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Things clearly work differently in Gotham than they do in Metropolis. Clark has a lot of difficulty finding anyone that will talk to him about the Bat, and he’s progressively more sure it isn’t because they think he’s a myth. There’s no way a single man could intimidate an entire city so thoroughly, and there’s no way it’s only a single man, if the people really are all that afraid to talk about him.
That’s the thought that ends up leading Clark to looking into the gang situation in Gotham. He finds no sign that the Bat is an enforcer for any of the better known gangs, since as far as Clark can tell, he’s been involved in significantly damaging the operations of every single one of them just in the last few years.
Nor is he the headpiece for a whole gang of bat-themed criminals, which Clark could have guessed by how little evidence there is of him existing at all. And almost all of it got anonymously delivered straight to Clark’s desk, which he perhaps should have questioned more than he did. In hindsight, the nature of the pictures made him too incensed to go through all the normal steps he would have taken when verifying information.
Which of course lands him with the consequences - investigating Gotham gang activity without thinking it through. Not that Clark could have predicted how absolutely mad Gotham gets as soon as the sun goes down. The trouble he lands himself in isn’t really anything serious, just some men with guns that are very unimpressed with Clark asking too many questions.
The issue, though, is this—Clark Kent, the journalist, shouldn’t be bulletproof. And since he’s currently cornered in an alley by members of the Black Mask gang that have been kind enough to detail how they’re going to not only kill him, but also drive his body over to Metropolis and dump it there as a message, well. He could fake his way through getting shot, but he will not be able to keep up the pretense through the entirety of it.
Before he has to decide how to deal with it, something happens that breaks up the entire scene.
A dark shadow lands behind the men, so quiet it must be completely soundless to humans. Even with Clark’s eyesight, he can barely distinguish the shape of a man at the center of that blot of darkness.
So that’s the Bat.
Clark wonders if this is going to be a team-up between more than one group of people displeased by his investigation. He doesn’t have to wonder for long - the Bat moves so fast Clark can barely keep track of it, and in three seconds disarms the Black Mask members. In another three, he’s pushed them to one side of the alley and handcuffed them to a security gate that looks like it hasn’t been opened in years.
There’s a knife sticking in the Bat’s arm, and Clark can’t figure out which of the men got that lucky hit in, with how fast it was all over. The Bat doesn’t even wince, but Clark can smell fresh blood. Can see wetness gathering around the slash in the dark material that covers the Bat head to toe.
“Call the police,” the Bat growls in a voice tinged with some kind of mechanical noise Clark can’t quite filter out. He takes a step back and just like that somehow becomes one with the shadows.
“Wait,” Clark calls out, almost too startled by the speed of the encounter to do it before the Bat is gone. To his surprise, the Bat does pause, in the middle of turning his back on Clark and his attackers. “I have some questions for you.”
The first on the list is definitely the Bat’s involvement in the prison murders. The branding. But the Bat only stays still for another second, before raising his hand and hurtling away towards the rooftops as silently as he arrived, leaving Clark in the company of only his would-be murderers.
Clark does call the police, who take a good long while to arrive, and look wholly uninterested and unsurprised when Clark describes being rescued by the Bat.
“Another one for Batman,” one of the officers tells someone, when Clark is so far away he shouldn’t be able to hear him.
“Dammit. Well, that’s one over my number for this month. Who has the next bet after mine? Troy? Think he’ll win?”
“Nah, we still have a while to go. Unless Batman takes a vacation, we'll get more of these.”
“He’s been more active lately—”
Clark stops eavesdropping when they get in the car, but he gets the gist. Getting saved by the Bat, the Batman, is not as uncommon as Clark would have expected by his inability to find sources. He hadn’t been ready to consider a protectiveness borne out of gratefulness as the reason for people’s silence. After seeing the brands, who would be?
And there’s also the Batman himself—his voice being the way it is could just be the work of some device, but the way he moved… Clark has never seen anyone move that way. No one human. He’s been active for years and years, as far as Clark can tell, and apparently is only speeding up not slowing down. Maybe- Batman isn’t like Clark, but maybe Kryptonian—maybe that’s not the only thing out there. Maybe the Batman is something else, too.
Clark takes a good long moment to berate himself, when he realizes all of his newfound fascination has overshadowed the most important part. The Batman’s cruelty. The deaths directly caused by his actions.
But the Bat Clark encountered didn’t seem like a rabid animal, nor a man pushed by only hate and violence. He saved Clark without a single unnecessary move. Without taking any kind of enjoyment in hurting the people he stopped, not even when he got hurt in the process. Hurt in the process of saving Clark—a stranger at best and someone poking his nose into the Bat’s business at worst.
Maybe Clark just met him on a good day, but even so, it makes him think there’s more to it than just what the photos wanted him to focus on.
And if that’s so, he should be working all that much more not on just the Bat story, but on figuring out who sent him the lead as well.
So that’s how Clark’s first encounter with the Bat happens. Very fast, barely lasting a full minute from start to finish, and it leaves Clark with many more questions than answers.
The investigation sucks him in to the point where he starts to see it in his dreams as well, but he figures that’s normal when faced with a mystery he can’t figure out how to solve. When he really digs into it, starts putting together not just halfway reliable, but also very questionable sources, and eavesdrops so much he constantly feels he should be apologizing to someone, he finds an—immense, impossible number of people saved by the Bat. Quietly, to never be spoken about afterwards. Not exactly the work of the monster staring at Clark from the pictures of branded bodies. So how can both of them be true?
Then he dreams of their meeting, mostly just that moment when he called out and the bat-shaped darkness paused, stopped for him. In the dream it feels significant somehow, and the moment stretches out in slow-motion, every detail dragged straight out of Clark’s super-human sense memories, and then dialed up to eleven. The shadows surrounding the Bat seem almost alive, flickering, impatient to pull him in and hide him. And Clark speaks again, the words distorted like they’re coming from underwater.
And in the dream he knows this is the most important part—what comes after that. The Bat turns away, into the shadows, slowly. But before he disappears back into the darkness he came from, Clark sees his face, his jawline and mouth, the only part of him that doesn’t completely hide there’s a person underneath the mask. In the dream, as Clark watches, the Batman smiles before he turns away completely. Just an upward curl of his lips, faint but impossible to look away from.
The knife stuck in Batman’s arm gleams red even when everything around it is darkness, and the Batman smiles ever so faintly. At Clark.
“Jesus,” Clark breathes the moment he wakes up. “Goddammit.” He lies in his bed, looking at the faint cracks in the ceiling and knows he’s lost. He was lost the moment the persistent darkness that suffuses Gotham against all the laws of physics spit the Batman out right in Clarks path.
Clark knows then and there that he’s lost all ability to claim any kind of impartiality, if he ever could in the first place. Still, he doesn’t completely give up the idea of putting together a story until he decides to search the Batman out as Superman.
His first attempt at striking up something goes horribly wrong. The Batman seems to completely lock up, and Clark gets the distinct impression he would freeze stiller than a statue, if he wasn’t in the middle of a fight. Clark tries to help, which is also a mixed success, but he thinks he does okay.
When everyone with a gun is out cold, but all still breathing and with no serious injuries that Clark can detect, Clark lands next to Batman. He desperately wants to ask if Batman’s arm is okay, but Superman shouldn’t know about that. He decides to start with some basic ‘what’s up with these heavily armed men attacking you’ smalltalk, but he only gets as far as, “So—”.
The Batman disappears. Clark blinks, and even with all of his abilities, he has to exert himself to figure out where the Bat disappears to. (It’s the roof which seems like a running theme, and the Batman has a plane of some kind, because why wouldn’t he? Clark is so lost.)
The second time he tries, he manages to get the Batman to actually talk to him. Well, for a given meaning of ‘talk’.
“Stop interfering,” the Batman growls, and his voice reminds Clark of the taste of iron. Clark shoots up, drags the last of the snipers—wow, Gotham really isn’t like anywhere else Clark has ever been—down to the ground and ties him up lightning fast.
“I’m trying to help you.” Clark breaks the sniper rifle in half and drops it at Batman’s feet. He hopes it doesn’t look as much like a grotesque offering as it feels.
“Don’t.” That’s it, that’s Batman’s entire response.
Someone shoots at Clark, several bullets flattening against him and falling down on the ground. Batman throws some kind of bladed weapon over Clark’s shoulder, and the bullets stop. Clark takes a second to check that the shooter is just disarmed and not dead, and then turns back to the Batman.
“So tell me what to do, if I’m doing this all wrong,” he says, half exasperated and fully honest. Batman doesn’t look like he believes what he’s just heard, but Clark would absolutely follow his lead in this. If even part of what Clark has found is true, the Bat has decades of experience on him. Why wouldn’t Clark listen to him?
Within reason, of course. He still keeps going back to those pictures time and time again, when he’s feeling particularly fixated. To remind himself that the Batman who branded those people is just as real as the one standing before Clark right now.
But then, the Batman that didn’t brand people was around at least a couple of decades longer, and that Batman, whoever, whatever he is, knows better than Clark. Clark would have killed to have someone like that tell him what to do, how to fight when Zod—
Clark looks away from Batman’s unnaturally still form. When he looks back, the Batman is gone.
Back home, Clark sleeps and dreams of the Batman standing in the way of knives meant for him, and then the bullets that Clark so easily caught today as well. The Batman of his dreams isn’t like Clark; he bleeds and falls. The dream ends with him burning up in a bright red light.
Clark decides to forego sleep for a couple of days. It’s not like he doesn’t understand the various things that dream tells him about himself. He doesn’t need an encore.
The third time, which is the first time Clark can really say they work together, they’re saving people from a burning building. Clark knows about it because he’s started keeping an ear out specifically for things happening in Gotham. It’s how he makes it in time to save the residents when an apartment building goes up like it’s made of matchsticks. This once he isn’t thinking about the Bat. But he runs into him anyway, when they crash into the same apartment through different windows. There’s no time to stop and stare at how otherworldly the Batman looks even in the bright orange light of a raging fire.
Clark just asks, “Can you take the upper floor?” Because Superman is heat resistant, and he doesn’t know if Batman is as well. There’s some kind of smoke filtering device over his mouth, so maybe not. And with the dreams Clark has been having, he’d really rather not put it to test.
When the Bat nods, Clark grabs the old lady and the cat she’s struggling to pull out from under the bed in the next room, and flies them outside. And then gets back and grabs the next person closest to the blaze.
He meets Batman again, looking slightly worse for wear, when everyone else is out. He’s near-invisible in the shadows of a nearby rooftop, and Clark lands close to him as silently as he can, to not attract attention to the Bat’s hiding place. He’s never before considered that there might be some advantage to having a less bright and flashy costume. Every other Kryptonian he’s met had—
Anyway. Clark finds the Batman, and this time he doesn’t immediately disappear, though everything about his carefully unreadable stance screams ‘wary’. But it also seems like in extremely poor taste to start in on that list of questions he’d like to ask the Bat while they’re still within full view of the flames. Not when Clark knows neither of them got there in time to save everyone.
“Anything else I can do?” he asks, subdued. He doesn’t expect a real answer, even having first-hand experience that the Bat can speak. The Bat stares at him silently for what feels like a long time. It should unnerve Clark, but he turns the thought over in his mind and decides it’s only fair, after how much time Clark has spent replaying the memories of their previous meetings. The Batman doesn’t have the advantage of overly vivid alien memory, probably, so he gets to stare at Clark the regular way.
“Don’t get in my way,” the Batman says in the end, in his strangely metallic growl. Clark isn’t too surprised, nor insulted. He figures this is the kind of thing that ends with Batman branding someone, and right this moment, looking through the flames and what’s under them, Clark would feel like a hypocrite if he argued against it. So he nods again, and flies away as quietly as he landed.
He figures out only days later that he was wrong. What the Batman actually meant was he’d be branching his nightly activities all the way to Metropolis.
Clark is so startled when he finds Batman in his own city that for a while he just hovers mid-air and watches him. And finds out that the unnatural-to-a-city darkness seems to have followed the Bat too. Somehow he finds shadows to melt into where there really shouldn’t be any, as he makes his way through a building, disables the security systems, or Clark guesses that’s what he does, and does something to a computer in one of the top floor offices.
That night Clark doesn’t interfere, no matter how much he wants an excuse to try talking to the Bat again. Instead he makes note of where exactly the Bat broke into, and researches the place in daylight.
It takes so much digging that he never would have done it if he didn’t know there has to be something to find. But in the end he finds an absolutely atrocious chain of embezzlement and safety violations, coupled with gambling debts and organized crime ties that all converge around the building fire.
It feels a little bit like cheating to get an article out of it, but Lois says he did all of the work and has the duty to let people know. He wonders if the Bat reads the newspapers, and if yes, what he thinks about Clarks article. Does he like the crimes getting exposed? Is he cursing Clark’s name for possibly interfering with his own plans for delivering justice?
Two nights after the article, and in a coincidence Clark finds hilarious also on Halloween, the Batman makes another appearance in Metropolis. Clark has been expecting something like this—there are threads that he couldn’t quite tie to the whole plot without sliding purely into baseless speculation. People directly at fault that are not going to go down for it or even get linked to it in any way. And if Clark knows it, Batman probably knows a hundred times more.
He finds Batman jumping out the window of a thirtieth-floor office and almost has a heart attack. But the Bat can apparently glide so well he looks like he’s flying. He lands on the edge of possibly the only building in the whole city that has the inexplicably gothic look of every place in Gotham. It can’t possibly be a coincidence, but Clark can’t quite imagine Batman planning out his night to make sure he only sulks on sufficiently gloomy rooftops.
Oh God, maybe he does.
Clark cannot believe he is this gone on someone like that.
He lands near the Bat just in time to see a small pack of masked kids wave at the Batman. Apparently even the shadows he carries with him aren’t enough to hide him completely in somewhere as bright as Metropolis.
“I thought I told you to stay out of my way,” the Bat says before Clark’s feet even fully touch the ground.
“Aren’t you done?” Clark asks, a lighthearted challenge.
Batman doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t tell Clark to leave, so it’s as good as an invitation to stay. Clark watches curiously as Batman keeps looking at the building he’s just left through some high-tech version of binoculars. After another gaggle of small children notice the unnatural shadow on the edge of the roof and happily wave at it, Clark can’t stop himself from commenting.
“I didn’t know you had any other fans in Metropolis,” Clark says, and hopes the Batman is in a good enough mood not to disappear again, just for that.
“Other fans.” Batman’s voice has so little inflection it should be impossible. He lowers the binoculars and finally turns and looks at Clark.
“Well, you know, I just meant—other than me.”
For a second they look at each other and Clark - Clark is so glad he realizes how that sounds too late to start fumbling for some kind of awfully embarrassing save. He smiles, maybe a little too sheepishly, and doesn’t try to walk it back. He knows they’ve barely exchanged a handful of sentences, but with how fixated he’s become, the Bat would figure him out sooner rather than later anyway.
“You.” The Bat’s voice actually seems to waver in disbelief, even with the metallic overlay, when he continues. “You are a fan of me.”
“I mean, I’m not a fan of everything you do. There’s a lot of stuff I strongly disagree with,” Clark defends himself. “It’s just—”
He trails off, but his gaze keeps wandering, lingering on the lines of Batman’s jaw, even though Clark does his best to keep looking him in the eyes. Surely more damning, he keeps not quite stopping himself from looking at Batman’s mouth.
There’s a strange kind of static from somewhere inside Batman’s mask, and then silence.
“So… The thing you’re definitely done with—you want any help with it?” Clark asks. He’s trying not to drown in his own desperation to take the conversation somewhere else before the silence goes on so long the ground swallows him.
Batman’s response is faster than any other time before. “Yes.” He looks strangely like he’s surprised himself more than Clark. And Clark wonders how he can tell, since he can’t name a single outward change in how the Batman looks. Maybe he’s imagining human expressions where there aren’t any.
“Okay.” Clark steps closer to Batman and looks up at the building. “Are we just staring at the windows tonight, or?”
When Batman doesn’t answer, Clark turns his head and—they’re right next to each other. Batman is examining Clark like he’s trying to figure something out, and Clark—can’t help it. His eyes slide down, to the line of Batman’t mouth.
When he looks up it seems they’re suddenly even closer than before. Batman slowly raises his hand and puts it on Clarks shoulder, and when Clark stays absolutely still to not accidentally do anything to stop him, slides it further until he’s gripping the back of Clark’s neck. Clark doesn’t know if it’s the strange texture of the glove or the increasing pressure of the grip that makes him shiver, turns his exhale into a sigh.
Batman watches him, even as the grip tightens to levels that would be very dangerous to a human. To someone with breakable bones. To Clark it feels good. Warm. Like he’s being touched by someone that knows him, really knows him. He only smiles when Batman draws him closer by that almost inhumanly strong hold.
They’re breathing each other’s air. Clark glances down again.
The Batman’s mouth feels as human as it looks, and he has definitely figured Clark out.
The kiss feels like another vector of attack—the Batman switching tracks after Clark’s reaction to the hand on his neck was not what he expected. But the thing is, Clark falls into it easily and completely. It’s exactly what he’s wanted since he saw the barely-there smile on Batman’s lips. Just like the bruising grip, the kiss makes Clark shiver in a very human way. He doesn’t mind the attempt to kiss him into submission at all.
Clark loves how honestly the Batman kisses him.