Aftermath of Bruce losing all his kids over the course of his career as a vigilante (they don't come back).
Clark tracks the heartbeat through Gotham's streets, his red cape a familiar sight to the twitching curtains seeking out the disturbance to their inky, black sky.
Moving slowly over the houses, he follows the sound of the Bat until his feet are brushing the tiles on the roof of the house just before where the alley opens it's gaping maw, waiting to swallow you whole.
He clenches his fists, and allows it to shroud him in its darkness, sinking down to the cobbled street until his boots disturb the gathering puddles from Gotham's perpetual rain.
Superman looks down at Batman, and nods sharply. Their height difference used to be a source of amusement; a giant man, dwarfed between a Kryptonian and an Amazon. Now, the Bat has never seemed so small. His shoulders rounded with age, bowed under the weight of his own fears throughout the years.
Beneath the vicious roll of thunder, the lightning cracking furiously across the thick clouds, Batman chuckles. "After everything. Why now?"
Clark groans slightly (human habit he trained himself to adopt as he aged) as he eases himself down to the ground. Being slumped against the wall certainly doesn't help with how small Bruce looks. And Clark finds that for this, there is no idea he despises more than being on an unequal footing with his old friend.
"You think I'd let you be alone?"
Bruce chuckles again, the sound roughr than it used to be, scraping up the walls of his throat on the way up. "Once upon a time...it would have been 'we'."
Clark looks away, eyes finding his own reflection in one of the puddles forming at his feet. Raindrops continue to pour down around them, breaking the surface again and again, and if Clark didn't know who he was looking at, he simply would not be able to tell.
Fitting. He doesn't really recognise himself, anyway.
"I didn't tell her," he confesses.
They don't talk much anymore, either. Once one of them left, the other two, without them... You cannot have a trio without your third.
Even if they promised to never let that happen.
Bruce's eyes bore into the side of his head, and Clark swallows, throat bobbing heavily. "And people say I am the one who lost himself," he says eventually, ending on a sigh. "Though I can't exactly fault them for it."
It's hard to find the way when your North Pole isn't there anymore, Clark thinks bitterly.
"What happened?" he asks, forcing the conversation to pivot. It's not like they have long, after all.
Bruce studies him for a second, those white lenses unfathomably intense, then the intense scrutiny disappears, and Bruce looks down towards the entirely different sort of puddle gathering around him, a painful, agonising red.
"What we've all been waiting for."
Two years since Cassandra died.
Two years since his last child was plucked from his grasp, and Bruce lost himself entirely to his mourning, burning every bridge that could be used to pull him out of the grief he was drowning in.
Two years since they gave up, and agreed to bury him next to his children.
"Are you happy?" His voice breaks, it feels harder to ask this question than it was to propose to Lois. Maybe that's because he didn't know if she would say yes, but he knows what answer will meet his ears from Bruce's lips.
Bruce eases back the cowl, and rests the back of his head against the brick wall behind him.
"I'm going to see them again."
I'm never going to see you again.
"I've missed them so much."
"Do you think..." Bruce hesitates, licks off the blood staining his lips. "Do you think they've been waiting for me?"
"I think," he croaks, "that you better stop procrastinating, and go find out."
Bruce smiles, laughs, and meets Clark's eyes.
Clark's world goes silent. For the first few seconds, he searches for that sound, that same sound that lead him here tonight, that same metronome he has lived the last decades of his life by, then he catches himself.
It's pointless to search for something that's gone.
He stands, unclipping his cape from his shoulders. The blood that seeps into the fabric immediately doesn't faze him, he doesn't plan to wash it out. Doesn't plan to wear it again. Superman—this Superman—dies with Batman. Maybe there will be another. Maybe he will be that other. But it will not be the same man he was before.
No. Nothing is the same as it was before.
Bruce does not fight being wrapped in Clark's cape, not like he always has. He can't anymore.
Only when he is tucked in nicely (where nothing can hurt him again) does Clark kneel in front of him, cupping the too-cold cheek of his best friend.
"Goodbye..." Friend is not enough. Yet they were never more. Clark closes his eyes, tight enough he wishes it hurt, and decides that no word is enough to encapsulate the man before him. No, only... "...Bruce."
