Gardens of Wayne Manor: Metropolis (28/40)
Title: Chapter Twenty-Eight: Metropolis
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None necessary
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2600Summary: In an amazing and unexpected coincidence, Bruce and Clark happen to run into each other in Metropolis.
”What are you doing here?”
Clark and Bruce glared at each other, the sound of their voices in unison hanging in the air between them. Bruce felt a sudden, childish urge to yell “Jinx, you owe me a Coke!” but fought it off by reminding himself that he was angry at Clark. Bruce didn’t want him here, Bruce didn’t need him here, and he definitely didn’t want Clark to know why he was actually in Metropolis.
“I’ve applied to Metropolis University. I wanted to check out the campus.” Clark crossed his arms and glowered, looking surprisingly intimidating for a teen in thick glasses and a hideous polyester suit. “What are you doing here?”
Bruce produced a scowl to match Clark’s glower. “Wayne Enterprises has a branch here. I'm visiting it today. Unless you have some objection to that?”
“It’s a free world.”
“So I thought.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
They stood there, glaring at each other. Then both of them turned and started to walk north.
“I believe Wayne Enterprises is to the south, isn’t it?” Clark observed, shooting Bruce a sideways glance.
“Well, the M.U. campus is to the east, if I remember right.” Bruce tried to speed up and lose Clark, but Clark just increased his own pace until they were striding ridiculously fast along the sidewalk.
“Stop following me,” snapped Clark.
“You’re the one following me,” Bruce growled. He pulled to a stop, keeping his gaze anywhere but on the marble-and-gilt “Bobby Crawford, LLD” sign across the street. “What are you, my guardian angel? Afraid I’m here to continue my junkie ways in another town?” His voice came out more bitter than angry, to his horror.
Clark grimaced and made a helpless gesture in the air between them. “I’m not--Bruce, I--” Then his face went suddenly abstracted, watching over Bruce’s shoulder. “Hey, that’s--” He broke off, his face closing up again.
“That’s what?”
“Nothing,” Clark said as Bruce whirled to follow his gaze. “It’s nothing.”
A man was leaving Crawford’s offices. He glanced both ways, then slipped into an alley. “That’s George Liles. Cobblepot’s henchman.” Bruce was already tailing George, keeping a safe distance between them. “He’s had some plastic surgery, but it’s him.”
He slipped behind a dumpster as Liles waited for a light to change. Clark crouched beside him. “You recognized him?” he whispered in Bruce’s ear.
As if I would ever forget the face of a man who held a gun to Clark Kent’s head, Bruce thought irritably. “So did you,” he hissed.
“I’ve got a good memory.”
“So do I.”
“This is dangerous,” Clark said as they followed Liles. “We shouldn’t be doing this. He might recognize us.”
Bruce snorted. “He’d have a hard time recognizing you. You don’t look anything like you did six years ago.”
Clark looked away from Liles to Bruce for the first time. “You really think so?” The glasses hid his eyes; his voice sounded somehow both pleased and sad at the same time.
“Well, we both look totally different now,” Bruce said as he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a window, hollow-cheeked and wiry, his hair still long and straggly.
“And are we?” Clark moved ahead to keep up with Liles and Bruce couldn’t see his face. “Totally different now, I mean?”
Bruce made a “hhr” sound in his throat, a habit he’d gotten into when he wasn’t sure what to say and wanted to buy some time. Liles chose that moment to speed up, and Clark and Bruce had to break into a run and cut across a small park to make up some space, ducking behind a hedge at the last second to stay out of sight.
Bruce looked over at Clark, crouching by his side. Clark was breathing heavily, winded by even that short burst of speed, but his thick glasses couldn’t hide the eagerness in his eyes as he hunted down a lead. Despite himself, Bruce felt a smile tugging at his mouth. “Maybe not,” he said. “Not where it matters.” He reached out and thumped Clark on the chest with a fist, hard enough that he wouldn’t be tempted to let the touch linger at all. Then he straightened hastily and kept moving, unwilling to wait and see if Clark responded at all, if he smiled or reached out in turn.
He didn’t want to look too closely at how he would feel if Clark didn’t.
Liles finally turned down a narrow alley and knocked on an unmarked door, which opened. There was a glimpse of two people inside the building before the door closed. "That's funny," said Clark. "I know those two guys. They're Bruno Mannheim's bodyguards."
"Mannheim." Bruce frowned. "The name doesn't ring a bell."
"He's a businessman who's had an increasing amount of influence in Metropolis over the last year. Why's he meeting with a thug of Cobblepot's?"
"Maybe Liles has had an epiphany and decided to go straight, and Mannheim is helping him out?" Bruce suggested sweetly.
Clark shot him a narrow glare. "I'm a positive thinker, but I'm not an idiot," he said. "I don't know, it all seems fishy. Cobblepot suddenly has a bigshot Metropolis lawyer, his man Liles leaves the lawyer and makes a beeline here, it's all--hey, wait!"
Bruce was already moving, hurrying to the back of the building where Liles had entered and finding a fire escape to clamber up onto.
"What are you doing?" Clark demanded as Bruce started up the fire escape.
"Keep your voice down," said Bruce. Clark swung up onto the fire escape after Bruce. "Don't follow me," whispered Bruce. "It's dangerous."
"I didn't come to Metropolis to sit on my hands while Cobblepot perverts the justice system!"
"I thought you came to Metropolis to visit the University," Bruce noted, and was rewarded with an annoyed look.
"I thought you came to visit your offices!"
"Hhn," Bruce said, and started quietly creeping up the rusted fire escape.
Clark made a strangled noise in his throat and followed him. Bruce winced, anticipating the rattling clank of steps on metal grating, but Clark's footfalls were surprisingly muted.
Cautiously, they inched up the corroded stairs.
They were at the sixth floor when they heard the voice of George Liles, muffled by the window. "--and so Crawford sent me here to tell you so, sir." Bruce's eyebrows lifted at the respect, bordering on obsequiousness, in the man's voice.
"Good. Good." Bruno Mannheim's voice was heavy and lifeless, a force that pressed the energy out of things. "Everything is going as planned. And you're sure Cobblepot can be trusted? He won't go squawking to Sionis?"
If a voice could cringe, George Liles's did so. "He sure can, Mr. Mannheim, sir! Mr. Cobblepot's an honorable man, a man of his word, he is--awk!"
"Honor," Mannheim observed dispassionately as Liles continued to make strangled choking noises, "Is such a meaningless term." There was a thump and Bruce could hear Liles take a deep, whooping breath. "I prefer enlightened self interest, myself. I believe I can trust Cobblepot to make himself useful one day in return for his freedom. And his continued well being."
Bruce didn't dare to risk even turning his head to look at Clark, but he could feel the tension in his body, crackling tight. They listened as Liles babbled assurances in a newly hoarse voice, and Mannheim dismissed him, apparently without listening. The following conversation between Mannheim and the other people in the room was an almost absurdly banal discussion of which of the three delis in the area had the best pastrami on rye, culminating in a placed order, but Bruce and Clark had to endure through it, unmoving on the fire escape until everyone left the room and they could slip back down unnoticed.
Back on solid ground, they waited until they had casually strolled a couple of blocks to let out huge breaths of relief. Clark sagged to the curb and rested his face in his hands for a moment. "I get the distinct impression Bruno Mannheim is not a strictly legitimate businessman," he said in a muffled voice.
"That's your keen journalistic instincts at work," Bruce agreed, his own voice a little shaky.
Somehow, he realized, it had become more upsetting rather than less to imagine Clark in danger.
"We need to go to the police," Clark said, looking up. "We need to--"
"--tell them we conveniently overheard Bruno Mannheim saying vaguely ominous things to Oswald Cobblepot's thug?" Bruce shook his head. "We don't have any hard proof. They'd probably just think we were doing it because it hurt our pride to potentially see Cobblepot go free."
"Which it does." Clark was looking down at his hands.
"Well. Yeah."
"It was our first case," Clark said, not looking up. "We did something really good together. The two of us. I couldn't stand--" He broke off, shaking his head.
"I know," Bruce said, and Clark looked up at him, squinting behind the ugly glasses. "I know." He held out his hand and Clark took it, allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. "Let's get going."
"What? Where?"
Bruce shrugged. "First things first. You need to visit the university. I need to stop by the branch office." Clark continued to look at him, face unreadable beneath shaggy dark hair. "Then we'll go back to Gotham. And we'll...find out which juror is recanting and why." Clark said nothing, and Bruce scowled. "You know I'm going to, and I know you're going to, so why not do it together?"
After a moment, Clark nodded. "Together."
: : :
“It’s such a beautiful city,” Clark said, taking another sip of soda and looking out the diner window at the soaring skyscrapers, their Art Deco spires flaring into the sky. “I guess I’d kind of hoped--wished--that it didn’t have some of the same problems Gotham does.”
“Human beings are the same in every city.” Bruce’s grim tone was mitigated slightly by the fact that he was currently drinking a chocolate malted, but Clark sighed.
“I just hate to think of it,” he muttered. This Metropolis was only the seed of what it would become in a thousand years; Clark felt an absurd protectiveness toward it, a desire to keep it safe, let it blossom. He shook his head. Metropolis would have to find its way without him.
“The university looked good,” Bruce said as if trying to cheer him up. “And you saw some of the useful research Wayne Tech is doing down here with nanobots.”
Clark couldn’t help but smile at the memory--not of Wayne Tech’s impressive laboratories, but of the look on the branch manager’s face when Bruce Wayne had suddenly strode in to ask for a tour. “They’re doing good work. The anti-coagulant the medical division is working on would be great. And that new bulletproof weave will go over big with the police if we can get the cost down.”
“Yes,” said Bruce. “I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on that project. It looks promising.” He frowned. “Mannheim,” he murmured as if to himself, looking worried.
“There’s always those who wants to pull down what someone builds,” Clark said, hearing the discouragement lacing his voice.
“When did you get to be such a sourpuss?” Bruce reached out and tapped the ring on Clark’s finger, a fleeting touch. “You’re obviously hanging around the wrong people.”
“Oh, it’s not them,” Clark muttered. “They’re all...really positive.” Almost too cheerful and optimistic at times, actually. The Legion always seemed so serenely confident that Clark was going to weather all the storms of adolescence and emerge this great shining hero, someone so gallant and brave Clark felt like he didn’t know him at all.
Superman wouldn’t feel bored when sitting through another awards ceremony. Superman wouldn’t find himself afraid when facing down a fleet of alien invaders.
Superman sure wouldn’t be sitting here wishing Bruce Wayne would touch him again, feeling awkward and stupid and gawky.
“So do I get to meet them? Your friends,” Bruce said when Clark stared.
“What?” Clark almost broke out into a cold sweat at the idea of the Legion, with their bizarre views about life in the twenty-first century, meeting Bruce. Brainiac 5 would probably ask him if he had electricity in his home, or if he rode to work on a horse. “No, no, that’s impossible.”
“I see,” said Bruce, and Clark wanted to kick himself, because Bruce’s face had gone remote and closed again, and it was obvious what he was thinking, and there was no way, no way at all to say “It’s not that I think you’re not good enough to meet them, it’s that they’re from the future, and I’m an alien, and someday I’m going to dress up like a lunatic in blue tights and save the world on a weekly basis.”
Clark didn’t really even believe that last part himself.
“Let’s go,” Bruce said, heading for the door as Clark sputtered and choked on his blocks and secrets.
Clark caught up to him halfway to the next light. “Did you drive?” he asked.
“Took the train.”
“Let me give you a ride back to Gotham.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’d like--”
“--I’m fine.”
Clark reached out to grab Bruce’s shoulder, but Bruce shrugged his hand off and kept walking, his head down, strides eating up pavement. “Damnit, Bruce--!”
Bruce stopped so suddenly in the middle of his sentence that Clark almost ran into him. “What the--” Clark started, then stopped as he realized Bruce wasn’t looking at him at all. He was looking across the street at a movie theater marquee, its blocky letters spelling out:
”Coming This Weekend, the Tenth Anniversary Re-Release: The Gray Ghost.”
“Ah,” Clark said, a quiet exhalation, almost a sigh. They stood and looked at the marquee in silence for a long time, at the old poster showing the Gray Ghost looming from the shadows.
“Was it good?” asked Bruce.
“What?”
“The Gray Ghost movie. Was it good?”
Old pain corkscrewed in Clark’s chest, melding with the newer anguish and longing into a strange bittersweet melange. “I never saw it,” he said. Bruce looked at him, and Clark couldn’t help smiling, just a little. “I promised I wouldn’t see it without you, remember?”
“I remember,” said Bruce.
“It wouldn’t have been the same without you,” said Clark. “Most things...most things aren’t.”
Bruce glanced at him and then away again, his eyes a sharp, sudden gleam in the twilight. “We’ll need to get an early start in the morning, if we’re going to go looking for Cobblepot’s jurors,” he said. “And driving is faster than the train. Would you...mind giving me a lift?”
Clark swallowed. “Sure thing.”
They filled the hour back to Gotham with conversation: journalism and engineering, Mannheim's conversation, the jury process. It was almost friendly. They talked about Cobblepot's sentencing and Liles' plastic surgery, about the M.U. campus, about the gas mileage of Clark's car.
They talked about all the things that were important, but none of the things that really mattered.
( Chapter 29)
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None necessary
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2600Summary: In an amazing and unexpected coincidence, Bruce and Clark happen to run into each other in Metropolis.
”What are you doing here?”
Clark and Bruce glared at each other, the sound of their voices in unison hanging in the air between them. Bruce felt a sudden, childish urge to yell “Jinx, you owe me a Coke!” but fought it off by reminding himself that he was angry at Clark. Bruce didn’t want him here, Bruce didn’t need him here, and he definitely didn’t want Clark to know why he was actually in Metropolis.
“I’ve applied to Metropolis University. I wanted to check out the campus.” Clark crossed his arms and glowered, looking surprisingly intimidating for a teen in thick glasses and a hideous polyester suit. “What are you doing here?”
Bruce produced a scowl to match Clark’s glower. “Wayne Enterprises has a branch here. I'm visiting it today. Unless you have some objection to that?”
“It’s a free world.”
“So I thought.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
They stood there, glaring at each other. Then both of them turned and started to walk north.
“I believe Wayne Enterprises is to the south, isn’t it?” Clark observed, shooting Bruce a sideways glance.
“Well, the M.U. campus is to the east, if I remember right.” Bruce tried to speed up and lose Clark, but Clark just increased his own pace until they were striding ridiculously fast along the sidewalk.
“Stop following me,” snapped Clark.
“You’re the one following me,” Bruce growled. He pulled to a stop, keeping his gaze anywhere but on the marble-and-gilt “Bobby Crawford, LLD” sign across the street. “What are you, my guardian angel? Afraid I’m here to continue my junkie ways in another town?” His voice came out more bitter than angry, to his horror.
Clark grimaced and made a helpless gesture in the air between them. “I’m not--Bruce, I--” Then his face went suddenly abstracted, watching over Bruce’s shoulder. “Hey, that’s--” He broke off, his face closing up again.
“That’s what?”
“Nothing,” Clark said as Bruce whirled to follow his gaze. “It’s nothing.”
A man was leaving Crawford’s offices. He glanced both ways, then slipped into an alley. “That’s George Liles. Cobblepot’s henchman.” Bruce was already tailing George, keeping a safe distance between them. “He’s had some plastic surgery, but it’s him.”
He slipped behind a dumpster as Liles waited for a light to change. Clark crouched beside him. “You recognized him?” he whispered in Bruce’s ear.
As if I would ever forget the face of a man who held a gun to Clark Kent’s head, Bruce thought irritably. “So did you,” he hissed.
“I’ve got a good memory.”
“So do I.”
“This is dangerous,” Clark said as they followed Liles. “We shouldn’t be doing this. He might recognize us.”
Bruce snorted. “He’d have a hard time recognizing you. You don’t look anything like you did six years ago.”
Clark looked away from Liles to Bruce for the first time. “You really think so?” The glasses hid his eyes; his voice sounded somehow both pleased and sad at the same time.
“Well, we both look totally different now,” Bruce said as he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a window, hollow-cheeked and wiry, his hair still long and straggly.
“And are we?” Clark moved ahead to keep up with Liles and Bruce couldn’t see his face. “Totally different now, I mean?”
Bruce made a “hhr” sound in his throat, a habit he’d gotten into when he wasn’t sure what to say and wanted to buy some time. Liles chose that moment to speed up, and Clark and Bruce had to break into a run and cut across a small park to make up some space, ducking behind a hedge at the last second to stay out of sight.
Bruce looked over at Clark, crouching by his side. Clark was breathing heavily, winded by even that short burst of speed, but his thick glasses couldn’t hide the eagerness in his eyes as he hunted down a lead. Despite himself, Bruce felt a smile tugging at his mouth. “Maybe not,” he said. “Not where it matters.” He reached out and thumped Clark on the chest with a fist, hard enough that he wouldn’t be tempted to let the touch linger at all. Then he straightened hastily and kept moving, unwilling to wait and see if Clark responded at all, if he smiled or reached out in turn.
He didn’t want to look too closely at how he would feel if Clark didn’t.
Liles finally turned down a narrow alley and knocked on an unmarked door, which opened. There was a glimpse of two people inside the building before the door closed. "That's funny," said Clark. "I know those two guys. They're Bruno Mannheim's bodyguards."
"Mannheim." Bruce frowned. "The name doesn't ring a bell."
"He's a businessman who's had an increasing amount of influence in Metropolis over the last year. Why's he meeting with a thug of Cobblepot's?"
"Maybe Liles has had an epiphany and decided to go straight, and Mannheim is helping him out?" Bruce suggested sweetly.
Clark shot him a narrow glare. "I'm a positive thinker, but I'm not an idiot," he said. "I don't know, it all seems fishy. Cobblepot suddenly has a bigshot Metropolis lawyer, his man Liles leaves the lawyer and makes a beeline here, it's all--hey, wait!"
Bruce was already moving, hurrying to the back of the building where Liles had entered and finding a fire escape to clamber up onto.
"What are you doing?" Clark demanded as Bruce started up the fire escape.
"Keep your voice down," said Bruce. Clark swung up onto the fire escape after Bruce. "Don't follow me," whispered Bruce. "It's dangerous."
"I didn't come to Metropolis to sit on my hands while Cobblepot perverts the justice system!"
"I thought you came to Metropolis to visit the University," Bruce noted, and was rewarded with an annoyed look.
"I thought you came to visit your offices!"
"Hhn," Bruce said, and started quietly creeping up the rusted fire escape.
Clark made a strangled noise in his throat and followed him. Bruce winced, anticipating the rattling clank of steps on metal grating, but Clark's footfalls were surprisingly muted.
Cautiously, they inched up the corroded stairs.
They were at the sixth floor when they heard the voice of George Liles, muffled by the window. "--and so Crawford sent me here to tell you so, sir." Bruce's eyebrows lifted at the respect, bordering on obsequiousness, in the man's voice.
"Good. Good." Bruno Mannheim's voice was heavy and lifeless, a force that pressed the energy out of things. "Everything is going as planned. And you're sure Cobblepot can be trusted? He won't go squawking to Sionis?"
If a voice could cringe, George Liles's did so. "He sure can, Mr. Mannheim, sir! Mr. Cobblepot's an honorable man, a man of his word, he is--awk!"
"Honor," Mannheim observed dispassionately as Liles continued to make strangled choking noises, "Is such a meaningless term." There was a thump and Bruce could hear Liles take a deep, whooping breath. "I prefer enlightened self interest, myself. I believe I can trust Cobblepot to make himself useful one day in return for his freedom. And his continued well being."
Bruce didn't dare to risk even turning his head to look at Clark, but he could feel the tension in his body, crackling tight. They listened as Liles babbled assurances in a newly hoarse voice, and Mannheim dismissed him, apparently without listening. The following conversation between Mannheim and the other people in the room was an almost absurdly banal discussion of which of the three delis in the area had the best pastrami on rye, culminating in a placed order, but Bruce and Clark had to endure through it, unmoving on the fire escape until everyone left the room and they could slip back down unnoticed.
Back on solid ground, they waited until they had casually strolled a couple of blocks to let out huge breaths of relief. Clark sagged to the curb and rested his face in his hands for a moment. "I get the distinct impression Bruno Mannheim is not a strictly legitimate businessman," he said in a muffled voice.
"That's your keen journalistic instincts at work," Bruce agreed, his own voice a little shaky.
Somehow, he realized, it had become more upsetting rather than less to imagine Clark in danger.
"We need to go to the police," Clark said, looking up. "We need to--"
"--tell them we conveniently overheard Bruno Mannheim saying vaguely ominous things to Oswald Cobblepot's thug?" Bruce shook his head. "We don't have any hard proof. They'd probably just think we were doing it because it hurt our pride to potentially see Cobblepot go free."
"Which it does." Clark was looking down at his hands.
"Well. Yeah."
"It was our first case," Clark said, not looking up. "We did something really good together. The two of us. I couldn't stand--" He broke off, shaking his head.
"I know," Bruce said, and Clark looked up at him, squinting behind the ugly glasses. "I know." He held out his hand and Clark took it, allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. "Let's get going."
"What? Where?"
Bruce shrugged. "First things first. You need to visit the university. I need to stop by the branch office." Clark continued to look at him, face unreadable beneath shaggy dark hair. "Then we'll go back to Gotham. And we'll...find out which juror is recanting and why." Clark said nothing, and Bruce scowled. "You know I'm going to, and I know you're going to, so why not do it together?"
After a moment, Clark nodded. "Together."
: : :
“It’s such a beautiful city,” Clark said, taking another sip of soda and looking out the diner window at the soaring skyscrapers, their Art Deco spires flaring into the sky. “I guess I’d kind of hoped--wished--that it didn’t have some of the same problems Gotham does.”
“Human beings are the same in every city.” Bruce’s grim tone was mitigated slightly by the fact that he was currently drinking a chocolate malted, but Clark sighed.
“I just hate to think of it,” he muttered. This Metropolis was only the seed of what it would become in a thousand years; Clark felt an absurd protectiveness toward it, a desire to keep it safe, let it blossom. He shook his head. Metropolis would have to find its way without him.
“The university looked good,” Bruce said as if trying to cheer him up. “And you saw some of the useful research Wayne Tech is doing down here with nanobots.”
Clark couldn’t help but smile at the memory--not of Wayne Tech’s impressive laboratories, but of the look on the branch manager’s face when Bruce Wayne had suddenly strode in to ask for a tour. “They’re doing good work. The anti-coagulant the medical division is working on would be great. And that new bulletproof weave will go over big with the police if we can get the cost down.”
“Yes,” said Bruce. “I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on that project. It looks promising.” He frowned. “Mannheim,” he murmured as if to himself, looking worried.
“There’s always those who wants to pull down what someone builds,” Clark said, hearing the discouragement lacing his voice.
“When did you get to be such a sourpuss?” Bruce reached out and tapped the ring on Clark’s finger, a fleeting touch. “You’re obviously hanging around the wrong people.”
“Oh, it’s not them,” Clark muttered. “They’re all...really positive.” Almost too cheerful and optimistic at times, actually. The Legion always seemed so serenely confident that Clark was going to weather all the storms of adolescence and emerge this great shining hero, someone so gallant and brave Clark felt like he didn’t know him at all.
Superman wouldn’t feel bored when sitting through another awards ceremony. Superman wouldn’t find himself afraid when facing down a fleet of alien invaders.
Superman sure wouldn’t be sitting here wishing Bruce Wayne would touch him again, feeling awkward and stupid and gawky.
“So do I get to meet them? Your friends,” Bruce said when Clark stared.
“What?” Clark almost broke out into a cold sweat at the idea of the Legion, with their bizarre views about life in the twenty-first century, meeting Bruce. Brainiac 5 would probably ask him if he had electricity in his home, or if he rode to work on a horse. “No, no, that’s impossible.”
“I see,” said Bruce, and Clark wanted to kick himself, because Bruce’s face had gone remote and closed again, and it was obvious what he was thinking, and there was no way, no way at all to say “It’s not that I think you’re not good enough to meet them, it’s that they’re from the future, and I’m an alien, and someday I’m going to dress up like a lunatic in blue tights and save the world on a weekly basis.”
Clark didn’t really even believe that last part himself.
“Let’s go,” Bruce said, heading for the door as Clark sputtered and choked on his blocks and secrets.
Clark caught up to him halfway to the next light. “Did you drive?” he asked.
“Took the train.”
“Let me give you a ride back to Gotham.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’d like--”
“--I’m fine.”
Clark reached out to grab Bruce’s shoulder, but Bruce shrugged his hand off and kept walking, his head down, strides eating up pavement. “Damnit, Bruce--!”
Bruce stopped so suddenly in the middle of his sentence that Clark almost ran into him. “What the--” Clark started, then stopped as he realized Bruce wasn’t looking at him at all. He was looking across the street at a movie theater marquee, its blocky letters spelling out:
”Coming This Weekend, the Tenth Anniversary Re-Release: The Gray Ghost.”
“Ah,” Clark said, a quiet exhalation, almost a sigh. They stood and looked at the marquee in silence for a long time, at the old poster showing the Gray Ghost looming from the shadows.
“Was it good?” asked Bruce.
“What?”
“The Gray Ghost movie. Was it good?”
Old pain corkscrewed in Clark’s chest, melding with the newer anguish and longing into a strange bittersweet melange. “I never saw it,” he said. Bruce looked at him, and Clark couldn’t help smiling, just a little. “I promised I wouldn’t see it without you, remember?”
“I remember,” said Bruce.
“It wouldn’t have been the same without you,” said Clark. “Most things...most things aren’t.”
Bruce glanced at him and then away again, his eyes a sharp, sudden gleam in the twilight. “We’ll need to get an early start in the morning, if we’re going to go looking for Cobblepot’s jurors,” he said. “And driving is faster than the train. Would you...mind giving me a lift?”
Clark swallowed. “Sure thing.”
They filled the hour back to Gotham with conversation: journalism and engineering, Mannheim's conversation, the jury process. It was almost friendly. They talked about Cobblepot's sentencing and Liles' plastic surgery, about the M.U. campus, about the gas mileage of Clark's car.
They talked about all the things that were important, but none of the things that really mattered.
( Chapter 29)