Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Clark Kent’s day began the way most people did — with the coffee tasting faintly of burnt toast, the elevator stalling for just long enough to make him check his watch twice, and Perry White barking about deadlines before Clark had even shrugged his coat off.

The Daily Planet newsroom was its usual blend of noise and movement: the steady ring of telephones, the whirr and slam of the copy machine jamming again, reporters leaning over cubicles to trade whispers that would turn into tomorrow’s headlines. Clark moved through it with his coat draped over one arm, offering nods and easy smiles, holding the elevator for a woman juggling too many file folders, stopping at the break room to refill the coffee pot when it sputtered dry.

He checked in on Jimmy, who was adjusting the focus on his camera and grinning about his niece’s first piano recital. Lois breezed past, balancing a half-empty cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll from a bakery three blocks over. She caught him by the arm and pressed a forkful into his hand, declaring he’d thank her later. Clark protested weakly, then ate it anyway, letting her launch into her theory about a councilman with suspicious property holdings.

At his desk, he opened a new document and began typing up a piece on a city zoning bill, the sort of story most readers skim past but which Clark quietly liked for its quiet importance. His glasses slipped down his nose; he pushed them back with the same absent motion he’d made a thousand times. Outside the tall windows, the city spread under a gray sky, its edges blurred by the steady mist of rain.

It was an ordinary day in an ordinary life.

At lunch, he stepped out onto the fire escape for a bit of fresh air and called home. Ma’s voice came warm through the receiver, wrapping him in the same comfort as her homemade bread. She told him about the calf that had been born two days early, about the neighbor’s fence blowing down in last night’s storm. She asked if he was eating enough, if he was keeping warm, if he was sleeping at all. He laughed, promised her he was fine, and listened to her linger a beat before saying goodbye.

When the call ended, he stayed there for a moment with the phone in his palm, staring out at the blur of traffic and pedestrians. Behind him, the muffled sounds of the newsroom — ringing phones, clattering keys, Perry’s sharp voice — filled the air like the constant ticking of a clock.

He had work he believed in, friends who cared for him, a home to return to at night. On paper, he lacked for nothing. But beneath the hum of all that living, there was a hollow space that no conversation seemed to fill.

The truth was, Clark wasn’t lonely because he lacked company. He was lonely because of the company he couldn’t keep.

No one here knew that when he left work, he sometimes flew halfway around the world before dinner. That the reason he always carried his bag was because inside it were the boots and cape. That the man in the headlines — the one holding up bridges and catching planes — often wrote the bylines that followed.

There were others like him — people who could shatter concrete with a punch, who could breathe underwater or walk through walls. He’d met them. Fought beside some of them. But always at a distance. They shared victories the way strangers share a bench at a train station: side by side, without ever really turning toward one another.

So Clark lived between two worlds, never entirely belonging to either.

And in the middle of a bustling newsroom, with the smell of coffee and ink in the air, surrounded by the noise of lives being lived — he had never felt more alone.

By the time most of the Planet staff had gone home, the newsroom had fallen into its after-hours hush. The overhead lights were dimmed to half, leaving the rows of desks in long pools of shadow. Rain tapped the tall windows in an even rhythm.

Clark sat hunched over his monitor, sleeves rolled to the elbow, glasses slipping down his nose. He was picking apart the middle section of his zoning bill piece, smoothing out clumsy transitions, trimming the extra words that had crept in while he’d been distracted. Perry wanted it ready for tomorrow’s print, and Clark told himself he’d have it wrapped in another half hour.

Then he heard it.

Not the rain, not the faint hum of the fluorescent lights — but something sharper, farther, carrying across the bay. An explosion. The crack of gunfire. The distant wail of sirens threading through the night.

Gotham.

His fingers stilled on the keyboard.

It was late, too far, and absolutely not his beat. Metropolis had its own problems — that was what he told himself on nights like this. But the sound of another blast rolled across the water, and the excuse dissolved before it could finish forming.

Clark glanced around. The newsroom was empty but for him; even Lois had gone home hours ago. He leaned back in his chair, rubbed a hand across his face, then sighed.

"Thirty minutes," he muttered under his breath. "I’ll come back and finish it."

He saved his work, set the computer to sleep mode, and pushed back from the desk. His chair rolled a few inches and bumped quietly against the cubicle wall.

In three strides, he crossed the room to the far corner — the one without cameras, where the floor plan bent just enough to give him cover from the street-facing windows. His hand was already at the knot of his tie.

The rain against the glass grew louder as the suit beneath the shirt came into view, the muted blue catching in the dim light. In another breath, he was gone — the desk chair still spinning slightly in his wake.

Gotham was already burning when he arrived.

The night sky flashed in bursts of orange and green. A block along the waterfront had erupted into chaos: overturned cars, shattered storefronts, civilians scattering in waves from the epicenter of the attack. In the middle of it stood the cause — Metallo, his chestplate glowing a sickly green, every step rattling the street like a drumbeat.

Clark hit the ground running, literally — a blur of red cape and forward momentum as he intercepted a chunk of falling debris before it crushed a family huddled in the street.

"Get to cover," he urged them, setting the twisted metal aside like it weighed nothing.

Metallo’s head snapped toward him, the glow in his chest intensifying.
"Superman," the cyborg spat, voice metallic and warped. "Wrong city."

Clark straightened, eyes narrowing.
"Looks like you brought the problem here. Let’s fix that."

Metallo didn’t wait. The blast hit Clark square in the chest, the green glow searing through him like fire under the skin. Clark staggered but held his ground, forcing himself forward against the wave of kryptonite radiation. The pavement cracked under his boots.

The fight tore through the street — Metallo using parked cars as weapons, Clark forcing him away from clusters of civilians. Every punch, every block came with a calculation: keep the damage contained, keep the people safe.

Somewhere behind him, police sirens grew louder. Gotham’s response teams were moving in. Clark caught Metallo mid-swing, spun him into the side of a reinforced loading dock, and braced for the retaliation.

He could feel the kryptonite’s bite already slowing him down. This was going to be a long night.

Metallo lunged, both arms swinging like wrecking balls. Clark ducked the first blow, caught the second, but the impact still rattled his bones. He shoved back hard enough to send the cyborg skidding into the shell of a delivery truck. The metal groaned, then collapsed around him in a spray of sparks.

Clark didn’t wait for him to recover — he was already moving, scooping an overturned sedan upright so the driver could scramble free. A sharp whine cut through the air. He turned just in time to see Metallo’s chestplate flare again, the glow seeping through the seams in his armor.

The blast hit square across his shoulder, the kryptonite radiation crawling into his muscles like ice water. Pain spiked down his arm; his grip faltered on the sedan. He forced it the rest of the way upright with a grunt, waving the driver toward a group of officers forming a barricade at the corner.

Metallo emerged from the wreckage of the truck, laughing — the deep, static-laced sound of a speaker tearing apart.
“You’re slower, Superman,” he taunted. “All that muscle, and you’re just… breaking down.”

Clark ignored him. Taunts were meant to draw his focus, and in Gotham, focus was survival.

He drove forward, fists hammering into Metallo’s armored jaw, ribs, midsection — each blow ringing like a church bell through his own bones. The street under them cracked from the force, but Clark kept pressing, kept pushing him toward the waterfront where there’d be fewer civilians.

Another burst of green energy tore through him before he could block. This one knocked him off his feet, sending him through the glass front of a warehouse. He hit the ground hard, rolling once before coming to a stop against a stack of pallets.

His ears rang. His vision swam. The rain was coming down harder now, mixing with the fine dust settling from the broken walls.

Metallo’s shadow filled the doorway.
“You’re not going to win this one.”

Clark pushed to his knees, feeling the weight in his limbs as though he’d been running for hours with lead in his veins. “I don’t need to win,” he said, forcing the words steady. “I just need to stop you.”

He surged forward, catching Metallo off-guard, and the two crashed through the far wall and into the street again. The waterfront loomed only a block away, its cranes and warehouses dark against the rain-smeared sky.

Sirens were close now — police, fire, and somewhere beneath it, the low roar of ambulance engines.

Clark caught sight of a cluster of paramedics setting up a triage station at the barricade. Even through the haze of pain, he made a mental note: Good. They’re here. Keep him away from them.

Metallo swung again. Clark met him head-on, even as the kryptonite’s burn sank deeper. Each punch landed slower than the last. His breath fogged the cold air in ragged bursts. But he stayed on his feet.

Because this wasn’t just about him. It never was.

Clark’s boots scraped against the wet pavement as he forced Metallo back another step, then another. The waterfront was close enough now that Clark could smell the brine of the bay, feel the open space of the docks behind him.

Metallo slammed a fist into his ribs; the impact lit a fresh streak of pain through his side. Clark caught the next blow, twisted, and used the cyborg’s own weight to drive him down into the cracked asphalt.

The ground trembled. Water splashed from the gutters in a wave.

Metallo snarled, the kryptonite in his chestplate blazing so bright it painted the rain green. “You can’t stop me, Boy Scout.”

“Watch me.”

Clark reached in, ignoring the fire racing under his skin, and gripped the edges of the chestplate. The radiation poured into him in steady, punishing waves — his vision dimmed at the edges, his legs threatening to give. With a guttural shout, he ripped the panel free and hurled it into the bay. It hit the water with a hiss and vanished beneath the surface.

Metallo’s glow died. The cyborg went slack. Clark let him drop to the ground, the rain instantly soaking the fractured metal shell.

It should have been a victory. But Clark was already swaying, one hand braced against the nearest wall to keep himself upright. Without the chestplate’s concentrated output, the kryptonite’s hold was fading — but too slowly.

The barricade was only half a block away now, lit in sharp red and blue. Medics moved between stretchers, their voices a practiced calm over the chaos. Police officers kept civilians back while fire crews doused the smoldering wreckage.

Clark pushed off the ground, his cape catching the steady rhythm of rain as it unfurled behind him. The cool night air rushed past, sharp and clean, a fleeting balm against the dull, burning ache threading through his muscles. Below him, the city stretched out like a canvas of blurred lights and shadows, the chaos of the night humming quietly beneath the steady pulse of his breath.

For a brief moment, weightless and untethered, he allowed himself to forget the pain — to simply be Superman, soaring above the world.

But then the familiar, insidious wave of weakness crashed over him, cold and unrelenting. His limbs trembled as if made of glass; his breath hitched sharply, caught tight in his chest. He’d pushed too far, overestimated what his body could bear tonight.

His ascent faltered. With a hesitant tilt, he angled toward the triage station below — and the world lurched wildly around him.

He was falling.

Instinctively, he yanked himself upward, desperate to reclaim control. Just then, strong hands caught him, steady and unyielding despite the weight he bore.

Clark blinked through the rain’s blur and found himself looking into the sharp, concerned eyes of a man crouched beside him — dark hair plastered to his forehead, rain tracing quiet paths down his angular cheekbones, a stethoscope slung casually around his neck like a quiet declaration of authority.

“Can you hear me?” the man’s voice was low but clear, cutting through the chaos of sirens and distant shouts. “Stay with me, Superman.”

The doctor glanced over his shoulder, urgency sharpening his tone. “I need a stretcher over here, now!”

Clark forced a polite, small smile despite the heaviness weighing him down. “I’m fine,” he said softly, pushing away the man’s hands with more grace than strength. “Thank you.”

With a sudden surge, his cape caught the wind and billowed wide as he lifted himself from the ground. The cityscape blurred beneath him once more, rain slicking his shoulders and tracing cold, sharp lines down the fabric of his suit.

But just before the darkness swallowed him, his gaze flickered back.

The doctor’s face was etched with concern, the crease between his brows deepening beneath rain-soaked hair. His eyes narrowed slightly, shadowed by something more than professional care — a quiet urgency, an unspoken warning Clark chose not to hear.

There was something in that look that lingered in Clark’s mind long after he had pushed away and soared toward Metropolis — a tether pulling at the edges of his resolve.

The weight of those eyes, steady and unwavering in the storm, stayed with him. Not just the hands that had caught him, but the calm in the storm — a presence that had steadied him when his own strength faltered.

As the city lights faded beneath him, and the familiar rush of flight surrounded him once again, Clark drew deep from his remaining reserves.

And then, through the patter of rain and distant shouts, he heard it:

“Here, Dr. Wayne!”

For a long moment, Clark’s thoughts clung to the man who had saved him, to the quiet strength he’d seen in those narrowed eyes.

Attack on Gotham Bay

Bruce Wayne barely spared a glance at the breaking news flashing across the hospital’s TV screen as he wiped grime from his hands. Nearly twenty hours into his shift at Gotham General, exhaustion had settled into his bones like an unwelcome shadow. Every muscle ached, every nerve was frayed and stretched thin, but Gotham’s heartbeat wouldn’t slow for his fatigue.

The city didn’t wait — and neither could he.

Without hesitation, Bruce pulled on his jacket, ran a practiced hand over the stethoscope hanging around his neck, and joined the paramedics and medical team gathering rapidly in the ambulance bay. The air was thick with tension and the sharp tang of rain-soaked concrete.

“Ready?” one of the paramedics asked, eyes flicking toward him.

Bruce nodded, stepping into the ambulance with practiced ease. The vehicle’s engine roared to life, wipers slicing through the downpour as they sped toward Gotham Bay.

The ride was tense but methodical — radios crackled with updates, directions, and urgent calls. Bruce’s gaze was steady, scanning the city as it blurred past, preparing himself for the scene he knew would greet them.

As the ambulance screeched to a halt amid flashing emergency lights and swirling chaos, Bruce was the first to leap out. He took a deep breath of the rain-slicked air — heavy with smoke, fear, and determination — before moving alongside the paramedics into the storm.

Nearby, Dr. Leslie Thompkins, freshly arrived for her shift, caught sight of him. Her eyes narrowed with that familiar blend of exasperation and concern.

“You’re not planning on doing this alone, are you?” she asked with a chiding tone as she caught up beside him.

Bruce gave a brief, wry smile. “Never alone when the city needs us.”

Leslie shook her head but fell in step beside him, her presence a steadying counterpoint to the frantic energy around them. Together, they moved through the frantic scramble — firefighters shouting orders, civilians fleeing, the sharp crackle of distant explosions blending with sirens and shouted commands.

Bruce’s training kicked in, instincts sharp as ever. Calm, deliberate, efficient — he directed firefighters away from a ruptured gas line, guided paramedics to the most critically injured, and physically pulled a trapped woman free from beneath a fallen beam.

The chaos swirled around them, but in that moment, Bruce was exactly where he needed to be — a steady force amid the storm, fighting not just to save lives, but to hold the city together.

Then, a sudden blur cut through the night sky — a figure falling fast, tumbling through the rain.

Bruce’s heart kicked into overdrive. Instinct flared — he lunged forward, arms outstretched to catch the falling man.

But the moment his hands made contact, recognition hit.

Superman.

The impossible, the myth, the man himself — hurt, vulnerable.

Bruce adjusted immediately. There was no use trying to break the fall gently; instead, he braced for impact, planting his feet firmly as the weight slammed into him.

The force knocked the breath out of Bruce’s lungs, but he held steady, wrapping an arm securely around Superman’s shoulders.

“Can you hear me? Stay with me, Superman.”

Superman’s chest rose and fell unevenly beneath his grasp — shallow breaths, quick and labored. His eyes fluttered open, gaze fogged but aware.

Bruce’s fingers pressed lightly to Superman’s pulse, noting its rapid thrum and the subtle irregularity beneath the surface. His mind cataloged the signs — exhaustion, trauma, something deeper hidden beneath the surface. He glanced over his shoulder, urgency sharpening his tone. “I need a stretcher over here, now!”

Superman gave him a small, polite smile—fragile, almost resigned. “I’m fine,” he said softly, pushing Bruce’s hands away with more grace than strength. “Thank you.”

Then, with sudden determination, his cape caught the wind and billowed wide as he lifted himself from the ground. The cityscape blurred beneath him once again, rain slicking over his shoulders, cold lines tracing the contours of his suit.

Bruce’s gaze followed him upward, watching the familiar silhouette cut through the stormy sky. A mixture of admiration and concern tightened in his chest. Even the strongest had limits.

But before he could gather his thoughts, a voice called sharply from the edge of the chaos.

“Here! Dr. Wayne!”

Bruce turned to see a team of paramedics wheeling in another stretcher, the rain-slicked canvas taut over its burden. Without hesitation, Bruce moved toward them, the rhythm of the night’s relentless demand pulling him back into the storm.

There was no time to dwell — Gotham needed him still.

Bruce moved methodically through the final moments of the chaos, his hands steady as he helped a woman clutching a twisted ankle to the waiting paramedics. Around him, the city was slowly waking from the night’s nightmare—the frantic shouts and blaring sirens giving way to the softer hum of morning.

He lifted his gaze toward the horizon, where the first pale fingers of sunlight pierced through the heavy storm clouds. The air was thick with the scent of rain and smoke, a lingering reminder of the havoc wrought just hours before.

Not far off, standing beside a sleek black car, was Alfred—quiet, watchful, a familiar anchor amid the fading storm. The older man’s eyes met Bruce’s, steady and unwavering despite the exhaustion clearly etched on both their faces.

Bruce nodded in acknowledgment, the simple gesture carrying unspoken understanding.

He pulled out his notebook, jotting down the last few notes with practiced efficiency. Nearly twenty-eight hours awake. The number pressed against his mind like a physical weight, but there was no room for self-pity, no time for rest.

His hands closed the notebook, and with one last look at the battered scene, he moved toward the waiting car. The world was just beginning to stir awake, but for Bruce, the night’s battle was far from over.

The drive home was long and silent. Rain still pattered softly against the windows, blurring the city into muted shapes and colors. Bruce’s thoughts drifted unbidden — memories of late nights in the medical library, the rigorous demands of medical school, the heavy expectations that had always hovered around his choice to become a doctor. His father’s footsteps loomed large in his mind, a silent standard to live up to.

Yet, amid the familiar thoughts, another image settled in his mind—the man who had fallen from the sky.

Superman.

A figure both magnificent and vulnerable. The weight of that fragile smile, the quiet resignation in his eyes, lingered with Bruce long after the night’s chaos had faded.

What stories lay beneath that suit and cape? What battles fought beyond what the world could see?

The questions spun in his mind as the car slipped through the waking city, but the relentless pull of exhaustion tugged harder.

His eyelids grew heavy, his vision blurred, and despite every effort to hold on, the darkness crept inward.

The storm of the night was nothing compared to the storm within his own body—a storm he could no longer fight.

And finally, surrender came.

Chapter Text

Bruce Wayne had not wanted to be in Metropolis.

Not for an hour. Not for a day. Certainly not for a weeklong symposium where the most immediate danger was death by boredom.

He could name a dozen more productive uses for his time — most of them involving a scalpel, a patient, and a room full of people who actually needed him. But Dr. Leslie Thompkins, the one person on Earth who could stare him down without flinching, had looked him square in the eye after his last forty-eight-hour rotation and said, in the unshakable tone of someone who would win this argument or die trying:

"You’re taking a break, Bruce. A real break. Go to the conference. Sleep in a hotel bed. Eat something that didn’t come from the vending machine next to the nurses’ station."

And then, before he could protest, she had booked his tickets.

So here he was, three hours into a medical symposium at the Metropolis Grand Convention Center, enduring a series of panel discussions about emergency trauma innovations he had already read — twice — in the New England Journal of Medicine. The conference hall was a cavern of glass and steel, sunlight pouring in through high windows to glint off the brushed-metal name tags and the endless parade of sensible shoes. The air smelled faintly of coffee, sanitizer, and too many people pretending to be impressed.

Bruce sat near the back, posture straight but with his weight balanced as if ready to stand at a moment’s notice — a habit from both medicine and other, more dangerous pursuits. His dark suit was pressed, his tie perfectly knotted, but his eyes had the faint shadows of a man who’d forgotten what eight hours of sleep felt like.

Leslie had booked him into every keynote, every luncheon, every evening reception. A man under court-ordered vacation. He half suspected she’d bribed half the guest speakers to “encourage” him to relax.

It didn’t help that Harvey Dent — Gotham’s current mayor and Bruce’s oldest friend — had somehow arranged to be in Metropolis the same week. Harvey wasn’t here for the conference; he had a scheduled meeting with the Metropolis mayor to discuss sending aid to Gotham after Metallo’s latest rampage had gutted the waterfront district.

Metallo’s attack had left the docks a mess of twisted steel and scorched concrete. Harvey had been tireless in the aftermath, securing funding for cleanup and housing for displaced families. Bruce had been equally relentless — but from inside Gotham General, triaging the flood of injured civilians Metallo’s rampage had left behind. The work had been grim, and exhausting.

That was another reason Leslie had insisted he come here.

“Bruce Wayne,” a familiar voice said from behind him, warm and faintly amused. “And here I thought you were allergic to leaving Gotham unless someone was bleeding out on the pavement.”

Bruce turned, a rare half-smile flickering across his face. Harvey stood a few steps away, framed by the gleaming entrance to the convention center, looking infuriatingly well-rested. His suit was immaculate — charcoal gray, single-breasted — with his tie loosened just enough to signal that the official business portion of his day was either over or about to be abandoned entirely.

“I was forced,” Bruce said simply, adjusting the cuff of his shirt.

Harvey’s grin widened. “Leslie’s orders?”

Bruce’s expression made the answer obvious.

“She finally pulled rank on you, huh?” Harvey said, tone somewhere between sympathy and amusement.

“She didn’t pull rank,” Bruce replied, though the protest was half-hearted at best. “She just… reminded me I don’t get paid extra for dying in the ER.”

Harvey laughed, clapping him on the shoulder. “Good. I like to see you above ground.”

They started walking toward the escalators, Harvey falling into step beside him with the ease of long familiarity.

“So,” Harvey said, “what’s on the agenda for Doctor Wayne? Fancy dinners? Keynote speeches? Maybe a little sightseeing?”

“I’m here for the conference,” Bruce said flatly, his gaze cutting briefly toward the grand hall where a new panel was starting.

“Of course you are.” Harvey didn’t miss a beat. “You mean you’re going to sit in a dark room full of other people who already know everything they’re talking about, nod at all the right times, and then hide in your hotel room reading case studies until you fall asleep in a chair.”

Bruce gave him a look. “I’ve upgraded to falling asleep in an actual bed, apparently. Doctor’s orders.”

“Progress,” Harvey said, mock solemn.

They passed a row of enormous posters advertising the conference’s keynote speakers — smiling surgeons in crisp white coats with arms folded like superheroes in operating rooms. Bruce ignored them.

“You could at least try to enjoy the city,” Harvey continued. “Metropolis has decent restaurants, a functioning transit system, and fewer muggings per block than Gotham. Might be good for your blood pressure.”

“I’m fine,” Bruce said, the same way he might answer ‘Are you bleeding?’ after a rooftop brawl.

“Yeah,” Harvey said dryly. “You always say that.”

They stepped out into the main lobby, where sunlight poured through the high glass façade, bouncing off polished floors and the gleaming chrome accents of the convention center’s architecture. Outside, the city moved with its characteristic hum — bright, fast, alive in a way Gotham never was in daylight. Bruce found it strange. Unsettling, even.

“Harvey,” he said, glancing at the mayor’s briefcase, “you’re here for your meeting.”

“In about forty-five minutes,” Harvey said. “Plenty of time to grab coffee. And maybe — if I’m feeling reckless — convince you to eat lunch somewhere that doesn’t serve boxed salads.”

Bruce shook his head, but didn’t outright refuse.

Harvey’s grin tilted sly. “Come on. It’s a rare thing — both of us in the same city without half of Gotham trying to kill us. Feels almost… normal.”

Bruce didn’t answer right away. He was thinking about how long that normality would last. In his experience, the answer was not long at all.

They found a small corner restaurant just off Centennial Park, tucked between a florist and an antique bookshop. It had dark wood paneling, linen tablecloths, and the faint aroma of coffee and rosemary drifting in from the kitchen. The sort of place that was quiet enough for a conversation but lively enough to feel connected to the city beyond its windows.

Bruce let Harvey choose the table — a corner booth with a view of the park’s green sweep and the glass towers beyond. The midday sun slanted through the window, casting clean light over the polished cutlery.

For a few minutes, Bruce almost relaxed.

Their menus lay untouched as Harvey recounted some ridiculous city council debacle involving zoning permits, a parade route, and a city councilman’s personal vendetta against food trucks. Bruce listened, the faintest smirk tugging at his mouth, though his eyes kept wandering — a habit he never quite shut off.

A few tables away, a knot of reporters occupied the center of the room. Their press badges still hung from their necks, the laminated tags swaying with their animated gestures. Bruce caught stray bits of conversation — Superman’s interference, jurisdiction overreach, collateral damage.

One of them, a square-jawed man with broad shoulders and dark hair that refused to stay tamed, sat at the edge of the group. Glasses framed eyes that were unexpectedly warm, but his expression was taut with quiet intensity. He wasn’t arguing loudly like the others — he was defending. Calmly, firmly. Every so often, his jaw clenched, and his hand tightened around his coffee cup as if willing himself to stay measured.

Bruce recognized the posture — the instinct to protect someone not present to defend themselves. He didn’t know why it stuck in his mind.

“Earth to Bruce,” Harvey said, waving a hand in front of him.

Bruce refocused. “Sorry. You were saying?”

Before Harvey could repeat himself, the floor shuddered beneath their feet. The cutlery rattled. A dull, subterranean boom rolled through the air, followed by another, sharper jolt that sent a ripple through glasses of water and made the chandelier above sway.

The conversation in the restaurant broke off in a dozen startled gasps. Then came the sound — a deep, grinding roar like metal being torn apart. Outside the window, pigeons scattered in a flurry of wings. A beat later, the pavement in the distance cracked, buckled, and dropped in on itself with a deafening crash.

“Earthquake?” Harvey muttered, though the disbelief in his tone made it more question than statement.

The screaming started.

From the park came the sight of people running — not in every direction, but away from a single point. Somewhere beyond the line of buildings, black smoke began to coil into the clear blue sky.

Bruce was already standing, scanning for the source. He caught the tail end of a shape vanishing between skyscrapers — mechanical, hulking, and wrong. A villain’s handiwork, not nature’s.

A flash of red and blue streaked overhead, cape flaring. Superman.

“Of course,” Harvey said grimly. He was already pulling his phone from his jacket, his expression snapping from lunch companion to mayor-in-crisis. He caught Bruce’s eye, gave a sharp nod — stay safe — and was gone, pressing the phone to his ear before he’d even cleared the doorway.

Bruce was moving the other way. “I’m a doctor!” His voice cut through the confusion, trained to carry over the noise. “If you’re injured, follow me — if you can walk, help someone who can’t. Move toward the south exit!”

He guided a family of four away from a collapsing awning, caught a stumbling man by the elbow and steered him toward the street. His movements were economical, precise — no wasted energy, no hesitation.

Outside, the air was thick with the acrid tang of smoke and pulverized concrete. Sirens were already wailing in the distance, growing louder. The ground shook again as something massive hit the street two blocks away.

Bruce herded a cluster of civilians into the cover of a recessed doorway, doing a quick visual triage. A woman’s ankle was twisted — he improvised a splint from a rolled-up magazine and a belt. A child’s forehead was bleeding — he pressed a folded napkin into the father’s hands. “Keep pressure on it. Don’t let her walk until help comes.”

Movement on the edge of his vision drew his attention — two figures darting toward the epicenter of the chaos, not away from it. One was a woman with dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her expression sharp with determination. The other carried a camera slung low, the lens cap already off, filming as they ran.

Reporters.

Bruce’s mouth tightened. He knew that breed — chasing the story even if it ran right into danger’s teeth. He caught himself scanning for the bespectacled man from earlier, the one with the quiet intensity. No sign of him.

Not running with his colleagues. Not anywhere in the panicked crowd.

Bruce grimaced and turned his attention back to the injured man in front of him.

The ground shook again, closer this time, and the shadow of something impossibly large swept briefly over the street. Above, Superman’s silhouette cut through the smoke like a blade, vanishing into the heart of the destruction.

The next minutes were a blur of movement, heat, and noise.

The street was chaos — the kind of chaos Bruce knew in his bones. Sirens screamed. Smoke curled upward in choking, black spirals. Glass rained from shattered windows. Somewhere behind him, someone was sobbing in high, panicked bursts.

Bruce had just guided an elderly man toward a pair of paramedics when the air shifted. The light dimmed, a shadow falling over him.

He didn’t have to look to know.

Superman landed a few feet away, the impact spiderwebbing the cracked pavement. His cape snapped once in the gust of displaced air before settling in sharp, clean lines down his back. Up close, he was the same as Bruce remembered from Gotham Bay — all steel and myth, with that unshakable steadiness in his eyes.

“Dr. Wayne.” Superman’s tone was calm, but it carried an undercurrent of recognition — and something almost like relief. “Anyone still trapped?”

Bruce didn’t waste time pretending this was their first meeting. “Half-collapsed deli, across the street. Two inside, one can’t walk.”

Superman nodded once. “Show me.”

They moved together without another word, the rhythm oddly natural. Bruce pointed out structural hazards, and Superman cleared them with impossible ease — lifting heavy shelving as if it were cardboard, peeling away twisted metal to give Bruce space to reach the injured.

Bruce’s hands were steady on a man’s pulse, his voice low but firm as he gave instructions. Superman crouched beside him, helping roll the man onto a makeshift stretcher. For someone with that much raw strength, his touch was almost impossibly gentle.

“You’re faster at this than some EMTs,” Bruce said, mostly as an observation.

“I’ve had practice,” Superman replied, and though the line was simple, there was a flicker in his eyes that made Bruce think of Gotham Bay — of rain, blood, and the impossible weight in his arms.

They emerged from the deli together, Bruce guiding the injured man toward the paramedics, Superman steadying the stretcher at the other end. But before Bruce could say more, the ground trembled again. A low, metallic shriek cut through the street from somewhere deep in the city.

Superman’s head turned toward the sound. His jaw tightened.

“Stay with them,” he said, already stepping back.

Bruce opened his mouth, but Superman was gone — a rush of displaced air, a blur of red and blue vanishing into the haze.

Bruce turned back to the work. Minutes bled together into a grim rhythm — check breathing, apply pressure, stabilize, move on. He was flagging down another paramedic when a muffled cry reached him.

Following it, he climbed over the wreckage of what had once been a narrow two-story. Brick and plaster lay in jagged heaps, the air thick with dust and smoke. A beam had fallen across the main room, its weight trapping a figure half beneath it.

“I’m here!” Bruce called, stepping over debris.

The man turned his head toward him — dark hair streaked with dust, glasses askew, a suit jacket torn at the shoulder. He coughed hard, trying to push himself up but failing.

Bruce dropped to one knee, bracing against the beam. “Don’t move. This’ll take a second.”

With a sharp heave, Bruce shifted the weight just enough for the man to crawl free. “Anything broken?”

The stranger sat back against the wall, breathing hard. “I don’t think so,” he said between coughs. His voice was deep, warmer than Bruce expected. “Thank you.”

Bruce gave him a quick once-over — no obvious fractures, just bruising and scrapes. “What happened?”

“I was with Lois and Jimmy — my coworker.” the man said, brushing dust from his tie with a slightly embarrassed gesture. “We were covering the story. I ran toward the scene when it started, then the ground shook again and…” He shrugged, offering a self-deprecating smile. “Guess I’m not really built for this kind of thing.”

Bruce studied him for a beat longer. Lois and Jimmy. That would be the two reporters he’d seen earlier charging toward danger — but there had only been two. Not three.

Still, there was no point pressing the issue in the middle of an active disaster. “You can walk?”

“Yeah. Clark Kent, Daily Planet,” the man said, extending a hand.

Bruce clasped it briefly, filing the name away. “Dr. Bruce Wayne. Let’s get you out of here.”

He led Clark through the debris and toward the waiting medics. As soon as he was handed off, Bruce turned back toward the smoke. The thought lingered — the missing third reporter, the dust-streaked hands that didn’t look like they belonged to a man pinned in place for long, the strangely steady pulse in a man who claimed to have taken a hard fall.

But then another scream tore through the noise, and Bruce was moving again.

The rumble in the distance was worse now, a deep, gut-level vibration that made the pavement quiver. Whatever machine the villain had unleashed was still tearing through downtown.

Bruce ducked behind a fire truck long enough to pull out his phone and hit Harvey’s contact.

It rang once before picking up.

“Tell me you’re in one piece,” Harvey said immediately, voice raised over background shouting.

“Not for long,” Bruce replied, eyes on the plume of smoke curling into the sky. “And we’re going to need more than Metropolis PD if this keeps up.”

Chapter Text

The steps of Metropolis City Hall had been polished by a century of shoes and a morning of camera tripods. By noon they were a canyon of microphones. Reporters packed shoulder to shoulder along the cordon, lenses and notepads angled toward a dais of municipal flags that snapped lightly in the river wind.

Clark slid into the second row beside Jimmy, rain cleaned from his glasses, a notebook already open to a page crowded with shorthand curves. The aftershocks had stopped, but the city still thrummed with the pulse of what had happened: sirens in the distance, steel being cut somewhere uptown, the restless murmur of a crowd that wanted answers laid out between brass handrails and civic columns.

Harvey Dent stood at the podium, tie a shade looser than his aide would have preferred, jaw tighter than the tie. To his right, the Metropolis mayor wore the specific strain of someone who had smiled for cameras through too many disasters. To the left, the police commissioner squared his shoulders like a barricade. A few paces back, in a darker suit and without a trace of grandstanding, Dr. Bruce Wayne waited.

Harvey cleared his throat into the mic. “At approximately eleven forty-one this morning, a seismic event—man-made—affected a six-block area around Centennial Park. Our working assessment indicates the epicenter originated from a device operating beneath street level. Damage assessment is ongoing. We’ve contained all secondary hazards. We’re grateful to our first responders, Metropolis General, and our neighboring cities for support.”

He glanced back. Dr. Wayne stepped forward, hands loose at his sides in a posture that telegraphed steadiness.

“Injuries,” Bruce said, voice even. “Two critical, both stabilized. Seventeen admitted with moderate trauma—fractures, contusions, inhalation injury. Dozens treated on scene and discharged. We’re monitoring for delayed complications. If you were near the epicenter and experience new shortness of breath, chest pain, or persistent dizziness, seek a medical evaluation.”

Clark wrote the numbers, heard the shape of the truth underneath. The people with broken bones and bandaged heads; the ones who would go home to find their apartments cratered; the way Bruce Wayne’s voice didn’t flinch when he said “critical.”

The commissioner took his turn, language set to the official register: active investigation; cooperation with federal partners; no further threat at this time.

Lois’s hand shot up. “Lois Lane, Daily Planet,” she announced to no one in particular and everyone at once. “Can you confirm whether the device recovered beneath the park matches technology used in the Gotham waterfront attacks last week? And if so, why did procurement records show emergency equipment shipped into the city this morning under a philanthropic umbrella rather than a municipal vendor list?”

Harvey’s eyes cut to hers. They had known each other long enough to skip preliminaries.

“We’re not confirming device specifics,” the commissioner said.

“That’s not a no,” Lois said.

Harvey leaned back toward the microphones. “Metropolis accepted several philanthropic shipments today—med-surg supplies, portable generators, bottled fluids. We’re grateful for the support.”

“From whom?” Lois pressed.

“Multiple donors,” Harvey replied smoothly. “We’ll publish a preliminary list.”

Clark’s pen paused. A minor wobble crossed Bruce’s expression and was gone—a flicker that said he’d learned something at the same time Lois did.

Jimmy’s elbow tapped Clark’s. “You seeing the crate stamp in the photos I sent?” he whispered. “Looks like a bird of some kind.”

Clark’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He left it there. Later.

He caught Bruce’s gaze for a moment across the podium’s edge: that steady concern with an extra facet to it, like a stone held to the light and turned. Recognition again, and something else—computation.

The press line pivoted to infrastructure: Why had the tunneling machine found a path? Could it happen again? The mayor explained bedrock and utilities corridors. Harvey promised coordination. Bruce outlined air quality testing and aftercare clinics with practical brevity—locations, hours, criteria—then stepped back, already turning away from the cameras to something that looked like actual work.

Lois angled out of the scrum as soon as the official questions dissolved into the sound of shutter clicks and shouted follow-ups. She caught Clark by the sleeve, tugging him aside.

“Dent’s dodging,” she said. “And he’s good, so if he’s dodging, there’s a reason.”

“More than one,” Clark said, softer.

She tilted her head, inventorying his face. “You look pale.”

“Thank you,” he said wryly.

“Eat something that isn’t a heroic sigh,” Lois said. “Then get to Metropolis General. I’m chasing the paperwork. Jimmy—”

“On crate duty,” Jimmy said, brandishing his camera like a knight’s sword. “The bird stamp? I’ll get a clean shot.”

Lois’s eyes flashed. “There we go. Group text. If it’s what I think it is, it’s not a municipal vendor. It’s a charity cutout.”

Clark nodded. “I’ll file a first take from the hospital. Quotes, numbers, human piece.”

Lois squeezed his forearm just once—part thanks, part warning to be careful, part we’ve got this. She vanished into the current of city staffers and reporters as if the building had made a doorway just for her. Jimmy jogged backward, filming, then spun and darted down the steps toward the loading dock behind City Hall.

Clark took a breath that felt like it went only halfway down. The world steadied anyway. He closed his notebook, tucked it into his jacket, and set out for the hospital.

The waiting room at Metropolis General (MGH) wore the same tired couches and earnest art as every waiting room in every city. It carried the same scent too—the blend of antiseptic and sweat and something like hope diluted across a hundred paper cups. Clark slid past a TV tuned to a rerun of the press conference, flashed his press badge once at the triage nurse with a question mark ready on his face, and moved into the corridor on the strength of that old newsroom magic: look like you belong, and you will.

He found stories without trying. A construction foreman with dust still in his hair describing the way the ground jumped “like a fish on a line.” A couple who’d been on a bench in the park, now holding hands so tightly their knuckles were white. A paramedic with soot on one cheekbone, eyes red but dry. Clark wrote and nodded and listened and didn’t flinch when he was asked whether the Planet would post places to donate to the deli owner whose storefront had become a geometric problem. “Yes,” he said. “Tonight.”

He brought a cup of water to a woman whose name he didn’t ask because he didn’t need it to be kind. He helped an old man ease his arm into a sling. He carried a tray of paper cups along a row of vinyl chairs like a deacon at a quiet service.

Only sometimes did the hallway tilt—just a degree, as if the building itself remembered the morning’s shake. When it did, a fine, insistent thread of pain slid under his skin, right where memory knew green light lived. He made his breath steady anyway. He was, after all, fine.

An orderly pushed through a pair of swinging doors with a stack of blankets. Clark caught the edge before it hit someone’s knee. “Thanks,” she said, and then, with a double-take, “You’re from the Planet, aren’t you? The nice one.”

“I’ll take ‘the one who brings water,’” he said, and set the blankets down on a chair.

“Leave them,” she said. “They disappear if you look away.”

“Blankets or reporters?” a voice said behind him, dry enough to be medical.

Clark turned. Dr. Wayne stood there with the same unhurried stillness he’d had on the steps. The stethoscope draped loose around his neck glinted when he stepped into the fluorescence. Up close, he looked almost exactly like he had in the rain at Gotham Bay: composed to the point of quiet; tired in a way sleep couldn’t solve; hands clean, steady.

“Dr. Wayne,” Clark said.

“Kent,” Bruce said, recognizing him without the prologue. His gaze took in the corridor—who sat where, who’d been waiting too long, who needed an extra gaze—then settled on Clark again. “You were at City Hall.”

“Press conference,” Clark said. “And before that—” He gestured vaguely toward the city. “There.”

“Right,” Bruce said. He nodded toward an alcove off the hallway where a vending machine hummed like a patient on oxygen. “You look like you could sit down without surrendering a principle. Come on.”

Clark could have said no. He didn’t. In the alcove, Bruce handed him a paper cup of water. The doctor’s fingers were warm where they brushed his.

“Drink,” Bruce said. “If you can tolerate the hospital coffee, I’ll upgrade you.”

“I’ll live,” Clark said, and managed half a smile.

Bruce watched him take a sip, professional habit disguised as casual concern. Then he lifted two fingers—not quite a request, not quite an order—and found Clark’s radial pulse as if the corridor were private and they were both alone.

“May I?” he asked, after his fingers were already there.

Clark shouldn’t have been surprised by the gentleness of the touch; he was anyway. The press of Bruce’s fingertips was precise and light. He counted in his head alongside the doctor without meaning to: one, two, three—

“Not tachy,” Bruce said, mostly to himself. “But irregular. You were closer to the device than your colleagues, weren’t you?”

“I was under a beam in a building that used to be a building,” Clark said. It was a deflection without being a lie. “Got out with help.”

Bruce nodded once, a simple acceptance that still felt like being let off a hook. “Any nausea? Headache? Shortness of breath?”

“Fine,” Clark said. It left his mouth more reflex than thought.

Bruce lifted an eyebrow, infinitesimal. “We both know what that word does in a hospital,” he said mildly. “It means ‘ask me a better question.’ So I will. Do you feel… wrong?”

The question landed in a place Clark didn’t name. He let out a breath. “I feel like I’m standing on a boat that’s stopped rocking,” he said quietly. “But I’m still braced for the next wave.”

“Keep drinking water,” Bruce said. “Small sips. Saltines help. Sit when you need to. When you stand up, do it slowly. If your vision narrows, don’t be heroic about it.” A faint wryness. “We have a shortage of heroes who know how to sit.”

Clark huffed something that might have been a laugh. “You sound like someone’s been telling you to rest.”

“Relentlessly,” Bruce said. “I am ignoring her with respect.”

“I got the same lecture from someone shorter,” Clark said. “We may know the same person.”

Bruce’s mouth tipped at one corner. “Leslie has a long jurisdiction.”

They let the vending machine’s steady hum fill the next beat, the kind of quiet that wasn’t awkward because it was framed by responsibility on both sides. Out in the corridor, the intercom paged a code nobody bothered to translate into layman. A child somewhere down the hall told someone with conviction that bandages made you brave.

Clark’s phone buzzed in his pocket, insistent enough to vibrate against his hip. He pulled it out, thumbed the screen. A text from Lois, photo attached: a crate corner in sharp focus. The stamp was a stylized bird with its head turned over its shoulder, wings half-spread as if about to lift. Underneath: PHOENIX RECLAMATION. Below that, a smaller sticker: RECEIVING—MGH S.W. LOADING.

Clark’s chest tightened—not the wrong way, just the kind that meant a story’s bones were starting to show. He turned the phone so Bruce could see.

“You recognize the stamp?” Clark asked, neutral.

Bruce took the smallest breath. The flicker from the steps was back—faint and controlled—but present. “I’ve seen it,” he said. “Charter filed out of Gotham County. They do salvage and disaster cleanouts. Contracting history is—baroque.”

“Baroque,” Clark repeated, deadpan. “As in ornate, or as in there’s a lot of shell companies and men named after their nephews?”

“As in both,” Bruce said. His gaze didn’t leave the photo. “That sticker says this crate went to the southwest loading dock here.”

“Lois thinks the shipments came under philanthropic umbrellas,” Clark said. “Not the city’s.”

“It’s efficient,” Bruce said. “Less red tape in a crisis. Also less oversight.”

There was no accusation in his tone. The restraint made the words heavier.

Clark weighed his next sentence and then asked it anyway. “Any of those umbrellas yours?”

Bruce didn’t wince. He could have met the question with Wayne charm. He chose honesty trimmed down to bone. “We move supplies when we can,” he said. “I didn’t authorize anything today. If a subsidiary did, I’ll know before midnight.”

“Dent said they’d publish a list,” Clark said.

“They will,” Bruce said. “It will be accurate. It may not be complete.”

A nurse moved past them, one hand around a chart, the other around a cup of Jell-O. She gave them a look you give two adults in a corner who don’t look like trouble. Clark wondered if he and Bruce looked like a reporter and a doctor talking about patient flow, or like something else: two men comparing maps of the same terrain they knew by different names.

Bruce angled his head toward the corridor. “Walk with me?” he asked. It wasn’t an invitation to trade secrets. It was a request to move while the world moved.

They fell into step. Bruce nodded at two orderlies, asked a tech if the chest CT for the tall woman in bay three had uploaded. He paused to check a dressing without making a production of it. He thanked a volunteer for handing out blankets, and the volunteer blushed like she’d been knighted. Leslie had looped him in with temporary privileges during the emergency, and the hospital treated him like a useful fact.

“You’re good at this,” Clark said.

“At walking and asking for lab results?” Bruce said dryly.

“At making it look easier than it is,” Clark said, and then, to be fair, added, “At seeing who needs a hand before they ask.”

Bruce didn’t answer that. He pushed open a fire door and led Clark down a shorter, quieter hall where the air felt cooler. The hospital’s guts—service lifts, supply rooms, the places families didn’t accidentally wander.

They stopped at a window that looked into the southwest loading dock. The sightline was perfect: pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped crates; a forklift waiting in amber light; a painted line on the floor that said STOP in letters that didn’t mean much to anyone whose adrenals were singing.

Two crates in the back wore the bird stamp.

“I shouldn’t show you this,” Bruce said in a voice that had decided that the line between shouldn’t and must wasn’t as thick as people pretended. “But if Phoenix is here, I want to know why.”

“Same,” Clark said. “Jimmy’s on his way to the municipal impound lot. Lois is combing procurement. If Phoenix is a cutout, there’ll be common threads.”

“And if it isn’t?” Bruce asked.

“Then someone shell-gamed the labels,” Clark said. “Or someone used a good name to move a bad thing.”

“And you?” Bruce said, turning toward him. “How bad are you willing to feel to find out?”

It was an odd question on paper. It made perfect sense in the hall’s cool air.

“I’ll manage,” Clark said. It was the wrong answer in one way and the only answer in another.

Bruce nodded as if he’d already guessed. “Environmental has counters by the dock,” he said. “No reason for one here to be hot.”

Clark could feel the place in his chest that had smoldered all day, like a coal under wet ash. He hoped it didn’t show on his face.

They stepped through a side door and onto the loading dock. The noise softened here; the hospital’s public soundtrack fell away to the tick of a cooling engine and the plastic whisper of shrink-wrap when a draft curled around it. A single security guard sat at a desk, head bent over a crossword. Bruce flashed his temporary ID, signed the log with a neat hand, and added a half-smile that implied this was routine. The guard waved them through.

Up close, the bird stamp was almost pretty—stylized lines, good design, the kind of branding that made you think of rebirth instead of insurance claims. Clark crouched by the crate, tracing the stencil without touching it.

“Phoenix Reclamation,” he said aloud, to hear how it fit in the air. “Why a bird?”

“Because nobody names their shell company Blatant Diversion LLC,” Bruce said. “Phoenix is comforting.”

A corner of the crate had a splintered seam where a nail had missed its bite. Clark angled his phone light toward it. He didn’t need the light; he held it anyway, gave himself permission to be exactly who the world thought he was. Reporter. Curious. Careful.

The seam showed packing—thick, white, foamed. Lead-lined, if you’d had your hands inside too many storage containers. Clark’s skin buzzed where it shouldn’t.

He straightened a fraction too fast. The dock tilted.

Bruce’s hand came up automatically—steady, firm, unflinching on Clark’s forearm—and held. “Slow,” he said, as if they’d agreed on this earlier. “Breathe with me.”

Clark did. Once, twice. The tilt became a level line again. Bruce didn’t remove his hand right away. He didn’t pretend he hadn’t seen what he’d seen, either.

“You’re not fine,” Bruce said, quiet.

“I’m trying to be,” Clark said, matching him.

“That isn’t the same thing,” Bruce said.

Clark wanted to make a quip about semantics. He didn’t. He let the truth sit where it was.

“Can you open it?” he asked, after a beat.

Bruce looked at the crate, then at the camera on the far wall, then at the security guard engrossed in thirteen-across. “Not without paperwork,” he said.

“And if you had paperwork?” Clark asked.

“I’d want Dent or the chief counsel here,” Bruce said. “And Environmental Health. And two witnesses. And a better respirator than the paper masks we used in the park.”

The corner of Clark’s mouth curved. “So you’re saying you won’t open it because you’re responsible.”

“I am told it’s charming,” Bruce said.

Clark stepped back. He let his phone’s camera click once, silent. He took a second shot of the smaller sticker: RECEIVING—MGH S.W. LOADING. Glide path to a sentence: The crate came through here.

“Lois will love this,” he said.

“You’ll send it to her?” Bruce asked, and Clark heard the substratum under the words: Will you put me between you and the people who would prefer we didn’t know?

“Of course,” Clark said. “And to Dent.”

Bruce nodded once. “I’ll call him too,” he said. “And ask him a question he won’t like.”

“What question is that?” Clark asked.

“Who told you to accept this,” Bruce said, eyes still on the bird.

The intercom in the dock cracked and hissed like an old radio. A voice spoke three floors up: “Environmental to maintenance. Environmental, maintenance.”

Bruce glanced toward the speaker with a fractional frown. “We’ll have company,” he said. “Time to be good citizens.”

They returned to the corridor. The hum of hospital life wrapped around them again. A respiratory therapist pushed past with a cart of nebulizers. Somewhere near the nurses’ station, two women laughed, relief and shock braided together the way they often were in hospitals.

Bruce stopped at the threshold of the alcove they’d left earlier. The vending machine’s light painted him in soft blue.

“You keep showing up in the wrong places at exactly the right time,” he said.

“I could say the same about you,” Clark said.

Bruce’s gaze tipped toward Clark’s hands. Their knuckles were un-scraped, but the callus pattern didn’t fit keyboards. “You’re… strong,” he said. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even loaded. It was a thing observed about a man who had lifted a stranger out of rubble without thinking.

“And you’re steadier than I think anybody has a right to be at twenty-nine hours awake,” Clark said. “But maybe that’s something someone taught you.”

“My father,” Bruce said, simply. “And a woman with a longer jurisdiction than the hospital directory.”

“Ma,” Clark said, smiling with the corner of his mouth.

They looked at each other, two quiet lines of history briefly visible like chalk marks on a street.

“How do you do it?” Clark asked. The question came out before he dressed it. “How do you stand between so much and not—” He searched for language that didn’t sound like a prayer. “Not break.”

Bruce didn’t pretend to have a righteous answer. He considered. “You learn what’s yours to carry,” he said. “And what isn’t. And when you forget, someone who loves you reminds you.” He paused. “It helps to put your hands on something. A pulse. A rib to splint. It reminds you the work is real, not just… noise.”

“Hands,” Clark echoed, thinking—against his will—of his own palms braced under a collapsing girder, of a chestplate wrenched from a metal sternum and hurled into a dark, green-black bay. Of the way a stranger’s hands had caught him when he’d faltered in the rain.

“You’re good with them,” Bruce said.

“So are you,” Clark replied.

His phone buzzed again. Lois. He opened it. Her text was a single line under the photo he’d sent:

Lois: “Phoenix Reclamation is a DBA. Parent company is Verne-Rowe Holdings. Board includes a Gotham donor who wrote a check at last year’s Wayne Foundation gala. Dent will know the name. Meet me in thirty?”

Jimmy followed with two shots of a different crate at the municipal impound, stamped with the same bird. In Jimmy’s second photo, someone’s gloved hand pointed to a customs label. The contents read: HEAVY EQUIPMENT—REFURB COMPONENTS.

Clark held the phone out again. “Verne-Rowe,” he said. “Ring any bells?”

Bruce’s expression did something sharp and contained. “Two,” he said. “None I like.” He pulled his own phone from his pocket and found Harvey’s name by muscle memory.

The call connected on the second ring. “Tell me you’re in one piece,” Harvey said by way of greeting.

“I am,” Bruce said. “You authorized Phoenix through Verne-Rowe to move anything into Metropolis General this morning?”

Harvey didn’t answer immediately. Ambient noise came through the line—voices, doors, the particular echo of City Hall hallways. “We greenlit a fast track for philanthropic shipments,” Harvey said. “You know how it is—after-action, everyone wants to help. Why?”

“Because their DBA is Phoenix,” Bruce said, “and Phoenix is at Metropolis General. And because the crate Jimmy Olsen is photographing at impound is stamped the same way.”

“Jesus,” Harvey said softly. Then, louder: “We’ll pull the logs. I’ll get Counsel. And I’ll call Dent back—”

“You’re Dent,” Bruce said mildly.

“Right,” Harvey said, sounding briefly like a man who’d been in three meetings at once for two days. “I’ll call myself, then. Stay where you are?”

Bruce glanced at Clark. “For the moment,” he said.

“And Bruce—” Harvey’s voice shifted. “If this loops back to a donor, press will get there. Stay clean.”

Bruce’s mouth moved in what, on another man, would have been a smile. “Always.”

He hung up. He and Clark stood side by side, not speaking, while the hospital made its human music around them.

“You didn’t ask me to keep your name out of it,” Clark said finally.

“If I wanted that, I’d have stayed at my desk,” Bruce said. Then, more carefully: “If this implicates someone adjacent to me, I want it clean and public. Quiet fixes rot. And besides—” He flicked a glance at Clark with something like humor. “You and Lane will get there whether I like it or not. Better we walk some of the way together.”

The lights over their heads flickered once. Not long. Not dramatic. Just a breath of shadow in a corridor that had been lit since before noon. A dull vibration rolled through the soles of their shoes, like a truck on a nearby street. Nobody screamed this time. The city had learned the shape of the day and decided not to jump at it again.

A page sounded overhead: “Dr. Thompkins to the ED. Dr. Thompkins.”

Bruce’s shoulders eased half an inch at the name. “Reinforcements,” he said, and then, as if to himself, “I’ll catch thirty minutes if she sees me still vertical.”

“You’ll take them?” Clark asked.

“I’ll bargain for twenty,” Bruce said.

He looked at Clark. “You’ll go meet Lane,” he said, not a question.

“In thirty,” Clark said. “She’s probably already two blocks closer than she says.”

“Buy her something that isn’t coffee,” Bruce advised. “Blood sugar is underrated.”

“I’ll try,” Clark said. “She listens about as well as you do.”

“Uncanny,” Bruce said, and it could have been about Lois or about the way Clark’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.

They walked back toward the waiting room together. The hallway widened; noise increased. A boy in a Spider-Man T-shirt gripped a balloon by the string as if it were holding him to the floor. A woman in a janitor’s polo leaned against her mop, eyes closed for exactly six seconds before she stood again. A volunteer knitted at a speed that suggested she could have sutured if called upon.

At the corner where their paths would split, Bruce stopped. He reached into the pocket of his white coat and pulled out something so prosaic it felt like an amulet: a packet of saltines.

Clark blinked. “You carry those around?”

“I have learned my audience,” Bruce said. He pressed the packet into Clark’s palm. “Eat them. They won’t fix much. They’ll fix enough.”

Clark turned the packet over once. “Thank you,” he said, and meant it at a depth that surprised him. “For… the rest of it, too.”

“You’re welcome,” Bruce said. He hesitated a fraction, then added, “And Clark?”

“Mm?”

“If you get worse, come back,” Bruce said. “Don’t be heroic with fainting. It’s undignified.”

“I’ll put that on a T-shirt,” Clark said. “No fainting. Dr. Wayne says.”

“Make it a bumper sticker,” Bruce said, deadpan. “It’ll last longer.”

Clark laughed, and the sound scratched something at the back of his throat that hadn’t been used in a while. He tucked the crackers into his jacket. “I’ll text you what we find,” he said, and then, after a heartbeat—because trusting someone was a decision and not a gamble—“if that’s all right.”

Bruce didn’t pretend to consider. He reached for Clark’s notebook instead and wrote a number in neat, unshowy digits on the corner of the page. The ink bled slightly into the paper.

“Use it,” Bruce said.

“Bruce,” Clark said, just to feel it fit.

“Clark,” Bruce answered, as if returning a pulse.

Bruce’s hand left his forearm, but the warmth stayed like a remembered grip in the rain.

They parted, each swallowed by his own kind of corridor. Clark stepped back into the waiting room, the TV with the replayed press conference, the soft chorus of coughs and whispers; Bruce turned toward the double doors that led to the clinical side, the beeps and calls and hands.

Lois: “Grafton alley. Thirty. Bring that face you use when you’re earnestly concerned.”

Lois: “And crackers. You never remember crackers.”

Clark sent back a photo of the pocket square that wasn’t—a square of saltines under his lapel.

Lois: “!!!! ❤️”

On his way out, he slowed by the nurses’ station. Leslie Thompkins had Bruce cornered in a way that suggested mercy by force. She saw Clark in her periphery, took his measure in a heartbeat, and lifted an eyebrow that conveyed an entire paragraph: Eat. Don’t be stupid. He won’t, so you must.

Clark saluted her with the packet. She inclined her head an inch: good.

Outside, the light was the thin, forgiving kind you got after a storm. Metropolis had already begun the performance of recovery. Someone chalked a hopscotch grid on a slab of unbroken sidewalk. A barista handed paper cups through a window and refused money until the rush was over. A street violinist tuned; the note hung in the air like a stitched seam.

Clark checked his phone once before he turned the corner. A new message waited.

Bruce: “Breathe when the street tilts. Call if it doesn’t stop.”

He didn’t need to ask who it was. He typed, as if replying to a question that had never been asked out loud:

Clark: “You breathe too. And sit when she tells you. I’ll be around.”

There was no immediate answer. He didn’t expect one. The knowledge of the exchange lived warm and sure in his jacket, heavy as a promise in a light pocket.

Inside, Leslie handed Bruce a yogurt as if it were a writ. He ate it with the docility of a man who’d learned, however briefly, the comfort of doing what he was told by people who loved him.

“You made a friend,” Leslie said, not exactly teasing.

“I made an ally,” Bruce said.

“Mm,” Leslie said, which in her language covered half a dictionary. “How’s his pulse?”

“Stubborn,” Bruce said.

“Mm,” again, a different definition. She examined him the way she examined the injured: tender, unsparing. “You’re steadier.”

“I sat,” Bruce said.

“You did,” Leslie said. Her hand landed on his shoulder for one measured second, her own kind of pulse check. “Keep doing that. He looks like someone who will remind you.”

“I doubt he’ll have to try,” Bruce said, and there was a quiet in his voice he didn’t recognize yet.

He washed his hands. He did the work. And more than once, between patients, his mind wandered back to the corner of a cafeteria where a man with a reporter’s notebook had laughed at a terrible pie, and to a hallway where a square of sunlight had made everything look briefly like it could be gentler.

Grafton’s alley held its usual collection of civilized sins: cigarette butts, a dented trash bin, a shard of mirror reflecting a sky more honest than the boulevard’s. Lois leaned against a brick wall as if she’d always been there, Jimmy’s camera already purring. Clark offered the saltines with a flourish. She took them like spoils and tossed one to Jimmy, who caught it without looking.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I’m on time,” he said.

“You’re late to me,” she replied, and then, eyes narrowing: “You look lighter.”

“Salt,” he said, noncommittal. “Who’s our bird?”

“Phoenix Reclamation,” she said. “DBA for Verne-Rowe, which is a holding company that smells like old money and new bleach. Board member includes a Gotham donor with a taste for naming rights and clean hands.”

Clark’s heart nudged once, not for the case but for the city that twined through both their lives. “Wayne Foundation gala,” he said.

“Exactly,” Lois said. “And before you ask, no, I don’t think Bruce Wayne is a villain. He is insufferably competent and too handsome to be statistically plausible, but those aren’t crimes.”

“That’s a brave claim on a day with cameras,” Clark said, deadpan.

Lois watched him like a cat finding a sunbeam. “Oh,” she said. “There it is.”

“There what is,” Clark said, with the dignity of a man on a ledge.

“Nothing,” she lied. “You’re writing the human angle; I’m writing the paper trail. Jimmy, get the label clean. Clark, ask the deli owner if he’ll give us five minutes at closing. Then we’ll both write the part where the city remembers how.”

“Remembers how what?” Jimmy asked.

“How to keep each other,” Lois said, already moving. “Go.”

They went. They did the work. And under it, like a second pulse, another rhythm took shape: a number written in neat ink; a square of crackers in a breast pocket; the sensation of steady hands and a better question.

Neither man named it. That would come later, or not. For now there was the small relief of knowing exactly where the other was in the city—one in a corridor where grief and grace met, one on a street where the news and the heart were the same thing said two ways.

The day folded into evening. Lights came on in windows. Somewhere above it all, a cape might have cut against the dark and vanished before anyone could be sure. Somewhere else, a piano that almost no one heard sounded a low chord, then another, the kind you play when you want to tell yourself that there are rooms left in you that are not yet empty.

Clark walked home with ink on his fingers and salt on his tongue. He paused at a crosswalk and, out of reflex, looked up. A window three floors over ground level framed a figure washing his hands slowly, carefully, as if the day’s dust could be convinced to tell only the story worth keeping.

Clark didn’t wave. Bruce didn’t look down. Neither needed the confirmation. The thread was there, thin as light and just as difficult to hold, stretched across a city that had not yet run out of ways to surprise them.

When Clark’s phone buzzed again just before midnight, the message said only:

Bruce: “Sleep. For both of us.”

He smiled at the ceiling in the dark like a man who had been handed something he might not yet have the words for and wrote back:

Clark: “In ten. You first.”

A lie, but a kind one, and kinder still in the knowing that the other man would tell exactly the same one back.

Between their apartments, somewhere around the line where two neighborhoods shook hands, the city exhaled. It did not know yet what it had set in motion. It knew only that two of its better men had found, after a long winter, a square of afternoon sun where a bench would fit, and had sat there long enough to call it a start.

Gotham General’s rooftop kept a different kind of weather than Metropolis. The air had weight here, like a hand on the shoulder. The HVAC stacks hummed low and patient; a red beacon at the helipad blinked its measured pulse into the dark. Far off, the Narrows threw up a thin salt smell, and a neon sign somewhere insisted OPEN the way Gotham always did: stubborn, sleepless.

Bruce sat on the low rim of the pad with his coat folded beside him and a paper cup cooling in his hands. Leslie had stolen him twenty minutes with the ruthlessness of a saint; he’d used twelve on food, three on answering residents’ questions, and come up here to try spending the last five on air.

He thumbed open his messages and typed without thinking too hard about why.

Bruce: Back in Gotham. Leslie stole me 20. Took the roof for the last 5. How’s the boat?

The typing bubble didn’t appear. He didn’t expect it to. They were in different cities again; the whole point was that the city could take a watch when they didn’t.

He set the phone face down beside him, and only then did he feel the draft.

The cape announced itself first, a respectful change in pressure that barely stirred the caution tape.

“Doctor Wayne,” Superman said, soft enough not to wake the roof.

“Evening,” Bruce replied, not surprised. He gestured at the ledge. “Open seating. Coffee’s an exaggeration, but I have another cup if you’re generous.”

Superman stepped out of the shadow the way people do when they’ve decided to be there and not elsewhere. He took the cup like it mattered and sat with the kind of caution you reserve for glass and children. The cape settled around his boots, suddenly domestic in a place that had seen everything.

For a while they faced the city together. Gotham was a bruise of light and fog, bridges like ribs in the dark. A medevac crossed the river far south, blades thudding the air into order and then letting it go.

“How’s the boat?” Bruce asked at last, gentle, as if they’d agreed on that metaphor earlier, which they had, in a different city under harsher lights.

“More pier than boat,” Superman said. “Every so often a wave argues.”

“Breathe when it does,” Bruce said. “Eight out. The body listens better to the exhale.”

Superman did. The beacon blinked its metronome; the wind said nothing.

“You didn’t have to come,” Bruce added, meaning the roof and the deli and the half-collapsed room where a beam had made a geometry problem of a man’s day.

“I wanted to,” Superman said. He turned the cup in his hands, letting the heat find his fingers. “Thank you—for the park, the deli, the hallway. For telling me to sit when I was intent on pretending.”

Bruce accepted it the way he accepted vitals: without ceremony, with care. “You were heavy,” he said, deadpan.

“You were sure,” Superman returned, and the line found something unguarded in Bruce and rested there.

“Any chest pain?” Bruce asked, the doctor taking its seat beside the man.

“No.”

“Vision?”

“Steady.”

“May I?”

Superman offered his wrist. Bruce found the radial pulse—warm skin, strong beat, that familiar irregularity that said a system was remembering itself after green light and adrenaline. He counted to ten and, just once, smoothed his thumb lightly over the spot as if to apologize to tissue for the day.

“Better at rest,” Bruce said.

“It’s easier to keep the floor under me when someone points to it,” Superman admitted. “Occupational hazard. I’m used to pretending the floor is optional.”

“Not up here,” Bruce said. “Up here we’re better when it’s not.”

They let the hospital’s breath fill the space. An ambulance whooped once below and cut out, the way they do when the worst has passed.

“Do you ever sleep?” Superman asked finally, curious without accusation.

“I’m trying to like it,” Bruce said. “Leslie recommends.”

“Me too,” Superman said, surprised into the truth. “Most nights I fly until the lights thin and pretend quiet counts as rest.”

“It doesn’t,” Bruce said, gentle. “But it helps.”

Superman’s mouth tipped. “You sound like someone who stands in hallways telling people the things that help… help.”

“I stand where I’m useful,” Bruce said. A beat. “You do too.”

They were quiet long enough for the coffee to fail its purpose. Bruce set his cup between them on the concrete; Superman mirrored him, aligning his with the care of someone who respects surfaces.

“You asked me earlier how to carry only what’s mine,” Bruce said. “Tonight it felt like washing my hands and knowing when I’m done. Putting a blanket on one person and trusting someone I taught to take the next. Letting a song end when it ends.”

“You play,” Superman said. Not a question.

“Badly when tired,” Bruce said. “Better when someone listens.”

They didn’t look at each other after that. They didn’t need to. The beacon gave them a respectful three-count of light.

“Lane will have your head if you keep giving me quotes like that,” Superman said, easing the edge back toward humor.

“Lane can have whatever she hunts,” Bruce said, and the admiration in it landed where it was meant to.

The wind tugged once at the cape; the cape agreed to behave.

“If the street tilts again,” Bruce said, eyes on the blink of the helipad light, “pick this roof. It’s closer than you think.”

Dangerous promise. Superman laughed once under his breath, relief threaded through it. “I have a history of taking those literally.”

“Good,” Bruce said. “I meant it literally.”

“May I say something presumptuous?” Superman asked.

“You could try.”

“You’re very good at being a person,” Superman said, plain and exact. “I don’t meet many who are better.”

Bruce went still—not brittle, receptive, like you do for a patient trying to tell you where it hurts. He inclined his head once, returning a pulse. “Likewise,” he said.

The cup had cooled completely. Superman stood, the cape sliding into place like a breath taken on purpose.

“You should take the rest of your twenty,” he said.

“You should take one,” Bruce returned.

“I will,” Superman said, and somehow it didn’t sound like a lie.

He stepped back toward the edge, paused. “Thank you, Doctor Wayne.”

“Come up when you don’t need anything,” Bruce said, because the sentence had been waiting for him since the vending machine corridor.

Superman’s expression did something that belonged to a man, not a myth. “That’s why I will,” he said, and rose.

He lifted without hurry—polite to the warning light, considerate of the air handlers—and slid toward the part of the sky where Gotham becomes river and then night.

Bruce picked up both cups. He stood for one more breath, counted eight on the way out, and felt the roof hold.

The stairwell door sighed. The phone he’d left face down on the rim lit and buzzed once, then again.

Clark: Got your message. You still on that roof? Sit before you come back down. Doctor’s orders, I’m told.

Bruce’s mouth did a small, private thing that fluorescent lighting would have killed on sight. He sat on the top step like a man complying with his own advice, thumbed back:

Bruce: Complying. You’re learning fast.

A bubble appeared, paused, vanished. He left it there, stood after two minutes because that was what he had, and went back down into the bright, honest work, steadier for having shared the weather.

Chapter Text

The siren that woke Gotham wasn’t police or fire. It was the city’s bones.

At 2:13 a.m., lights flickered in the Narrows and the river hummed like a plucked string. A tremor ran under the avenues, not the chaotic shake of an earthquake but a deep, purposeful shiver, like a machine changing gears somewhere beneath the street.

In the trauma bay at Gotham General, Bruce felt it through the soles of his shoes. He set a suture, tied, cut, and glanced automatically at the wall clock that lied kindly about the hour.

“Generator?” a resident asked, too loudly.

“Not yet,” Bruce said, calm capping the word like a lid. “Finish irrigating.”

The second tremor came with sound—a grinding roar under concrete that made a stack of emesis basins buzz together like cheap cymbals. Somewhere far off, metal complained. An alarm two floors down made a single startled yelp and died.

Leslie’s voice arrived before she did, the way storms send wind ahead. “If the floor tries to move, you don’t,” she said in passing, and half the staff grinned by reflex at the doctrine.

Bruce’s phone trembled at his hip. He didn’t need to look to know who. He finished taping a dressing and stepped just to the edge of the bright, honest light, where a man could check messages and still be someone’s doctor.

Lois: “Drone footage shows a tunnel cap blown at Old Mercy Station. Something’s moving down there. City won’t confirm machine.”

Clark: “On the 2:05 from Metropolis; switching to Southline. I’ll be at Old Mercy in 40. Breathe. Eat. Don’t pretend.”

A small, private thing happened to Bruce’s mouth. He typed back one-handed.

Bruce: “Southline will hold at St. Alban’s if the subfloor shifts. If they do, don’t push past a barricade for a quote.”

A bubble. Then:

Clark: “Who do you think I am?”

Bruce: “Someone I don’t want to treat tonight.”

A longer pause. Then:

Clark: “Okay. Will ping when I hit street. Don’t be heroic with fainting.”

He pocketed the phone. He didn’t examine the way those words threaded through his ribs like something structural.

Triage surged; the hospital did what it does when a city asks. A janitor set a wet floor sign with ceremonial care. A nurse laid three blankets over one woman and snapped saltines into halves because halves sit better on frightened stomachs. Bruce washed his hands, counted to ten, and kept count of a dozen other things at once.

The third tremor wasn’t a tremor. It was a shock and aftershock packed together, a double-pulse that made a glass break somewhere down the hall and three nurses swear with the artistry of sailors. The lights dimmed, caught themselves, burned steady.

“Find me Environmental,” Bruce said to no one in particular and everyone within earshot. “If they have counters that hum, I want them humming.”

“Already in the lobby,” someone called back.

He was halfway to the nurses’ station when his second phone—a number too few people had—buzzed once and then went silent, as if embarrassed. He didn’t take it out of his pocket. He knew what it would say without words.

The machine finally spoke over their heads.

It didn’t have a voice, but what it did to the air was language. The building’s frame transmitted it: a sustained, low-frequency pressure that lived in the sternum and along the medullary surface of every long bone. You didn’t hear it so much as understand it as intent.

“Underground,” a paramedic said needlessly, eyes wide.

“Under Old Mercy,” Bruce said, confirming a guess he didn’t like having been right about.

Old Mercy Station had been bricked up since the 1947 fire and left to rats and stories; the platform survived on maps that had long ago quit trying to be true.

A code paged two bays over. Bruce listened; it wasn’t his. Leslie was already there—he could hear her voice being gravity. He turned toward the ambulance bay, toward the city.

“Where are you going?” the charge nurse asked, not to stop him but to calibrate the board.

“Down,” Bruce said.

“Take your coat,” she said. “And a radio.”

He took both. He took two paramedics and a rolling bag labeled FIELD in Sharpie. He took the weird certainty that had kept him moving his whole life: it is always better to walk toward where the floor has decided to lie than to wait and count the ones who fell.

On the ride he texted with his thumb braced against the rail.

Bruce: “Old Mercy?”

Clark: “Southline held. I’m above ground and on foot. Jimmy’s sending a map. Lois is yelling at a deputy commissioner. She told me to tell you to wear a helmet.”

Bruce: “Tell Lane I will if she will.”

He didn’t add the thing his chest wanted—Stay above ground. He’d started to learn where advice was love and where it was control. He tried not to confuse them just because he was afraid.

Old Mercy sat under a tangle of overpasses and compromises three blocks east of the river. The street above it had forgotten it had once been a street; it was a place for trucks to idle and for dogs to find their loyalties. Police tape crossed the yawning hole where a portion of road had simply gone missing. Smoke lay in the pit like a thought that refused to leave.

Bruce’s people were already there. Gotham had more of them than it liked to admit—cops and medics and firefighters who treated the city like a relative with too many bad friends. He nodded, took two seconds to be briefed, and moved with the ease that comes from a thousand repetitions of the same terrible choreography.

“Machine’s three levels down,” a young firefighter told him, sweat cutting tracks through soot. “PD’s got a hard stop on the second landing. They said we wait for—”

A red-blue streak cut across the mouth of the hole, not so much color as decision. The tape lifted in the wind of it.

“—for him,” the firefighter finished, unnecessary.

Superman didn’t land. He fell deliberately, as if falling were simply a faster way of choosing a place to stand. He hit the second landing and bled force into structure; the concrete accepted him like an old friend.

Bruce had never been afraid of heights. He felt a brief, unreasonable stab of vertigo anyway—something to do with weight and grace and the distance between them. He put it away.

Two minutes later, he put himself away.

There was no staircase left. Instead there were a series of non-choices: a slope turned treacherous by dust and grease; a ladder cut by heat; a run of utility conduit slicked with seep. Bruce took the conduit because it was the stupidest option and therefore the least crowded. He went down with the rolling bag bumping his shin, a paramedic above and another below, his grip complaining and his body grateful for the complaint.

The air tasted of pulverized concrete, old water, and something metallic, a memory of how green light had once painted rain. Bruce felt it settle along his skin like a film and wished for a Geiger counter that wouldn’t tell him anything he didn’t already believe.

He reached the old platform and found what Gotham always hid: a lot of mess and a little grace.

The mess was the machine.

It looked nothing like the creature that had torn the waterfront or the device that had chewed under Centennial Park. It looked like a problem someone had thrown money at without first thinking about whether it was a good idea. The core was older tech—industrial, reliable, stubborn—and around it were bolted new ideas: dampers, steering fins, a carapace of local plates. You could still read the nameplate under grime: VERNE-ROWE—SERIAL 2047.

The grace was that Superman had put his body between the machine and the city.

He had wedged himself against a collapsed section of ceiling, one shoulder braced to a buckling beam, both hands convincing a bent blade to reconsider. He wasn’t trying to lift; he was trying to persuade. Bruce could see the argument in the line of his back. Yield. Yield. Yield.

“Back it down,” a PD captain said into a radio. “I’ve got civilians in the old laundry corridor. If this thing steps one foot—”

Superman changed strategy. He listened, and something that wasn’t a fist hit the underside of the blade. The machine squealed, pitched; for a second the load above the laundry corridor floated. Two trapped people took a breath.

“Okay,” Bruce said under his breath, not because Superman could hear it, but because the air needed a syllable that wasn’t a command.

The machine adapted the way things built to hurt do. A panel slid; a compartment opened; three small drones scurried out like idea-rats and zipped toward the stair under an old sign that read MERCY LAUNDRY. They weren’t weapons; they were problem-solvers—assessing, pulsing, seeking weak spots with low-frequency taps that made joints forget their job.

Superman’s face tightened. The old ceiling moaned.

“Keep the shield line,” the PD captain snapped, and the officers on the lower landing did what good officers do when asked to hold a thing they didn’t fully understand: they set feet and stayed.

Bruce moved when the line faltered. He didn’t think about it. He wasn’t going to hold a load. He was going to hold a person.

He slid along the platform edge and into the laundry corridor, low and quick, the way a man moves when he needs to get under a problem’s line of sight. Two civilians were pinned—a maintenance worker with a busted ankle he was pretending wasn’t, and a woman with a cut high on her scalp that made her look like a horror movie. Bruce put a hand on the worker’s shoulder, found his eyes, said the two sentences that calm a body enough to do what it can: “I’m Bruce. I’m here.”

A drone pulsed at the corner. Dust fell in a curtain from the seam above the worker’s head.

“Shield,” Bruce said, and the officer nearest him—twenty-five, smart enough to be scared—stepped into the space like a practiced puzzle piece. The pulse hit the riot shield with a dull thunk and made the officer grunt.

“Hold,” Bruce said, no urgency, only rhythm. He tore open a dressing with his teeth and pressed it to the woman’s scalp while counting her with his other hand. “Look at me. Keep your eyes on me. That’s it.”

He could hear Superman breathing without seeing his face. It wasn’t the ragged hitch of a man about to fall; it was the controlled push of someone who had found the edge of his endurance and was negotiating for an extension.

The negotiation failed when the machine learned the wrong lesson.

It cannibalized its own fin—clean snap, quick meal—and shunted energy into the carapace. For a handful of seconds, the seams glowed faintly emerald.

Bruce didn’t say the word out loud. His back knew it before his mind did—the way you know an old injury by its weather.

Superman did not let go. He made an inhuman, very human sound and held. The drones skittered, delighted by the new parameter. Two zipped toward the shield line. One turned toward the laundry corridor, curious.

“Down!” the officer with the shield barked. Bruce dropped—half over the woman’s torso, dragging the worker’s collar. The drone pulsed. The old ceiling remembered everything it had wanted to forget. It dropped something like a sigh.

Three things happened fast and one very slowly.

Fast: the officer with the shield took the brunt and stayed standing.

Fast: the maintenance worker tried to be brave and failed, which was fine.

Fast: Superman shifted his shoulder two degrees and changed the future of seven people a little.

Slow: the beam he was bargaining with lost patience.

It came down with a break that sounded like a train leaving a station. Superman hurled himself and the worst of it the other way. He caught most of it. The part he didn’t catch rode along bent fin and compromised frame, hit him across the ribs, and sent him through a brittle wall into a service room the size of a small office. Dust ate the air. Sound left.

Bruce didn’t decide to go after him. The corridor moved in a way that made it the only option. He rolled off the woman, palmed the worker’s sternum like a good father—stay—and slid through the torn opening feeling for the shape of a person in hurt.

He found the cape first.

It lay in grit like a flag that had stopped trying to speak. He found the person next—a heavy weight half-curled by impact, both hands tucked like a man guarding his own chest from an old enemy. The room smelled faintly of hot copper. A pattern in the dust radiated from the center of his suit, the outline of a rectangular something that had scorched cloth without finding skin.

“Hey,” Bruce said, low, a word that could be anyone’s name. “Hey.”

Superman didn’t open his eyes. He drew breath like an argument with his body and let it go like an apology.

“You’re going to want to get up,” Bruce said in the tone you use for a stubborn dog. “You can’t yet. So don’t.”

He checked the carotid—precise fingers, even now. Strong; irregular; too fast. The rhythm of a system trying to right itself in unfriendly math.

“Can you hear me?” Bruce asked, because protocol is a kindness. “Squeeze my hand.”

A warm, iron-strong hand found his and squeezed with the restraint of someone who knows what he can break without meaning to. Relief tore through Bruce so clean it felt like sleep.

“Okay,” he said, because sometimes authority only has that to offer.

The corridor outside was holding—barely. PD had adjusted the shield line; Fire had found chocks in the old station that hadn’t crumbled and made them remember their job. The machine had gone into a sullen chew; the green sheen died, leaving sweat and metal and the nervousness of stripped bolts. Drones lost interest in hurting and began to cluster like bored children.

Bruce pictured the patient flow chart in his head and wrote Superman on it in pencil under C for complicated. Then he did the three things he could do without calling a senator: reduce insult, protect tissue, keep the man.

He shoved the rolling bag across the floor with his foot and popped the FIELD kit with a thumb. Gauze; saline; shears; a blanket; a lead apron borrowed from Radiology two days ago because he was paranoid, and it had paid before.

He draped the apron over Superman’s chest with approximation and respect. A flinch; then stillness. The next breath went deeper.

“That’s it,” Bruce murmured. “Let your heart be a choir, not a drum. In for four, out for eight.”

Superman complied. Bruce kept his hand on the radial pulse and counted softly: “…six… seven… eight.”

The eyes opened without warning.

Not a god’s eyes. A man’s—shocked to find themselves still with the job. They found Bruce and stayed, the way a rope holds in the hand it knows.

“I tried to keep it out of the corridor,” Superman said, voice raw and immediate. The apology was built into the sentence.

“You did,” Bruce said. No argument. “They’re breathing because you did.”

Superman’s mouth settled. He looked like someone willing to go back in despite doctors and physics.

“You protect everyone who protects you,” Bruce said quietly, feeling a truth click into place like a joint after reduction. “It’s not noble. It’s habit.”

It wasn’t a compliment. It wasn’t a rebuke. It was a reading.

Something in Superman’s face went unguarded and stayed that way, as if the sentence had put a palm somewhere nobody else had and pressed exactly right.

“Yes,” he said, almost soundless.

“Good,” Bruce said. “Then do it like this: let me protect you so you can protect them. That’s the math.”

The look that followed carried a hundred things Bruce didn’t have words for without turning them unstable: respect, relief, and something that—if you stood far enough back—looked like gratitude’s older brother.

Dust made a fine crown on Superman’s hair. He reached automatically, realized what his hand intended, and dropped it, embarrassed. Bruce took gauze and did it for him—one sweep along the hairline, catching grit instead of pushing it.

A voice at the torn opening shouted: “Doc! Civilians clear!”

“Hold,” Bruce called back, not because anyone needed the reminder but because the body likes commands it understands. He hung a saline bag for placebo and ritual both. Checked pupils. Counted another eight.

“How bad?” Superman asked, ready to accept the answer even if the worse part of him would reject it.

“Contusions. You tried to stop a wall with your ribs. You mostly succeeded. You’ll hate sneezing for three days.” He tapped the lead apron. “The other thing made everything worse for a minute. It won’t again if we keep you under this and you let me be the hero of doing nothing for ninety seconds.”

“Ninety,” Superman said, like a man making friends with a number.

“Give me one-eighty,” Bruce said.

“Meet you at one-forty,” Superman bargained, insufferable and necessary.

Bruce smiled with what breath he had. “Fine. One-forty. Then you can do the thing I won’t like.”

“Which is?”

“Stand up,” Bruce said, dry.

A radio crackled outside. Lois, not Clark, pinged Bruce’s phone in his pocket—vibration he ignored because he was holding a pulse.

“One-forty,” Bruce said, and moved the lead with all the care and none of the fear. “On your side first. Test your legs before you trust them.”

Superman took the advice because the alternative was foolish and because the world sounds different when someone steady asks a thing of you. He rolled, braced, got one knee under him. The room tilted and un-tilted. The pulse under Bruce’s fingers stuttered and remembered.

Bruce kept his hand where it was, not to restrain, not to assist. Only to be one true thing in the room.

“You’re going to go in there,” he said, a certainty, not permission. “You’ll take the carapace apart, not the core. Ignore the drones—they’re noise. When you breathe, count on the way out.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Superman said without irony, and stood.

He didn’t launch. He walked out of the room like his weight belonged to him. The corridor saw the cape move and made one contained, human sound, then remembered itself and got back to the work.

Superman set his palm on the carapace and listened the way he’d listened to the blade. He didn’t punch. He pressed where torque would travel wrong, whispered force into places too much was asked of old metal.

The machine yielded because it knew, in the end, whose city this was—and because someone had reminded it to stop pretending otherwise.

An ugly, expensive sigh. The core fluttered into safe idle. A drone ratcheted itself brave; Superman flicked it away with two fingers like a mosquito.

“Clear,” the captain called. “Clear! Fire with me. Environmental gets their toys back if they promise to stop inviting them.”

Gallows humor did its thing. They were going to be okay.

Superman stepped back. He glanced at the torn wall without theater. Bruce raised two fingers—check. The answering nod was small and real.

“Get him back to the bay,” someone said behind Bruce. “Doc?”

But Bruce was already moving again. The laundry corridor had turned into triage overflow. He laid a hand on a wrist—pulse calmer than his own—and another on a boy’s shoulder until tremor gave way to shiver, which was an improvement.

When he finally looked up, the cape was gone.

The after-incident press conference started before dawn because politicians like to pretend the sun waits on them. Bruce didn’t go. Leslie sent him to a cot; he negotiated a draw and got ten minutes in a stairwell chair instead.

His phone filled the quiet like a friend on the other end of a long bar.

Lois: “You alive?”

Bruce: “Ambulatory.”

Lois: “Close enough. Verne-Rowe serials confirmed. Phoenix crate print down in an alcove. Donor will wish he’d stuck to bridges.”

Bruce: “Keep the paper trail clean.”

Lois: “Tell Dent to retire the word ‘preliminary.’”

Bruce: “You terrify him.”

Lois: “I terrify everyone. Where’s Clark?”

Bruce stared at the screen and typed the only honest answer he could afford.

Bruce: “Everywhere he needs to be.”

He almost added: and one or two places he shouldn’t. He didn’t.

By eight, the incident was a cleanup and a press cycle. By nine, the city had decided the day could be ordinary if it tried. By ten, Bruce’s hands had the chap of January.

He stepped into a supply alcove to breathe without a job, and the excuse he hadn’t realized he’d hoped for arrived like weather.

The cape moved at the open window’s edge.

Superman didn’t land; he arrived, as if the room had widened to include him and would narrow again to survive his leaving. He touched down on the sill and stepped in with a care that made the metal frame not complain.

“Doctor Wayne,” he said softly, and the way he said it made the title mean something closer to a name.

“Superman,” Bruce replied. He didn’t ask why. The body knows when someone is done being alone with what he just survived.

The light was tired and flattering. Dust motes looked like earned grace.

“You were right,” Superman said. “Carapace. Drones. Breathing on the way out.”

“I’m right more often than is charming,” Bruce said, because the alternative was saying something the room couldn’t carry.

A small silence. Superman’s eyes had that look again—the one that appears when a person has been told he may be just a man for a minute and he is trying it on without believing it’ll be in stock.

There are questions you can only ask when the floor is steady and someone is watching the door for you.

“When this has fewer moving parts,” he said, less like an icon, more like a person, “not a corridor or a roof—would you go somewhere with me? Coffee. A room that isn’t trying to fall. Your call.”

For a second Bruce felt the world do two inconsistent things at once: become very quiet and get very loud.

He had a lot of tools for hurt. Almost none for this.

He didn’t let the pause become cruelty. He didn’t look past the man in front of him to the man he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about. He allowed himself one heartbeat to look at the contradiction: the symbol in the suit; the reporter whose texts had taught Bruce what it felt like to be checked on in a way that calibrated help and control correctly.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said, and meant it enough that it hurt the way right truths hurt. “I’m already… thinking of someone else.”

Someone did a lot of work without revealing anything it wasn’t allowed to. It contained a vending-machine hum and a hallway bench, a square of sun saved by a building, a How’s the boat? and a Don’t pretend.

It contained Clark.

Superman’s face did what honest people’s faces do with disappointment when they’ve practiced carrying other people’s: it absorbed the blow and slowed it so it wouldn’t cut on the way in.

“Of course,” he said, immediately—kind to Bruce and cruel to himself. He rescued himself with humor. “It would have been terrible for your hospital’s reputation anyway.”

“We’ve survived worse,” Bruce said, finding a smile he didn’t entirely own. “But it’s—”

“—the right call,” Superman finished for him, perhaps because he needed the sentence to land somewhere other than grief.

They stood in the not-quite-private light of an overworked morning. A nurse passed the open door with a tray and didn’t look in; hospitals are full of things better not seen.

“I don’t want this to change—” Superman began, and stopped. He meant to say the work, and what came out was this. The corridor. The tea that wasn’t in a study. A palm finding a pulse and counting it like it mattered.

“It won’t,” Bruce said, because here control was love.

Superman nodded once, like returning a pulse. He took his breath and kept his other promise: to be the person who did the right thing when it cost him.

“Good,” he said. “Then… thank you.”

“For what?” Bruce asked, because gratitude is easier to hold if you hand it an object.

“For being steady,” Superman said. He surprised them both by adding, “For protecting everyone who protects me.”

Bruce couldn’t look at him. He studied his very clean, very tired hands and marveled that a body could still be surprised by feeling.

“Try to like sleep,” he said, because a man must say something.

“I’ll try,” Superman said. He looked at Bruce openly for one long, human second—memorizing a face in a crowd he wasn’t allowed to approach again—then stepped back onto the sill.

“Tell your someone,” he said quietly, and didn’t wait for an answer. Some sentences are too dangerous to survive replies.

He went out into the bruised light. He did not hurry. He did not look back.

Bruce stood very still in a room that had seen enough crying to recognize a man not doing it. He washed his hands, because that’s what he knew to do with feeling when it refused a name.

Hours later—after the press, after rounds, after a nap so brief it only taught his body what it had been missing—his phone buzzed.

Clark: “Press conference became a circus. Lois says Dent wore the tie she hates. You alive?”

Bruce smiled, a careful thing.

Bruce: “Ambulatory. Your boat?”

Clark: “Docked. Mostly.”

He watched the dots come and go, then return.

Clark: “Eat something that wasn’t handed to you by a vending machine. And if you’re on the roof, sit before you come back down.”

Bruce typed, then paused, then sent:

Bruce: “Complying.”

Clark: “Good.”

He put the phone screen-down and stood in the doorway of the supply alcove until a nurse needed his hands. He placed a palm on a shoulder here, took a pulse there, told a boy it would hurt less in the morning and lied with integrity because it would be a different kind of hurt and he knew the difference.

Out by Old Mercy, Environmental hauled drones onto a flatbed and pretended to be proud of how well they’d behaved when they weren’t trying to ruin things. PD took a victory photo with a machine that wouldn’t remember their names. Fire drank something hot on the curb and called it coffee because it had steam.

On a roof Bruce couldn’t see, a man who belonged to a city and to no one at all watched the river and let the wind do the counting for once.

He had been turned down for a kindness. He had been told a truth that respected him enough to hurt. He carried it into the afternoon like a bruise where armor didn’t fit.

And somewhere between two neighborhoods that shook hands in the late light, a reporter sat with a paper cup and a square of crackers in his pocket, typed a message he didn’t send, and smiled at nothing the way a man does when someone steady has told him he can be, too.

Chapter Text

Clark texted less.

It wasn’t abrupt, not a door slammed shut. It was a dimmer switch turned slowly by an invisible hand, the light running out of a room over days. Where there had been a steady trickle of messages—Eat something that isn’t coffee. You sound like you’re on hour twenty; drink water. If you pretend you’re fine, I will tell Lois and she will call you at the nurses’ station—there were now tidy replies, efficient and correct. Copy. On deadline. Safe. A punctuation change here, a vanished joke there. Bruce felt the absence the way a cardiologist feels a skipped beat: not fatal, but felt.

He told himself simple things. Newsrooms were beasts. Clark had an editor who weaponized the word urgent and a city whose crises arrived in multiples. It was proximity bias, that was all—Bruce noticed what touched him. The city had not grown stingier; it was only that Bruce had grown used to the small thread that ran from his pocket to someone else’s life, and now it thinned.

The hospital didn’t leave room for brooding, but it left corners. In those corners, Bruce found himself reading Clark’s work more slowly than he needed to, as if the cadence between the lines might disclose an answer. Clark’s articles carried that precise mercy Bruce had come to recognize: the facts were clean, the timeline untangled, and the people in the paragraphs were not props for the thesis. He could feel Clark’s hand in the choice to name a janitor and spell it right; in the sentence that stopped before it turned cruel; in the verb that remembered a body had been afraid before it was brave.

But the byline did not look up and grin at him. The cursor did not blink like a pulse waiting for his thumb to answer. The work never owed him that. He knew it. It didn’t stop him from wanting.

The city kept speaking in its low register. After Old Mercy, Environmental swore on public radio that every tunnel cap left in the pre-war schematic would be cored and sealed by men who knew their fathers’ wrenches by weight. Verne-Rowe floated in committee hearings like a ghost with receipts. Dent did three press availabilities in two days and slept in his tie between them. “We’ll get the machines out of our bones,” he promised, and meant it, and signed papers that made nobody quite happy because that’s what governance does when the problem is old and expensive.

Bruce did his rounds. He stitched and reduced; he signed discharge papers for the lucky and wrote the letters for the unlucky that said This will hurt a while; here is what to do about it. Between cases he checked a phone he didn’t need to check. Sometimes he found a line from Clark: On assignment. Out with Jimmy. Metropolis desk wants copy by six. He answered with the kind of shape a man can live in: Be careful. Bring water. Don’t be heroic with fainting. The bubbles came back slower. Once, not at all.

At midweek, the press conference unfolded on the steps of City Hall with all the choreography of a wedding nobody believed in. Dent spoke, polished and tired, promising audits with teeth. Behind him, a deputy commissioner tried to look like her badge meant more than the budget attached to it. The crowd bucked and swayed with the weight of microphones. Lois Lane stood like a fulcrum at the front, questions sharp as filings. Bruce clocked her in the way you clock weather: she would break what wasn’t built right. He scanned for Clark, even though he hadn’t told himself he would. No glasses. No dark hair refusing to lie down. Not even the shoulder of a coat he could have pretended belonged to him.

“Don’t,” Dent said under his breath without looking, the mutter of a friend who has learned where not to press.

“Don’t what,” Bruce said, equally quiet.

“Don’t stand on a set of stairs and take attendance,” Dent replied, smiling for cameras that weren’t pointed at him. “He’s a reporter. They evaporate when it suits the story.”

Bruce watched a flock of photographers migrate to the next corner. “I know what reporters do.”

“Do you?” Dent risked a glance. The half-smile was old as their friendship. “Because from here it looks like you know what one reporter does when he texts you at two in the morning.”

He deserved the jab. He didn’t take it. “How’s the oversight committee?”

Dent huffed. “A piñata made of policy. Hit it enough and candy falls out for whomever’s standing closest.”

“Cheerful.”

“Traditional,” Dent corrected. The cameras shifted; his name was called. He clapped Bruce’s shoulder on his way to the podium, the pressure a wordless: Eat. Go home at some point. Don’t fossilize in the lobby of your own life.

The next crisis was smaller on paper and not smaller at the elbow: a water main collapsed under Claremont, taking a skin of asphalt and a row of parked cars with it. It was two in the morning and raining the wrong kind of rain, the kind that makes gutters forget their job. Bruce was out in a coat that no longer pretended to be waterproof, triaging in streetlight that blinked out every time the grid hiccuped.

He felt the air thicken and did not look up in surprise.

Superman didn’t need a stage to arrive. He set down without theater near the edge of the sinkhole, turned his head to take in the geometry with a professional’s economy, and was moving before Bruce had raised a hand to point. The compactness of his strength was a thing Bruce respected the way you respect a tool you’ve come to trust: you put it where it belongs and it does the job without lecturing you.

They worked as they had worked before—two people who had found the other’s rhythm by repetition. Bruce marked the safe line with his body; Superman honored it. Where a beam threatened, Superman braced; where a shoulder needed, Bruce put his palm and lent a quieter strength. Their exchange was a liturgy of nods. A few times their eyes caught. Once, Superman looked like he meant to say a thing that belonged to daylight and friends. He didn’t. Bruce didn’t ask. The work ran out faster than the rain.

“Doctor,” Superman said, when the last stretcher had gone and the sinkhole gaped like a mouth that would have to be sutured by men with better machines, “thank you.”

“Get out of the rain,” Bruce said, because he could not say I turned you down because I was thinking of you in a different coat. He could not say I’m sorry that hurt; it was also true. He could not say Stay. He said the thing a doctor can say to a person who will listen to him in exactly this narrow band. “Breathe on the way out.”

A corner of Superman’s mouth ceded the smallest ground. He left with a sound like agreement.

After, standing under an overhang with a coffee that didn’t qualify as drinkable, Bruce looked at the blank of the sky and felt, for the first time, a new kind of formality in the space Superman had kept between them. Not distance—respect weaponized as caution. It was the right choice. It made his chest feel like the weather had set in.

He tried, once, to write a message that didn’t sound like a weather report.

How are you— he typed, then deleted. Saw your piece— delete. Metropolis coffee is worse; you were right— cowardly, delete. He sent something true and survivable instead: Shift’s long. Turn your notifications off and sleep.

The reply came four hours later. On a train. Copy filed. Sleep later. Then, almost as if a hand had brushed his arm and moved on: You okay?

Ambulatory, he wrote. He didn’t write, Are we okay? He had a lifetime of avoiding questions a person can only answer by lying or leaving.

By the end of the week the city had learned three new acronyms and retired one. The Verne-Rowe audit found serials that didn’t match invoices. A contractor with a patriotic name and a foreign shell company made the rounds on Dent’s schedule and did not enjoy himself. Lois wrote like a scalpel; Bruce skimmed the top third and stopped before the second pull quote because he could hear her cadence and not Clark’s, and it made the room feel thinner.

Late on Friday, Harvey appeared in Bruce’s doorway the way he always did—without knocking, with a smirk he hadn’t earned and a list of crises he had. He flopped into the chair opposite and looked at Bruce’s face as if it were a whiteboard that needed erasing.

“You look like someone told you the vending machine is out of saltines,” he said.

“It is,” Bruce said, which was both true and beside it.

“Ah.” Harvey tipped his head toward the dark laptop. “And The Reporter?”

Bruce didn’t rise to the bait. “Busy.”

“Busy,” Harvey echoed, stretching the word to see if it snapped. “Bruce, people get quiet for ten reasons, nine of which aren’t you.”

“And the tenth?”

“The tenth is you,” Harvey said cheerfully. He sobered a fraction. “You told me once you prefer problems you can hold in your hands. This is not that. You’ll make yourself insane trying to palpate a feeling.”

“I am not palpating,” Bruce said, dry, because the alternative was confessing that he had been mapping silence like scar tissue.

Harvey leaned forward and planted his elbows on his knees. “Do you want me to tell you you’re imagining it, so you can be offended? Or do you want me to tell you it’s real, so you can be brave?”

“You’ve had bourbon,” Bruce said.

“Two,” Harvey said, raising imaginary fingers. “And I still know this: you care. He cares. One of you is making room. The other is mistaking that room for absence.”

Bruce stared at the ink stain on his own knuckle, a badge from a pen that had surrendered unexpectedly mid-signature. “You’re better at this when you’re cruel.”

“This is me being cruel,” Harvey said softly. “Because I am telling you to live with not knowing.”

The pager on Bruce’s belt rattled like a jar of nails. He looked down, grateful for any sentence he could complete. Ambulance bay—multiple incoming—Claremont extension. The city had decided the day wasn’t done after all.

Harvey stood with him and straightened his tie. “We are all in love with something that doesn’t love us back,” he said, too casual to ring with pity. “The trick is figuring out which part of that is poetry and which part is fear.”

Bruce didn’t offer him the truth, which was that he had chosen a life where the thing that didn’t love him back still needed him constantly. He reached for his coat. “I’ll call you if we run out of saltines.”

“Eat a sandwich,” Harvey said, already walking backward out the door. “And if you see Lane, tell her my office’s preliminary findings are now just findings so she can find a new word to hate.”

“I won’t see Lane,” Bruce said automatically, and then, because it betrayed him to admit it: “I never see Kent.”

Harvey’s face did the small thing human faces do when they could be kind or funny and choose both badly. “Then stop looking at stairs,” he said, and left him to the work.

The sirens met him before the bay doors did. A pair of paramedics rolled past with the good chaos in their stride, the kind that means a patient is still a person and not a package. Bruce stepped into the stream and let the hospital take him, hands finding jobs without supervision. Needle. Voice. Pressure. Count.

He didn’t notice the text until the room made room for him to breathe.

Filed. Out on the Southline in an hour. Don’t be heroic with fainting, the message read.

He could pretend it was an old message the universe had delivered late. He could pretend he didn’t feel the little relief that came with it, like a joint seating back into its socket after a minor misadventure. He could pretend. He didn’t.

Complying, he wrote, and tucked the phone away before he could ask the wrong thing and make it true.

Outside, Lois’s voice cut through a bank of microphones on a live feed no one in the ER had time to watch. Dent’s name trended for three minutes longer than the city’s patience. Environmental hauled a drone into a conference room and called it evidence. Gotham, which did not know how to love its doctors or its reporters properly, at least kept them busy.

Bruce washed his hands until he could smell only hospital and not doubt. He dried them on a paper towel that disintegrated the way cheap things do and went to the next bed, the next pulse, the next problem he could hold.

The city’s bones hummed. Somewhere above ground, a man with a notebook chose a verb that would keep another man human on the page. Somewhere higher, someone who did not belong to anyone at all counted on the way out because a doctor had asked him to. Between those floors, Bruce made peace with a thing he did not know how to fix and called it medicine.

When the shift flipped, the sun was pale and mean. Bruce stepped into it anyway. He pulled his coat close against a wind that owed him nothing and felt, beneath the ache, the stubborn, ordinary hope that keeps men at their posts: that distance is not absence, that absence is not an answer, that answers are not the point.

He went back inside when the pager called his name.

Chapter Text

The Narrows kept their own weather.

Fog pooled low, lit by tired streetlamps into a sort of ground-level dawn. Bruce moved through it in a gray hoodie and an old ball cap, field bag slung crossbody, the weight familiar against his ribs. He wasn’t running the basement clinic tonight. Tonight was the other work—the kind that didn’t wait for a folding table and a sign. The kind that meant stepping into spaces where help had not been asked for but was still owed.

He took the alleys that cut behind the pawnshops and bodega back doors, the ones that belonged to kids and couriers and the men who sold what they couldn’t afford to keep. He knew which stoops fed the feral cats, which windows belonged to night-shift workers, which doorbells weren’t wired to anything except hope.

He didn’t look like a fight, which was the point. Still: there was a flashlight in his back pocket, metal and heavy. There was a tourniquet rolled where his hand would find it without looking. There were four pressure dressings and the knowledge of where to put two fingers on a wrist to remind a body that it belonged to itself.

Two blocks in, he heard the sound that yanked him faster than a pager: a kid trying not to cry.

He found them in the notch between a shuttered laundromat and a chain-link fence—three shapes and the sharp, black geometry of a knife. The smallest shape, all elbows and a too-thin hoodie, had a backpack clutched to his chest and blood darkening the cuff of his sleeve. The man with the knife wasn’t posturing; he was hungry. The third, older boy, watched with that resigned vigilance Bruce recognized from a thousand waiting rooms: I don’t want to be here, but here we are.

“Hey,” Bruce said, stepping into the light like an accident. He kept his hands visible, shoulder turned to the blade so he could move without giving the wrong answer. “He needs a hospital.”

“Back off, man,” the older boy said, not unkindly. “Ain’t your business.”

“It’s exactly my business,” Bruce said, and let the lid come off his voice. “He’s bleeding.”

“The Angel?” the kid with the knife said, surprise thickening the word. Gotham might fail a thousand ways, but it knew its doctor. He twitched, more nerves than menace. “We just—he owes. It’s just a scare.”

Bruce stepped closer, slowly. “Scares cost less if nobody leaks out.” He tipped his head at the youngest, dropping the volume to something that didn’t have to be earned. “Can I see?”

The boy’s chin came up like a cornered animal’s. Then he nodded, barely. Bruce didn’t take the bag from him; he pried the cuff back instead and saw the cut—long, shallow, more bark than bite but messy enough to make the world tilt. He set the field bag down, keeping his body between the kid and the knife.

“Here’s the deal,” Bruce said, eyes on the wound. “I wash. I close. You keep the bag. Then he goes home. He’s a kid; he doesn’t owe you what you think he owes.”

The older boy shifted. The man with the knife started to speak.

Bruce moved.

He’s no Superman. No cape. But the body remembers how to be an instrument when the hands are calm. He angled the flashlight hard into the knifeman’s eyes—light is a weapon if you ask it right—stepped in, struck the wrist with the base of the light, shoved the knife against the brick with a palm that knew where a joint ends, and planted his shoulder to make the man reconsider gravity. The blade clattered. The older boy grabbed his friend on instinct and yanked him back. Nobody yelled. Nobody wanted police.

“Enough,” Bruce said, low. He kicked the knife under the fence with the toe of his boot and looked at the older boy, not the one who’d been holding steel. “Your friend can be angry without making you stupider.”

For a second, there was the tight, dangerous silence of a choice. Then the older boy looked at the small one’s sleeve and made it; he nodded once, kept his hands where Bruce could see them, and said to the younger, “Let him fix it, Jay.”

“Sit,” Bruce told the kid, already snapping a light-stick so he could see without blinding anyone. He poured saline over the cut and the blood went pink, then pale, carrying away less of the night than he wanted. “This’ll sting. Be brave now; it’s cheaper than being brave later.”

Footsteps. A shape at the mouth of the alley. A woman’s voice from a window above, half-mock, half-prayer: “You’re the angel, right?”

Bruce didn’t look up. The Narrows had a dozen names for him. He accepted none, answered to all. He pressed gauze to the cut and counted the beat he felt in the boy’s wrist.

Down the alley, another voice—familiar, warm, startled for only a second. “Dr. Wayne?”

Bruce glanced back. Clark stood in the spill of a tired streetlamp, scarf badly wrapped, a paper bag in one hand. The question in his face—angel?—flickered and vanished when recognition replaced it.

The older boy stepped in front of Bruce without thinking. “Back up,” he warned Clark. Protective, not threatening. “Don’t touch him. Don’t touch the doc.”

Clark raised his hands, palms out. “I won’t.”

“Jay,” Bruce said to the kid, keeping pressure with two fingers and a tone that made muscles obey. “He’s okay. He’s with me.”

The boy looked between them, running the math only a kid like him knows. Finally, to Bruce, not Clark: “You sure?”

“I’m sure.” Bruce tipped his head at Clark without looking away from the cut. The order landed like muscle memory. “Kent—gloves. Light low. Pressure when I say.”

Clark blinked—Kent—then moved. He slid on nitrile, crouched, angled the flashlight so it lit the wound without blinding anybody. He waited.

“Now,” Bruce said, and Clark’s hand replaced his on the gauze, firm and steady.

The older boy hovered, ready to yank Jay away at the first wrong move. “You sure about this, angel?” he asked, defiance fraying into worry.

“Don’t call me that,” Bruce said mildly. “And watch his backpack. If it walks off, we’re all starting this night over.”

That won him the smallest, reluctant grin. The older boy planted a sneaker on the strap like a vow.

“Breathe,” Bruce told Jay, cutting steri-strips, his voice a soft metronome. “In for four. Out for eight.”

Jay obeyed. Clark matched the rhythm under his breath without realizing it.

“You like soccer?” Clark asked, tentative, awkwardly making conversation like a guy who’d learned the hard way that silence scares kids. “Position?”

“Wing,” Jay muttered. “I’m fast.”

“Yeah?” Clark said. “Your shoes agree. They just want new laces.”

Jay snorted, the laugh catching on a flinch when Bruce laid down the last strip. “Ow—okay.”

“Good,” Bruce said. “We’re done pretending you aren’t tough.” He wrapped the forearm, clean and neat. “No scrapes for a week. Come by St. Bart’s basement tomorrow night. I’ll change the dressing. Bring the backpack, not the knife.”

That last to the older boy, who ducked his head like someone had called him by his real name.

From the window above, the woman’s voice again: “That you, angel?”

“It’s doctor,” Bruce said, not looking up.

“Uh-huh,” she said, satisfied. “Thought so.”

Clark’s eyes flicked up at the nickname, then back down quickly, filing it with care. He had a thousand questions and asked none of them.

Jay flexed his fingers and kept his face brave. “You okay, doc?” he asked, sudden, fierce—protective of the man who’d just repacked him into himself.

“I’m okay,” Bruce said. “You’re the one leaking.”

The kid nodded, serious. Then, to Clark, still suspicious: “You his friend?”

Clark, surprised by how much he wanted to be, answered honestly. “Yeah. If he’ll have me.”

Jay squinted. “Don’t mess it up,” he instructed, like someone who had learned about leaving far too early. He bumped his backpack higher and let the older boy steer him out. At the corner, he glanced back once—at Bruce, not the knife—and then they were absorbed by the Narrows in that particular way the Narrows has of pretending its children are invisible so they can survive.

The alley exhaled.

Clark shifted back on his heels, removing pressure as Bruce took over, hands brisk and exact. The flashlight made a soft circle around competence. The word from the window still hung in the air like a paper lantern neither of them wanted to touch.

Clark cleared his throat. “I didn’t know people… called you that.”

“They don’t,” Bruce said, too quickly. Then, because lying felt worse than being called a myth, “They do it to be kind.”

“It’s protection,” Clark said before he could stop himself. He softened it with an apologetic grimace. “Sorry. Reporter mouth.”

“Don’t print it,” Bruce said, eyes finally cutting up, dry and serious at once.

“I won’t,” Clark said. “I wouldn’t.”

A beat. The awkwardness arrived in all its shuffling, honest weight.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Bruce said, which sounded like I’m glad you are, spoken by a man who didn’t know how to say it tonight.

“I brought… gauze,” Clark offered, looking at the bag like it might redeem him.

“I had gauze,” Bruce said. Then—because he had also ordered him to help and been obeyed without argument—“Thank you.”

Clark nodded, relieved and very tall and somehow trying to be less of both. “Do you, um—do you always do this?”

“No,” Bruce said. “Only on nights that end in y.”

“Right,” Clark said, mortified by his own question. “I meant— I didn’t—”

“Walk with me,” Bruce said, closing the field bag with a decisive click. He stepped past Clark into air that smelled like iron and frying oil. “My car’s at the hospital. Don’t argue. Keep up.”

“Yes, doctor,” Clark said, because being bossed around by the man you liked turned out to be oddly stabilizing.

They headed out, shoulder to shoulder and not touching. Gotham opened into its cheap light and earnest noises. A TV at a bodega door showed a telenovela; a cat owned an entire stoop with sovereign contempt.

After a block, Clark risked it. “So… angel?”

“No cape,” Bruce said, dry. “Just hands.”

Clark smiled, then killed the smile for fear of making it larger than the night could hold. “You were—good. With him. With both of them.”

“I was bossy,” Bruce said. “It works on twelve-year-olds and reporters.”

“Is that… a category?” Clark said, flustered. “I can be older than twelve. Sometimes.”

“Tonight you get a sticker,” Bruce said, and let the corner of his mouth concede an inch.

They walked. The silence wasn’t comfortable; it wasn’t not. They were building a silence that could learn to be either.

Clark tried again. “You ordered me around.”

“You did what I asked.”

“I always will,” Clark said, a little too fast. He corrected himself, cheeks warming under the scarf. “I mean—tonight. In alleys. With kids. If you tell me to hold still, I’ll hold still.”

“Good,” Bruce said. “Hold still.”

Clark obeyed like it was a vow.

They reached the hospital lot. Sodium lights painted every car bureaucratic beige. Bruce stopped at the curb and turned the bag on his shoulder so the strap sat where it didn’t cut.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” Clark asked, after a lifetime of wanting to.

“For letting me order you around,” Bruce said. “And for not trying to be bigger than the room.”

“I didn’t know that was an option,” Clark admitted, shy and honest. “I— This… the angel thing—”

“Is a rumor,” Bruce said. “That’s all.”

“Right,” Clark said. “A rumor that bleeds and carries antiseptic.”

“Don’t make me regret letting you help,” Bruce said, but there was no heat in it.

“I won’t,” Clark said. Then, because awkwardness deserved a small mercy: “Walk you the rest of the way?”

Bruce glanced toward the bay doors, where the work never slept. He looked back at Clark. “Yes.”

They went in together. Security pretended not to know a famous face. A volunteer pushed a cart of paperbacks past with the gravitas of a librarian at sea. The sirens, for once, were quiet enough that you could hear the building’s bones hum.

“Come on,” Bruce said, tipping his head toward the side corridor that led out to the staff lot. “Ride with me.”

Clark blinked. “In your car?”

“In my car,” Bruce repeated, as if clarifying a medication dose. “Two minutes.”

Confused, Clark still fell into step, matching Bruce down the echoing hallway, through the door with the scuffed push plate, into air that smelled like metal and cold. Sodium lights flattened the rows of sedans into the same tired color. Their shoes ticked on the concrete. Bruce’s keys chattered once in his palm and then found the right groove; the blinkers flashed a quick acknowledgment.

Inside, the world shrank to a rectangle of dim upholstery and the slow breath of the heater trying its best. The dome light went out; the lot became a soft field of shadows. Bruce didn’t start the engine. He set the field bag in the back, closed the door, and sat with his hands on the wheel like he was reminding them they were allowed to be empty.

“Clark,” he said.

Clark turned, the seat creaking a little. “Yeah?”

“Someone asked me to coffee last week.” Bruce said it without preamble, as if he were describing a lab value. “I said no, because I thought it would be a bad idea.”

Clark went very still. The seatbelt lay untouched across his lap; he folded his hands over it like he needed something to do with the sudden, awkward weight of them. “Right,” he said, voice careful. “Sure. Of course.”

Bruce let the quiet sit between them long enough that Clark could feel the shape of it. Then he looked over, really looked—eyes adjusting to Clark’s face at this close distance, to the way the scarf had imprinted a faint line along his throat, to the way the city’s rough light put a shine on his glasses.

“Do you think,” Bruce asked, steady, “I should risk it?”

Clark’s breath snagged on the question. He felt the answer climb his throat like a confession and jam there, too large for words. He swallowed once, then again. His mouth opened and closed around a dozen sentences that would all have been either too much or not enough.

“Yes,” is what he meant.

He didn’t get it out.

Bruce reached across the console the way a man does when he has already done the math and decided to pay the cost. His palm found Clark’s jaw, fingers skimming the stubble he’d earned by being a person first and a byline second. He leaned in.

The kiss was unhurried and brief—no theater, no claim. A touch that registered as intent and question both. Warmth, a soft drag of breath, the faint taste of the apple cider he hadn’t had time to drink, and then it was gone.

Clark’s forehead rested against Bruce’s for a heartbeat neither of them tried to control. He exhaled, shaky, certain. “You knew,” he whispered.

Bruce’s mouth tilted, the smallest admission. He dipped back in and pressed another kiss to Clark’s mouth, a chaste seal placed neatly where the truth had just been spoken. “I knew,” he said against him, quiet as a promise.

Outside, a door thumped; a cart rattled; the hospital remembered itself. Inside the car, the heater breathed, and two men sat very close without rushing to explain anything to the part of the world that would have demanded explanations.

Clark’s laugh arrived late and small, astonished at its own gentleness. “Just for the record,” he managed, “if that coffee offer ever comes back around, my answer is yes.”

“It just did,” Bruce said.

“Then yes,” Clark said, and let his head tip back against the rest, eyes closing for a second like a man finally allowed to blink.

Bruce didn’t move to start the car. He set his hand palm-up on the console between them instead. Clark’s fingers found it like a habit he had been practicing without knowing.

“Why did you think it’d be a bad idea?” Clark asked at last, voice low, as if speaking too loudly might wake the building.

Bruce looked down at their joined hands, then up. “Because I like my work clean of me. Because reporters make stories out of men like me, even when they’re trying to be kind. Because Gotham turns care into spectacle, and I can’t triage optics. Because I didn’t want to ask you to split yourself in two just so I could feel safe. Because you’re Superman—and saying yes would mean living with the sky taking you away, with bruises I can’t fix and silences I shouldn’t break.” A breath, unguarded. “And because if I said yes, I wasn’t sure I’d remember how to stop.”

Clark absorbed it, throat working. “And now?”

“Now you showed up with gauze and not a microphone,” Bruce said. “You held pressure when I asked and didn’t try to lift the city. You let me order you around and called me ‘doctor’ like it was a name, not a costume. And now that we’re not pretending about who you are, it feels less like a bad idea and more like the right difficult one.”

Clark let out a breath he hadn’t noticed he was holding. “I can do difficult,” he said. “I’d rather do difficult with you than easy anywhere else.”

Bruce’s mouth tilted, not quite a smile. “Then we make rules.”

“Okay.” Clark’s voice steadied around the word. “I won’t turn you into a story. Not in print, not in my head. I’ll text when I go and when I’m back. If I can’t… I’ll find a way to say alive without making you carry it.”

Bruce nodded. “And I won’t ask the sky for a logbook. I’ll let you keep the parts that belong to the city.” He paused. “But if you start disappearing to protect me, I’ll be angry in ways I don’t have time to be.”

“Deal.” Clark swallowed. “No roof-goodbyes. No… theatrics.”

“Good,” Bruce said, softer. “And don’t be heroic with fainting.”

“That one’s non-negotiable, I know.” Clark’s laugh was brief, grateful. “Add one for me?”

“Name it.”

“When you fall,” Clark said, “fall toward me.”

Bruce considered it like a physician considering a new protocol, then gave the smallest, most serious nod. “Toward you.”

They leaned together again, the kiss gentler than the first, an agreement sealed in the warm hush of the car and the far-off clatter of a cart. When they separated, they stayed close enough to share breath.

“Soup,” Bruce said, measuring how much future the moment could hold. “Tomorrow. Eleven-oh-five.”

“I’ll bring honey,” Clark murmured, wicked and soft.

“Blasphemy,” Bruce answered, and the word sounded a lot like fond.

He turned the key. The heater found its hum; the dash clock blinked itself awake. Bruce eased them out of the slot, the lot’s sodium light stretching and shrinking across the windshield like slow tide. At the curb by the staff entrance he braked, not because the road demanded it but because good things should get set down carefully.

Clark’s hand found his again—brief, certain. “Goodnight, Bruce.”

“Goodnight, Clark.” Bruce’s thumb pressed once, like a pulse he approved of. “Text me when you’re home.”

“I will.”

Clark slipped out into the thin autumn air, scarf crooked, smile underlit by a tired streetlamp. He tapped the roof twice—habit, superstition, blessing—and backed away, one hand lifted in a half-wave he didn’t feel the need to complete.

Bruce watched him cross the spill of light and vanish into the corridor’s shadow. The hospital breathed. Somewhere a monitor insisted. Somewhere a child slept harder because a cut had been cleaned. The city’s bones hummed, and for once the sound felt less like warning and more like a metronome they could keep.

He pulled forward, the tires whispering across concrete, and let the night take him back to the work he’d chosen—warmed by the knowledge of eleven-oh-five, of soup that wouldn’t be soup, of blasphemous honey, and of a man who would let him fall toward him when it mattered.

Risk, then. They would risk it.

Chapter Text

Gotham Gazette — Announcements (Paid Notices)

WAYNE — KENT
Dr. Bruce Wayne, M.D., and Mr. Clark Kent are pleased to announce their marriage on Sunday October 12 2025, in Gotham City.
A small ceremony with family and friends.
In lieu of gifts, please consider donations to St. Bartholomew’s Free Clinic and the Narrows Youth Soccer Fund.

Bruce folded the paper along the crease and slid it across the kitchen counter, steam from two mugs rising into October light.

Clark read the fourteen plain words again and grinned at the part that insisted on Mr. Clark Kent. “That’s it?” he asked, smiling into the simple.

“That’s it,” Bruce said, tacking the clipping under a chipped apple magnet. “Wayne tradition. No society pages, no interviews. Just a notice and a place to send help. My mother hated spectacle. My father hated waste. This is where they compromised.”

“And you?”

“I like telling the truth without giving it away,” Bruce said. He tapped the type. “We told it.”

Clark reached for his hand. “We did.”

Outside the window, a leaf let go of the maple like it had been waiting for permission.

Harvey showed up before lunch with a paper sack of bagels and the smugness of a man who’d known the secret for weeks and enjoyed every second of it.

“Nice six-point confession in the Gazette,” he said by way of hello, shouldering into Bruce’s office like a weather system. “Very you. Very I’m not giving you a quote, stop asking me.”

Bruce took the bagels; Harvey took the chair. “You brought food. You’re either proud or about to ask for a favor.”

“Both,” Harvey said, tearing a sesame in half. “Proud first: I am obnoxiously, insufferably proud of you. Second: favor—allow me to run interference when the press tries to pretend a paid notice is a press conference.”

“There won’t be a press conference,” Bruce said.

“Exactly,” Harvey replied, pleased. “So let me make sure there isn’t one by accident, either. Security at the park, quiet routes, a press pen somewhere else entirely. Optics are like toddlers: if you ignore them, they draw on the walls.”

Bruce’s mouth softened. “Thank you.”

Harvey tilted his head at the clipping on Bruce’s desk. “You nervous?”

“The right kind,” Bruce said.

“Good.” Harvey leaned forward, elbows on knees, the mayor dropping into best friend without a seam. “Here’s my wedding advice. Keep the vows short. Say one thing the other person can actually measure. ‘I promise to sit before I come back down’—that sort of thing.”

Bruce’s eyes flickered with something private. “Noted.”

“And when in doubt,” Harvey added, “fall toward him.”

“That line is taken,” Bruce said, dry.

“Good,” Harvey said. He pointed with a bagel half. “Lois will pretend not to cry and will definitely cry. Jimmy will try to invent a camera that is both invited and not invited. And I—” he tapped his chest “—will pronounce your permits perfectly boring. We’ll put a bow on dull. Dull is safe.”

“I don’t need pomp,” Bruce said.

“You need a day that remembers to be about you,” Harvey corrected gently. He set the bagel down and sobered. “Really—congratulations, Bruce. You picked the right difficult thing. Those are rare.”

“Thank you,” Bruce said, and meant it all the way through.

Harvey stood, smoothing an imaginary wrinkle from his jacket. “Do you want me to threaten anyone who brings honey to the reception?”

“That would start a war you can’t win,” Bruce said.

Harvey paused at the door, grinning. “Then I’ll pick a different hill. See you Sunday, Doctor Wayne.”

At the Planet, Lois didn’t bother pretending to be surprised. She breezed past a half-built headline, confiscated Clark’s pen, and flicked the Gazette clipping with her nail like it owed her money.

“So,” she said, too casually. “Superman’s favorite reporter and Superman’s favorite doctor are getting married.”

Clark tried and failed not to grin. “If you had a point, I assume it would be sharp.”

“I have several.” She counted on air. “One: I expect front-row access to the cake. Two: if any outlet calls this a love triangle, I will set their CMS on fire. Three: you’re happy.” The last one came out softer than she meant.

“I am,” Clark said, no deflection.

Jimmy popped his head over the partition like a meerkat. “Do I get to take photos, or are we going full mysterious elopement?”

Lois slapped a hand over his lens. “Paid notice, Olsen. That’s all they get. The rest is ours.”

Clark folded the clipping and slid it into his wallet behind a creased photo of a bad grilled cheese and a better night. “We’re keeping it small,” he said. “But we’ll save you a slice.”

“Two,” Lois said, already walking away. “And if he tries to bring honey to the reception tea, I’m calling Alfred.”

“You’d lose that fight,” Clark called after her.

“Never,” she tossed back, then turned at the door, the tease giving way to truth. “Congratulations, Smallville.”

“Thanks, Lois.”

He watched the newsroom swirl around her—a weather system that could break and brighten a city—and thought about the quiet announcement, the bad apple magnet, the way Bruce had said we told it like a diagnosis and a vow.

Down on the street, Gotham wore its best jacket: crisp air, warm sun, leaves pretending they were rain. Somewhere, a volunteer taped a fresh FREE FLU SHOTS / VACUNAS GRATIS sign to a church pillar. Somewhere else, a doctor counted pulses, and a man who could fly decided—for once—to take the stairs.

Sunday was coming, steady as the season. And the notice in the back pages, small and sure, said everything they needed it to say.