.

But the door isn't the only thing they have to worry about.

Bruce glances around; only reasonable, for Bru-Zek as much as for Bruce, so he doesn't bother to conceal that he's doing it.

And within a moment, the display inside the helmet is able to helpfully highlight half a dozen fixtures of the compound's security system, tucked away within the corners of the main room. He needs to give it another four and a half seconds for full analysis, but after that, it's also able to suggest a temporary countermeasure: the armor itself can emit a frequency through its systems that will block all sensors in the suite, visual, auditory, and otherwise, for approximately four minutes, until the compound's security system is able to perform a dynamic adjustment to compensate.

Good enough.

It won't be subtle, brute-forcing some privacy that way. So there's no point in hiding that he's doing that, either.

Bruce turns around.

Clark meets his eyes, but only for an instant; there must be something, something in the cast of Bruce's face, that tells him they still need to keep their cover in here, because he lowers his gaze quickly, drops to his knees

(—and there it is again, that half-frantic clumsiness, a strange shuddering exhale. What's wrong with him? Has he been injured in some way Bruce just can't see?)

and Bruce leans down, closes a fist in his hair almost the same way Xid had done it earlier and tilts his face up. "Were you trying to run, Kal-El?"

He asks it like he doesn't particularly care about the answer, like he's just trying to gauge the facts before he reports in to the House of El.

"No," Clark says quickly. "No. I was taken," and then, startlingly, "The House sent you, so I know you can—you can look. You can look, if you need to. You can see for yourself. Look, and you'll know I'm telling the truth."

And it's—an excuse, Bruce understands all at once.

Clark's told him, in bits and pieces, what it had been like to be taken onto Zod's ship, what had happened to him there. The Kryptonian interrogation machine that Zod had used, on Clark and Lois both; the way Zod had casually stepped inside Clark's mind, had been able to see for himself where Martha Kent lived, even though Clark would never have told him such a thing willingly.

Kryptonian technology—but the way Clark has framed it, the House sent you, so I know you can look: in comparison to Bru-Zek's armor and weapons, plausibly a secret belonging to the House of El. Plausibly guarded jealously. Plausibly the kind of thing Bru-Zek might only make use of if he could be sure he wasn't being monitored while he did it.

Bruce watches Clark a moment longer, as if assessing, and then glances up again—this time, directly toward one of the sensor emplacements, and then another. And then he refocuses on the display, shifts his eyeline over the waiting prompt, and enables the jamming frequency.

Within an instant, confirmation appears on the display, and he blinks it away and releases Clark's head immediately.

"We have a minimum of three minutes before the armor's systems can no longer block the security sensors in this room," he says. "I am Bru-Zek, and you are the rightful property of the House of El, which sent me to track you down when you went missing, after you were lent to their allies by arrangement with the Green Lanterns. Do you understand?"

Clark takes a moment to absorb it, swallowing—wrong, Bruce thinks, wrong wrong wrong. Clark is smart, played along beautifully when he needed to, shouldn't be struggling so much now.

But he says at last, unsteadily, "Yes, all right. Yes, I—"

"What's wrong?" Bruce interrupts.

And Clark looks at him with wide eyes. Startled, Bruce thinks, and it would almost be unflattering except for the way Clark's whole expression warms a moment later, full of unbearable gratitude.

He swallows again, reaches up with both hands—and then stops short, before he can actually touch his throat. Or, no, not his throat, Bruce evaluates; that flat dark collar.

"It—hurts," Clark says, very softly. "Not—it isn't injuring me physically. Or at least I don't think it is. It's emitting a—field, or—" He stops, and huffs a quiet breath out his nose, half a laugh. "I don't know, I'm not you. I don't have half a dozen theories about what it's doing and how it's doing it. It's just—it makes it feel like—"

He stops again. This time, he doesn't keep talking, and Bruce can't bring himself to wait more than about three seconds. "Like what?"

"Like," Clark says, and then shuts his eyes, wets his mouth. "Like somebody—cut all my skin off."

Christ. Christ, no wonder going to his knees had made him flinch; how the fuck had he managed to walk down that entire corridor without screaming? How long has he had the goddamn thing on?

And he'd stopped a good eight inches short of touching it himself. He must've tried to tear it off at first, once he'd realized what it was doing to him—impossible not to contemplate how much worse the sensation must have gotten, and to a great enough degree to teach him never to try again—

"What will happen if I touch it?" Bruce says.

"Nothing. Nothing, it's—anybody can except me. It's fine."

Clark hadn't said whether the sensation applied to everything; but if it does, if it does and Bruce touches him and it feels to him as if Bruce is flaying him raw, he won't say a goddamn word.

So Bruce holds himself carefully away, makes certain he isn't so much as brushing Clark's knee with the toe of the armor, and focuses the armor's sensors on the collar. Best to keep his hands away from it until he has some idea what he needs to do—until he can plan out how to do it without accidentally touching Clark's throat in the process.

"And is this standard operating procedure, or—?"

"I may have gotten myself in a little bit of trouble," Clark admits, wry. "It's punishment, for—interfering."

Interfering in what? Bruce doesn't ask, because if Clark isn't telling him, isn't offering him the answer, then it must have been—something bad, something Clark doesn't want to think about when they're going to have to go back undercover in two minutes and thirteen seconds.

The armor's systems are able to scan the collar, to analyze its construction. And Clark hadn't actually been that far off, Bruce understands after a moment, despite his self-deprecating little joke. It is generating some kind of field, activating his nerves—A-delta fibers gone wild, that first sharp sensation of pain in the surface of the skin endlessly distended. Christ.

Three more seconds, and the display is able to identify the key power circuit.

"All right," Bruce says aloud. "This armor has sensors. The system has been able to analyze the collar, and I should be able to disable it. Hold still, if you can."

"Okay," Clark says.

And Bruce lifts his hands at last—takes the collar by the edges, in his gauntleted fingers, and lifts it as carefully as he can. The fit isn't skin-tight, thankfully; he has about half an inch to work with, if he's going to keep the far side of the collar from touching Clark's throat while he does it, and he's distantly grateful for the practice he's put into keeping his hands steady.

Grateful, too, more immediate and far more selfish, that his fingertips are all he needs for this—that the armor's assistive power is enough for the least twisting pressure between his hands to snap the fucking thing completely, the barest taste of what it must be like to walk around with super-strength all the time.

And he knows immediately that it worked the way it was supposed to, because Clark's entire body slackens at the same time. Clark inhales sharply, makes a small sound in the back of his throat and sways into Bruce with relief—hands against the armor, just over Bruce's knee, steadying himself against the sudden and complete cessation of pain.

"I hate to say it," Bruce murmurs, "but—"

"We should try not to offend this guy while we're still stuck in here," Clark finishes for him. "Including by preempting the punishment he picked out for me." He looks up, the angle of his mouth wry and knowing. "I couldn't laser-vision it at this angle even if I had my powers, but—can you?"

And Bruce—can, as it turns out, once he's reviewed the options offered to him by the display. It shouldn't be a surprise, given that the entire purpose of this specific kind of armor was, presumably, to ensure members of the warrior guild still had every Kryptonian power available to them no matter what kind of planet they happened to have been sent to. But Bruce perceives something—horribly, inappropriately satisfying, in discovering that he has power to hand that has been stripped so deliberately from Clark. Revolting, to be gratified by it, to enjoy anything about this experience at all—

"Yes," he makes himself say. "Don't move."

Because it doesn't matter. It can't matter, not now, not while Clark is still in danger. He needs to re-close this collar, and he can.

He focuses. The helmet increases its power draw by a few thousand percent, and two of its transparent panes begin to heat up rapidly; the system allows him to select the broken ends of the collar as a target, aims for him, and the beam is so hot it's almost white—Bruce cuts it off almost immediately, because he isn't going to have to touch Clark's neck with it for superheated air to start searing Clark's skin, but that was enough to leave the ends of the collar red-hot anyway. He presses them together, closes his armored fingers around them even though they are still glowing

(—and what a sweet fucking satisfaction, to be able to put himself, the feeble human body that is usually so goddamn useless, in between Clark and certain injury and find himself so thoroughly unharmed; what a selfish kind of pleasure, to magnanimously bestow his protection on Clark, when it only matters that he can because Clark is so unspeakably vulnerable—)

and the timer running in the corner of the display is down to a minute and twenty-four seconds. Which might be enough, but Bruce asks the armor to maximize heat absorption through the surface over his hand and fingers anyway, just make sure it'll be cool to the touch by the time he needs to let go.

"I came in the scout ship," he says belatedly, because that had been the next thing he'd intended to tell Clark, until the problem of the collar had come into focus. "The Lanterns are on their way from Jaasku II, but this system is actually closer to Earth than it is to Jaasku, so they won't arrive for another four hours at minimum, even at FTL."

"Okay," Clark says, quiet, and then looks up again, throat working, gaze shifting back and forth over Bruce's face, behind the almost-transparent panes of the Kryptonian helmet. "This is kind of a stupid thing to say, probably, but—I'm glad you got here first. I'm—I couldn't—"

"Clark," Bruce manages.

"No, just let me—I knew someone would come for me. I trust all of you, the League, the Lanterns. I knew someone would come for me. I'd have been grateful no matter who it was. But I know—I know you'd have hated being told I was gone, and you'd have hated even more if someone else had come to get me without you. But it's not even that, it's—" Clark shuts his eyes. "Jesus, Bruce, it's—it scares me so much, when the powers are gone. When the powers are gone, when I'm in pain and it won't stop, it's Zod's ship all over again, it's—"

"Me trying to kill you," Bruce bites out.

"—you hating me," Clark says unevenly, "you afraid of me, it's—two of the worst days of my life, ever. Two of the worst days, when I was alone, when there wasn't anybody who would come for me. But now you would, you have. Bruce," and he says it as if it's a sentence in itself, still hasn't opened his eyes but reaches up without looking and finds the sides of the helmet, draws Bruce down, a touch that would be a press of their foreheads if it weren't for the goddamn helmet in the way.

Bruce shouldn't be allowing it, shouldn't be—encouraging Clark to form the impression that this, this closeness, is something Bruce in any way needs from him. But—

Bruce squeezes his own eyes shut, forces himself to breathe slowly, evenly, until it feels possible to open them again.

"Thirty-one seconds," he says at last, hoarse.

"Okay," Clark says quietly. "Okay," and he lets go, looks up at Bruce with those blue blue eyes and smiles just a little. "Whatever you need to do, while we're here—do it. You can worry about presenting me with some kind of apology later."

"Don't tell me you're actually going to let me," Bruce says.

"Oh, I didn't say I was going to accept it," Clark says, and the smile gets briefly wider, brighter.

"Nine seconds," Bruce says, somehow, in the face of it.

And they don't need to be in exactly the same position they were in when the system shut off, but they do have to prepare themselves to resume the narrative.

Clark is still on his knees. Bruce lets go of the collar—reading as no worse than skin temperature to the armor's sensors, which has to be good enough—and grips the nape of Clark's neck instead, tilts his head. Three seconds, and Clark must be counting it down for himself, because he meets Bruce's eyes one more time, calm, steady, anchoring, before his gaze drops again.

And then the armor's systems register the security sensors coming back online. Bruce squeezes Clark's neck, just a fractional press of his fingertips, to let Clark know; and Clark stays there, relaxed in his grip, for an extra second before his whole body tenses—as if he's coming out of something, being released from something.

Bruce huffs out a breath, lets go and straightens up. "Yes, very well, I believe you," he says aloud. "I would not have taken it upon myself to discipline the property of the House of El in any case."

"Of course," Clark says.

"Now—I would like to rest, until they come to show me whatever it is they think will pique the interest of the House of El."

The bed—or at least Bruce is reasonably sure it can plausibly serve the same function—is shaped along similar lines to the piece of furniture Xid had seated himself within: more round than rectangular, with a lip around the edge, a depression that's clearly thickly cushioned. Bruce climbs over the lip of it, shifts his weight back and forth a few times with an assessing expression. The pillows are a more familiar design, and Bruce pushes a few behind him, leans back and takes a moment to roll his head from side to side. Makes himself comfortable—as if rest is even possible for him, under the circumstances, but for Bru-Zek, it would be.

He closes his eyes.

And Clark—Clark hadn't moved much, if at all, during most of that. But the room is silent for only a moment, after Bruce has stopped shifting around, and then Bruce hears fabric brush against itself, that goddamn skirt, as Clark rises to his feet.

He cracks an eye, because Bru-Zek would have heard that, too—would be considerably more prepared to correct Kal-El's behavior than Bruce feels, but surely Clark wouldn't do anything he thought Bruce might plausibly need to punish him for—

Clark crosses the room, quiet, bare feet on alien stone, and then sinks down again: next to the bed, approximately beside Bruce's hip. The lip of the bed isn't deeper than Bruce's body, so Clark can—can kneel there, can rest his chin against the edge of the bed and his cheek against the armor plates that run up Bruce's thigh.

Bruce twists his mouth, makes a dubious noise in the back of his throat. "No need to make yourself agreeable to me, Kal-El," he says. "I am here to return you to the House of El where you belong—no more and no less."

"Of course," Clark says, soft. "I understand. Thank you for your dedication in retrieving me."

But he doesn't move away.

And Bru-Zek—Bru-Zek, Bruce thinks distantly, might plausibly lie there for a moment longer, pretending to be unmoved, before giving in to temptation: before settling a hand casually in Kal-El's hair, and not to jerk his head up, this time, but simply for its own sake; simply to indulge in the earliest stages of a certain proprietary—affection.

Excruciating, a little bit. Not subtle. Unmercifully generous, as Clark so often is. Generous, to have taken the initiative to construct a scenario that allows Bruce to touch him, to keep touching him, even this much—to have him within arm's reach and know it. Almost certainly a mistake, to—to validate Clark's line of reasoning, to permit him to come to the understanding that this kind of reassurance is something Bruce wants badly enough to accept it when it is offered to him.

But Clark has been gone, taken, held here, for days; and Bruce's ability to restrain himself has worn irreparably and unforgivably thin.

*

Sssyin doesn't return for them for almost three full hours.

Bruce isn't about to complain. Better by far to be allowed to pretend sleep, with Clark resting beneath his open hand likewise, than to have to muster some semblance of interest in anything Yantha Xid has to offer anyone.

But it had to happen, in time.

Sssyin announces themselves with a gentle chiming tone—probably some part of the door system. Bruce stays as he is for a moment, and the tone repeats; he allows the second one to appear to rouse Bru-Zek, climbs from the bed and catches Clark easily by the length of chain between his shackled wrists as he goes to the doorway.

The door begins to melt away, has shimmered to nothing by the time he reaches it, and Sssyin, standing in the corridor, inclines their head and says, "If it pleases you—follow me, Bru-Zek, representative of the House of El."

"Yes, very well," Bruce says, without particular enthusiasm.

He would have been able to make his way back to the auction chamber even without the map shown to him by the display. But he doesn't allow himself to betray any sign of it—as if perhaps Bru-Zek no longer perceives any need for caution, as if he has taken Xid's overtures at face value.

If Xid has used the time to prepare some new trap, that alone won't be enough to change his mind, though it may at least contribute to an overabundance of confidence. But if he hasn't, then Bruce may as well reinforce to him that he's achieved his aim—that there is every reason to believe Bru-Zek will speak well of him to the House of El.

He thanks Sssyin for their assistance; finds a seat, and settles into it with Clark at his feet, head against his knee.

He does have a second container of the Kryptonian element. He had wanted to be prepared for every eventuality, including that the ship's database was wrong—that some new source of the element had been discovered somewhere, that what he had brought with him was a briefcase full of one-dollar bills instead of hundreds.

But he faces an agonizingly familiar problem: he doesn't have nearly enough to bid on and win every single—lot being brought to the auction block.

There are always more wrongs than it is ever possible to right alone.

And the solution, too, is familiar. He sits there, and he observes everything. He uses the armor's sensor system to record every single object, creature, and person presented for auction as comprehensively as possible—and every winning bidder. He can't raze this building to the ground, can't rescue every single stolen thing in front of him and return them each safely to wherever they ought to be, can't lock up every single rich alien asshole doing the buying. But he can make sure that, sooner or later, someone else can, someday.

The best he has ever been able to do.

And it is, inevitably, a comfort, to have Clark there with him. In certain fundamental, irrational ways—the solidity of Clark's weight against his shins, the awareness that there is at least one person in this room who knows precisely how much Bruce hates being here. And also—

Also, in a small wretched way he will never admit aloud unless he has to, because all of his justifications for his own course of action, all his assertions that he is doing the most effective thing he can do under the circumstances, feel so much less thin, so much less pathetically inadequate, when Superman is acting no more directly than he is.

(—idiotic. Clark can't act more directly, not here, not like this. He's trapped, and in ways Bruce has sometimes been trapped by his own mortality, his human physical limitations, but emphatically isn't trapped when he has a fully powered suit of Kryptonian warrior-guild armor on.

But some foolish part of Bruce considers and always will consider Clark the standard against which he must measure himself; and, for once, however artificial the circumstances, however forced the reasons why, he does not fall short of that standard—)

It is, of course, part of the cover. Kal-El isn't a common laborer, isn't a kitchen servant; he's the kind of favorite, capable, trusted slave who might plausibly be lent to an ally of the House of El, who might be given to the Green Lanterns to serve as a bodyguard for an alien leader, which is exactly what Clark had been doing on Jaasku II before Yantha Xid's fleet had showed up to raid the planet. Clark is only acting in-character for him, in fawning like this, staying pressed close to Bruce's legs, attentive in the only ways he can be when any other service he might normally undertake is impossible, in chains in a strange place.

Bruce keeps a hand on his head, on the nape of his neck, and doesn't visibly pay him any particular attention otherwise—the better to indicate that Bru-Zek considers his behavior normal and reasonable for a Kryptonian slave, even if it might be inappropriate by the standards of some or most of the aliens in this room. Bru-Zek shows a polite degree of interest in the proceedings, but nothing appears to strike him as exceptional, which is about the best balance Bruce can come up with between looking like he's having a decent time and refusing to imply that there is anything Xid has that Bru-Zek particularly wants.

And then, toward the end of the evening, Yantha Xid makes a personal appearance.

The chamber is perhaps a little less than half full, by the time Xid appears—only the heavy hitters, those who can still afford to bid on the biggest-ticket items, are left, Bruce assumes.

But Xid comes straight toward Bru-Zek, at a rapid skittering pace like the spider he resembles, and Bruce has to dedicate some effort to preventing tension from creeping into his shoulders.

Perhaps he's taking one last opportunity to make sure Bru-Zek understands how eager he is to establish some sort of business association with the House of El. But—perhaps not.

Focusing on the auction, on the familiar frustration of painstakingly collecting usable evidence instead of taking direct action, had allowed Bruce to achieve a state of—not relaxation, precisely, but at least refuge, a sense of routine. The closer Xid comes, though, the more pressingly Bruce finds himself freshly aware of Clark in front of him, of the soft blue glow of the kryptonite embedded in Clark's chains.

"You have enjoyed your time, then, within the palace of Yantha Xid," Xid says, with that extra repeating rasp of enthusiasm.

"Yes, yes, certainly," Bruce says, mild. "And of course I will be sure to mention your generosity in all respects to the House of El."

"Mm, good, good. Yes, very good. The resources of the House of El are many, no doubt."

Plausibly, Bruce thinks, an egomaniac luxuriating in the excellent decision he believes himself to have made, in the good fortune he has decided will shower down upon him because of it.

But there is a hunch creeping up the back of his neck that says otherwise. Something leading in the words, something just a fraction too intent about the way all ten of Xid's eyes are fixed on Bruce.

"I suppose," Bruce says aloud, with half a shrug, because Bru-Zek's only real concern is his service in their name, his success or failure.

And because the math, for the moment, remains the same: if there is any chance at all that Bruce and Clark can simply walk out of this building without interference, then Bruce is obligated to make it reality, the best and surest way to keep Clark safe. He can't afford to attack Xid, not unless Xid has unambiguously made the first move.

Unfortunately, if Bruce is any judge, that is precisely what Xid is about to do.

He waits, braced for it, and tightens his hand on the back of Clark's neck—feels Clark press a shoulder just a little harder into Bruce's knee, acknowledgment, silent agreement that Clark will move wherever Bruce directs him to whenever it should become necessary.

And then Xid tilts his head, blinks his eyes, and says, "Resources enough to, perhaps, offer a greater reward for two than for one?"

He lifts a leg, folds it in; a signal, because the guards arrayed along the walls of the auction chamber immediately start to move, closing in, ignoring the exclamations of surprise and dismay coming from the rest of Xid's remaining guests.

"Your ship has been located," Xid announces, mouthparts rasping excitedly. "You cannot hope to escape. The House of El will seek you, surely, with even greater dedication than they would seek a slave; and your ship is Yantha Xid's, your technology is Yantha Xid's. Surrender, and you will remain here in comfort until the House of El has paid what Yantha Xid deserves."

No reason Bru-Zek should appear impressed or frightened; Bruce doesn't bother. The bare minimum is all that's necessary: Bru-Zek waits, expressionless, unmoved, to see how exactly Xid thinks he's going to pull this off, concealing only Bruce's sharply strung attention, the clear and frigid focus Batman brings to combat.

And then Xid's leg twitches outward again.

Bruce moves at the same moment Xid's guards start to, with all the accelerated speed the armor can bring to bear—grips Clark, uses the assistive strength to lift him upward bodily, and in the same moment, turns the momentum of rising from his seat into half of a leap: just enough to carry him half a dozen feet into the air, to let him twist and throw himself toward the nearest corner of the room with Clark held securely against him.

He ignores the blurring of his vision, concentrates on what the display is telling him about his position and Clark's—its guidance lets him set Clark down safely and then turn on his heel without slowing down at all, even though his surroundings are nothing but a whirling smear.

But then, with Clark at his back, caged in between Bruce and the walls of the chamber, Bruce feels a grim, hard-edged gladness start to fill the space between his ribs. The guards are shouting, firing at him—but the armor's shielding has stayed calibrated to their weapons since Bruce first walked into the compound, and he takes half a dozen shots to the torso with no effect.

This, being inside this armor, is what it means to be invulnerable.

(—except that Clark is still outside of it—)

Invulnerable, powerful.

He doesn't want to fire himself, doesn't want to risk an energy blast being knocked in the wrong direction or ricocheting off one of the guards' personal shields. He waits for the nearest three of them to close with him instead, tells the armor to ignore his body's kinaesthetic input and move in whatever direction is necessary to block any shot directed toward Clark behind him, and then kicks one in the midsection, takes a shot directly to the helmet from a second and then strikes them in the upper body with an elbow—swings toward the third, catches the limb with which they are about to shoot at him in one hand, and finds the shield generation device on their opposite limb with the other hand. Their limbs aren't especially long, and Bruce is able within a moment to yank the shield generation device free. "Clark," he says, because it no longer matters whether their cover is maintained inside this room, and he tosses the device over his shoulder.

He waits long enough to hear Clark say, "Thanks," to catch the faint fizzy sound of the shield activating, and then—

Then, with Clark able at minimum to protect himself from stray energy blasts, Bruce can afford to move away from him.

Not far; never far. Bruce identifies a radius for the armor, tests it immediately in a rush of speed, and the alert that fills his vision when he exceeds the radius is satisfyingly unignorable.

And Christ, after that it's so easy it feels almost unfair, the way Bruce can just—plow through them all. He doesn't shoot them because he doesn't need to; one well-aimed blow, with all the force of the armor's assistive super-strength behind it, and they're either down or hurled halfway across the chamber, no longer relevant. He doesn't even need to make the usual tradeoffs, doesn't have to temporarily sacrifice his balance or make certain he's lined up his body mass behind a strike—there's no more effort in it than a hit in fencing, than playing fucking tag, and they're flung away from him anyway, the armor readily making up the difference without any meaningful cost at all.

Bruce had entertained vague thoughts of fighting his way to Xid—taking him hostage, perhaps, on the off chance that that would make it easier to reach the scout ship, through however many of his underlings he sent to search for it. But Xid starts scrambling away in a panic the moment the first few guards go hurtling through the chamber. Bruce could catch up easily enough, with the speed—but he'd have to leave Clark behind to do it, and frankly it just doesn't seem worth the effort.

So when the last guard facing Bruce is down, he turns around instead. Turns around, and uses a rush of the speed to reach Clark in an instant. For a moment, they're looking at each other through the faint reddish glow of the personal shield, Clark's eyes wide—but then, Bruce thinks, he's probably never seen anyone move at Kryptonian speed when he doesn't have his.

"Bruce," Clark says, hushed.

The shield generator is in his hand; he moves the shield out of the way, flips it and holds it—at the small of his back, Bruce understands, because he has realized what Bruce is about to do.

"Almost over," Bruce tells him, and then—

Then, at last, he can give in to the urge fully: gathers Clark into his arms, draws Clark's head down against his chest and bows his helmeted head over it, and when he leaps up, turns in the air, he can smash straight through the stone wall of the chamber, the outer wall of the compound, with Clark tucked safely against him.

He knows where he left the scout ship, even without the display helpfully projecting a highlighted arrow to indicate the direction he should fly from here. He applies just enough of the speed that they'll be almost impossible to target, if some of Xid's remaining guards should try to shoot them out of the sky, and the city is a pale blur beneath him, the sky purple with the last late remnants of sunset, the planet this moon is orbiting starting to rise on the opposite horizon, a fat yellow-green gas giant.

And, in the end, they don't need to fight anyone else at all. Xid's underlings did locate the ship, but they weren't actually able to get inside it. They spot Bruce coming, shout to each other, and a couple of them take optimistic potshots at him—but he doesn't need to come down to ground level, carries Clark over the ship, and the hull up there is already parting, opening to let him drift down inside.

"Execute takeoff sequence gamma," Bruce says, as soon as they touch down against the deck.

"Gamma initiated," the ship agrees, and the pressure against the soles of Bruce's feet increases for the barest instant, only a hint of inertia to tell him anything is happening at all, as the ship begins to rise.

The moon's atmosphere is thin. They break it rapidly, the pale bowl of the alien sky deepening, darkening, abruptly filling with stars—but then the deck shifts in front of them, a liquid geo display forming up out of it: the surface of the moon they've left behind them, and two, three, half a dozen smaller shapes taking off from it.

None as large as the Kryptonian scout vessel, Bruce assesses, but almost certainly ships—fighters.

"Pursuit detected," the ship murmurs, "presumably hostile."

"Extremely hostile," Bruce agrees. But they're only about five minutes short of Bruce's original estimate, and surely, if they can just stay ahead of Yantha Xid's forces that long— "Engage in evasive maneuvers as needed, and maximize sensor range. Are you able to detect—"

"Evading," the ship interrupts, and Bruce braces himself reflexively, but of course they feel nothing, any sense of inertia entirely dampened now; it's only the display suspended in front of them, the way it rotates, that implies the ship is rolling, yawing sharply sideways.

Bruce looks up, past the display capturing what's behind them, in time to see a hard bright bolt of red light fly past them in the massive front viewing pane—but far, far in the distance beyond it, to the left of the dull red ball that is this system's sun, there's something else.

"FTL rift detected," the ship announces.

"The Lanterns," Clark says, his voice full of relief, and the tiny flickering shape of the rift—probably at least a hundred thousand kilometers away—grows wider, brighter, the ship's display melting and reforming itself into a model just in time to show them the first half-dozen Lantern ships blinking through.

The immediate next steps are, thankfully, straightforward.

It's all too easy for Bruce to allow himself to step away from the banality of it—opening a channel, making contact. Reporting in to the Lanterns, updating them; preparing the data he recorded with the armor for transfer through the ship's communications system, and waiting out the brief lag before the Lanterns can confirm they've received it. The fleet arriving from Jaasku II isn't huge, but it's enough to allow them to blockade Yantha Xid's moon, to prevent any other ships from leaving or arriving until they've taken him and everyone else inside his compound into custody.

He goes through the motions of it without difficulty, without friction. But then—

Then, there is nothing left to do. Then, there is—Clark.

Bruce acknowledges the closure of the comms channel, and then forces himself to look up, away from the control panel the ship had created for him; it's melting away anyway, the liquid geo sinking back into the deck. It can't save him.

Clark meets his eyes, offers him a lopsided little smile. "Time to debrief, right? Write up our mission reports?"

He's teasing, Bruce assesses distantly. Attempting to gently return them to steadier ground, familiar territory. He's—

He's still wearing that goddamn skirt, flimsy alien cloth wrapped around his waist and hips. He's still wearing the fucking chains. And Bruce, Christ, Bruce is still in the Kryptonian armor.

His awareness of it is abruptly visceral, a full-body jolt. He keeps his eyes on Clark. But he can—feel it again, the enclosing weight of it. He can see it in his peripheral vision, the gleaming metal covering his chest, his upper arms. He needs to move, needs to offer to snap Clark's chains apart; he can't.

He makes himself breathe, makes himself blink; controls, ruthlessly, the surge of bile that tries to rise up into the back of his throat.

"Mm, I think we can afford to change clothes first," he says aloud, mildly, evenly.

But something must have shown through. He must have held himself too still, too stiffly, for an instant, or—had the ship assessed Clark's condition for itself, the moment its sensors had detected them both rising into the air above Yantha Xid's compound? Had it adjusted its atmosphere, its internal lighting, the better to recharge Clark's powers as rapidly as possible? Is it able to neutralize the kryptonite still studding Clark's chains directly?

Whatever it is that's given him away, the sound of his heart in Clark's ears or a microexpression Clark parsed at superspeed without even realizing he was doing it—Clark is watching him, now, with sudden close intensity.

But all Clark says, after a moment, is, "Sure. Don't worry, it's—the kryptonite's just blue. I'm fine. The ship can help me get these off. See you in fifteen?"

Bruce nods. The best tack would be to smile; or to allow the line of his mouth to soften, at least, the closest thing he has to an analogous gesture in the first hour following any crucial mission.

But he is unable to force himself to make it happen, and knows it. All he can do is turn and walk away.

*

He moves through the ship at a normal pace, without the speed, until he reaches the cargo area, the storage enclosure where he'd found the armor in the first place. The armor itself is easy to remove, for something that looks so complex, so intimidatingly without weakness. Bruce steps into the storage enclosure, finds the right option on the helmet's internal display, focuses on the prompt that will ask the armor to open for him—and it does, rearranging itself as neatly as the hull of the ship does, melting away from the front of his body to allow him to step out of it in nothing but the undersuit.

It closes itself up again just as cleanly, as soon as he's clear of it and out of the storage enclosure. He looks at it. It's almost beautiful, in its way—the heavy, powerful lines of it, scalloped overlapping layers of alien metal, so distinctly Kryptonian in its design.

(—it doesn't—it doesn't look anything like the exoskeleton he'd developed. It doesn't. There's no reason to—)

He becomes aware, distantly, that he is no longer certain how much time has passed, how long he's spent staring at it.

He blinks, and makes himself move, reaches for the controls at the side of the storage enclosure and seals it again.

There. Better. He took it off, he put it back. No matter how much—

—no matter how much he enjoyed it, no matter how satisfying it was to find himself so unstoppably powerful—no matter how alarming it is that he hasn't even managed to force himself to regret it, not when he was able to save Clark by it—

"Bruce."

Bruce jerks away from the storage enclosure, yanks his bare hand back from the contacts that form the control panel. Stupid, to move that way, as if he's been caught doing something he shouldn't, just because he feels as if he has.

It's Clark, because of course it is. If Bruce had thought to expect anything from him, once he had the opportunity to ask the ship for some actual clothing to replace that skirt, it would have been jeans, a plaid button-down. But he must've had a hard time getting the ship to understand what he was looking for—he is dressed, but in a shirt with a distinctly Kryptonian sort of looseness to the sleeves before they contract again at the wrists, long dark slacks made from a fabric that looks too thick, too velvety, to really resemble denim.

"Bruce," he says again, soft. "Are you all right?"

"Am I all right," Bruce repeats.

"Pulling that trick, huh," Clark says, with half a smile. "You must really not want to answer."

Bruce ignores it, because there is no response to that ploy on Clark's part that ever truly satisfies Clark; blinks, and frowns fractionally. "We agreed on fifteen minutes."

"Yeah," Clark says quietly, and he's—watching Bruce again, brows drawing together the barest inch. "It's been, um. It's been eighteen, so."

Fuck. Bruce should have thought it through before saying a word; should have at least had the presence of mind to avoid a mistake as elementary as betraying his own lack of awareness of the time. Worse by far than the error itself—the inability to cover for it appropriately will constitute a clear flag on the play, from Clark's perspective, and there is nothing Bruce can do about it now.

"Come on," Clark adds, and curls a gentle hand around Bruce's forearm just below the elbow.

Transparent of him, Bruce decides distantly. He thinks he has some idea what's wrong here, believes that Bruce needs to be—taken care of; needs to be coaxed carefully away from the armor, guided into beginning the familiar routine of debriefing, in order to calm or steady himself.

But it will cost nothing to allow him to—decide it's helping, feel useful. And the prospect of explaining to him that Bruce can see through him, that his efforts are appreciated but unnecessary, seems so exhausting, so pointless, when he almost certainly won't listen anyway.

Clark is still talking, Bruce registers, but not to Bruce. They step out of the cargo area together, and the corridor no longer goes where it used to. Clark is drawing Bruce into a room that wasn't there when Bruce came down here; but then there's no point in the two of them walking all the way back up to the command deck, when the ship is capable of adjusting its layout and creating a briefing room right here.

There are chairs, too, a table, just forming up out of the deck. But Clark doesn't sit. He turns, that's all, props himself against the edge of the table and then meets Bruce's eyes. He released Bruce's arm only just in time to allow himself the space to do so; Bruce is less than a stride away from him, and—should step back, probably.

But he hasn't quite worked out how to do it, how to make it happen, when Clark clears his throat and says, "So I guess I should—start at the beginning, probably."

Debriefing. Right.

Bruce gives him a nod.

"You must've already figured most of this out, when you were trying to find me, but—everything was going fine on Jaasku. The Lanterns weren't wrong. It really was just a ceremonial role, stepping in to guard Queen Jyllaa. But there were so many ceremonies, so many dignitaries, and I guess—" Clark stops, and shrugs, mouth twisting ruefully. "I guess one of them was on Yantha Xid's payroll, or—or knew he'd shell out for a solid tip that led him to a rare enough piece of merchandise. I don't know. Anyway, I got a message in my quarters, anonymized, somebody claiming one of the guests was an assassin after all. I figured I should at least talk to them, pass whatever they could tell me on to the Lanterns so they could check it out. But when I went out to the gardens where they'd asked me to meet them—"

"They took you," Bruce bites out.

"Yeah," Clark agrees, soft. "I don't even know how many of them there were, it was—they all had kryptonite, so I couldn't—" He stops again, swallowing, and shakes his head a little. "It was dark, and I couldn't see anymore, I couldn't stand up, I couldn't think. They dragged me onto a shuttle, and they still had the kryptonite, the lights were all red, they—they'd really done their research."

He falls silent, abrupt. Bruce doesn't understand why, and then realizes, strange and distended, belated, that he—jerked a step away, though he doesn't remember choosing to do so; that his jaw feels hard and tense, that his eyes are hot.

(—setting it down in the Cave, green and glowing; eight, ten, fifteen different scans, everything he could think of that might help him understand its structure, might allow him to discover a way to synthesize it or recreate it, if Luthor, the alien, were to exert themselves or whatever allies they could bring to bear to recover it from him, because it was the only weapon he had, it and every scrap of research he could do on it while he had it—)

"Bruce," Clark says, and he's—he's holding out his hands, open, cautious, stepping forward, with no consideration for the degree of danger he's in.

"Don't," Bruce tells him sharply, but Clark ignores it like a fucking idiot, catches Bruce by the wrist, and his palm is warm, the solid strength of his arm right there—Bruce's body betrays him utterly, disobedient fingers digging themselves into Clark's forearm for an instant.

An instant; and then Bruce catches himself, brings himself under control again, draws his hand away as if Clark has burned him and clenches it up tightly so it can't get away from him again.

But an instant is, as always, enough, with Clark.

"Bruce, it's okay," he says, hushed. "I'm okay. Don't—you don't have to—I know you. All right? I know you. I know the last time you dressed yourself up in a suit of armor, you were about to try to do pretty much the worst thing you've ever done. And you think you can't trust yourself with the kind of power to do it again, even if you wouldn't—even if you'd rather turn yourself inside out than do something like that to me now. You think you can't trust yourself, and you don't see how I can, either."

Bruce shuts his eyes. "Clark," he says, hoarse.

"I get it," Clark adds. "It wasn't all that great for me either. But I was—I mean, I tried to tell you, when we had that minute to talk. For me, the bad part ended as soon as I saw you, as soon as I knew you'd come for me. That was when I knew I was safe, and I was going to be okay. But you didn't." He pauses. "You didn't know I was safe, really safe, until you sealed up that armor again."

Bruce doesn't argue. He can't.

"But I am safe, Bruce," Clark says, and he moves, shifts his weight; Bruce still isn't looking, isn't letting himself, but he can hear it, and not that fucking skirt anymore, but the quiet hushing sound of Kryptonian cloth against itself. "I'm safe. You saved me. I know—"

No. "Clark, don't," Bruce manages, hoarse.

"—I know you know how I feel about you," Clark says anyway, too stubborn for his own goddamn good. "But I won't—this isn't about that. I won't read anything into it, or—I know you care about me. I know how worried you must've been. And I won't—you can—"

(as if he hadn't received ample proof already, as if Bruce's reciprocal weakness hadn't made itself clear: alone in that room, their three minutes together; Bruce had known better than to allow Clark to come to the understanding that whatever closeness he found himself seeking, Bruce wanted it at least as badly, and then had—had let Clark give him closeness anyway, had let Clark lean into him, had sunk his armored hand into Clark's hair afterward and left it there, unforgivably obvious—)

"I'm safe, Bruce," Clark says again.

And then his hands close over the backs of Bruce's, and he lifts them, sets them against his own face.

Bruce doesn't do anything, doesn't move, doesn't breathe. It seems too easy, he thinks vaguely.

But he feels Clark's cheeks against his palms, the line of Clark's jaw against the heel of one hand; solid, warm, alive. He moves his thumb, just a little, against the strong shape of Clark's cheekbone, and Clark doesn't pull away, doesn't vanish out from under his hands. And then, all at once, only half-controlled, he finds himself stepping closer—pressing himself into Clark, against Clark, even though he doesn't have to anymore, even though it isn't necessary—

Clark draws a startled breath against the ball of Bruce's thumb, pressing almost at the corner of his mouth. But all he does is—slide his hands up Bruce's arms, warmth bleeding rapidly through the sleeves of the undersuit, and then he's—he curls his palms over Bruce's shoulders, digs in a little with the tips of his fingers. "It's okay, it's all right. I'm all right."

Because he doesn't understand what he's done, what he's unleashed. He still believes Bruce can be soothed.

Bruce is—still touching his face, with one hand. Gripping the nape of his neck, with the other, and doing it much too hard. He screws his eyes shut more tightly, shoves his forehead against the blunt pressure of Clark's temple, because if he can only—rein this in, contain it, then perhaps he can save Clark after all.

But Clark is so close, warm and whole, not even trying to shake himself free; turning into Bruce a little, mouth brushing Bruce's jaw, as he says, breathlessly, unsteadily, "Bruce—?"

Bruce kisses him.

It is, of course, the wrong thing to do. The wrong thing to do, and cruel besides, unconscionably so. Bruce does know how Clark feels about him, has known for months, and that means Clark isn't going to stop him—is going to give him this, is going to let him take it, and will be functionally unable to hold it against him.

Clark makes a soft uneven sound into Bruce's mouth, and, inevitably, moves with him, accepts it; skims careful fingers up from Bruce's shoulder to the side of his throat, up into his hair, as if to reassure him, to gentle him.

Idiocy. If Clark would only shove him away, that would take care of it, that would—Bruce could deal with it, then, could finish the job; could shove it all back down where it belongs, apologize, take the memory of Clark's frustration and disgust and forge that into shackles more than heavy enough to bind it there forever.

But as it is, he can't—he—he isn't strong enough alone, he can't—he practically carries Clark half a step, pushes him into the edge of the table and pins him there, kisses him harder; catches him by the jaw, draws his mouth open, bites at his lip—

"Bruce," Clark gasps against his teeth, "Bruce, jesus, you—?"

Bruce can't fix this. But he can redirect it. He can do that much, at least, to keep Clark safe.

He breaks away. It feels as if it's been no time at all, not really, and yet his mouth is—wet, buzzing, hot and awake.

He pries his hands from Clark's face, from the nape of his neck; finds Clark's waist with them instead, rubs the tips of his fingers against that rich Kryptonian cloth and discovers the sensation is oddly grounding, steadying.

And then he sinks to his knees.

"Oh, god," Clark says faintly, and then, "Bruce, wait, you—don't, you don't—you never—"

"Please," Bruce hears himself say.

And Clark—Clark is, after all, in love with him. Clark won't refuse him this, doesn't have the sense of self-preservation to understand what Bruce is doing to him, how decisively Bruce is eliminating any chance that remained to Clark to get over the feeling and move on.

"Yes," Clark says, "yes, jesus, if you're—if you're sure you won't—"

Whatever he intended the end of that sentence to be, it does not matter; it can't. Bruce locates the front of the Kryptonian slacks, finds the shape of Clark's cock within them and squeezes, and Clark cuts himself off, chokes helplessly on air and shudders under Bruce's hand.

The Kryptonian cloth parts readily under Bruce's fingers, splitting for him the same way the Superman suit seems to split itself when Clark needs to take it off; and this is good. This is better. Bruce on his knees

(—instead of—instead of Clark, in the rain, shivering with agony, overwhelmed—)

and Clark over him: the way it should be. Clark is half-hard at best, but considering how careful he'd intended to be—I won't read anything into it—how he must have meant to stand there and let Bruce hold him, touch him, without letting himself react to it at all, that's a compliment. A kiss, another, and the pressure of Bruce's body against him, the implications of Bruce dropping to the deck in front of him: enough in and of itself to leave his cock thickening steadily by the time Bruce has a hand around it.

Bruce doesn't linger. He tells himself he shouldn't make this worse, more difficult for Clark, than it needs to be; but once he's closed his mouth around the bare uncut head of Clark's cock, once he's sliding the flat of his tongue along the curving stiffening length of it, the truth exposes itself to him: it is reassuring, comforting in a way he doesn't deserve, to be so—so close to Clark, intimately and undeniably. To press himself against Clark's shaking legs, to wrap his hands around Clark's hips, to dig his fingertips into the generous shape of Clark's ass just above where he has Clark pinned against the table; to hear Clark cry out, to listen to each hoarse uneven gasp work its way closer and closer to a sob—to have that hot thin skin against his tongue, his palate, and the crinkling of hair against his nose. Even the smell, warm and musky; not unpleasant, but animal, private, skin and sweat and arousal.

Clark, all of it. Clark, alive, alive and letting Bruce do this, letting Bruce absorb him so thoroughly, so fully, though Bruce has done so little to earn it.

"—Bruce, Bruce, jesus, I can't—"

Bruce closes his eyes, relaxes his throat; sinks deeper, closer, the blissful choking pressure of Clark's cock filling his mouth, and Clark cries out again, clutches at Bruce's head, curls his shaking hands into Bruce's hair. Perhaps he will, at least, pull on it—pull on it, forget himself; hold Bruce there and fuck Bruce's throat, extract something for himself from Bruce that is even a fraction as selfish as Bruce doing this to him at all.

"—hold on, just—just wait a second, Bruce," and he's—he isn't pulling, not really; finding Bruce's face, and for an instant his fingers, against Bruce's cheek, are in the right place to feel himself through it, the shape of his cock inside of it; he swears, breathless, but the pressure he exerts then is only to—to hold Bruce at bay, to keep Bruce from sucking him in any farther. "Just wait, let me—look at me. Please."

Fuck.

Bruce can't make himself do it. But he—allows Clark's cock to slide from his mouth, and then Clark touches his face, his chin; guides it upward, by degrees, until it would be harder to look away from him than to look at him.

"Hey, hey," Clark is saying, "here, come on, just," and his hand dips lower, catches the collar of the undersuit and drags at it, pulls.

"Clark," Bruce says, hoarse.

"Come on. That was—that was so—that was good, that was amazing, but I," and Clark's still pulling on him, the undersuit, his shoulder; not a difficult instruction to interpret, and Bruce follows it, rises from the deck and stands.

Clark hardly lets him do it before drawing him in again, kissing him—licking straight into his mouth, unhesitating even though Bruce must taste like him, his cock, salt and sweat and fluid. "Bruce, jesus," he repeats, against Bruce's jaw, when he's finished, and then he—

Then he shifts his weight, hitches himself up without letting go of Bruce at all: onto the table, parting his knees, holding Bruce in between them.

"Please," he says, low, stroking Bruce's face with his thumbs.

"Clark—"

"Please," and he kisses Bruce again, again, hot and sweet and overwhelming. "I want you to. I want you to, if you—if you want to."

No, Bruce thinks.

No. This is—this is not a good idea, this is exactly what Bruce has been trying to avoid. Rescuing Clark had required it: had required him to act as if he were indulging the worst urge he has ever held toward Clark all over again; had required him to put himself in a position of power, of control, over Clark, and at a moment when Clark had been utterly without the ability to stop him—

Clark is Superman. Clark has recovered, or at least is beginning to, and could probably already hurl Bruce through the wall of this room if he wanted to.

Bruce knows that. But something in his head, something in his chest, does not believe it: cannot afford to, when the stakes in play are as unimaginably high as—Clark.

"Please," Clark says again, hardly more than a whisper. "I want you to, I want—give it to me, please," and the Kryptonian slacks are already hanging loose around his hips, he's—he's still as barefoot as he was when he had been brought to Bruce in the palace of Yantha Xid; a brief blur, proof that he's already got some portion of the superspeed back, and then he's there again, hooking an abruptly naked leg over Bruce's hip, clutching Bruce's shoulders, suspended at the edge of the table.

Bruce shuts his eyes. "I—"

"Or—let me touch you," Clark tries, stubborn, relentlessly optimistic, even about this. He leans forward, kisses Bruce's jaw, cheek, and then his mouth again. "Let me, just—"

He spreads a hand out over Bruce's chest. The undersuit isn't Bruce's own, isn't one of the ones he wears underneath the Batsuit; he couldn't be sure how those would have fit within the Kryptonian armor, whether they'd have interfered in some way with some crucial piezoelectric connection. It's Kryptonian, provided to him by the ship, and Clark touches it, parts it the same way Bruce had parted his slacks—but he stops there for a long moment, slides his hand inside and rubs his thumb across the scarred skin of Bruce's chest, and it is suddenly difficult to remember precisely why it is so important to stop him.

"Clark," Bruce hears himself say, and he—kisses Clark first, this time, unable to prevent himself from swaying into Clark's body, the weight of Clark's leg over his hip and thigh. Moving that way presses him—presses his—

Presses his cock, the heavy hard weight he had been so ruthlessly ignoring when he was on his knees on the floor, against the back of Clark's thigh, and Christ, that feels so fucking good; Clark makes a sharp eager sound in the back of his throat, sucks on Bruce's tongue and shifts his weight just enough to nudge Bruce's cock between his legs instead. Against the base of his own cock, his exposed balls, that's all—but Bruce can feel the the texture of it, the wet drag against the undersuit, because Clark's cock is still slick with Bruce's spit, and it's—it's obscene, obscene and staggeringly hot.

"Oh, god," Clark says at the same time, gasping, his head falling helplessly back, the whole glorious line of his throat exposed. "Oh, Bruce, Bruce, please—" and suddenly his hand isn't lingering anymore; he jerks the undersuit aside, splits the surface of it down to Bruce's waist with one tug, pushes his hand down inside it to shove greedy knuckles down the length of Bruce's cock—

"Fuck, Clark—"

"Yes, come on, jesus," and as quickly as that, they're practically tangling themselves up, trying at the same time to yank the undersuit open. Bruce shrugs it off his shoulders, pulls his arms free with two sharp tugs, and then Clark drags him back in, hooks an arm around him and rolls his hips—makes a hard broken sound in his throat, as Bruce's cock slides past it and then almost, almost, where he's been pleading with Bruce to put it. "You can't hurt me, you know you won't hurt me," he gasps. "Please, just do it, do it."

And Christ, that's—Bruce kisses him again, holds his face in one hand and catches his thigh in the other, presses it up until Clark holds it there for him and then finds his own cock with his thumb, pushes it down a fraction and bears forward—

"Oh, oh, Bruce," and it's intolerable, his name in that voice like this, right now; he understands he isn't going to last, understands that there's nothing he can do about it—clutches Clark against him and fucks in, and Clark is almost unfathomably tight around him, the gritty drag of friction so intense it's almost uncomfortable, but Clark's leg closes around him, practically forces him deeper; Clark's eyes are so so blue, a hot lovely red blooming across his cheeks, his mouth a wet shocked O, and Bruce cannot bear it.

He digs his fingers into Clark's thigh, takes the inch Clark gives him to pull out just enough to let him thrust back in, and Clark shudders, gasps and fumbles to grip the back of Bruce's neck, and then—Christ, he's coming, trembling around Bruce; Bruce has a split second to feel it, to commit a snapshot glimpse of his cock, how dark it is, the first white spill across his belly and thigh, before he's dragged under by it himself, the hot bright wave closing over his head.

*

Clark doesn't let him go, after. Holds him there, against Clark, one broad hand cradling the nape of Bruce's neck, thumb gentle in Bruce's hair.

And then, once Clark has caught his breath, he says into Bruce's ear, "I'm safe."

Bruce shuts his eyes.

"I'm safe with you. You don't trust yourself, I know that. But you can—you can trust me, Bruce."

"I do," Bruce manages.

And Clark falls silent, then; draws him up, thumbs smoothing along his jaw, and kisses him. Throws himself into Bruce's hands all over again, as reckless as he has ever been—and all Bruce can do is try to make sure he won't regret it, try to catch him: kiss him back.