(FIC) Life equations (Superman/Batman, PG-13)
Haha, I love that I have the perfect icon for this story X) I love you, T-Rex!! Ahem.. yes, well, story time! this is a wandering thing that happened in the course of a month -probably more, knowing me- whenever I felt like writing a bit. So.. it.. wanders. One of those stories that didn't end like I thought it would! they seldom do, silly stories...
Title: Life Equations
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Superman/Batman, a bit of Tim, mentions of Batclan
Word Count: 2700+
Summary: Bruce wakes up alone.
He wakes up. It’s twenty past four, and he’s alone in his bed.
He doesn’t like waking up alone.
He shifts, and the sheets are cool under his bare feet. He’s still warm from sleep, so it shouldn’t be too hard to settle back down but he’s alone, and--
He pushes the bed sheets away and stands up, picking a black silk robe from a chair. The night is chilly and he can feel his body temperature descend. His heart beats slowly and he's always cold -he has taught his body to consume as little energy as possible, but when he sleeps he always starts to warm up. He doesn't like being cold.
His bed has been empty for two days. He’s only now realizing that he hates sleeping alone. Maybe before he didn’t mind; he might have even preferred it: sleeping alone kept others away from his most vulnerable moments. But these days he finds the company comforting. He has an ally against the ghosts in the dark, someone to fend off the nightmares and hold him, contain him. Protecting him from his own mind.
He pads down the hallway. The Manor is quiet; outside, a gentle breeze is brushing branches against the windows, a low, unnatural whisper. The polished wooden floors should creak under his weight, but he knows these hallways as well as he knows the rooftops and streets of his city. The Manor is, in some ways, a scale model of Gotham, and he can run around corners and jump from balconies without a sound. Knowing the field gives him an advantage over the forces that would rather have him fail, that would rather have Gotham fester in its own madness, collapsing like a black hole of corruption. Knowing the field is important for battle, for planning, for living and breathing with ease.
He knows his house and can sense the void inside it, the one that woke him up in the middle of the night after only a couple of hours of sleep, calling for him.
Bruce knows all he can do is wait. The empty spaces in his house -in his bed, his mind quickly supplies- do nothing but wake up the gnawing restlessness inside him. The moon has set, and these few hours of darkness before dawn are always eerie. He's preternaturally aware through them, the fight against sleep at its most vicious in these still and cold hours. He sees things at the edge of his vision, hears things just beyond range. These are dangerous hours without the influx of adrenaline of the hunt, the hours when the nightmares always come, asleep or awake.
----------
He stands before Tim's bedroom and opens the door. The boy sleeps, much needed rest for exhausted limbs and a weary spirit. He takes a deep breath, and walks in to close the windows. The nights are too cool to sleep with the windows open, but Tim seldom closes them. Bruce knows he's waiting for the breeze to touch him, ghostly fingers of the night that bring the only comfort Tim will ever seek. His hand stops, fingers tracing the wooden frame, the wind caressing him. He suppresses a shiver and leaves the window open. Tim is curled on his side, and Bruce knows if he stays much longer he will wake up.
The door closes behind him without even the faintest of clicks, and he continues down the hallway, haunting the house like one of Tim's ghosts, except the one he wants to reach out for is not here.
The house is silent and his bed is empty and cold.
Dick's old room opens before him. He knows the windows will be closed here -Alfred resents the cold currents, and this wing of the house faces the coast. The still rooms seems even more plagued with ghosts than Tim's room, but these are ghosts from memory and not of wistful hope. Memories of old laughter, old tears. Anger and frustration and the admiration of a young man. He sits down in the chaise longue facing the French windows, fingers touching the texture of well worn leather. The leather feels warm, like it too remembers the whirlwind of energy that used to call this place home. And he can feel it, in the static nature of the shadows, in the suspended whisper in the air, how the room is waiting for the next visit, for the next time a boy -not a boy anymore, a young man, capable and brilliant still so young, too young- will flick the light on and throw his backpack on the floor and swing himself onto the bed or the chair or do a headstand on the balcony's handrail, thinking no one is seeing him. Bruce doesn't say anything, never says anything, has learned from Alfred that it's better to just let them be, like Alfred let him be. And when they fall -because they all fall, no matter how smart and fast and strong they are- that's when he has to be there, to catch them. But he can't tell them not to try, not to risk the fall. Even when biting down the words hurts worse than his own mistakes ever do.
But Alfred never stopped him -almost never stopped him- and was always, always there. That much Bruce has tried to learn.
He'll never be as good as Alfred at that. He's too selfish, and this is one of those things where his heart is unrelenting. If he can spare his children the pain, then he will take the pain from them. He knows it's not fair, but he's selfish and-
He leaves Dick's room, and the doorknob of the room next door always clicks, no matter how he handles it. The good thing is that Jason was a heavy sleeper, so he never noticed Bruce coming in to check on him. Bruce is selfish and he knows it. There's so much he can't find the words for that he prefers to leave it unsaid. Chances are he would kill the meaning with the bluntness of honesty, throttle it with frustration, smother it with the weight of nuances he can't explain. And Jason... his room is empty, and the feeling of expectancy here is accusing, sullen.
Wistful in ways that tear him apart.
The room is clean, Alfred would never let an air of abandonment take its hold here, but the room was never this clean when it was inhabited, never this tidy.
Bruce can't manage to stay there for too long.
He drifts around the house, making a stop in the kitchen, looking at the room plunged in the pre-dawn darkness. Some of his best memories are set in this room, Alfred's domain, where the old man's hold on him is the strongest. Comfort, warmth, understanding, love. He remembers telling Alfred about what he planned to do, all those years ago, before the Mission had a shape. Remembers telling him that he wanted to leave Gotham and study abroad, travel and see the world, almost a decade before the Mission had a name. He remembers telling Alfred he wanted to leave Gotham again, this time alone, a proud and overconfident teenager that couldn't seem to stop for anything. When he took Dick in, this had been where he had finally felt it was the right thing, that everything would work out, as Alfred spoiled the young boy and the tension started to ease as they gave each other shaky smiles. After Jason's adoption, they had planned dozens of climbing trips on that table, marking routes and making lists of supplies for weekends away from the city, which had been too few. The first time he and Tim had sit down to talk shop out of costume, it had been in the worn wood of the kitchen table, tea boiling in the stove and blue prints and notebooks scattered all over the place, much to Alfred's displeasure.
Countless nights unwinding and talking with Barbara, when she had still lived in Gotham. Silent talks with Cass in that private language of the body that he hardly ever got to use, a little rusty after all those years since he had trained with Cain. Talking shop -he refuses to think of it as gossiping, thought it had felt like it- about Gotham and their teams and acquaintances with Steph. A thousand meals that had eased away the ghosts for a while, brightening an otherwise dull and gray day or making a terrible one bearable.
They have spent a considerable amount of time, here. He and Clark. Clark likes to cook, and Alfred does the incredible exception of letting Clark fumble around his kitchen. Bruce makes tea or coffee -he isn't allowed near the drawers or the pantry, because according to Alfred, he is too curious for his own good. Bruce smiles at the empty room. He could never fathom the mysterious order Alfred has for everything in the house. He can look for patterns, systematic categorizing, but Alfred always scoffs. 'Hands off, sir, before you make a mess out of things'.
It's good advice. He does have a way of messing things up. For all his methodical thinking and obsessive compulsive organizing, he has come to accept entropy as a principle of his life, for better or for worse. Like the cave, where what had started as an enormous womb with the Batmobile -not the Batmobile then, just the car, it wasn't the Batmobile until Dick came along and christened it- and the computers soon became a labyrinth of work stations, labs, medical bays, trophy rooms, vaults and gyms. A logical progression that led to organized chaos. Like that, he could follow the pattern of his life. A single painful, terrifying moment became the starting point of the Mission, and how since then the pain has branched out, tearing him apart, touching other lives with its freezing fingers, its choking grasp. Chaos has also brought forth more criminals, bigger threats, lunatics coming to challenge him. Insanity that begot bigger, more senseless insanity. A legacy of pain.
Bruce has heard it all before. Often from his conscience, more often still from detractors of the cause. He can see their point, he really can. But he also knows he can't quit. Not when he knows people are suffering, knows that he can do good not just as a industrial philanthropist -which he does, but that's slow change, education and better living conditions and more widespread opportunities for honest, transcendental good lives- but that he can do good as a single man, a symbol of hope for the people who fear, and a symbol of fear for the people who would dare hurt others. He can punch and plan and think and stop pain from happening, one night at a time. Even if chaos is ever growing, and a state of utopia will never be reachable. But chaos isn't always bad. Chaos just means there's people living their lives, choosing different ways, creating the opportunity for change. He can't resent chaos. Not when it has brought a family to his side along with the pain and the uncertainties and the never ending battle.
He started out alone -truly alone, a single flame inside his heart that lead him around the world, looking for meaning for his life. When he was ready, he could see that Alfred had always been there. Waiting for him, keeping him from falling. Letting him make his own mistakes, bandaging his wounds -physical and otherwise. And then Harvey. Gordon. Dick. Barbara. The League. Jason. Tim. Steph, Cass, Jean Paul, Helena, Selina. Flames of vibrant, fierce life that entwined with his own. Sometimes only for a while, and never without sparks and flares and a lot of smoke.
And Clark? When did Clark's flame became so entwined with his that he can no longer sleep a whole night alone without feeling the void of his absence? It would be hard to tell, given how few times he sleeps through the night. But when he does, Clark is there. He brings him a sense of peace, of safety, of order, of all things, so he can sleep without a worry. How Clark can bring order with him defies physics. Clark should be classified as an anomaly in the careful records he makes of his chaotic life, except he isn't. Because before he brought order -before Bruce started to associate love and safety and good, whole-making things with him, Clark was the biggest source of chaos in his life. He would disrupt his plans and thoughts with any brief appearance, send his mind into a turmoil of uncertainties and his heart into terrible cycles of hope and despair every time they interacted. They could be friends. Only of course they couldn't, they were too different. They were two sides of the same coin and their differences brought them together. But they were too alike and couldn't stand to let the other take charge. They couldn't let the other take risks. They were too set in their ways. He was too set in his ways. He was afraid he would compromise too much. He was afraid he would push him away. Or that he would get too close. That he would give too little... or too much.
His relationship with Clark had been a downward spiral of unfulfilled potential haunting Bruce's life with its descent. Bruce had told himself that at one point, they had to either find balance or break. Either hate each other or love each other but not both, and not with such overwhelming intensity.
And that is the anomaly. Out of such chaos only more chaos should have aroused, and to hope for such clean, orderly results should have been foolish. But there you go. He doesn't hate Clark. And Clark doesn't hate him.
Saying he loves Clark by process of elimination of other feelings sounds terribly hollow, though. It's more like he loves Clark as a result of the addition of all the other feelings, and it's not something that he thinks will burn out, but compound. He makes him feel whole and happy. Makes him feel alive.
A while ago -and because he can't leave such things alone- he concluded the anomaly isn't so. To create order you have to spend energy, and the amount of energy they have spent shaping their relationship isn't a small thing. And in the big picture, chaos has grown, not diminished, because his life now includes a friend who is a lover and partner, said partner's parents and extended family, his alien heritage, his cousin from outer space, his alien dog, his coworkers and friends from his childhood, his enemies, his sorrows, his worries and his pain.
The equation is messy, and every time he stops to think about it -he has a spent a lot of time in romantic imaginary mathematics, not that he'll tell anyone that- he has to add a new factor, either because he had overlooked it before or because said factor is a new addition in their lives. The potential for order diminishes with every day, every hour spent living.
His wanderings have led him to the library, the smell of books soothing as he stares out the windows to the balcony and the cold night outside. Somewhere, out there, is Clark. He settles down on the sofa, looking at the quadrant where the planet where Superman is conducting a diplomatic mission rotates around a young star, too far away to be seen from Gotham. But this window at least faces the right direction, and he looks at the empty space where he knows his star is. Shrouded in darkness, his thoughts quickly fragmenting into sleepy calculations of distances and the promise that Clark will return tomorrow, that this is his last night alone, he lets the toll of patrol take him over again, and falls asleep.
A few minutes later, Tim walks in and throws a blanket over him. With a small smile on his lips, he sits on the floor beside him, staring at the sky outside, looking for his own star lost in the darkness, certain that he will come back home again, too. Someday.
Title: Life Equations
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Superman/Batman, a bit of Tim, mentions of Batclan
Word Count: 2700+
Summary: Bruce wakes up alone.
He wakes up. It’s twenty past four, and he’s alone in his bed.
He doesn’t like waking up alone.
He shifts, and the sheets are cool under his bare feet. He’s still warm from sleep, so it shouldn’t be too hard to settle back down but he’s alone, and--
He pushes the bed sheets away and stands up, picking a black silk robe from a chair. The night is chilly and he can feel his body temperature descend. His heart beats slowly and he's always cold -he has taught his body to consume as little energy as possible, but when he sleeps he always starts to warm up. He doesn't like being cold.
His bed has been empty for two days. He’s only now realizing that he hates sleeping alone. Maybe before he didn’t mind; he might have even preferred it: sleeping alone kept others away from his most vulnerable moments. But these days he finds the company comforting. He has an ally against the ghosts in the dark, someone to fend off the nightmares and hold him, contain him. Protecting him from his own mind.
He pads down the hallway. The Manor is quiet; outside, a gentle breeze is brushing branches against the windows, a low, unnatural whisper. The polished wooden floors should creak under his weight, but he knows these hallways as well as he knows the rooftops and streets of his city. The Manor is, in some ways, a scale model of Gotham, and he can run around corners and jump from balconies without a sound. Knowing the field gives him an advantage over the forces that would rather have him fail, that would rather have Gotham fester in its own madness, collapsing like a black hole of corruption. Knowing the field is important for battle, for planning, for living and breathing with ease.
He knows his house and can sense the void inside it, the one that woke him up in the middle of the night after only a couple of hours of sleep, calling for him.
Bruce knows all he can do is wait. The empty spaces in his house -in his bed, his mind quickly supplies- do nothing but wake up the gnawing restlessness inside him. The moon has set, and these few hours of darkness before dawn are always eerie. He's preternaturally aware through them, the fight against sleep at its most vicious in these still and cold hours. He sees things at the edge of his vision, hears things just beyond range. These are dangerous hours without the influx of adrenaline of the hunt, the hours when the nightmares always come, asleep or awake.
----------
He stands before Tim's bedroom and opens the door. The boy sleeps, much needed rest for exhausted limbs and a weary spirit. He takes a deep breath, and walks in to close the windows. The nights are too cool to sleep with the windows open, but Tim seldom closes them. Bruce knows he's waiting for the breeze to touch him, ghostly fingers of the night that bring the only comfort Tim will ever seek. His hand stops, fingers tracing the wooden frame, the wind caressing him. He suppresses a shiver and leaves the window open. Tim is curled on his side, and Bruce knows if he stays much longer he will wake up.
The door closes behind him without even the faintest of clicks, and he continues down the hallway, haunting the house like one of Tim's ghosts, except the one he wants to reach out for is not here.
The house is silent and his bed is empty and cold.
Dick's old room opens before him. He knows the windows will be closed here -Alfred resents the cold currents, and this wing of the house faces the coast. The still rooms seems even more plagued with ghosts than Tim's room, but these are ghosts from memory and not of wistful hope. Memories of old laughter, old tears. Anger and frustration and the admiration of a young man. He sits down in the chaise longue facing the French windows, fingers touching the texture of well worn leather. The leather feels warm, like it too remembers the whirlwind of energy that used to call this place home. And he can feel it, in the static nature of the shadows, in the suspended whisper in the air, how the room is waiting for the next visit, for the next time a boy -not a boy anymore, a young man, capable and brilliant still so young, too young- will flick the light on and throw his backpack on the floor and swing himself onto the bed or the chair or do a headstand on the balcony's handrail, thinking no one is seeing him. Bruce doesn't say anything, never says anything, has learned from Alfred that it's better to just let them be, like Alfred let him be. And when they fall -because they all fall, no matter how smart and fast and strong they are- that's when he has to be there, to catch them. But he can't tell them not to try, not to risk the fall. Even when biting down the words hurts worse than his own mistakes ever do.
But Alfred never stopped him -almost never stopped him- and was always, always there. That much Bruce has tried to learn.
He'll never be as good as Alfred at that. He's too selfish, and this is one of those things where his heart is unrelenting. If he can spare his children the pain, then he will take the pain from them. He knows it's not fair, but he's selfish and-
He leaves Dick's room, and the doorknob of the room next door always clicks, no matter how he handles it. The good thing is that Jason was a heavy sleeper, so he never noticed Bruce coming in to check on him. Bruce is selfish and he knows it. There's so much he can't find the words for that he prefers to leave it unsaid. Chances are he would kill the meaning with the bluntness of honesty, throttle it with frustration, smother it with the weight of nuances he can't explain. And Jason... his room is empty, and the feeling of expectancy here is accusing, sullen.
Wistful in ways that tear him apart.
The room is clean, Alfred would never let an air of abandonment take its hold here, but the room was never this clean when it was inhabited, never this tidy.
Bruce can't manage to stay there for too long.
He drifts around the house, making a stop in the kitchen, looking at the room plunged in the pre-dawn darkness. Some of his best memories are set in this room, Alfred's domain, where the old man's hold on him is the strongest. Comfort, warmth, understanding, love. He remembers telling Alfred about what he planned to do, all those years ago, before the Mission had a shape. Remembers telling him that he wanted to leave Gotham and study abroad, travel and see the world, almost a decade before the Mission had a name. He remembers telling Alfred he wanted to leave Gotham again, this time alone, a proud and overconfident teenager that couldn't seem to stop for anything. When he took Dick in, this had been where he had finally felt it was the right thing, that everything would work out, as Alfred spoiled the young boy and the tension started to ease as they gave each other shaky smiles. After Jason's adoption, they had planned dozens of climbing trips on that table, marking routes and making lists of supplies for weekends away from the city, which had been too few. The first time he and Tim had sit down to talk shop out of costume, it had been in the worn wood of the kitchen table, tea boiling in the stove and blue prints and notebooks scattered all over the place, much to Alfred's displeasure.
Countless nights unwinding and talking with Barbara, when she had still lived in Gotham. Silent talks with Cass in that private language of the body that he hardly ever got to use, a little rusty after all those years since he had trained with Cain. Talking shop -he refuses to think of it as gossiping, thought it had felt like it- about Gotham and their teams and acquaintances with Steph. A thousand meals that had eased away the ghosts for a while, brightening an otherwise dull and gray day or making a terrible one bearable.
They have spent a considerable amount of time, here. He and Clark. Clark likes to cook, and Alfred does the incredible exception of letting Clark fumble around his kitchen. Bruce makes tea or coffee -he isn't allowed near the drawers or the pantry, because according to Alfred, he is too curious for his own good. Bruce smiles at the empty room. He could never fathom the mysterious order Alfred has for everything in the house. He can look for patterns, systematic categorizing, but Alfred always scoffs. 'Hands off, sir, before you make a mess out of things'.
It's good advice. He does have a way of messing things up. For all his methodical thinking and obsessive compulsive organizing, he has come to accept entropy as a principle of his life, for better or for worse. Like the cave, where what had started as an enormous womb with the Batmobile -not the Batmobile then, just the car, it wasn't the Batmobile until Dick came along and christened it- and the computers soon became a labyrinth of work stations, labs, medical bays, trophy rooms, vaults and gyms. A logical progression that led to organized chaos. Like that, he could follow the pattern of his life. A single painful, terrifying moment became the starting point of the Mission, and how since then the pain has branched out, tearing him apart, touching other lives with its freezing fingers, its choking grasp. Chaos has also brought forth more criminals, bigger threats, lunatics coming to challenge him. Insanity that begot bigger, more senseless insanity. A legacy of pain.
Bruce has heard it all before. Often from his conscience, more often still from detractors of the cause. He can see their point, he really can. But he also knows he can't quit. Not when he knows people are suffering, knows that he can do good not just as a industrial philanthropist -which he does, but that's slow change, education and better living conditions and more widespread opportunities for honest, transcendental good lives- but that he can do good as a single man, a symbol of hope for the people who fear, and a symbol of fear for the people who would dare hurt others. He can punch and plan and think and stop pain from happening, one night at a time. Even if chaos is ever growing, and a state of utopia will never be reachable. But chaos isn't always bad. Chaos just means there's people living their lives, choosing different ways, creating the opportunity for change. He can't resent chaos. Not when it has brought a family to his side along with the pain and the uncertainties and the never ending battle.
He started out alone -truly alone, a single flame inside his heart that lead him around the world, looking for meaning for his life. When he was ready, he could see that Alfred had always been there. Waiting for him, keeping him from falling. Letting him make his own mistakes, bandaging his wounds -physical and otherwise. And then Harvey. Gordon. Dick. Barbara. The League. Jason. Tim. Steph, Cass, Jean Paul, Helena, Selina. Flames of vibrant, fierce life that entwined with his own. Sometimes only for a while, and never without sparks and flares and a lot of smoke.
And Clark? When did Clark's flame became so entwined with his that he can no longer sleep a whole night alone without feeling the void of his absence? It would be hard to tell, given how few times he sleeps through the night. But when he does, Clark is there. He brings him a sense of peace, of safety, of order, of all things, so he can sleep without a worry. How Clark can bring order with him defies physics. Clark should be classified as an anomaly in the careful records he makes of his chaotic life, except he isn't. Because before he brought order -before Bruce started to associate love and safety and good, whole-making things with him, Clark was the biggest source of chaos in his life. He would disrupt his plans and thoughts with any brief appearance, send his mind into a turmoil of uncertainties and his heart into terrible cycles of hope and despair every time they interacted. They could be friends. Only of course they couldn't, they were too different. They were two sides of the same coin and their differences brought them together. But they were too alike and couldn't stand to let the other take charge. They couldn't let the other take risks. They were too set in their ways. He was too set in his ways. He was afraid he would compromise too much. He was afraid he would push him away. Or that he would get too close. That he would give too little... or too much.
His relationship with Clark had been a downward spiral of unfulfilled potential haunting Bruce's life with its descent. Bruce had told himself that at one point, they had to either find balance or break. Either hate each other or love each other but not both, and not with such overwhelming intensity.
And that is the anomaly. Out of such chaos only more chaos should have aroused, and to hope for such clean, orderly results should have been foolish. But there you go. He doesn't hate Clark. And Clark doesn't hate him.
Saying he loves Clark by process of elimination of other feelings sounds terribly hollow, though. It's more like he loves Clark as a result of the addition of all the other feelings, and it's not something that he thinks will burn out, but compound. He makes him feel whole and happy. Makes him feel alive.
A while ago -and because he can't leave such things alone- he concluded the anomaly isn't so. To create order you have to spend energy, and the amount of energy they have spent shaping their relationship isn't a small thing. And in the big picture, chaos has grown, not diminished, because his life now includes a friend who is a lover and partner, said partner's parents and extended family, his alien heritage, his cousin from outer space, his alien dog, his coworkers and friends from his childhood, his enemies, his sorrows, his worries and his pain.
The equation is messy, and every time he stops to think about it -he has a spent a lot of time in romantic imaginary mathematics, not that he'll tell anyone that- he has to add a new factor, either because he had overlooked it before or because said factor is a new addition in their lives. The potential for order diminishes with every day, every hour spent living.
His wanderings have led him to the library, the smell of books soothing as he stares out the windows to the balcony and the cold night outside. Somewhere, out there, is Clark. He settles down on the sofa, looking at the quadrant where the planet where Superman is conducting a diplomatic mission rotates around a young star, too far away to be seen from Gotham. But this window at least faces the right direction, and he looks at the empty space where he knows his star is. Shrouded in darkness, his thoughts quickly fragmenting into sleepy calculations of distances and the promise that Clark will return tomorrow, that this is his last night alone, he lets the toll of patrol take him over again, and falls asleep.
A few minutes later, Tim walks in and throws a blanket over him. With a small smile on his lips, he sits on the floor beside him, staring at the sky outside, looking for his own star lost in the darkness, certain that he will come back home again, too. Someday.