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Bruce moves cautiously farther into the Hall, and calls out, "Clark?"—pausing, going still, to listen as closely as he can for any response.
He can't actually be certain Clark is still here. But it's the best guess he has.
The League had been in the middle of going through Magnus Labs, which had come to their attention—and the attention of every available authority—when six different kinds of alarms had gone off at the same time, terrified staff fleeing the building from every exit. It had turned out to be full of malfunctioning industrial equipment, a frankly excessive hoard of automatons that attacked anything that came within their sensor range, and a number of sealed auxiliary labs containing god only knew what.
And then Clark, checking down one particular hallway for any scientists who might still be trapped inside, had vanished.
Bruce had tried to raise him on comms, and failed—not, according to Alfred's diagnostics, because there was anything wrong with either his comm or Clark's, but because Clark simply hadn't been answering, or else had been but was for some reason inaudible.
Bruce might have begun to worry that something in the lab, something Clark had touched or perhaps inhaled, had sent him out of phase with material reality or into another dimension. But not ten seconds later, he'd received an alert from the Hall's security system, logging an entry.
It had to have been Clark. As little sense as it made—why had he fled to the Hall like that? Why hadn't he said something, if he'd been hurt, or if he'd found something too dangerous to deal with alone?—anything else made even less.
The League had only cleared perhaps a quarter of the labs, at that point. It had simply been reasonable to divide their labor as a team between those members who were undeniably capable of surviving, handling, analyzing, or outrunning just about anything they might come across in there, and the one who was, even as the sole representative of baseline humanity, perfectly well-equipped to return to the Hall to ask Clark what the hell his problem was.
The only hitch so far is that he hasn't been able to find Clark.
He calls out again. It feels idiotic, considering Clark could have heard his first shout—could have heard him clear his throat, for that matter—from the other side of the planet, but there's nothing else he can do. In the time it will take him to check the interior cameras and use the high-speed footage to narrow down a location, Clark could depart for Jupiter; if Clark were honestly too incapacitated to answer, he could never have made it all the way to the Hall at super-speed. The only remaining option is that Clark is choosing not to respond, for reasons Bruce cannot begin to fathom. And in that case, it's simply sound strategy to make him aware that someone is looking for him—that Bruce is worried for him and trying to find him. If anything might prove itself to be more powerful than whatever is stopping Clark from answering Bruce, it's Clark's massively overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility, his unwillingness to put anyone to any trouble that he could instead resolve.
Bruce waits. Nothing. Nothing. Then—
The faintest shuffle. Barely a sound at all. But it came from ahead of him, ahead of him and—just around the corner at the end of the hall, he thinks.
He reaches that corner in a handful of strides. And he couldn't say what precisely makes it occur to him, where it is that the hunch comes from, but there's a table set against the wall to his right, fitted into the corner so as almost to form an enclosed space on five sides out of six, if you count the floor and the underside of the table. Shelter.
He steps closer, ducks down with a gauntleted hand against the edge of the table to check under it.
And he's ready to castigate himself for treating this like a game of hide-and-seek with a five-year-old, except—Clark is there.
Clark is there, scrunched up about as small as he could possibly hope to make himself, arms squeezed tightly around his knees. He makes a thin strained sound when he understands that Bruce has found him, seen him, and he's—he presses himself back as far as he can, hard enough that Bruce can hear the warning creak of the wall behind him, and twists his face away. "—no, no no no—"
It's astounding. Bewildering. "Clark," Bruce says, baffled; it's only when it comes out as a deep growl that he realizes he still has the cowl on. And if this is—fear toxin, or something like it, then that can't possibly be helping.
He hurries to take it off, makes no effort whatsoever to prevent the process of pulling it free from disarranging his hair. Whatever's wrong with Clark right now, the less threatening Bruce can make himself look, the better.
But his bare face only earns him a vicious show of teeth, a furious agonized glare. "You can't trick me," Clark grates out. "Not like that."
"I'm not trying to trick you," Bruce says cautiously, evenly. He lets the cowl drop from his hands, holds both of them up palm-out so Clark can see that they're empty. "Just tell me what's wrong—"
"You think I'm that stupid?" Clark spits, lip curling. "He's dead," and all at once his voice is cracking, wavering. "He's dead, and you're a monster. You won't get me that way." And then—
Nothing happens. Nothing happens that Bruce can perceive, anyway. But Clark reacts, moves, as if something has: he sucks in a sharp breath, flinches away from the edge of the table and ducks his head down, flattening himself back against the wall to as great a degree as he can manage.
"Clark, what are you hiding from?" Bruce tries.
"You," Clark whispers, sharp, blue eyes hard. "All of you, you and your goddamn ships. You think I can't hear them up there? They're looking for me. I know they're looking for me. There isn't anyone else left—you won."
And that, Bruce thinks, answers several questions at once. Clark is hallucinating, paranoid, each feeding the other. The hallucinations are clearly affecting more than one of his senses, if he can't tell that the Hall is whole around him, if he's hearing something that sounds to him like alien ships passing overhead. But they're also not so powerful that he can't perceive Bruce at all—he's aware that Bruce is present, is seeing Bruce's face and hearing the things Bruce is saying to him accurately.
Most important of all: if he earnestly thought he were facing some kind of Apokoliptian shapeshifter that had taken Bruce's appearance in order to trap him, he would have no reason not to simply kill it. But he hasn't tried to touch Bruce, hasn't so much as let his eyes start burning red. So there must still be room here to maneuver—to convince him that the things he's perceiving aren't all real.
Bruce lowers himself fully to the floor, careful not to move any closer than he already is. "Will you tell me where you think you are?"
Clark gives him a sharp, wary look, and for a moment, Bruce thinks the answer is going to be no.
But then he says, "The Hall—what's left of it, anyway."
Also essentially congruent with reality, if one step off to the side.
"Can you see the ships when they go over us," he tries next, "or can you only hear them?"
Clark's mouth twists. "You think I'm going to stick my head out so they can spot me, just because you asked nicely? Who the hell are you kidding?"
Shit. He's not wrong—Bruce should have thought it through, should have been more careful to take what he believes is happening into account. "No," he says aloud, "no, of course not. You're right. You should stay where you are—you have to keep yourself safe."
Something flickers across Clark's face, so impossibly fast Bruce can't hope to parse it.
And he has to come up with a new angle, another way to find out more about what Clark thinks he's facing. "The other monsters like me who are hunting you—none of them have ever tried to use his face before? What do they do instead?"
Clark laughs, short and hard, bitter. "Well, normally they just try to kill me. They don't waste time messing with my head—"
"Have any of them ever gotten close enough to you to touch you?"
That gets him a blank, bewildered look. "What?"
"They haven't, have they?" Bruce says, and takes the leap: reaches out and closes his gloved hands over the backs of Clark's, which are wrapped so tightly around Clark's knees that the knuckles are pale.
Clark jerks under the touch. But for the first time since Bruce found him, he looks more startled than he does angry or afraid, as he stares down at their overlapping hands. "Your hands are warm," he says quietly, his tone somewhere between puzzled and accusing. "I didn't think—I didn't think they would be."
"That's because I'm not dead, Clark," Bruce says, equally quietly. "I'm not dead, and I'm not a monster. I'm real."
Clark's gaze rises, halting, from their hands to Bruce's face. He doesn't look like he believes it; but he looks like he wants to.
And then he twitches without warning, glances up at the table as if hearing something above it again and going tense all over, breath starting to come faster, uneven.
"They won't find you here," Bruce says quickly. "You just need to stay put. All right?" Because, Christ, if Clark gets too frightened to listen to him anymore, super-speeds out of here and halfway around the planet— "You just need to stay right here, and you'll be safe."
"I can't," Clark gasps, squeezing his eyes shut. "I can't, I can't—"
Fuck. "Will you let me help you?" Bruce tries, last-ditch.
Clark's throat works. He's fighting with something—with himself. "Yes," he manages at last, ragged.
And Bruce can't afford to wait for some fresh hallucination to come along, for something to make him change his mind.
He moves, quick, and crawls under the table too, right in front of Clark. He still has his hands spread over Clark's, and it takes a moment, but Clark lets him move them, lift them: hold them open against the chestplate of the Batsuit's armor, a silent instruction, before he takes his own away and plants them against the wall to either side of Clark's shoulders, so Clark is encircled, surrounded, restrained, by Bruce himself—his arms, his body.
"Stay here," he repeats, softer now that he's saying it almost into Clark's ear. "Stay here with me."
And Clark lets out a slow shuddering breath, and then swallows. His hands shift against the armor; just flexing a fraction and then relaxing, at first, as if testing the reality of Bruce in front of him, but then his brows draw down into the barest uncertain frown.
"This is his suit," he says. "This is—the texture of the armor, it's exactly right. But you—how did you—?"
He must have been seeing something else; like the Hall, almost true but a step to the left. Something distorted, something that suited the nightmare he thinks he's living in. But now that he isn't just looking at it but is touching it, the hallucination simply can't hold fast against the evidence of multiple senses at the same time.
"What's the worst part now?" Bruce murmurs. "What's left, other than me, that won't go away?"
Clark looks at him, face working. His eyes are wet. "The smell," he whispers. "The smoke. They—they're burning the bodies. There are so many bodies, it's—" He stops, screws his eyes shut again, shakes his head almost convulsively.
Of course. Bruce restrains the half-hysterical thought that he's lucky the next thing he needs to do isn't convince Clark to lick him, and forces himself to say it: "All right. Breathe me in instead."
There's no reason to be stupid about it. If this works, it means absolutely nothing except that Clark is burdened with super-senses twenty-four hours a day—it's entirely reasonable for him to know what Bruce smells like. It suggests no meaningful intimacy at all, only consistent proximity during situations in the field where Bruce is exerting himself, where he is undeniably at his sweatiest—
It's a convincing line of thought, he's sure. Or at least it feels like it is, right up until the moment Clark folds in toward him, presses his face into the side of Bruce's throat just over the edge of the chestplate, right at the collar of the undersuit, and breathes in deeply.
"Good," Bruce says, almost evenly. "You're all right. There isn't any smoke. Everything's all right."
And then he tilts his head and presses the top of his shoulder up into his ear to open the main outgoing channel on his comm, because he isn't about to move his hands right now.
"I've located S, and the situation is under control. Whenever you're finished at Magnus and you return to the Hall, do not enter the south wing until I've given the all-clear."
Another press shuts it off again; and Clark huffs out a breath against Bruce's collarbone.
"Bossy," he murmurs. "You were always so goddamn bossy."
"I am," Bruce says, half into his hair. "I am so goddamn bossy."
Clark goes still against him, for a long stretching moment. "You—are," he agrees at last, and he probably doesn't believe in it yet, that present tense, but at least he's willing to pretend it might be true.
In the end, it takes two hours for the effect to wear off completely.
Bruce stays where he is, wrapped halfway around Clark underneath the table, talking to him quietly to give him something real to listen to—anything he can think of, from mission reports and lab analysis results to the series of increasingly bad jokes Arthur had told yesterday, impeccably straight-faced, until Barry had been practically crying with laughter.
He checks in now and then, asks Clark whether he can still hear the ships overhead hunting for him. And the answer is yes, yes, yes; until, at last, it isn't.
At first, Bruce doesn't get an answer at all, and he wonders for a moment whether Clark's fallen asleep outright.
But then Clark's head comes up, so abruptly he almost smacks Bruce in the nose, and he says, "No," sounding almost startled. "No, I can't. Bruce—"
He stops short, and looks at Bruce. At him, and then past him: out from under the table, sideways, at the perfectly intact and undamaged walls, floor, of the Hall, and then up—through the table, presumably, at everything else.
"Jesus," he says, soft. "It's—is it really—?" And then his gaze flicks back to Bruce, Bruce's face, and he draws in a sharp breath. "Bruce. You—god, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I just—"
"Don't apologize," Bruce says, and he has every intention of elaborating. It had hardly been Clark's fault; something in that lab had affected him profoundly. He'd needed help, and Bruce had given it.
He understands a moment too late that Clark wasn't apologizing for the last two hours, but instead, in advance, for what he was about to do.
Because he reaches up, takes Bruce's face into his hands, and starts smoothing his thumbs over Bruce's cheekbones, over and over again, almost compulsive.
"Sorry," he says again, halting. "I just have to. It felt so real. You were dead. I knew you were dead."
"I understand," Bruce says.
And it is, admittedly, something of a reflex; but that doesn't mean it isn't true. The skeptical look Clark gives him is unwarranted.
"I didn't know what had happened to you. I had no idea what you might have encountered in that lab, or what it had done to you. I'll grant you I was fairly certain you were still alive, but beyond that?"
"Oh," Clark says. "It was—I don't know what it was, exactly. It looked like kryptonite, but it was silver. And then the lab was just gone. There wasn't anything there anymore. It was all rubble, rubble and emptiness, and the ships in the sky. All I could think was that I had to find somewhere to hide, and I knew there wasn't anyone left alive but me."
His voice is faltering again by the last handful of words, fine-grained shivers running through him, and then he stops and swallows hard, hand briefly tense against Bruce's jaw. He's—he—
He sways halfway forward, almost breathing Bruce's air; and then he jerks himself to a halt.
It's unbearable. "Clark," Bruce says, gently, reassuringly, and surely there couldn't have been anything else he was about to do. Surely it's acceptable, this once, to offer him the one remaining comfort he seems to want, the one he can't bring himself to ask for.
Bruce kisses him.
He intends to make it quick, unassuming, to linger only long enough to allow Clark to absorb the reality of him fully by it.
But Clark makes a sharp sweet sound against his mouth, hooks an arm immediately around his shoulders, and doesn't let go—two fucking hours, with Bruce practically wrapped around him, and he still only draws Bruce closer, closer, and holds on.