#cherry responds

He does not answer right away.

The cowl is off. That makes it worse. There is no mask to blame for the stillness of his face, only Bruce standing under the Cave lights with bloodless lips and haunted eyes.

“This isn’t real,” he says.

And it is quiet. That’s what kills. It is not shouted. It is not angry. It is almost soft, like he is begging the universe not to do this to him again.

Reader takes one step forward, and he takes one back.

UGH.

Because from her side? That hurts. She knows Bruce has trauma, she knows he is paranoid for good reasons, but she is so tired. She has spent months being brave in places where no one knew her name. She has dragged herself through alien battlefields and empty stars and probably had to make impossible choices just to get a route home. Maybe her ring kept translating foreign languages, but nothing translated loneliness. And now the one person she needed to believe in her cannot.

And from his side? He has already grieved her.

Maybe there was a failed search. Maybe Hal came back with his jaw clenched and said, “I’m sorry.” Maybe the League had a memorial because space does not always leave bodies. Maybe Bruce refused to attend, then watched the recording alone three days later. Maybe he kept her jacket in the Manor, her spare mug untouched, her Lantern insignia locked in a drawer he opened too often. Maybe he kept monitoring deep-space frequencies long after everyone else stopped calling it a rescue.

So when she comes back, it is not joy first.

It is terror.

Because if he believes she is real and she disappears again, he has to lose her twice.

There is also such delicious tension in the ring recognizing him before he can recognize her. Like the ring flickers and says, “Identity confirmed: Bruce Wayne of Earth,” or maybe it scans him automatically because she programmed him as home. And Bruce hears that and still cannot accept it because technology can be fooled.

He asks her questions. Horrible, intimate questions.

“What did you say to me before you left?”

Reader answers.

“What did I say back?”

She answers that too, but her mouth trembles because he had said something stupidly restrained, something like, “Come back safe,” when what he meant was, “I love you too much to survive this cleanly.”

Still, he does not move.

So she gets angry because grief is one thing, but being treated like a threat after fighting her way home is another.

“You don’t get to do that,” she says. “You don’t get to make me survive all of that and then stand there like I’m the part that hurts you.”

And that is what breaks him.

Not the proof. Not the scans. Not the ring.

Her anger. Her exhausted, wounded, deeply human anger.

Because a hallucination would be kinder. A trap would be neater. But she is angry in the exact way she gets when she is scared he has decided to punish himself instead of letting someone love him.

Then maybe Bruce finally reaches for her, but he does it like he is terrified his hand will pass through light. His fingers touch her wrist first. Pulse. Warm skin. A tremor that is not his.

And then he just falls apart quietly.

He does not sob dramatically. He presses his forehead to her shoulder and holds on too tightly, one hand locked at the back of her suit, the other around her waist like he can physically anchor her to Earth.

“You were gone,” he says.

“I know.”

“You were gone.”

“I know, Bruce.”

“I looked.”

That one destroys her.

Because of course he did. Of course he looked past reason, past hope, past every sensible end point. Of course he built a grief into a search pattern and called it discipline.

And she softens immediately, because underneath his cold reaction was the one thing Bruce cannot say cleanly: I missed you so much I stopped trusting reality.

The reunion could be so tender after the initial hurt. He checks her injuries with shaking hands. She keeps touching his face because she needs to prove he is real too. He tries to ask what happened, but she says, “Tomorrow,” because right now she cannot tell the story of how she survived. She can only be home.

And maybe later, when she is asleep in his bed for the first time in months, he stays awake with one hand against her back to feel her breathing.

Because he believes her now.