DCU: Untitled Identity Porn
7. The Damage
It had been a terrible night.
Bruce watched as Kent disappeared into his apartment building and forced himself to relax his hands, to pull the Veyron out of idle and slide it into the road and away from… from everything. From such an unmitigated disaster. He drove blindly, not wanting to return to his hotel room and thus at a loss amongst the clean, shimmering, art deco spires of Metropolis. Not home at all and he briefly considered driving back to Gotham right then, got halfway out of the city before he abandoned the idea as stupid and far too much like running away.
The situation wasn’t irredeemable. Yet.
Because the operation had been simple on paper. Winning Kent’s trust had been the easy part and Bruce had crossed it off as completed the moment he saw the man stumble into the restaurant. The next phase was to be more delicate; part conspiracy, part friendship, part seduction. Enough of whatever it took to worm his way just enough into Kent’s life to make the third phase — evidentiary analysis — possible. Luthor had been his in; Superman was his out.
Simple.
Except there was one thing he hadn’t considered.
In retrospect, it all boiled down to a matter of perception. Bruce had to admit it should have been obvious from the outset; Lord knew he’d had enough firsthand experience. Because all this time, even when he’d been planning around Kent, Bruce had to admit that the man he’d really been thinking of was Superman. And that had lead to certain… assumptions on his part. Dangerous ones. Because Bruce knew Superman; not well, of course, but enough. Enough to know he didn’t particularly like the alien; didn’t like the aura of altruistic compassion he radiated. Bruce had been through the dark heart of the Earth and he knew — as much as he knew anything — that it didn’t work that way. No-one, human or not, was that good without wanting something in return. Whether it was money or fame or power or revenge or love; there was always something. And that had always been the root of Bruce’s problem with Superman, because he didn’t seem to want anything. He never accepted money nor seemed to possess much that would require it. For a while Bruce had thought fame was possibly an issue; Superman was oddly helpful towards the press, who fed him good PR in return, but he was careful with them and in public appearances he almost seemed, well, shy. The manipulation was masterful, really; for such a public figure, shutting the press out completely would have been disastrous, so he fed them just enough to keep the headlines rolling in without actually giving anything useful away. Even the man’s name had been given to him by someone else.
Which would all make sense — be second nature, even — for a man with a journalism degree. Or someone with a good PR agent.
Not that Bruce could find one. He’d looked.
So it wasn’t money and it wasn’t fame. Power seemed even less likely; Superman was the most powerful force — forget about ‘being’ — on the entire planet, short of (maybe) the planet itself. He didn’t appear to have much temporal authority but that was seemingly by choice and that bothered Bruce. A lot. Because, once again, he didn’t know why. The reasons didn’t have to be elaborate, they only had to be there.
And this was about where Clark Kent came in and started to make things… messy.
Because Kent had spent the last few hours expounding, all very innocently, on his childhood and his family and his job and Bruce had asked just enough questions in just the right places to start to feel that Kent was a straight-out good man. Bruce had seen enough of the flip side of that equation to be able to smell it from a mile away. And his brain said, What happens when you take a good, honest kid from Kansas and give him the power of a god?
Bruce didn’t know much about super-powered aliens, but decent midwestern kids were less of a mystery.
And that was about where things started getting dangerous. The first hint of it had hit Bruce over the main course but he hadn’t been absolutely certain until their first coffee.
He enjoyed Kent’s company.
The man was open and honest and clever, if slightly clueless. He believed in old fashioned things like justice and the strong protecting the weak and respect being a hard won commodity. He bridled at corruption and cruelty.
And he talked. A lot. Enough to give Bruce the impression that he hadn’t really talked to anyone for a very long time. Kent had certainly had friends at one point, but the stories about them were mostly old; his recently anecdotes had almost exclusively mentioned ‘co-workers’ and ‘acquaintances’. Bruce knew all about self-imposed isolation but somehow Kent didn’t strike him as the type, because in those earnest blue eyes and nervous smile Bruce had seen…
He’d seen loneliness.
And that had changed everything.
Seducing Superman to prove a point had been an academic exercise and truth be told the morality of it hadn’t particularly bothered him; he did the same thing on a nearly weekly basis, had left a trail of heiresses both crushed and resigned and (yes, even) contented across half of America. He’d worked hard to have his reputation precede him — even before he’d had one — and he knew how to let a relationship cool with time and distance. And surely Superman of all people wouldn’t be at a loss for pleasant company.
And then there was Kent. Kent with his kicked dog expression and endless stories starting with, “Back on the farm…” that somehow always managed to end up being more interesting than any story starting with those four words had any right being. And Bruce knew — as much as he knew anything — that whether Kent was Superman or not was slowly becoming moot. Because offering any kind of relationship — friendly or intimate — to someone that lonely and that yearning without meaning it was… it was unconscionable.
Which meant Bruce had to abort. To back out of his original plan, or…
Or to try something wholly new and different.
He threw his car keys at the small flock of valets that had magically appeared outside the Halldorf as he pulled up and half-watched them attempt to discreetly squabble over it like a pack of red-and-gold hyenas. The hotel was exclusive but his car even more so and with a sigh he turned back to the group and handed over several neatly folded bills.
“Nothing illegal and I want a full tank of gas tomorrow,” he told the row of stunned, gaping faces. He walked off to a chorus of disbelieving thank-yous and ecstatic whooping; the car would be fine. There was no currency for boys like that in destroying something as beautiful to them as the Veyron, and now they all had a story to tell, too.
And even if the car didn’t come back at all? He had others. And next to the Tumbler they were all toys.
The hotel annoyed him. The concierge jumped up and raced to greet him with the over-enthusiastic friendliness spending a lot of money always brought out in service staff. He stalked past without acknowledging her, studiously ignoring the withering stare from Alfred, who was of course asleep a hundred miles away but was also, in a small part at least, watching him from the back of his mind.
Bruce decided mind-Alfred could go to hell; the hotel was an indulgent cascade of polished brass and Italian marble and thick red carpets and the stink of people getting away with things they shouldn’t simply because of the size of their bank accounts. A young black man in an antiquated uniform smiled and held open an elevator door as he approached, and Bruce had to fight a sudden urge to turn and run; to leave Bruce Wayne crumpled and abandoned in the hotel’s foyer and lose himself in Metropolis’ dark places. They’d be there, he knew, hidden under the gilt and the light; slithering beneath the bland, postcard skyline. He didn’t need this hotel with its endless staff and luxury spa and comfortable furniture and internationally renowned two-star chef. He could survive on dirt and blood and fear and cold forever and his hands ached to grab the bellhop’s jacket and shake and scream until the man and everyone else in the building knew that it was true.
Except he didn’t.
The elevator was made of glass and there was something exposed about that which put Bruce on edge. Exposed and gaudy and rising up into the skyline felt like ascending into some kind of Disney version of the future; a glimmering, retro-pastiche tomorrow envisioned by yesterday’s dreamers. The sort with jet packs and talking robots and machines that could produce whatever you wanted, whatever you wanted it and made crime obsolete until you caught sight of a streak of blue between the buildings and realised that it was all a lie.
And because Bruce was all alone he said, “Go to bed, Kent. You’ve work tomorrow.”
The elevator pinged.
By the time he got back to Gotham, things had deteriorated again. He still hadn’t decided what to do about Kent; Luthor was still a problem but Bruce knew it would be easy enough to close that off without things getting too messy. Superman, however, was another story. Kent yet another. He’d been studiously Not Deliberating over the issue for half a day when a trip down to the Cave had made up his mind for him with half a screen of red flags. He was monitoring certain aspects of Kent’s life — of course he was — not too obtrusively but just enough, apparently, and now something had happened. Something he needed to know about.
There were two things; the first were airline tickets and the second was a ping from the backdoor he’d wormed into the Daily Planet’s Exchange server. Re-routing all email would’ve been too risky — not to mention to heavy on his end — so he’d filtered it down to a few keywords and even fewer addresses. In the time it’d taken him to drive back from Metropolis, a score or so had tripped across a fairly short string of emails; that was a bad sign. The backdoor had been programmed to route copies of the flagged content through a string of anonymous proxies across five countries before finally dumping them all on an offsite server Bruce kept on a small Pacific island he’d bought specifically for the purpose. Well, that and a holiday retreat.
He might want to take a holiday. One day.
From the Cave it was then simple to tunnel his own way onto the island’s server — he could have gone direct, of course, but where was the fun in that? — boot up a shell and check the delivery.
Four emails, set between Kent and his editor this morning, explaining the plane tickets and… something else.
Bruce stared at the screens for a long time before finally, and very softly — just on the off-chance Alfred was nearby, even though he wasn’t — saying, “Shit.”