You would have fought very bravely, and died very quickly. Who then, would avenge your brother?

[isitablurred]

Who: Superdad isitablurred  and Batboy kingofrooks / rookminor 
When: June 25th 2011
Where: The streets of Gotham I mean Siren's Port. Sector 9.
Summary: Bruce is determined to keep patrolling even though he is 8 years old. Clark finds him on the street. Eight year olds have no defense against bullets.
Warnings: Violence, swearing, superheroes making up, flashbacks to Bathistory. Oh

Comments

[rookminor]

The purpose of him checking out the casino in the first place was to possibly find a cure for the little 'affliction' that were killing people. Bruce had been trying to figure out how the woman had done this - it wasn't a time reversal, because he kept his mental faculties in the present, and it seemed to be entirely physical. Yet how had her powers manifested? How do they work? And more importantly- how could he reverse the process quickly enough so that more people wouldn't have to die because of it

[isitablurred]

Clark noticed the Batarang stuck out of the man's knee just a moment before he heard the jarring young voice behind him. The boy, right, but... Wait.

Wait.

Batarang. Little boy. No way.

He span around, deliberately ignoring the man on the ground so that he could get a good look at Bruce, choking down on a laugh that threatened to bubble up simply because... Well, he was ridiculous. Why was he out here, fighting crime, when he was - well - tiny.

"You--"

He was smaller than Clark had expected him to be.

"What--" in Rao's name "--do you think you're doing out here? You can't possibly expect to make a difference when you're that high, can you?"

Funnily enough, the crook seemed content to just stay back, whimpering to himself as he pulled the bat shaped throwing knife out of his knee, Clark's cape fluttering in his face.

[rookminor]

The belt was too big for his waist now - obviously - but Bruce had it slung over his shoulders. It was more like a slingbag than anything, and the pockets - built for a pair of hands far, far bigger than the ones he now owned - were big enough to swallow up his entire fist. All the better - it just meant that it was still easy for him to take out what he needed.

He hooked his fingers against a belt loop, ignoring Clark and walking towards the man. Picking up the batarang nonchalantly, he tucked it into a pocket- and kicked the criminal straight in the face with a boot. He fell back, cursing, and Bruce folded his arms, stepping back until he could see Clark.

Why in the name of everything was the man so irritatingly tall? He was tilting his head back as far as it would go, and all he could see was the S-shield and his neck and chin and not his face. Not his eyes

[isitablurred]

Was he... Was he actually pouting? With his arms folded across his chest like a spoilt child? Clark held his breath for just a moment to force down a laugh, and once again turned his back to the criminal to step after Bruce as he walked away.

"So what're you going to do now? Drag him off to the police station by his ear?"

The man managed to drag himself up, clearly roaring into a rage, wrapping his arms around Clark's shoulders to try and twist him into a headlock. Clark merely shrugged, and the man stumbled back a few dozen feet or so and fell on his back in a puddle.

"You can't." Damnit, he was having a conversation here. Stay down. "You can't play vigilante when you're small enough to be shoved into a binbag and dropped in the river, B. No matter how determined you are."

The man behind him, finally pushed to his limit, drew a gun.

the keywords very relevant

[rookminor]

He could hear it, of course. All that was going on. But Clark was an invulnerable alien who could take care of himself; an invulnerable, naggy alien who seemed to believe that he had some sort of imperative to make sure that Bruce was taken care of or something. And no matter how old he was, Bruce could take care of himself just fine.

"No, but I managed to stop this one from taking advantage of a--"

The click of a gun. The safety going off. Resounding in an alley. The vantage point- low, very low- the way the sounds bounced off the walls before reaching his ears. It was almost the same, almost- and Bruce suddenly forgot his training. Forgot his purpose. Forgot what he could do.

He forgot that he wasn't actually eight years old and--

In an alley. It's a shortcut, his father had said, laughing. His parents' hands warm in his - his father's callused by holding scalpels and other surgical instruments, his mother's smooth and soft as a child's- as his own. She was laughing, tilting his head back, and the light from above shone against

Re: the keywords very relevant

[isitablurred]

Something terrible was happening.

Clark wasn't sure what had set Bruce off the way it did; after all if he was thinking he'd know that Clark couldn't be hurt by a mere bullet, that it would just bounce off him. It did, even though Bruce hit the man with all the force his young body could gather. The man collapsed, his pelvis shattered, and fell to the ground with a sort of heavy smack, and Bruce... Bruce was growling, he seemed rabid, furious--out of control.

What was going on?

Clark stepped forward, swung for Bruce's shoulder and caught it in an unforgivingly tight grip, and newspaper headlines flickered back to him from Smallville memories.

"Oh, that poor boy

[rookminor]

Wind. Cold wind in his hair. Movement- wind in his face, and he was starting to feel again. Arms like iron around him, and they were moving- moving where? There was a peculiar kind of light, and there was no longer the tall walls that were looming up around him. No longer in an alley. There was no gun in sight- a house, they were inside. Couch, there was a couch- Bruce stumbled, and his too-short legs collapsed in front of it, and he ended up crashing onto the floor.

His eyes were still blank, and he could barely see. Images in front of him. The smell of aftershave, sick and cloying and thick. Cheap aftershave- except it no longer existed. Alfred had the entire company bought out, all the bottles recalled and burnt in a giant bonfire. Never again.

Never again--

Where was he?Bruce blinked. Interior. Right. Inside- he was inside. Couch behind him. Red and blue- Superman in front of him. He was at an alley, there was a man with a gun- and he reacted. The man probably had a shattered pelvis. He should call an ambulance- which street

[isitablurred]

There was definitely something horribly wrong with Bruce Wayne.

Clark stepped back, more out of shock than anything else, watched the man - boy - stumble forward, disorientated, confused, held his distance well away from him. No lecture. That definitely meant something bad, though to be fair this was only the second time he'd seen Bruce act out of character. Third? Well. It probably only meant that he simply hadn't had enough time to register his character, that this was all just a part of it, and he hadn't known, hadn't noticed.

They'd only known each other two months. A little less.

Taking the man to hospital and bending the gun clean in half took a little over six seconds. Clark stood at the door on his return rather than come closer, leant against it and frowned, unsure.

"Are you planning to explain any of that to me?"

[rookminor]

The moment Clark was gone, Bruce was already standing up. Far too small to feel like himself- but he was tugging off the goggles and the mask, breathing in the air of the safehouse. Tinged with Darkness- that was different. Different from the alley and its stink. There was no aftershave here

[isitablurred]

Clark stayed back, kept his distance from Bruce, watched him with avid curiosity. What did this remind him of? Himself, maybe. The nights after his father had died, the self-punishing, the sulking in his room. But there was an element of something else to it that being apart from Bruce's state of mind he couldn't quite put his finger on.

Bruce's obsequience.

It was weird, like Batman wining and dining golddiggers would be weird. Completely, unrelentingly odd. He hadn't been shouted at for snatching them both out of the alleyway. For interfering - more than those first few comments - for not leaving when Bruce clearly wanted to be alone.

He was so...

--That was it!

Human.

"Bruce Wayne, the heir to the Wayne legacy, named inheritor of the Wayne billions and its companies. I think he's thirty-five next year. A playboy billionaire by all accounts, but a charitable man none the less. The Gotham press love him, because he's always giving them plenty to write about. Fortunately I write crime, not gossip"He...lost his parents when he

[kingofrooks]

Information was always easier to process than memories. Always easier to deal with than his own emotions. Bruce listened- wait, Bruce Wayne would be... thirty-five next year, and Clark Kent was only twenty-four this year. Which meant that Bruce Wayne was eleven years older than Clark Kent- which was frankly unimaginable because they had always been equals. The Clark he knew was three years older than he was, but they might as well be the same age in the grand scheme of things- they were equal

[isitablurred]

"He's just a billionaire, and you were just a rumour."

God, he's talking to a child about Batman's legacy. A child Bruce Wayne. A baby version. Tiny. He doesn't want to think of him that way, but it's hard to imagine his Bruce--

No. Not his Bruce.

When did he become his Bruce. It's ridiculous. It's... Totally ridiculous. They'd just went over the part where Bruce Wayne in his world wasn't really the same Bruce Wayne at all. So this Bruce - the one standing smirking at him now - wasn't his Bruce at all. It was all ridiculously confusing; no wonder Bruce was uncomfortable with how different Clark was.

Clark folded his arms, and dared to step down from the doorway into the room proper, tilting his head slightly to one side.

"What happened to them?"

He already knew, of course. The incident in the alleyway... It was easy to work it out.

[rookminor]

There was a part of him that was still stuck on the fact that Batman was so old when he first began. Bruce himself had only been twenty-one - he had wanted to rid Gotham of crime since he was a child, and though he had wanted to be a police officer in the beginning, it wasn't enough. He studied criminology, martial arts, sciences, everything he could get his hands on while he had no solid goal in mind. No real thought of what he could be and what he wanted to doWhen he had been a child he had fallen into the caves, and the bats, frightened, had flown at him, and the sensation of a thousand wings against his face had made him shriek. It was fear- and he never wanted to go back again. That was what had given him the idea - fear as a deterrent. Fear as a signifier. Something that scared you while you were committing a crime- and you would never go back, because you were afraid

[isitablurred]

"I'm not sadistic, Bruce, I just... I'm used to you admonishing me for getting it even slightly wrong." He was even speaking to him with familiarity now. Warmth. He admonished himself quietly. He was getting taken in by the fact that Bruce looked like a harmless child. It was, after all, just a mask like any other. A disguise. This was still the man that he couldn't trust; the one that had snapped red Kryptonite about his throat and let Clark beat him almost to death

[rookminor]

Of course Bruce was paying attention- he always did. And he didn't blame Clark for that, because he was keeping his eyes on Clark constantly; even when his body was turned away his shoulder was still tilted towards him so that he could face Clark easily and defend himself if there was a need. And of course, his fingers were lingering on the pockets of his belt, tugging at the tips of it, not pulling it open but just keeping it there. In case he needed it.

That was the pocket with the green kryptonite. It might not affect Clark at the distance he was keeping, but if he got closer then Bruce would take it out and keep him at a distance. It wasn't that he didn't trust him to have control his powers- it simply was that Bruce had stopped trusting him to not use them on him(The funny thing was- when he first met Clark, he was able to turn his back fully on him without a second thought, and that was when he had barely known anything about him. He just knew that he was Clark Kent, and he didn't have that signature crazed look in Ultraman's

[isitablurred]

It was more than just a gesture of trust, though that was perhaps how it was meant to be seen. It felt a little like a surrender, too. Perhaps tonight had shaken Bruce up more than Clark had realised, which, if everything he'd deduced about his parents was true, wasn't really that surprising.

Carefully Clark stepped forward, picking up the belt quietly. Bruce had been fingering the pockets, and Clark knew well enough which one had the Kryptonite in it--he'd memorised it by instinct. Quietly he lifted the belt up and sprung the catch.

For such a cheap-looking green glowy rock, it really did make him feel violently ill. Especially this close. Inside his veins, he knew, his blood was bubbling as though held over a hot flame. His face tinged with green, his hands clenching tight around the belt, around the pocket, grimacing, forcing his teeth sharply together. There was only white noise in his head, stomach twisting violently and he felt more than sick--as always, when he was exposed to Kryptonite, he felt like he was dyingBut he'd been