Chapter Text
Bruce has been gone for nineteen days, seven hours, and twenty-six minutes when Clark feels the first sign of it.
He’s lost his keys. It’s the most idiotic thing. But he’s been in a bleak, empty fog for nineteen days, seven hours, twenty-five minutes and fifty-nine seconds, and where he put his goddamn keys is nowhere near the front of his mind. He doesn’t even really need them; unless he’s moving at literally Mach 2, Alfred somehow always beats him to the door to open it anyway, and has in fact appeared to delight in doing so since the day Clark moved into the Manor.
But his keyring also has his key to the Planet’s physical archive storage, and if he needs to have another one recut for himself Perry will take it out of his ass. So he’s looking for his goddamn keys, because fixating on this one tiny thing is something he can do instead of constantly straining to hear a heartbeat he will not ever hear again—
—and he’s not at his best, so it takes Clark a solid six seconds of staring across the room at his messenger bag to realize he can’t see through it.
He blinks, and blinks harder, and tries to refocus his eyes. He tries to x-ray his bag again, and it gets blurry, halfway there, but only if he’s focusing hard enough that it hurts a little.
He’s not at his best. He has not been at his best since Darkseid—since Bruce—
—since his partner—
—so it takes him another few seconds to realize that if he’s actually in physical pain from that, something else entirely is wrong with him besides grief.
-
He’s not proud of how long it takes him to tell someone else about it. To tell Diana, specifically.
In that he does not tell her, or anyone, until they’re halfway through fighting today’s fresh wave of intergalactic threats to the planet—Brainiac, drones, must be Tuesday; Clark could barely focus enough to get through the briefing—and he nearly drops out of the sky when his flight control skips like a record scratch.
He thinks at first that no one notices. But when it’s all over, and John’s rounding up scattered robot parts into a glowing green bin, Clark’s standing and watching that and trying not to scream because there’s no one next to him running quiet commentary on the fight and the next ten steps of here’s what we do now when Diana takes his shoulder.
“Kal,” she says quietly, “what happened?”
She doesn’t ask what’s wrong or are you all right, because they both know his answer to that. But it still feels like it flays part of him away, knowing she noticed, knowing she cares, when he feels like he can’t care about anything anymore. Clark manages to stop the flinch before it starts, but Diana still can tell, because Diana is almost as observant as—
—as—
God, Jesus, Kent, get a fucking hold of yourself, he’d be so fed up with you—
“Kal-El,” she repeats, concern layering her voice now. “What happened?”
He’s only caught snatches of sleep in—it’s twenty-four days, twelve hours, and eighteen minutes now, and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to even think of a lie. “I fell,” Clark says.
Diana frowns at him. “You—what?”
He has to swallow, to wet his lips with his tongue before he can speak again. He wishes he could think of a lie. Maybe her lasso’s touching his hip. “It’s been happening, since.” He doesn’t need to say when. Clark shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Her arm slides around his back, steadying, and he feels more than sees her look around for J’onn. “Why didn’t you say?” she asks, keeping her voice down; there aren’t that many civilians around, but you never know. You need to be careful. He always says we need to be— “That something was wrong?”
Clark shrugs helplessly. “Because everything’s wrong?”
Diana’s eyes are ocean-deep and they glow when they’re shining with tears, and Clark can’t bear to look at her longer than a moment.
“We’ll go to the Watchtower,” she says, and Clark can hear J’onn coming closer, that familiar alien sinus rhythm a comfort—because his ears won’t stop reaching out for a sound he can’t hear anymore— “The medical facility. Let us help.”
Clark takes a deep breath. He doesn’t know how to articulate—really, you don’t have to; honestly, I’m fine, it’s probably just the crushing spiritual agony; and Christ alive, could he be more goddamn Midwestern than trying to convince his best friends they don’t need to worry about him when the love of his life has been dead for three weeks?
“Okay,” he says, and lets them move him.
-
He’s managed, is the thing. He hasn’t asked for help because he’s still in control of things—the facade of his powers, yes, but everything else, too. Still, behind the fog and beneath the crushing agony of the grief, he’s grateful for the three people who seem to have decided not to ask, nor wait to hear any of his bullshit about not needing them, and just forged ahead.
There’s Lois, obviously. Bruce Wayne can’t go missing at the same time that Batman very publicly died saving all of reality from Darkseid, so Clark is not on the bereavement leave that he can admit to himself he wishes more than air that he could have. Instead he’s going to work and dragging himself through the motions, and maybe it’s for the best because if all he did was sit at home or be Superman he thinks he might actually lose Clark Kent and never get him back. Lois is making sure he eats, making sure he takes notes and turns in drafts even if she has to sit next to him and pointedly stare while he does it, and he will never be able to repay her for the fact that she’s single-handedly keeping him functional in his external life.
And there’s Alfred, who has continued the routine of life in the Manor with an attention to detail that tells Clark he’s clinging to it with both hands. He comes into their—into the bedroom in the morning and opens the curtains, fully aware Clark’s more often than not just lying awake, and pulls clothes from the wardrobe for him the way he would have for Bruce. The part of Clark raised to do his own laundry since the age of ten balks at it a little, but Alfred genuinely enjoys the sartorial aspects of his role and God only knows Clark can’t make decisions right now. Unfailingly, every morning and evening, Alfred just tells Clark what’s for breakfast or dinner, instead of asking either what he wants or will you be joining us, and once it’s made apparent Clark is expected to go down to the table and eat it’s easier for him to just do it.
It’s not surprising that Lois and Alfred are keeping him afloat. It is surprising that the third person is Jason.
All of the boys were in Gotham when—it happened, holding the city against hordes of parademons and Apokoliptian generals. When Clark came back to the Cave with— Well. They were all there waiting; they already knew. Tim and Damian are the only ones properly living at the Manor these days, but Jason and Dick both stayed that night, and while Dick started sleeping back at home with Babs after a few nights, Jason just…hasn’t left.
Damian’s swinging wildly between suppressed grief and blazing rage, and when that all starts seeping out in bitter lashes of you’re Superman but you couldn’t— that freeze Clark and Dick both in their tracks, Jason’s the one who brings him down to the Cave and drags him out on Jason’s brand of cathartic, fine-no-killing-but-plenty-of-bloodshed patrol. Jason mercilessly needles Tim into eating something besides coffee. Jason sits and reads aloud to Alfred from the latest book they’re on together while Alfred does the dishes. And when he’s not doing any of that Jason sits silently on the roof with Clark half the night, until Clark’s worked up the courage to go down to his empty bed and feel his chest cave in all over again when he lays down alone.
They have never once talked about it. Clark is sure that if he tries, Jason will be gone the next day. He’s just accepted that it’s a very strange blessing of how difficult Jason and Bruce’s relationship i—was, because Jason is the only one who’s not incapacitated with grief, and therefore Jason is the one forced-marching the rest of the family through this awful aftermath, and Clark’s helplessly grateful even as he’s gutted that Bruce will never see it.
So he doesn’t let Diana and J’onn steer him into the medical bay because he does, actually, want to know what’s wrong. He just feels like—Lois and Alfred and Jason are working so hard to keep him upright, and he should probably hold up his end of things. None of them can be Superman for him, and if this is finally affecting Superman…
He’d be so angry with you, Kent, Clark can’t help but think, blinking against the hot stab of tears as he lies down under the medical scanner. He’d tell you the world needs Superman, stop fucking wallowing—
He swallows hard and for the fifty-sixth time in twenty-four and a half days wills himself to get a goddamn grip.
“Can you tell me what’s been happening?” J’onn asks in his quiet voice as he starts the scans.
Clark tries to think of the least worrying way to put it. “I first noticed that my x-ray vision was going in and out,” he says at last. “Sometimes my hearing’s been getting away from me. It feels like…the things that require fine control. I don’t have it right now.”
J’onn’s eyebrows come up slightly, his eyes widening where they’re focused on the readouts. “Your neurotransmitter levels are extremely off your baseline.”
Clark barely chokes back the harsh scrape of laughter that tries to claw its way out of his throat. “Yeah, there’s not a lot of serotonin in here anymore.”
“Not just that.” J’onn frowns. “Your dopamine in particular is concerning. There are…a great number of biological markers that are concerning me, Clark. How have you been functioning?”
That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it. Clark closes his eyes. “Badly.”
Diana’s hand lands on his shoulder, tight and comforting. “Clark, I know more than most how grief can poison the body, but. This shouldn’t be able to happen to you.”
“I can’t find any obvious internal cause,” J’onn agrees. “Nor does there seem to be an external agent.” He comes around the console to the bed as Clark sits up slowly. J’onn lifts a hand, and Clark knows what he’s asking. He nods, and J’onn’s fingers alight gently on his temple.
Permit me?
It’s a mark of how not-himself he is that it doesn’t take conscious thought to let J’onn in. J’onn feels his assent and Clark doesn’t have to try to relax his mental walls or anything—he’s a leaking dam and J’onn slips right inside.
Dimly he hears J’onn’s small gasp in the physical world, but J’onn’s surprise and dismay reverberate much louder through the shared mental space they’re in right now. Clark.
I’m sorry, he thinks helplessly, because he feels like he should apologize for how awful it has to be in his head right now—but there’s a sudden, agonizing relief at not being alone that catches him off-guard. Something inside of him is so, so glad to have J’onn here, suddenly—like there was an empty space his mind was used to having filled, and J’onn isn’t exactly what he was missing but it’s something, at least.
J’onn catches the thought as soon as he has it, seizing on it with the same bewildered relief, because—God, Clark can feel what J’onn’s feeling from him in a strange self-conscious doubling, and it’s pain. The ache inside of him that’s been there since Bruce—
—you can’t even think it, you fucking coward, why can’t you just—
—but it’s not just his grief eating away at him. It’s physical, like the mental fog, the way his concentration is gone, the way he can’t sleep, the way he’s feeling every emotion a thousand times more sharply, because J’onn is feeling it too now that he’s in here and it hurts. Clark wants to apologize, he didn’t know, he wouldn’t have let J’onn in if he’d known it was going to hurt, but J’onn cuts him off before he can even start forming the words in his thoughts.
Clark, no, J’onn thinks, warm and exasperated, and then all at once Clark is wrapped in a thick blanket of care and comfort and empathy that brings another burning rush of tears to his eyes. I’m so sorry. We should have noticed sooner.
I didn’t want anyone to. I didn’t… I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how I do this, J’onn.
Together. J’onn’s mental presence holds him, tightly, and it helps. It helps, somehow, and now that the first flood has been stemmed they can both look at why.
J’onn follows that impulse, that sense of relief, hollow that it is, and pulls Clark along with him. It’s deep, buried, almost past subconscious; they go down and down and finally they’re in what Clark would call his instincts, if he had to put a name to it. The part of him that turns to the sunlight like a flower, the part of him that listens constantly for his mother, his best friend, his children, because they’re his, and there’s something else gone that was his, too—a gaping hole, a bleeding wound deeper than he knew he could feel something.
He feels J’onn understand something, then—a ripple of shock through him/them, and then they’re flashing back up through all the levels of Clark’s mind, unraveling from each other. And then they’re separate again, J’onn and Clark, and when he’s slammed back into his body alone Clark has to bite back a sudden, sharp scream of agony.
“Clark!” Diana’s holding him, bewildered, and he clings to her with one hand, reaching helplessly for J’onn with the other. “What is going on?”
“I’m sorry,” J’onn says hurriedly, taking his hand. “Clark, I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting…” He looks shaken, too, and takes a moment to breathe before saying again, more levelly, “I wasn’t expecting to understand what you were feeling. You have a broken psychic bond. It’s very similar to—to the one I have, from my family’s deaths.”
Clark can’t understand, at first. “I’m not psychic,” he says stupidly, unable to process it.
“It was very deep—latent, I would say,” J’onn says slowly. “But it was in the Kryptonian part of you. Your most basic self.”
He doesn’t know what it could be. He’s never—there’s never been anything in the medical files, but. He hasn’t translated them all, he realizes slowly; Bruce hadn’t…
“We should go to the Fortress,” Clark says finally. “If it’s something Kryptonian about me.” He doesn’t want to go, because the last dozen times he was there it was always with Bruce. Because Bruce is good at this; Clark is a good researcher, it’s his job, but Bruce just gets the Kryptonian file system’s naming convention much more intuitively—
He has to pull himself up short, and now that he’s aware that it’s a physical pain, it stabs him that much more strongly when he thinks about Bruce.
J’onn can tell. “The Fortress,” he agrees.
-
When they activate it in the Fortress’ lab, Jor-El’s hologram takes one look at him and knows something’s wrong. Which is validating, in a way. “Kal-El. You are unwell.”
Clark nearly smiles. “Yeah.”
“We require your assistance,” J’onn says. “I believe the root of the illness is something specifically Kryptonian.”
The hologram motions him to the medical scanner, and Clark lets J’onn situate him in it to be looked over another time. “Can you tell what it is?”
He’s expecting Jor-El to need to research something, to go blank in the way the hologram does when he’s accessing the database. But the hologram takes one look at the scan and looks sharply back up at him. “Your spousal link is broken. Where is your bonded?”
Clark stares at him.
It takes a moment for his rational thoughts to process around the knife in his fucking throat at the word spouse, his left hand physically aching for the lack of anything there. It takes another minute for the relief to wash in, that Jor-El knows what’s wrong with him—before the confusion hits, properly. “My what?”
“Your bonded partner,” Jor-El says, impatient now, though that was not in fact the what Clark meant. “The one who usually accompanies you here, I assume. Your deterioration is due to his absence. Where is he?”
God.
“He’s dead,” Clark says. He can’t make it nicer, more elegant.
It’s the first time he’s said it aloud.
Jor-El’s whole manner changes, and the part of Clark that’s still remotely himself feels a savage, petty pleasure at it. His expression is shocked, saddened, as much as an advanced hologram can look. “I am sorry.”
He can’t handle any new condolences without breaking down, and J’onn knows it and moves them along. “What link?”
Jor-El pulls a relevant page of the archive up onto the holoprojectors. “Kryptonians mate for life. A bond is created when a mate is chosen—a biochemical link.”
Christ, if he thought spousal link hurt to hear, those four words are worse.
Kryptonians mate for life.
Clark’s legs don’t want to hold him up. He collapses into one of the lab chairs, covering his face with his hands. I know, part of him wants to say, insanely. He didn’t know, but he knew. Since the very first time he saw Bruce—that first glimpse of Batman in motion across the rooftops of Gotham, a living shadow protecting every life under his feet—he’s known.
It was only ever Bruce. It would only ever be Bruce, and now. Now.
“Please explain the biochemical link,” J’onn says, his voice dim in Clark’s ears under the rush of his own heartbeat.
“It derives from the Kryptonian limbic system,” Jor-El begins. “It was thus more difficult to engineer out of our genome than the need for biological reproduction. The limbic system creates a psi field similar to telepathy over prolonged exposure, and neurological receptors bond to the partners’ chemical signatures…” Jor-El keeps talking, and Clark lets it wash over him. The great thing about eidetic memory; he’ll play it back later when he can actually think around the inescapable fucking agony of knowing that there was a part of Bruce inside him, and it’s gone now.
J’onn nudges him mentally, a very gentle touch that conveys a great deal of worry, and Clark lifts his head, trying to tune back in. “If I understand you, Jor-El,” J’onn says carefully, “there is a…dependency, that is created, between the partners?”
“It would not have affected the human partner. But Kryptonian physiology adapts to incorporate their mate’s chemical signature into their own functioning, and to expect it.” Jor-El glances at Clark. “There is a…difficult period of adjustment, following separation. Some partners do not recover.”
Dependency, Clark’s thoughts echo belatedly. Adapts to expect it. He realizes what J’onn’s getting at.
“I’m in withdrawal,” he says aloud. J’onn and Jor-El both turn a pained, sympathetic eye on him, and yeah, he’s gotten there. “That’s what this is. I’m in withdrawal from…from Bruce.”
God. Fuck. He can’t even pretend that he’s not gone, because his body is screaming at him that he is. That he’s alone.
“Can we alleviate the symptoms?” J’onn asks.
Jor-El spreads his hands. “There is no set treatment. Most who suffer from the loss of a spousal link find some comfort immersing themselves in the remaining family unit. Beyond that, an artificial hormone supplement works for some Kryptonians, though not all. It is, unfortunately, a very difficult process to recover from the loss.”
“Kal-El has noted his powers requiring fine control are difficult to access at the moment.” J’onn steps closer to examine the archive page, still projected up. “Would such a supplement help?”
“It is possible. It would need to be derived from the partner’s DNA signature…”
Clark stares blankly at the archive page, his thoughts a sluggish river as they talk about how to fix this. How to fix him.
His spousal link.
He didn’t know about it while he had it, but it makes so much sense. The part of him that always had Bruce’s vitals in the back of his mind, that was always ready to drop everything and fly to him if he called—it was this. He knew they were better together than apart, and it was because they were. Because when he was with Bruce he was whole, and now he’s not.
There’s no grave for Clark to weep over, but—there’s this, this hollow place inside him that was only Bruce’s, that he can tend. He doesn’t get to show the world his grief, but he can carry it here.
“Clark?” J’onn touches his shoulder, very gently. “It will take some work, and some assistance, but I believe we can find a way to help.”
“Great,” Clark says tonelessly. “Thanks.”
J’onn gives him a look, sensing the strange reluctance in him, but doesn’t raise it in front of Jor-El. “You should go home. I will return to the Watchtower.”
Clark nods, but it’s a while before he can make himself get up and go.
Now that he knows what it is…maybe he can live with it.