Archive of Our Own

The first time he remembers purring he’s very young. It’s naptime and his mother is holding him on her lap in the summer sun, and he feels so warm and cozy that he snuggles himself close. Her hand is stroking his hair when the first little rumble rises from his chest. Mommy’s hand pauses for a second before resuming her soft, slow stroking of his hair.

She doesn’t purr back.

His breath hitches a little, a stutter in the rumble. She loves him, he can feel it, but - she’s not. She can’t. jeje. Uku. gone -

He curls a little tighter into Mommy’s worn jeans, purring a little louder, wishing.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mommy says quietly. “It’s all right. Um…” She gathers him closer and rocks him on the porch chair, and then she starts humming. A little song, one she’s sung before to him, one Daddy’s sung. And it’s not the same - but it’s… it’s close enough to know. Maybe jeje ch’ uku will come back but until then it’s close enough, and Kal - and Klahrk lets out a heavy little breath and thinks to himself that Mommy would purr back to him, if she could.

He’s almost asleep when Daddy pulls into the driveway. He thinks about stopping, but… he feels safe. Truly safe, for the first time since the long cold dark, when he’d had only the echo of that sound from jeje ch’ uku but none of this warmth of being held in the sweet strange sun. So he closes his eyes again.

“Ssh,” Mommy says, when Daddy comes up the porch. For a moment he thinks Mommy’s talking to him and he tries to hold it back, but then Daddy gives a questioning sound and he realizes Mommy’s talking to Daddy, so he carries on.

“Is… is he snoring, or purring?” There’s a smile in Daddy’s voice, a warm smile, and Klahrk wiggles just a little. Mommy’s heartbeat catches, but it catches in the way it does when she sees him coming home from the store with Daddy, so it’s nothing to worry about.

“Who knows?” Mommy says, and kisses the top of his head, and the little rumble fills the space between them and folds in Daddy too. He falls asleep like that, finally, heart calm and still.

—

Clark gets the inhaler when he’s six, when Pete’s new cat finally warms up to him and presses her face against his thigh and all of a sudden he’s sobbing. Allergies, Mom says, and whisks him away and holds him and hums until he feels better.

—

“Clark, dear. Can I come in?”

“Yeah,” Clark says happily, looking at everything he’s packed. Toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, pajamas, change of clothes, inhaler. That’s got to be everything.

Mom comes in with a mug of Sleepytime tea and Clark sniffs the air and smiles. There’s three spoons of sugar in there, just how he likes it.

“We’ve got to have a special talk,” Mom says. He must make a face because she quickly says “Not a big one, sweetheart, nothing’s happened.”

“We already had a special talk about tonight,” Clark says. “I remember everything.”

Mom sits on the end of his bed and offers him the mug. He’s about to drink when he remembers, and, carefully, gently, fakes blowing across the top because it’s too hot for norm- for most people. He smiles at Mom. He can do this.

Mom smiles back at him and ruffles his hair. “I know you do, baby. It’s just one more thing I forgot to mention. And it’s not a big thing.”

Clark sips the tea, intrigued. Most things they talk about in special talks are big things.

Mom folds her hands on her lap, which means the special talk is beginning. “It’s about the purr.” Clark blinks. “I know you don’t do it often, but it’s usually when you’re going to sleep, and this is your first sleepover.”

Clark nods seriously. “I won’t do it, Mom.”

She smiles at him. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” He nods, determined. “I…” He bites his lip just a little, embarrassed, but it’s a special talk so it’s important to be honest. The warmth of the tea in his hands is comforting; he takes a sip and it helps to feel that warm in him. “It’s… it’s not when I go to sleep. It’s when you and Dad tuck me in. It’s a, it’s a family sound.” He looks down. “Safe sound.”

“Clarkie,” Mom says, and pats the bed right next to her. He scootches over and she puts an arm around his shoulder and kisses the top of his head. “I love you.”

He’s totally got enough control not to do it, but the ghost of the feeling rises in his chest as it always does when he hears her say that. “Love you too,” he says instead, and hums low and happy the way hu- the way other folks do instead. “An old asthma symptom?”

She kisses his head again. “Perfect. That’s all, darling.”

Clark downs the rest of the tea in one go and sticks his finger in the bottom to scoop up the undissolved sugar. Special talk is over. “I think I have everything.” He knows Mom is gonna check anyway.

Mom cranes her neck to look through his bag. “Toothpaste?”

He pats the side pocket proudly. Dad’s turning the corner to Siegel Drive. Clark pops off the bed, zips the bag up, and hooks it over his shoulder. The Rosses expect him at seven, and Dad’s picking him up at ten tomorrow. In between he’s gonna hang out with his best friend, and he’ll be on his best behavior in both ways. Normal ways and special ways. He can do this. He’s not going to make a mistake. And even if he does make a little mistake, he knows that Mom and Dad love him, and he knows how to explain it away because of the special talks.

Mom smiles at him and holds her arms out for a hug. He goes in happily, standing on his tiptoes to tuck his head under her chin, and just a little of the sound slips out.

—

Clark discovers two other noises in high school. Both of them are because of Lana. In the same place, even - both of them under the tree on the border of the Kent and Lang farms.

One. It’s not the first time they’re kissing, but it is the first time they’re kissing a lot. And it’s really good. All the movies make a lot more sense now. Her hands are on his back and his waist, so it’s okay to put his hands on her back, noses brushing between kisses as he revels in being allowed to be in the same space as her. His senses are alive, tasting her chapstick, feeling the warmth of her fingertips as they tease at the hem of his t-shirt.

And something is working its way out of his throat.

He barely manages to choke it down by pulling away, almost falling over himself in the process. “Sorry, sorry - I uh-” spills out instead. 

Clark can see her little swallow clear as day, the blood moving hot in her cheeks. Her eyes are bright as she reassures him it’s all right, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

He says sorry again. She asks him if it was all right. He says yes. He thinks it was more than all right, he just doesn’t know if he’s all right. He should…

He doesn’t know what he should.

He asks, tentatively, if they can take it slow, and she says of course, and with a quick goodbye hug she’s making her way back to her house, and Clark touches his throat and swallows.

It’s hard to listen to himself, to figure out what it is, because he’s - aware of himself, and that makes him not want to make the noise. It takes a tape recorder borrowed from Ms. Kaye’s music classroom, a blank tape Mom mercifully doesn’t ask why he needs to buy, and a 1AM session alone in the barn loft when all of Smallville is asleep before he’s unselfconscious enough to let the low, low scrape-growl-something spill out as he comes. He plays the tape back once and then, ears flushing, incinerates it with his new heat vision. There’s no way he’s passing that off as an asthma symptom.

It’s just another thing he’ll have to keep hidden.

Two. It’s three weeks before their high school graduation and Lana’s eyes are bright again, but this time it’s because she’s saying goodbye. It’s not him. It’s not his secret, which she knows, which he’s finally been brave enough to tell her. It’s hers.

It’s just that - she’d tried to hide it, she’d tried to be the good farm girl, she’d - and god, Clark, you can’t tell anyone about this at all - but -

“Believe me, Lana,” he whispers into her hair as she hugs him tight, burying her nose into his flannel, “I’m pretty good at keeping secrets,” and they both laugh wetly.

At least he knows for sure that this is all right. That she’ll be all right. That at UCLA she’s going to be happy, she is going to find the girl of her dreams. They’ll be able to go out. They’ll be able to hold hands without Smallville eyes staring at them. He tells her so, and she smiles a watery smile and kisses him light and closed mouthed on the lips, best friend to best friend, like that goodbye kiss years ago.

“You were - you were safe, Clark. Thank you for that.”

After her screen door creaks shut, he rises far into the sky. Slowly at first, gathering speed, until the air’s thin and won’t carry sound far. And then he lets the new thing in his chest out.

It’s not her fault - he would never blame her, not ever. It’s just that he doesn’t know what to do with the grief rising in him. The end of an easy idle fantasy he hadn’t known he’d still wanted. Of a quiet life, a simple life, a white-picket life of combined farms. A life with the only girl he’d ever been brave enough to show what he was. A life never having to leave home.

So he hangs there alone above the midnight blue curve of the Earth, and lets the high cold harmonic of alien grief shiver the sky.

In retrospect, perhaps the timing was for the best. Six weeks later when he’s standing stiff by his mom at the cemetery watching his dad’s casket being lowered into the ground, he knows what sound it is that claws at his chest to be let out. Knows its unmistakable inhumanity. He’s able to claw it right back, freeze it, trap it in his chest. At the end of the day, when the Rosses have left and they’re alone, Mom leans against him on the couch, and instead of the awful screech-keen of loss he’s able to focus on her, to focus on how she’s still here, to summon up a wet, quiet little purr as they hold onto each other, and let the tears go.

—

It gets easier. A lot easier, after that awful summer. His control gets better and better. With some practice, he’s able to shift around his… well, he’s not sure what to call them, since they’re not the same as human vocal chords. Most of his organs he can look at - it’s disconcerting, but instructive - but he can’t exactly turn his eyes to the back of his throat.

Besides, he’s not often in a position to make any of the sounds. At least not where other people can hear them. That low sound of arousal - well. He… his anatomy would make his inhumanity immediately apparent, and that’s not something he can bring himself to show to any casual partner. So he’s gotten very good at staying quiet. The grief keen is the sharpest, the one that hurts the most, the most alien, but he’s fortunate enough to rarely be in a position of deep grief. It teases at the back of his throat sometimes when he gets lonely, but… well, he can cry just like a human too, and that satisfies the need.

The purr is the only one that comes up. He purrs for Mom when he visits home. He’s glad there’s a safe sound. He’s glad that when he hugs her she always hums back to him in the best imitation she can.

Then, well, then Mom and Dad are together again.

—

Clark has not made any alien sounds in years.

It’s not like he’s never… tempted isn’t quite the word. It’s not like he never feels the ghost of the feeling in him. In fact it comes up more often than he’d like. It’s cats. They’re the problem.

Well, they’re not the problem. He’s the problem. He likes cats. He rescues them from trees, sometimes. In the beginning, when he’s still trying not to be seen, quietly and quickly, which makes them very unhappy. Even when he finally dons the cape, steps into the full Metropolis sun as Superman, and doesn’t have to move at eye-blurring, near-invisible speeds anymore, most cats are still not happy at being plucked from a tree by a stranger who doesn’t smell quite human. So they don’t usually purr at him, and when they do, all it provokes is a distant hollowness in his chest.

Then Clark Kent, newest cub reporter at the Planet, is assigned a fluff piece on the animal shelter, and it’s hard. It’s really, really hard, when there’s nine kittens in the room all purring and half of them are climbing up and down his cheap Goodwill suit. He has to close his eyes to focus enough to hold it back.

“You really are a sap, Smallville,” Lois says fondly, the mother cat Wonton curled up in her lap, also purring away. “I can’t blame you, though. They like you.”

“Mmh,” he manages. It’s good, almost, to have Lois there. It lets him focus on her, and her human laugh, instead of the contortions in his throat. Noodle loses her footing and almost takes a tumble off his shoulder, so Clark wrestles back enough control to catch the kitten, opening his eyes again. “What, uhm, happened to their financial records?”

Lois squints at him. “Come on, Kent. Even you couldn't have possibly bought that-“ She breaks off when a corner of his mouth twitches up. “Oh thank God. I would have had to fire you as my junior hanger-on if you couldn’t see through that.”

He wrestles his throat into a “M-hmm?”

“So all it takes to relax you is covering you in kittens. I’ll remember that,” she declares.

Clark strokes Noodle’s back lightly, and she arches into his palm, rubbing her little face on his knee. He’s not sure he could survive going through this regularly. He feels the vibration in his bones, and sits with the feeling a few seconds until he can let it pass over him.“So,” he says, very humanly. “The court clerk hasn’t gotten back to you yet, your interview with the mayor isn’t until three, you’re ahead on all of your deadlines, and you admit that even, I quote, a hack from Nowheresville can cover this story alone. So…”

“So?”

“You came to pet cats on Planet time.”

Lois gives him a grin and a mock salute.

—

When he finally - finally - unlocks the full encyclopedia, gapes as spires rise from the Arctic, steps inside and hears the welcome both unfamiliar and familiar, purring is not the first thing on his mind. First is the language, and the recording of his birth mother and father. Ieiu and Ukr. He can finally understand what happened. Why they sent him away. Why they had to.

Clark - Kal-El - spends weeks and weeks, every moment of his spare time, learning about Krypton. Learning about the people - his people - that once were.

The purr is called urvishulahdh. The cultural anthology tells him that it can be used to calm children, or even as a self-soothing mechanism, but it is most common between family and close friends as an expression of contentment, tranquility, peace. Clark stares at the 3D anatomy diagram of the throat, the auxiliary cords layered underneath the human-like main set, as they slowly vibrate, and asks the Fortress in broken, halting Kryptonian to play the associated audio. And play it again. And again and again and again.

It’s not right there’s no physical vibration the sound file is compressed but it’s-

-and he wants to return it but his throat is tight and choked and years of forcing it down - it’s too far down and it won’t come out -

Eventually, his accent gets too muddled for the database to recognize the repeat command.

—

“Mr. Pennyworth,” he says, tightly, clearly. “This is an emergency.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then Mr. Pennyworth says “Superman?”

“I need you to start counting out loud. Do not hang up, just count out loud. I’m coming to you.”

To his credit, the man doesn’t ask for clarification. “One. Two. Three.”

Clark focuses intently, bending his hearing along the phone line, listening for the echo. He knows the man’s in Edinburgh, he just has to -

There.

“Keep counting,” he says, and drops the phone. He goes, honing in on those steady numbers, and only slows down enough to be sure all the glass in the vicinity won’t shatter from his arrival as Mr. Pennyworth breaks off in the middle of saying twenty-two. “I need your reserve Scarecrow antidote.”

The moment Mr. Pennyworth grasps his words, his eyes flick to a valise. Clark follows his line of sight to see the hidden compartment full of neatly labeled vials.

“Take me to them.”

Clark already has the antidote in hand, wrapped in his cape to protect it. “I fly faster alone. I’ll come back once-“

“Understood. Go.”

It’s an order. Clark nods. Holds the bundle flat to his chest, and hurls back across the Atlantic, honing in on those two pounding heartbeats.

Dick and Bruce are still where he’d left them, on the floor of the Batcave. He reads the emergency medical files, draws the right doses while slowing to human speed. The last thing they need is more of the supernatural to be afraid of.

At the sudden blur of his arrival, Bruce’s heartbeat spikes, and he pulls himself into a low crouch. He’s trying to put himself between the little form and Clark.

“Dick,” he says softly, approaching. “Bruce.” Twin heartbeat spikes. Dick’s eyes are wide and still behind his mask, his body frozen except for his hands twitching flat on the ground like he’s trying to reassure himself it still exists. “I have the antidote. I’m going to hold you down, inject it, and release you.” He’s not sure how many of the words will make it through the frenzy, but he hopes it’s enough.

It’s not enough. Dick stays still, mercifully, as Clark administers the drug. But Bruce - he’s been given time to react, to struggle away, and worse, Clark needs to take the cowl off to access his carotid artery. Doing this at human speed is just giving him more time to fear. So Clark silently asks forgiveness and pins him to the ground in a blur, holding his head in place.

The horror in Bruce’s pale wild eyes drops Clark’s heart into his chest even though he knows he’s done the best he can. Bruce struggles against him uselessly, lower body twisting and thrashing, and Clark lets go and backs away once he’s done. Bruce’s head swings between Dick’s frozen form pressed up against a stalagmite and Clark. Then he starts crawling towards Dick.

Clark watches, tight and tense. The new strain is both more effective and, as they’d just discovered an hour ago, skin-absorbent. The margin for error on the antidote is unforgiving. They had gone over protocol when Bruce had looped him into the investigation two weeks ago. Including protocol for him, as if the Scarecrow would somehow come up with a Kryptonian-effective toxin. If their heart rates haven’t come down at the five-minute mark, he has to administer the overdose. Until then, he’s not supposed to make any motions, interfere at all. He’s supposed to watch. Observe. Outside stimulation, Bruce had tersely explained, usually provokes more fear. That’s the protocol.

Bruce is still going to hate him for seeing him like this. He’s not going to admit it, but even though they’ve only known each other a few months, Clark already knows that much about the man shaking out of control on the cold cave floor.

Bruce has reached Dick, clawed his way to him, reaches out to him with trembling hands. His eyes are fixed on Dick’s throat, at the little prick mark Clark had made. With a dull burn, Clark realizes he’s seeing far more. Far worse.

Dick flinches as Bruce’s gauntlets brush his throat.

Bruce draws back, swallowing over and over again. He pushes back the cowl, and then he’s scrabbling at his - he’s trying to take his gauntlets off, but his fingers are shaking too badly. There’s an ache in Clark’s chest. Bruce finds the release catch, gets one gauntlet off, but the concealed claws in his other gauntlet rake down his forearm as he wrestles it off, almost drawing blood.

He can’t do this. Can’t just watch.

He catches Bruce’s hand, wincing at the strangled gasp. In a few seconds he’s drawn the other gauntlet off the shaking hand. Bruce stares at his bare fingers a moment as if they don’t belong to him, and then reaches out to Dick again.

This time, Dick turns into the hand.

After a moment, he grabs it with both his own.

It’s still not enough.

Bruce pulls Dick into his chest, and the kid - Clark can’t see anything but a kid, in pain and afraid - is huddled into the Kevlar, his whole body curled so tightly around Bruce’s hand Clark can hear his joints straining - and it’s still not enough. Their heartbeats - the strangled noises he can hear in their throats - Clark needs them to know it’s okay, that he’s - that someone’s here for them, they’re not alone, and it’s rising and it’s rising in his chest. And this time -

He ducks his head, and kneels close to them, and he can’t hold back the purr any longer.

It feels strange, coming in stops and starts like an old motor trying to turn over, but when he shuffles closer, there’s no heartbeat spike. Bruce’s glazed eyes flick up, and Clark pauses, there on his knees on the cave floor, but then Bruce looks back down to Dick, and lets out a small, halting breath when Clark slowly wraps his arms around them. Dick looks up to him, eyes still obscured by his mask, and Clark tucks his head over Bruce’s shoulder to rest his forehead against Dick’s sweat-soaked hair, and his low purr is rumbling through the both of them.

Bruce doesn’t even flinch when he gently, gently picks him up under his knees and back. He just holds Dick closer to his chest. Clark holding Bruce holding Dick. He floats them over to the recovery cot. It’s small for Bruce and Dick, let alone Clark. Clark pulls away, but Dick makes a noise and reaches out for him. So he lies down beside his little form, Bruce on the other side, three-quarters of the way off the cot, hovering to avoid falling off.

And when the full five minutes are up, their heart rates are still falling, and their breathing is steadier, and the tension in their muscles is slowly, slowly fading away. They’re falling asleep. The antidote’s worked, and they’re falling asleep.

Clark stays until they’re both fully unconscious, slowly tapering off the purr. He tells himself it’s because sudden silence might wake them up. Then he slips away, quietly as he can. He flies back across the Atlantic to Alfred, who is waiting on his hotel room balcony, the bill settled and luggage neatly packed, and tells him that his two charges are all right. He wraps Alfred in his cape and flies him back to Gotham. And on the way he thinks about the surveillance cameras.

He will not do it. Despite the terrible unease churning in him, he’s not going to erase the footage. He wouldn’t. It wouldn’t do either of them any good. On his part, it’s an irrational fear. Bruce knows he’s not human - the entire world knows that. Why does the thought of a video of him purring make him more uneasy than videos of him lifting cars? And on Bruce’s part…

Bruce is paranoid, to put it lightly. To erase evidence like that would probably shatter their fragile working relationship. If he hasn’t done that already.

So he writes a report. A case report. It’s almost easy. Clark is good with facts, details. Narratives. Estimated dose, removal from the gas, Scarecrow’s difficult-to-decipher notes on how he’d created his skin-absorbent variant. His newly assigned cell number in Arkham. The six people he’d hired to help him. Their arrest details. The thirty civilians Scarecrow had managed to infect before his capture, resulting in the total depletion of Batman’s reserves of antidote. The dents Clark’s fingertips had left in the chassis of the Batmobile as he’d flown it back to the cave. Going to the only remaining reserve of antidote Clark knew about. Administering it.

Subjects 31 and 32 were reacting poorly, possibly due to the older nature of the reserve antidote.

Body contact and

Body contact and low sonic vibrations seemed

Body contact seemed somewhat effective at calming Subjects 31 and 32 for the length of time it took for the antidote to take effect. After approximately 9 minutes Subjects 31 and 32 fell asleep.

—

Given the choice, Clark probably would have checked in the next day. Well, he would call it checking in. Bruce would call it a debrief. But it’s always been up to Bruce to define the terms of their meeting. And Clark does have a full time job. So he shoots the contact labeled “Thomas Kane” in his phone a text saying he’d love to “catch up” sometime, and breathes a sigh of relief when he gets a text four days later. He has a commitment in Australia, but knowing the hours Bruce keeps, he confirms he’ll stop by afterwards.

Bruce is still in the cave when he flies in at 2:13 AM. He spins around in his ridiculous Bat-chair as Clark touches down, and they look at each other in silence for a second or two. “You don’t smell like smoke,” Bruce finally says.

Clark, who’d been learning about controlled burns with indigenous rangers, relaxes a little. If this was going to be a confrontation, Bruce wouldn’t have led with asking about his day. “I took a dip on the way back,” he says. “Was the case report okay?”

Bruce tabs over to it on one of his nine monitors, and Clark takes Bruce’s silence as the invitation it is to come closer onto the computer platform and stand beside him. His original text is highlighted in blue, and as expected, Bruce has added an excessive amount of details in black. There’s only a few points of red - most scattered throughout the beginning and middle, and then one at the end.

They start at the beginning. This is familiar ground. Clark closes his eyes as he fills in the details Bruce asks about that he hadn’t realized were significant, draws out the pattern of certain tattoos on a henchwoman’s bicep, describes exactly what was disturbed in Metropolis’s Ineos Research Laboratory warehouse. It makes him shudder, but he uses his total recall to recite, with perfect inflection, the particularities of Scarecrow’s raspy taunts into Bruce’s recording equipment. He coughs once they’re done, and Bruce offers him a glass of water, and Clark takes it gratefully, massaging his throat to help reset his voice.

And then they’re into the medical portion of the case notes. The personal part. Talking about the case is safe. Had been safe. But Clark doesn’t fail to notice the slight tensing of Bruce’s shoulders, the forced casualness as he scrolls to the impassive description of his helplessness.

And then there’s only one red annotation demanding an explanation, with an attached audio file. Bruce taps his fingers against the keyboard without typing anything, once, twice, and then turns to Clark and waits.

Clark has an explanation. He’s prepared with his apology for not sticking strictly to the protocol. He has figured out the best way to spell urvishulahdh using the English alphabet. He’s prepared, if Bruce asks, to copy out the entire article from the cultural anthology. There’s nothing to be self-conscious or embarrassed about. He did the best he could. He’s been telling himself that for four days, reevaluating his actions, and he would not have done anything different, and he doesn’t regret what he did.

He opens his mouth and the words won’t come out.

Distantly he recognizes that he’s cold, cold and still. The cultural anthology would call this a freeze response. A natural stress response, evolved to protect against the enormous amount of Kryptonian predators with thermal and motion sensitive vision. Except it’s just Bruce. It’s just Bruce, in this stupid cave, asking a normal question.

Bruce, who is clearing his throat, who has taken his silence for simple reticence and who is clicking on the file.

The recording of Clark’s purr fills the room for three seconds.

Three seconds, because Clark’s face twists into something without his permission, and he breathes and bites his lip, and Bruce shuts it off as soon as he turns his attention back onto Clark and sees his expression. It’s so clearly a compressed recording, it’s just a recording of himself, but it still…

“It’s… painful?” Bruce ventures after a few seconds, and there’s a soft something in his voice Clark’s heard before, but never directed at him.

“It’s…” Clark heaves a shuddering sigh, and shakes his head. “It’s not. It’s just…”

Bruce is waiting for him, and Clark is trying to find the words, any words, remembering a conversation from years ago. “It’s… it’s a Kryptonian sound - it’s to be, it’s to sound safe. It’s - between close friends, or parents to children, a-” he swallows, “ -family sound, usually - but it’s to… let people know they’re safe.”

Bruce doesn’t say anything. Clark rubs his face tiredly, looking away. He’s about to apologize when Bruce’s head turns towards the stairs.

Oh. He had been distracted, not to notice that second heart.

“You should be in bed,” Bruce says, to the little figure on the stairs, halfway between the cave and the manor. There’s a stern edge to his voice as he glances back towards Clark, and Clark blinks for a moment until it registers that Bruce is trying to protect his privacy.

“Sorry,” Dick says softly. He’s in his pajamas. “I just - woke up, and I wanted to see if you were back from patrol yet. I didn’t want to pry, but I heard - you guys talking.” His voice is very steady. His eyes are ever so slightly red.

“We’re almost done here,” Bruce says softly. “I’m going to be up in a few minutes.”

Clark recalls the last line of the report Bruce had added, detailing Subject 31's occasional recurring nightmares, side effects from the toxin.

Dick fidgets on the stairs. “Can I say hi to Superman first?”

“Hey,” Clark says, and walks over to the bottom of the stairs. At three steps from the bottom they’re of equal height and Clark doesn’t need to stoop to give him a hug. “How’re you doing?”

Dick hugs him back, and then Clark lets him down. “Honestly, pretty garbage,” he admits. Clark gives him a sympathetic smile and ruffles his hair, about to say something about how it’s good to be in tune with how he’s feeling, when Dick looks down. “Can you do that thing again?”

Clark glances at Bruce, who’s stilled while shutting down the computers. “That thing?”

“It, uh, helped me go to sleep,” Dick says, not meeting Clark's eyes.

Clark swallows. Bruce looks at the two of them for a moment and then continues to shut down the system. Turning his back on the two of them. Trusting Clark with Dick.

“Sure,” Clark says, and goes to one knee so he can hug Dick. He bows his head over the little shoulder, and lets out a long sigh, and rubs Dick’s back, and slowly, for the second time in years, the purr unwinds itself from his chest.

Bruce takes his time shutting down the Cave. Under his breath, quiet enough for only Clark to hear, he murmurs something about putting the Suit away, and then they’re alone for a few minutes, and Dick’s head droops against his shoulder. Eventually, when Bruce returns, Dick is curled up into his chest, on the verge of sleep.

Bruce looks at the two of them a moment - Clark kneeling, looking up at him, with Dick’s little arms looped around his neck, and then signs. Let’s get him to bed.

Oh.

Clark gathers Dick in his arms, and Dick rests his cheek against the still-reverberating S, and follows Bruce up the stairs into the manor for the first time.

It’s a different world, one shadowed but warm, stepping out from the concealed door behind a grandfather clock of all things. Clark’s purr rumble-hitches in amusement. It fits Bruce’s flair for the dramatic. They’re in what looks to be Bruce’s study. There are old pictures on the walls, ones of what must be Thomas and Martha, and Waynes past, mixed with pictures of Dick Grayson, grinning at his first day of school, Bruce and Dick in suits holding what Clark assumes are adoption papers. He realizes he’s paused, taking in his first sight of Bruce’s home, and turns to Bruce, who’s looking at him with a faint smile in the warm moonlight.

Clark looks back at him, feeling Dick curled up against his chest, and wonders if it’s selfish to want to stay in a moment like this. He follows Bruce, down a long hallway in plush carpet and antique, worn detailing. Up an improbably grand staircase with traces of shoe marks on the banister and a rope line to the chandelier, and into a boy’s room, a lived-in room, shoes lined up against the wall, textbooks lying out on the desk, sheets rumpled, and a little stuffed elephant waiting in the bed.

Dick makes a soft sound when Clark lays him in bed. Clark draws the covers up, smooths the blanket over him. Looks hesitantly at Bruce, begins to taper off the purr, and Bruce’s expression is soft and strange in the warm sliver of moonlight showing through the curtains, and he pulls Clark into a brief, one-armed hug. “Thank you,” he breathes, and for a long moment Clark allows himself to hook his jaw over Bruce’s broad shoulder and continue the purr.

And Bruce hums, his short little hnn Clark has heard a hundred times, in return.

It’s a short, quiet thing, but it’s enough.