#izzy.request

Then your vision shifts.

It sharpens like a camera lens, like someone cranked up the contrast on reality itself. The edges of the coffee table glow while every fleck of dust becomes a supernova. Every light source blazes, and you blink hard, trying to will it away, but instead end up with a white-hot band of pain cinching itself around your temples. Your focus tunnels to the nearest thing: Bruce's hand, resting on the back of the couch. His knuckles are grazed, his grip is white. You can see each individual skin cell, the variety of scars, and the infinitesimal pulse of blood beneath his nailbed. The heat comes next, building behind your eyes like you've swallowed the sun.

You think you're dying, and you scream. Loud, raw, and for a second, the men are worried that you've started burning your eyelids.

Somewhere in all of that chaos, Clark is beside you. He isn't frantic, thankfully not even close. His hand lands on your shoulder, warm and grounding, and his voice is impossibly steady. "Hey. Hey, look at me. Just me, don't focus on anything else." He says your name, over and over, low and even, trying to give you a baseline to focus on. Instead, it just becomes another note in the hurricane, lost somewhere in the noise.

You try, fuck you want to. But when you look at him, it's like the world splits open: Clark's face, the every subatomic tremor of his expression, the way his blue eyes glow with worry and something older and sadder underneath. And then the heat behind your eyes peaks, and you scream again, sharper this time, slicing clean through everything.

You don't even know you've done it until you smell burning.

It's chemical and wrong, scorched metal and ozone and something you can't name. The room goes red at the edges, and the couch is smoking. Bruce is gone — no, not gone, moving, throwing himself sideways with impossible precision. Clark doesn't move at all. He squares his shoulders and takes the full force of it, arms locked to his sides, jaw clenched so hard you think his teeth might snap. The heat vision, your heat vision, catches him directly in the chest. Where his shirt used to be, there's only charred and smoldering fabric, and underneath it a raw, angry burn already beginning to close.

The sound that comes out of you next isn't human. It's part sob, part animal shriek, and it tears your throat raw before you can stop it. You stagger back, hands up, helpless. You look for Bruce, he's fine, bridging the distance between you two, scanning you for injuries, already calculating the next move. His eyes are wild, but he isn't afraid. Not of you, never, not even now.

You try to speak, to apologize, to fucking say anything. You just hurt the love of your life, potentially hurting Bruce -- God, you could have killed Bruce!

The emotions and thoughts are working you up, you feel your heart beating, and it has to be filling the room with how loud it sounds to you. You're frantically glancing around, trying to calm yourself, unable to look into either of their eyes.

"I'm — I can't — I'm sorry —" The words trip over themselves, pile up, fall apart, and not nearly enough.

You want to run, hell, you almost do, but in the aftershock, your body refuses the order. Your limbs are waterlogged, your hands are shaking, and the cold thought underneath everything is louder than the sirens: you are not safe. You are a hazard, a ticking bomb in a person-shaped container, and you should get as far away from the people you love as possible. The only thing more terrifying than having hurt them is the knowledge that you could do it again. Without warning, and most certainly without meaning to.

You start saying as much, your voice rising, breaking, becoming a litany you can't stop. "I can't stay, I can't. Please, understand, I can't hurt you. I don't want to." Your hands feel like they belong to someone else. The air around you still shimmers with the afterimage of the blast.

Clark steps between you and the door, ready to block you. His arms come around you, and the warmth of him is almost enough to pull you back to earth. "Hey, listen to me. You didn't hurt me." His hands cradle your face, his thumb wiping something from your cheek — tears, or maybe blood, you honestly can't tell. "You didn't mean to. And I promise you, I've had worse. Sorry to tell you that you don't even rank." He laughs, not bitterly but genuinely, like this is a kitchen accident, not a supernova in the living room.

Behind you, Bruce's voice is so calm it's almost hypnotic. "It's okay. Eyes on the ground, don't panic, we're here. Breathe in for four, out for six." A pause, while you instinctually do as he says, focus on a bit of flooring that's slightly steaming still from the earlier explosion. "Good, that's good." Bruce is only a few in front of you, his shoes not coming into your periphery, but everything he's serving as he always has, your anchor, steadfast and reliable. "You're not going to hurt us. We know what's happening. This isn't permanent."

You don't believe him, not yet.

But the panic fades enough to let other things in. The feeling of Clark's heartbeat, steady and slow. The cold air on your back where you've singed a hole through your own shirt. The scratchy texture of the rug as they lower you to the floor, Clark's arms still around you and Bruce crouched close enough that you can see the stubble on his jaw, the focus in his eyes.

You try to hold onto the details: the pulse under Clark's wrist, Bruce's smooth breathing, anything to keep from floating away.

When you finally look up at Bruce, he's ready. His eyes are steady and unblinking. "You're not a threat," he says. "Not to us. Not ever."

And you realize he means it as much as Clark. They're both idiots, and you would burn the whole world for them.

"We're going to fix this," Clark says, quieter now, almost conspiratorial. He presses a quick kiss against your temple before continuing. "And until then, we help you control it. It's nothing we haven't handled before." He squeezes your shoulders with careful precision, like he's reminding you of the limits of your own body. Then, glancing at the twin scorch marks on both your chests: "Besides, I always wanted matching shirts."

You almost laugh, but it hurts and ends up sounding like a wheeze. You hear Bruce stand up to get you some water while Clark helps you calm down from the mini cough attack that started. There in the moment, you're allowing yourself to relax, letting the world shrink down to just your bodies and your hands and the warmth between you. You don't know what tomorrow holds, but for a few heartbeats, you're not afraid to find out.

--

That night sparks a new sense of unrest somewhere in the soles of your feet. You chalk it up to nerves, or the tremble of aftershock, the way adrenaline leaves your system raw and humming. There's a buoyancy to it, though. An alien kind of lightness, like waking up underwater and discovering gravity has skipped town.

You don't mention it, trying to relax between your partners, and forget about the trouble and the mishap. You were out on a mission with them earlier, and another underground group was trying to synthesize Clark's powers. They were successful in the way that it works. However, they had no clue that it did until they had injected you with it during the battle, knocking you out afterward so you couldn't tell anyone. Except, they hit way too fucking hard, and you didn't remember the fight at all.

They had taken you back to the Watchtower where they drew blood, but besides the concussion, there were no obvious signs of injury, so they let you go home to rest. Clark had just gotten the health report call when you woke up, quickly speeding over to take the blast of your heat vision.

The three of you are now packed into the couch; a human Tetris of warmth and limbs and old sweatshirts all braided together. Bruce is half-asleep, jaw resting against your hair, his breathing a slow and stubborn anchor. Clark sprawls on your other side, his hand near yours on the cushion, his pinky grazing your wrist. There are no words left between you; they were spent in the last hour, traded and emptied until silence became its own kind of comfort. For a few seconds, the world is quiet enough to trick you into thinking you imagined everything that came before.

Then Clark's hand finds your shoulder, soft as anything, humor evident in his voice. "Hang on," he says, voice pitched low, apologetic. "Not to alarm you, but…"

You open your eyes, and Clark is looking at you, but not quite at eye level. A little below it, actually, as if some trick of the couch has rearranged your heights while you weren't paying attention.

You blink. "What?"

He grins, sheepish, and hunches his shoulders in a boyish gesture that looks faintly ridiculous on a man built like a summer thunderstorm. "You're hovering," he says, almost fondly.

"You're full of it," you say, but you look down, and there it is, plain as physics: a few inches of nothing between you and the faded upholstery. A shadow stretched thin by the overhead lamp. Bruce's arm, still wrapped around your waist, is taut now, the fabric of his sleeve bunched at the shoulder. His feet are planted on the carpet, firmly, unmovingly, while yours are dangling an inch from the floor. Maybe two.

The panic floods you before the thought can finish forming, and it's as if your insides have been scooped out and replaced with helium and glass and the uncanny urge to be somewhere sturdy, grounded. The gap widens, and with a sick little lurch, it doubles, making your stomach turn over.

Bruce's grip on your waist cinches tighter, equal parts possessive and practical. His mouth is at your ear, voice steady as a metronome. "Stay calm."

"I'm not doing it," you say, which sounds ridiculous even to you. If not you, who?

Clark, for his part, looks delighted. Not smug, just genuinely entertained by the spectacle of a human balloon taking shape in his own living room. You can see the effort it costs him not to laugh, the way his jaw twitches with it. He floats up himself, just enough to keep pace, both hands open and out like he's spotting you in case you make a break for the ceiling.

"Control is the key," he says sagely. "Think heavy thoughts. Mass times acceleration. Bruce, before his first coffee."

"Not helpful," Bruce says.

Clark grins wider and says nothing. He just hovers a foot above the carpet, tracking your ascent like a very cheerful lifeguard at a pool no one else can see.

You reach for the armrest to find nothing but air. The gap is real and growing; you can see out the window from a height you've never had sitting down. You try to will yourself back to earth, brace every muscle, bear down with everything you have, but it makes no difference.

Bruce's arms never leave you, adjusting his position as you rise, eventually standing on the sofa to keep pace, all the while making quiet calculations with the same calm he uses to disarm bombs and dismantle supervillains. His thumb presses into your hip; a clear and present message. I'm not letting go, not for anything.

"This is…new," you manage, your voice climbing higher than you'd like.

"First time for everything," Clark says, bright as a sunrise.

You try to focus on your breathing the way Bruce taught you earlier, but the in-breath is thin and the out-breath catches on a laugh you can't hold back. You're floating, actually floating. If you stop to think about that, you'll probably pass out.

Then it happens again: you feel yourself bob upward, like a helium balloon on a long leash. Bruce's grip catches, but you feel his feet begin to leave the ground too, the center of gravity in the room shifting entirely.

Clark moves to intercept, palms open, the way someone coaxes a frightened cat from a tree.

"You okay?" he asks, close enough to read every flicker of panic on your face.

"Do I look okay?"

He shakes his head. "You look better than I did the first time."

Bruce, ever the pragmatist, begins strategizing aloud. "This is an emotional feedback loop. You panic, you gain altitude. Stay calm, you stabilize."

"Great," you say flatly. "So I just have to not think about the fact that I'm becoming a weather balloon in the living room."

"Precisely," Bruce says.

You try, you really do. You picture anchors, lead weights, the sheer gravitational pull of the Earth itself, but it's difficult to concentrate with both of them looking at you the way they are — like you're a miracle and a problem in equal measure.

Clark is the first one to break. He starts with a low, controlled chuckle, and then it builds, and then he's genuinely laughing, head thrown back, the sound filling the apartment and spilling warmly into all the corners. Even Bruce cracks — you feel it more than see it, the way his shoulders ease and he presses the curve of his smile into your shoulder.

"Look on the bright side," Clark manages. "At least you're not melting furniture anymore."

"Yet," you say, but the edge is completely gone from your voice.

With careful precision, Bruce maneuvers himself beneath you — a safety net made of muscle and quiet intention, both arms come around your waist, and for the first time you feel secure enough to unclench your fists from the air. You don't descend, but you don't rise either. Equilibrium, of a sort.

Clark drifts up alongside you both. "You're doing great," he says, hushed and entirely sincere. "Just let yourself adjust."

You take a slow breath and let yourself go soft. The world stops spinning, and there's a moment, maybe only a few seconds long, where you're suspended in perfect stillness. The only sounds are the whisper of fabric shifting and the distant murmur of city traffic far below. You close your eyes and let the new reality wash over you. When you open them again, neither Bruce nor Clark has looked away.

"You're not alone in this," Clark says.

Bruce doesn't echo it in words. He echoes it in pressure, a tightening of his arms, a grounding, a promise made without language. Eventually, you float back down, landing in a sprawl, limbs tangled, the three of you wedged together in a way that is almost comfortable and not quite. No one speaks for a long moment as Clark's hand finds yours, warm and steady. Bruce presses his forehead to the back of your neck and murmurs quiet, nonsensical things until your breathing slows all the way down.

Somewhere below, if you'd been able to see his face, you would have found Bruce wearing the expression of a man quietly, thoroughly revising every decision that had ever led him to this moment.