Fic: For Ever Nearer Yet (3 of 3) (Clark/Bruce)
Title: For Ever Nearer Yet
Author: tmelange
Epilogue
Bless the day he came to be
Angel's wings carried him to me
Heavenly
I can fly
But I want his wings
I can shine even in the darkness
But I crave the light that he brings
Revel in the songs that he sings
My angel Gabriel
Ten years ago, on a road on the outskirts of Smallville....
In the back of his mind, too distant to properly register, the nine-year-old could feel the car bounce hard as it hit something in the road, but he was in the throes of the dream that had haunted him for months, prevented him from sleeping, that he lived over and over and over, every time fatigue got the better of him. The bump in the road interrupted the worn out ways of a dream that never varied, but this time it varied, all because of a bump in the road. He was too young to respect the power of karma, fate, kismet, whatever you wanted to call a thing that happens without warning and that changes everything. He was only dreaming.
The dream that Bruce dreamed every time he closed his eyes consisted, oddly enough, of a series of images-a series of slow, specific, portentous events.
In the dream, he is sitting pensively at a wooden easel, on a manicured lawn, in a well-tended cemetery, in the shade of a big tree. Color is not important, he knows instinctively as he slowly-very slowly-picks up a small piece of black chalk to continue his work. Everything in this dream is shaded black and white and gray, and Bruce needs to capture the shading exactly, it is his mission. It is the most important part of his task. He looks up from his work and the movement takes a lifetime.
A funeral procession is making its way to an open grave in the distance, coffins hoisted up high, colorless people pacing in two straight lines, women with umbrellas cocked to protect themselves from the sun or the moon. Men in suits. Bruce is sitting at the easel, drawing that picture.
The black coffins, ebony with silver handles, are set carefully on the ground by two adjacent holes. Two enormous wreaths of flowers balance white upon the closed lids . . . and the service begins. A few women weep a few crystal tears, but there is no sound. Cries fall upon deaf ears. The men stand solemn, quiet as rain. There is a eulogy spoken over the ebony boxes. Bruce can see lips move even though the silence is impenetrable. He recognizes himself standing, so small, alone, though his hand is held tightly by some other mourner, although all he can see is the back of his own head. Then his semblance turns, and Bruce can see that his double is not himself at all, that it is, in fact, a ghost-a ghost of himself-standing there, mourning with those poor people.
The ghost catches his eye and smiles sadly, sears him with a desolate, silent gaze that says: I can see through you-down to the real you.
Bruce is disconcerted. He rises from his chair. Chalk falls to the grass, his chair tips over . . . the easel is disturbed. Everything happens in the slowest of motions. All Bruce can think is that he shouldn't let the ghost mourn in his place.
That no one should have to suffer an endless repetition of losses.
Then the coffins are lowered into the ground. He is standing, looking down at two ebony boxes lying in their open graves. Everyone has vanished like so much smoke . . .
. . . but the spirits of the dead-they visit him, stand at his side to protect him. His father places a hand on his shoulder; his mother kisses his cheek. They bring him color-in a world bereft of color. Blue. Shades of blue. Eyes. Eyes that sear. Eyes that sear his soul. A single blue rose falls from the palm of his hand....
Everything is spinning in circles. The picture changes, but this time it is all explained to him in the dream, with the sound of wings, angels whispering in his ear the meaning of the easel, the funeral, the coffins, the color blue-all the many meanings in a rose. In the end, he is told everything and asked to promise only one thing: that he will find some measure of joy in his life despite the pain.
Bruce opened his mouth. The breath exploded out of him suddenly, violently; he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbed, and tried to get his bearings. The car was stopped, Alfred was outside; he could see the top of his head through the tinted glass as Alfred knelt by the front tire. And the dream, it was already fading, he was losing it like sand through fingers spread wide. He could only remember bits and pieces in knife-like flashes, impressions of color, so strange. Slowly, Bruce straightened himself up and opened the car door. He stepped outside into a tempest that snatched at his tie and sent tufts of his hair flying in opposite directions.
"Alfred!" he hollered, attempting to make himself heard over the gale. The sky was steel gray, with ominous black clouds rolling across the horizon. Bruce knew it was mid-afternoon but it seemed as if the dead of night was about to fall. He was frightened.
"Alfred!"
Alfred appeared on the other side of the car. "Master Bruce," he called out. "I think it would be best if you stayed inside the car."
Bruce ignored him and, instead, ran to his side. "But, Alfred, what's wrong? Why have we stopped?"
"I have it all under control, young sir. We have a slight problem with the tire. All I have to do is change it and we'll be on our way."
Though Bruce was young, Alfred had been his family's butler for his entire life. He could tell when Alfred was worried, like when Bruce had hit the baseball in the house and broken his mother's favorite vase, and Alfred had promised that he would fix it, that no one would be able to tell it had been broken. Then, as now, Bruce could tell that Alfred very much wanted to make everything right for his young charge, but wasn't exactly sure how he would pull it off.
"What else is wrong?" he hollered. The wind was so loud. Even standing right next to Alfred it was hard to make himself heard.
Alfred wrung his hands. "We are also out of gas, Master Bruce. We could possibly make it ten, fifteen more miles, but the last three gas stations were closed due to the approaching weather and I think it highly unlikely that we'd fair any better if we were able to make it to the next one."
"Can't we just stay in the car?"
"I think it may be our only option, but-"
It was then that the sky opened up, torrential rain poured down, and in the distance, all around him, as far as the eye could see, lightning peppered the open fields of corn. Bruce couldn't help it; he yelped at one particularly loud crash of thunder and a flash of lightning that hit so close that it turned night into day.
"Master Bruce!" Alfred yelled. "In the car!"
They both jumped into the car, but, really, the car only made the situation worse for Bruce, as it was buffeted by winds, shaken, and felt as if at any moment the terrible storm would whip them up and sweep them away. It was then that Bruce noticed the persistent pounding at his window. He looked and saw a boy out there, about his own age, pounding on the window with a small fist, hair flying in all directions, wanting to be let in. Bruce opened the window, and was immediately blasted by wind and rain.
"Master Bruce!"
He could hear Alfred calling from the front seat, but the boy was pulling at him, yelling in his face through the open window, "Come with me! Come on! You can't stay here!"
He wasn't sure why but he obeyed the boy immediately. He got out of the car. The only thing that kept his feet on the ground was the solidity of the hand that clutched his and dragged him to the other side of the car where Alfred was struggling to maintain his feet.
"Come on!"
Alfred grabbed his other hand, and with the boy leading the way and Alfred following behind, the three of them made their way into the cornfield in single file. Bruce sure did hope the boy knew where he was going, but when he looked back at the car and saw that the wind had flipped it over into a ditch, he no longer cared where they were going. He simply wanted to go.
They fought against the weather for what seemed like ages, his only tethers the hands that held him secure. It was at the point where he didn't think he could go any further, when the rain and the wind had whittled his reserves down to the marrow of his bones, when the peals of thunder and knife-like flashes of lightning made everything inside of him stop and start in fits and gasps, that the young boy in the lead looked back at him and grinned widely, and squeezed his hand comfortingly, looking for all the world like he was having the grandest time, that Bruce resigned himself to his fate. He'd either get out of this storm, or not, and there was nothing to be done about it except to keep moving forward. He answered the boy in the lead with a grin of his own.
Then in front of them appeared a path, then an archway with a sign at the top that said "Kent Farm" and then a pretty yellow house. In front of the house was a man with blond hair, yelling, "Clark! Clark!" and when he noticed them, he came forward at a run.
"This way!" he yelled over the howling wind.
Bruce was hustled over to the house, and down the steps of a storm cellar at the side, by the man and the boy, Alfred following close behind. When they were all standing in the middle of the underground room, soaked to the bone and breathing heavily, a pretty red-haired woman scooped the boy up in her arms, hugged him tightly, and said, "I see you've brought us guests." She turned and introduced herself as Martha, and her husband was named Jonathan, and her son, the boy who had found them and saved them, the boy with the black hair and bright blue eyes, was named Clark.
Many years later, with the help of a scrapbook and some small prompting from Alfred, who had betrayed him, Bruce would remember that he met a boy named Clark during those hazy days after his parents' death, when he had been so lost, traveling back from California and his failure there; that the boy who had become a man had been with him from the very beginning of his journey, a kindred spirit, a commensurate karma, a soul-mate. He would remember his dream in the car, the way his father had placed a hand on his shoulder, the way his mother had kissed his cheek, lovingly, protectively, and he would know that as sure as night will fall in Gotham, Clark Kent had been sent by his parents to watch over him, to provide the only solace in his life, to be his sunlight when he was lost in shadows. His light to my dark, his wide outward gaze to my introspection. It would be the reason why Bruce Wayne was always so certain that Superman was a gift that belonged to him alone, sent on the wings of angels, despite his unworthiness, despite his own nature-their love consuming, passionate, beyond reason. No matter the burden. No matter the cost. Their destiny-inexorable.
The remembrance of that dream would give him the courage, the absolute certitude, to face down Lex Luthor, Lois Lane, the world entire and say, When will you learn? He is mine. Always.
finis
I can fly
But I want his wings
I can shine even in the darkness
But I crave the light that he brings
Revel in the songs that he sings
My angel Gabriel
I can love
But I need his heart
I am strong even on my own
But from him I never want to part
He's been there since the very start
My angel Gabriel
Bless the day he came to be
Angel's wings carried him to me
Heavenly
I can fly
But I want his wings
I can shine even in the darkness
But I crave the light that he brings
Revel in the songs that he sings
My angel Gabriel
Gabriel, Lamb, What Sound
Notes:
Though the large part of this universe is set in general DCU, the first few stories use a bit of lore from the television show Smallville, specifically, (1) it adopts the notion that a young Lex spent some time in Smallville while Clark was in high school and that the two of them were, for a time, good friends; (2) that Clark found out about his powers and Kryptonian heritage while in high school; and (3) that Clark was exposed to red Kryptonite while a sophomore and it had the effect of turning him immoral and drastically lowering his inhibitions, creating a sort of "bad boy" persona. This universe uses a bit of the Season Two and Three episodes Exodus and Exile where Clark purposely exposes himself to red K and runs away to Metropolis to live a life of crime due to the guilt of having caused an accident that put his adoptive mother in the hospital with a miscarriage. He spends three months in Metropolis during the summer between sophomore and junior years, living on his own and causing trouble. It's not really necessary to have seen any Smallville to understand this universe, however, as I try to include full explanations of background in the relevant stories.
The title was gacked from a poem called Insomnia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the relevant part of which is:
Our lives, most dear, are never near,
Our thoughts are never far apart,
Though all that draws us heart to heart
Seems fainter now and now more clear.
To-night Love claims his full control,
And with desire and with regret
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
For ever nearer yet.
Author: tmelange
Epilogue
Bless the day he came to be
Angel's wings carried him to me
Heavenly
I can fly
But I want his wings
I can shine even in the darkness
But I crave the light that he brings
Revel in the songs that he sings
My angel Gabriel
Ten years ago, on a road on the outskirts of Smallville....
In the back of his mind, too distant to properly register, the nine-year-old could feel the car bounce hard as it hit something in the road, but he was in the throes of the dream that had haunted him for months, prevented him from sleeping, that he lived over and over and over, every time fatigue got the better of him. The bump in the road interrupted the worn out ways of a dream that never varied, but this time it varied, all because of a bump in the road. He was too young to respect the power of karma, fate, kismet, whatever you wanted to call a thing that happens without warning and that changes everything. He was only dreaming.
The dream that Bruce dreamed every time he closed his eyes consisted, oddly enough, of a series of images-a series of slow, specific, portentous events.
In the dream, he is sitting pensively at a wooden easel, on a manicured lawn, in a well-tended cemetery, in the shade of a big tree. Color is not important, he knows instinctively as he slowly-very slowly-picks up a small piece of black chalk to continue his work. Everything in this dream is shaded black and white and gray, and Bruce needs to capture the shading exactly, it is his mission. It is the most important part of his task. He looks up from his work and the movement takes a lifetime.
A funeral procession is making its way to an open grave in the distance, coffins hoisted up high, colorless people pacing in two straight lines, women with umbrellas cocked to protect themselves from the sun or the moon. Men in suits. Bruce is sitting at the easel, drawing that picture.
The black coffins, ebony with silver handles, are set carefully on the ground by two adjacent holes. Two enormous wreaths of flowers balance white upon the closed lids . . . and the service begins. A few women weep a few crystal tears, but there is no sound. Cries fall upon deaf ears. The men stand solemn, quiet as rain. There is a eulogy spoken over the ebony boxes. Bruce can see lips move even though the silence is impenetrable. He recognizes himself standing, so small, alone, though his hand is held tightly by some other mourner, although all he can see is the back of his own head. Then his semblance turns, and Bruce can see that his double is not himself at all, that it is, in fact, a ghost-a ghost of himself-standing there, mourning with those poor people.
The ghost catches his eye and smiles sadly, sears him with a desolate, silent gaze that says: I can see through you-down to the real you.
Bruce is disconcerted. He rises from his chair. Chalk falls to the grass, his chair tips over . . . the easel is disturbed. Everything happens in the slowest of motions. All Bruce can think is that he shouldn't let the ghost mourn in his place.
That no one should have to suffer an endless repetition of losses.
Then the coffins are lowered into the ground. He is standing, looking down at two ebony boxes lying in their open graves. Everyone has vanished like so much smoke . . .
. . . but the spirits of the dead-they visit him, stand at his side to protect him. His father places a hand on his shoulder; his mother kisses his cheek. They bring him color-in a world bereft of color. Blue. Shades of blue. Eyes. Eyes that sear. Eyes that sear his soul. A single blue rose falls from the palm of his hand....
Everything is spinning in circles. The picture changes, but this time it is all explained to him in the dream, with the sound of wings, angels whispering in his ear the meaning of the easel, the funeral, the coffins, the color blue-all the many meanings in a rose. In the end, he is told everything and asked to promise only one thing: that he will find some measure of joy in his life despite the pain.
Bruce opened his mouth. The breath exploded out of him suddenly, violently; he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbed, and tried to get his bearings. The car was stopped, Alfred was outside; he could see the top of his head through the tinted glass as Alfred knelt by the front tire. And the dream, it was already fading, he was losing it like sand through fingers spread wide. He could only remember bits and pieces in knife-like flashes, impressions of color, so strange. Slowly, Bruce straightened himself up and opened the car door. He stepped outside into a tempest that snatched at his tie and sent tufts of his hair flying in opposite directions.
"Alfred!" he hollered, attempting to make himself heard over the gale. The sky was steel gray, with ominous black clouds rolling across the horizon. Bruce knew it was mid-afternoon but it seemed as if the dead of night was about to fall. He was frightened.
"Alfred!"
Alfred appeared on the other side of the car. "Master Bruce," he called out. "I think it would be best if you stayed inside the car."
Bruce ignored him and, instead, ran to his side. "But, Alfred, what's wrong? Why have we stopped?"
"I have it all under control, young sir. We have a slight problem with the tire. All I have to do is change it and we'll be on our way."
Though Bruce was young, Alfred had been his family's butler for his entire life. He could tell when Alfred was worried, like when Bruce had hit the baseball in the house and broken his mother's favorite vase, and Alfred had promised that he would fix it, that no one would be able to tell it had been broken. Then, as now, Bruce could tell that Alfred very much wanted to make everything right for his young charge, but wasn't exactly sure how he would pull it off.
"What else is wrong?" he hollered. The wind was so loud. Even standing right next to Alfred it was hard to make himself heard.
Alfred wrung his hands. "We are also out of gas, Master Bruce. We could possibly make it ten, fifteen more miles, but the last three gas stations were closed due to the approaching weather and I think it highly unlikely that we'd fair any better if we were able to make it to the next one."
"Can't we just stay in the car?"
"I think it may be our only option, but-"
It was then that the sky opened up, torrential rain poured down, and in the distance, all around him, as far as the eye could see, lightning peppered the open fields of corn. Bruce couldn't help it; he yelped at one particularly loud crash of thunder and a flash of lightning that hit so close that it turned night into day.
"Master Bruce!" Alfred yelled. "In the car!"
They both jumped into the car, but, really, the car only made the situation worse for Bruce, as it was buffeted by winds, shaken, and felt as if at any moment the terrible storm would whip them up and sweep them away. It was then that Bruce noticed the persistent pounding at his window. He looked and saw a boy out there, about his own age, pounding on the window with a small fist, hair flying in all directions, wanting to be let in. Bruce opened the window, and was immediately blasted by wind and rain.
"Master Bruce!"
He could hear Alfred calling from the front seat, but the boy was pulling at him, yelling in his face through the open window, "Come with me! Come on! You can't stay here!"
He wasn't sure why but he obeyed the boy immediately. He got out of the car. The only thing that kept his feet on the ground was the solidity of the hand that clutched his and dragged him to the other side of the car where Alfred was struggling to maintain his feet.
"Come on!"
Alfred grabbed his other hand, and with the boy leading the way and Alfred following behind, the three of them made their way into the cornfield in single file. Bruce sure did hope the boy knew where he was going, but when he looked back at the car and saw that the wind had flipped it over into a ditch, he no longer cared where they were going. He simply wanted to go.
They fought against the weather for what seemed like ages, his only tethers the hands that held him secure. It was at the point where he didn't think he could go any further, when the rain and the wind had whittled his reserves down to the marrow of his bones, when the peals of thunder and knife-like flashes of lightning made everything inside of him stop and start in fits and gasps, that the young boy in the lead looked back at him and grinned widely, and squeezed his hand comfortingly, looking for all the world like he was having the grandest time, that Bruce resigned himself to his fate. He'd either get out of this storm, or not, and there was nothing to be done about it except to keep moving forward. He answered the boy in the lead with a grin of his own.
Then in front of them appeared a path, then an archway with a sign at the top that said "Kent Farm" and then a pretty yellow house. In front of the house was a man with blond hair, yelling, "Clark! Clark!" and when he noticed them, he came forward at a run.
"This way!" he yelled over the howling wind.
Bruce was hustled over to the house, and down the steps of a storm cellar at the side, by the man and the boy, Alfred following close behind. When they were all standing in the middle of the underground room, soaked to the bone and breathing heavily, a pretty red-haired woman scooped the boy up in her arms, hugged him tightly, and said, "I see you've brought us guests." She turned and introduced herself as Martha, and her husband was named Jonathan, and her son, the boy who had found them and saved them, the boy with the black hair and bright blue eyes, was named Clark.
Many years later, with the help of a scrapbook and some small prompting from Alfred, who had betrayed him, Bruce would remember that he met a boy named Clark during those hazy days after his parents' death, when he had been so lost, traveling back from California and his failure there; that the boy who had become a man had been with him from the very beginning of his journey, a kindred spirit, a commensurate karma, a soul-mate. He would remember his dream in the car, the way his father had placed a hand on his shoulder, the way his mother had kissed his cheek, lovingly, protectively, and he would know that as sure as night will fall in Gotham, Clark Kent had been sent by his parents to watch over him, to provide the only solace in his life, to be his sunlight when he was lost in shadows. His light to my dark, his wide outward gaze to my introspection. It would be the reason why Bruce Wayne was always so certain that Superman was a gift that belonged to him alone, sent on the wings of angels, despite his unworthiness, despite his own nature-their love consuming, passionate, beyond reason. No matter the burden. No matter the cost. Their destiny-inexorable.
The remembrance of that dream would give him the courage, the absolute certitude, to face down Lex Luthor, Lois Lane, the world entire and say, When will you learn? He is mine. Always.
finis
I can fly
But I want his wings
I can shine even in the darkness
But I crave the light that he brings
Revel in the songs that he sings
My angel Gabriel
I can love
But I need his heart
I am strong even on my own
But from him I never want to part
He's been there since the very start
My angel Gabriel
Bless the day he came to be
Angel's wings carried him to me
Heavenly
I can fly
But I want his wings
I can shine even in the darkness
But I crave the light that he brings
Revel in the songs that he sings
My angel Gabriel
Gabriel, Lamb, What Sound
Notes:
Though the large part of this universe is set in general DCU, the first few stories use a bit of lore from the television show Smallville, specifically, (1) it adopts the notion that a young Lex spent some time in Smallville while Clark was in high school and that the two of them were, for a time, good friends; (2) that Clark found out about his powers and Kryptonian heritage while in high school; and (3) that Clark was exposed to red Kryptonite while a sophomore and it had the effect of turning him immoral and drastically lowering his inhibitions, creating a sort of "bad boy" persona. This universe uses a bit of the Season Two and Three episodes Exodus and Exile where Clark purposely exposes himself to red K and runs away to Metropolis to live a life of crime due to the guilt of having caused an accident that put his adoptive mother in the hospital with a miscarriage. He spends three months in Metropolis during the summer between sophomore and junior years, living on his own and causing trouble. It's not really necessary to have seen any Smallville to understand this universe, however, as I try to include full explanations of background in the relevant stories.
The title was gacked from a poem called Insomnia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the relevant part of which is:
Our lives, most dear, are never near,
Our thoughts are never far apart,
Though all that draws us heart to heart
Seems fainter now and now more clear.
To-night Love claims his full control,
And with desire and with regret
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
For ever nearer yet.