Chapter Text
The city was burning.
Not just in isolated patches, not just the occasional car overturned and smouldering--the whole of Metropolis was alight, the skyline fractured by pillars of flame and thick, cloying smoke that turned the night air into something dense and suffocating. Skyscrapers that once gleamed with the clean, golden glow of city lights were now gutted, their glass façades shattered, interiors exposed like open wounds. Sirens howled through the chaos, sharp and discordant, their shrieks swallowed by the deeper, bone-rattling thunder of collapsing steel.
And above it all, the sky flickered red.
Bruce moved through the destruction with methodical precision, his muscles taut beneath the Kevlar plating of his suit, every step measured, every breath controlled. The heat was unbearable, radiating off the pavement in shimmering waves, warping the air like a mirage. His boots kicked up dust and ash as he landed, the weight of the battle pressing against him from all sides.
His cape flared in the updraft of an explosion behind him, a brief silhouette against the firestorm, before settling heavily against his back. The HUD in his cowl was struggling to keep up, flashing alerts too quickly to process--civilian casualties climbing, structural integrity failing, oxygen levels plummeting. His filtration system worked to keep the worst of it out, but the acrid scent of burning synthetics still curled in his lungs, sharp enough to sting.
It was carnage. Planned carnage.
This wasn’t chaos for the sake of chaos. This wasn’t an act of desperation. This was a strategy.
The enemy forces--whoever the hell they were--had come in fast, a coordinated strike that had cut through the League’s defenses like a blade through soft tissue. They weren’t the usual breed of mercenaries or extremists. These soldiers didn’t hesitate, didn’t falter, didn’t break formation.
Black ops, Bruce’s mind supplied. Military-grade precision. No wasted movements. No erratic decisions. No fear.
They knew exactly what they were doing.
And they were losing by choice.
Superman was in the air, his red cape a blurred streak of color against the smoke-drenched sky, cutting through the chaos like a warning, a promise. The city’s burning wreckage flickered beneath him, orange and gold reflecting off the crest on his chest like an ember waiting to ignite.
Bruce could hear him.
Not just the deep, concussive boom of his landings or the wind-ripping velocity of his movements--no, he could hear the impact. The shattering crunch of bodies breaking under force, the sickening snap of reinforced armor giving way like wet plywood. Bones cracking, concrete rupturing, the dull, meaty sound of fists meeting flesh at speeds human reflexes couldn’t hope to follow.
They didn’t stand a chance against him.
None of them ever did.
Bruce moved like a shadow through the battlefield, his own violence quieter, more deliberate. A soldier lunged at him-- too slow, too obvious. He caught the strike mid-air, twisting the man’s wrist sharply enough to elicit a crack before driving his gauntleted fist into his windpipe. The soldier collapsed, choking on nothing, and Bruce didn’t hesitate before flipping him over his shoulder and into the pavement, out cold before he landed.
Every movement was calculated, precise. His body ran on instinct sharpened to a knife’s edge, while his mind--his mind was always two steps ahead. Every encounter was mapped before it happened, every strike part of a larger plan, a rhythm he could predict.
And yet.
Something felt wrong.
There was a pulse beneath the violence, a rhythm to battle that Bruce had learned to read like a second language. It was the way a fight flowed, the way an enemy reacted --or didn’t. The hesitation before a deathblow, the subtle shifts in movement, the intent behind every attack.
And this one was just… off.
The enemy wasn’t panicking like they should have been.
They were well-armed, trained, organized-- too well-organized for a standard assault. They moved in coordinated waves, flanking, cutting off escape routes, funneling resistance into narrow pockets. This wasn’t an attack.
It was a strategy.
Bruce narrowed his eyes, the gears in his head turning too fast, too sharp. He’d fought enough wars to recognize this wasn’t about brute force. It wasn’t about destruction.
It was a delay.
But for what?
His comm crackled to life, a sharp burst of static against the chaos.
"Batman."
Clark’s voice. Steady. Unshaken. There was wind rushing past him, an ambient roar beneath his words, but no strain. No exhaustion. He could be standing in a quiet room for all the tension in his tone.
Still calm. Still in control.
Bruce glanced up, tracking him through the haze. Superman hovered just above, an unyielding figure against the rolling smoke, his body outlined in the dull glow of firelight. His cape billowed, torn near the hem where a blast had caught the edge, and a long tear ran across his side, fabric split to reveal unmarred skin beneath.
He was fine. He always was.
But Bruce wasn’t.
"Something’s off," he murmured, barely audible over the roar of collapsing structures and the distant wail of sirens. His cowl was feeding him a steady stream of data--heat signatures, enemy formations, movement patterns--but none of it accounted for the slow, grinding unease twisting in his gut.
They weren’t fighting for territory. They weren’t pushing forward or consolidating control.
They were stalling.
Bruce’s jaw tightened, his gaze locked on a spot above the horizon, his mind far away, piecing together the fragments of information that were clicking into place.
Clark's voice cut through the haze, “They’re not aiming for a takeover. This is a--”
The words never finished.
A pulse--sharp and sudden, small enough that if Bruce hadn’t been watching he wouldn’t have noticed--rippled through the air, a flicker of energy that could barely be seen before--
Gone.
No impact, no sound, no warning.
One second, Clark was there--floating, whole, unshakable --and the next, the space he had occupied was empty .
Not blasted backward, not struck down. Not even a shift in the air, as if the world itself had simply erased him.
The wind still carried the faint echo of his last words over the comms, distorted and fading, but the man himself-- Superman --was gone.
That should have been the first clue that this was wrong . If he had been hit, struck out of the sky, Bruce would have seen it, heard it, felt it in the tension of the battlefield. But there had been no impact, no scream of displaced air, no flicker of red and blue plummeting from the heavens.
Bruce’s body moved before his mind could catch up, pure instinct overriding reason. His grappling hook fired with a sharp hiss, and he launched himself forward, muscles coiled, heart hammering against his ribs in a way he hadn’t felt in years.
Clark hadn’t been hurt .
He had just--
Vanished.
No body. No trace. No anything.
Bruce landed hard on the rooftop where Clark had hovered just moments before, his boots skidding against the concrete, his breath sharp against the filters of his cowl. He scanned the space in an instant--searching for something , anything --but there was nothing to find.
The air was static, untouched . No disruption of wind, no heat signature, no ionized particles or radiation spike. His cowl fed him a flood of data, scrolling too fast across his lenses, but every analysis came back the same.
Nothing.
His stomach lurched, an acidic twist deep in his gut.
"Superman, respond."
Bruce’s voice came out clipped, controlled, but his pulse was hammering against his throat, a brutal counterpoint to the silence pressing in on him.
No answer.
His fingers flew over his gauntlet, switching frequencies so fast the system barely kept up. He tried again. "Superman, do you copy?"
Static.
Nothing.
He swallowed hard, throat dry as ash.
"Clark."
Still-- nothing .
The silence was worse than any explosion. Worse than the whine of an incoming missile, worse than the thick, wet gasp of someone breathing their last through shattered ribs. It was the kind of silence that tore through you, jagged and empty, like something vital had been ripped out --leaving only the hollow echo of what was gone.
And then, in the space between one second and the next, Bruce understood exactly what had just happened.
This wasn’t an accident.
This wasn’t a battlefield casualty.
This wasn’t chaos.
It was precise .
It was deliberate .
It was planned.
His breath came slow and steady, but inside, his mind was a white-hot wire, running through possibilities, through every enemy capable of this .
Not brute force. Not raw firepower.
No, this had been the work of someone careful. Someone patient. Someone who had studied Superman-- anticipated him --and knew exactly what it would take to steal him away .
A cold weight settled in Bruce’s chest, heavier than the thickest Kevlar.
Because Superman didn’t just disappear .
He was taken.
Bruce clenched his teeth and forced himself to breathe , to think .
Panic was useless. It clouded judgment, slowed reflexes, turned men into corpses before they even knew they were dying. He knew this. He had trained for this.
But it didn’t stop the way his ribs felt too tight, like his suit had suddenly shrunk around him, pressing down against his lungs.
His hands moved fast, fingers flying over his gauntlet as he rerouted every available system, pulling a rapid environmental scan from every satellite and drone still intact. Infrared, ultraviolet, electromagnetic pulse detection--he ran everything , dragging the city’s digital veins through his fingertips in search of a pulse.
Come on. Come on, damn it--
Nothing.
Not a heat signature. Not a gravitational shift. Not the slightest energy disruption beyond the static hum of the battlefield.
Bruce’s jaw locked so tight his teeth ached.
Not possible. Not fucking possible.
There were rules to this. Even metahuman disappearances left a footprint-- something for him to track. A burst of kinetic displacement, a gravitational disturbance, residual energy in the air. Something.
His comm crackled again, sharp and static-laced, but this time, it wasn’t Clark.
"Batman, what the hell just happened?"
Diana.
Bruce exhaled through his nose, sharp and controlled, snapping himself back to the present. The battlefield below was still a warzone--metal screeching, explosions rattling the foundations of the city, the scent of ozone thick in the air--but it all felt distant now, muffled under the deafening roar of absence .
Clark was gone .
The thought pressed against the edges of his mind, a cold, sinking weight he shoved aside before it could settle. He couldn’t afford that--not now .
His fingers flexed against his gauntlet as he recalibrated his sensors, re-scanning, re-checking-- there had to be something, he had to have missed something--
"Batman."
Diana’s voice, firm but edged with something just shy of worry. He could hear the tension in it, the barely concealed urgency, the way she was keeping herself steady through sheer force of will.
She didn’t ask again.
She didn’t have to.
Bruce swallowed against the dry burn in his throat. His hands curled into fists
"Superman’s gone." Bruce said.
A beat of silence. Then, a single word, edged with disbelief.
"Gone?"
Bruce’s jaw tightened. He could hear the moment she processed it, the weight of the word sinking in like a blade between ribs.
"Taken," he corrected, his voice flat. Precise. Because gone implied accident, implied uncertainty, implied something uncontrolled . This-- this --had been by design.
Diana swore, something sharp and guttural in Themysciran, and he almost welcomed the rawness of it, the way it slashed through the heavy, ringing silence in his head.
"Who?"
Bruce stood motionless, scanning the shadows below. He let out a long breath, frustration mounting. "I don’t know." He hesitated, eyes flicking back to the empty space where Clark had disappeared. "Yet."
And that was the problem, wasn’t it?
His fingers moved in a blur over his gauntlet, a rhythmic dance of urgency as he bypassed security protocols--his mind narrowing to a singular focus. This wasn’t the usual methodical check of systems--no, he was digging deeper now, plunging into every satellite feed, every scan, every goddamn piece of data that might have captured a trace. The usual paths weren't enough anymore. He switched frequencies with barely a thought, cross-referencing timestamps and analyzing fragments of static. His eyes flicked across the data streams, chasing the faintest hint of the pulse that had swallowed Clark whole. There had to be something. There was always something.
But there wasn’t.
Nothing. No energy displacement. No spike in teleportation readings. No atmospheric anomalies.
No trail .
His stomach coiled, tight and cold.
"Bruce," Diana’s voice cut through the static, steady and sure. "Where do you need me?"
He should have had an answer.
He always had an answer.
But Bruce was still standing there , rooted to the spot where Clark had vanished, his fists clenched so tight his gloves creaked. His mind was running a thousand calculations a second--angles, trajectories, possible technologies that could have pulled this off, who , why , how --but none of it was enough. None of it gave him anything .
And for the first time in years --goddamn years --Bruce felt something he hated.
Something cold. Something razor-edged and insidious, winding through the cracks of his control like a slow-working toxin.
Doubt.
Clark was gone, and Bruce didn’t know how to bring him back.
That was the simple, brutal truth of it. The fact lodged itself in his ribs like shrapnel, sharp and unrelenting. His mind screamed against it, fought to dissect every possible explanation, every conceivable method of retrieval-- but there was nothing. No trail to follow, no breadcrumbs to pick apart, no goddamn clue as to who had done this or how.
But he would find a way.
No matter what it took.
Because there was only one certainty in the chaos of this war-torn city, only one undeniable truth anchoring him through the storm of data and dead ends.
Superman had been taken.
The fires in Metropolis burned for six more hours. The city smoldered under the weight of its own ruin, the air thick with the acrid scent of melted steel and scorched concrete. Smoke coiled into the sky like a living thing, darkening the stars, choking out what little light remained. The battlefield had quieted--no more gunfire, no more shouts of resistance. The last of the drones had crumpled to the streets in twisted, sparking heaps, their artificial lives snuffed out one by one. The League was moving, securing the city, assessing the damage. The emergency response teams finally pushed through the wreckage, red and blue lights flickering weakly against the destruction.
Bruce barely noticed.
His world had narrowed, honed down to a single, empty space in the air. The spot where Clark had been.
It was wrong. All of it was wrong. The battle had been brutal, but this--this was surgical. A clean cut. A perfect, bloodless kill. Clark’s voice had cut off mid-sentence, not even a flicker of static to mark the break. One moment he was there , the next--
Nothing.
No light. No struggle. No trace.
His fingers flexed at his sides, the sharp scrape of gauntlet against gauntlet barely audible over the distant wail of sirens. The wind carried the lingering bite of scorched metal, the chemical tang of ozone clinging to the back of his throat. Smoke still hung low over the city, curling in ghostly tendrils around the broken skyline, swallowing the distant figures of first responders as they moved through the wreckage. It was all background noise. Static.
His focus was locked on the feeds still flickering across his HUD, data streaming in endless loops. He cycled through them again. And again. And again.
A teleportation anomaly. A spike in energy. A distortion in the footage.
Something. Anything.
But there was nothing.
No distress call. No body. No disruption in the air. No lingering radiation, no gravitational shift, no heat signature fading into the distance.
Clark had vanished as if he’d never been there at all.
It had been clean. Precise. The kind of extraction that didn’t just happen --the kind that took weeks, months to plan. The kind that anticipated every variable.
Someone had orchestrated this. Someone had waited for this moment.
And Bruce had missed it.
The League was speaking over the comms, their voices a steady hum of reports and commands threading through his earpiece--damage assessments, rescue coordination, casualty counts. It all blurred together, distant and unimportant. White noise.
None of it was this.
"Batman."
Diana’s voice, cutting through the static. Steady. Controlled.
He didn’t turn.
The impact of her landing was barely a whisper against the ruined rooftop, her lasso catching the firelight in a brief golden gleam. The scent of smoke clung to her armor, streaked dark with soot and battle.
"You should get some rest," she said after a moment, quiet but firm.
Bruce didn’t acknowledge her.
His fingers moved over his gauntlet, calloused tips flying over the console as data streamed across his HUD. He didn’t have time for rest. Rest was for people who had the luxury of waiting. Of hoping.
There were still angles. Still doors left unopened, still shadows left unsearched. The world had its secrets, but so did he. And he would gut every last one of them open if it got him even an inch closer.
Through every criminal network, every black-market transaction, every classified file buried so deep it had been meant to stay forgotten.
He would go through everything.
"Bruce."
His name, this time. Not Batman. Not a title wrapped in duty, in expectation. Just his name, spoken with quiet weight, edged with something too close to caution.
A warning.
His lenses dimmed as he finally turned his head, meeting her gaze. Diana stood with the unwavering stillness of a warrior, shoulders squared, stance solid. But her eyes--her eyes --were softer. Watching him with the kind of patience he had no use for.
Concern.
Pity.
He hated it.
“We missed something,” he said, the words rough in his throat. Too many hours spent barking orders through comms, breathing in the acrid smoke still thick in the air. “I need access to the Watchtower’s full records. Every captured metahuman, every classified experiment, every--”
“Bruce.”
She didn’t raise her voice, didn’t harden her tone, but there was steel in it all the same.
“You’ve been running scans for hours,” she said. “If there was a trace, we would have found it.”
She meant let it go.
He exhaled sharply, jaw tight. No.
“Then we keep looking.”
There was a flicker of frustration in her expression--barely there, barely more than a shift in her brow, a slight press of her lips. But he caught it.
“Bruce,” she tried again, voice steadier now, firm but not unkind. “Even you can’t run on nothing. You need to rest, regroup--”
“Clark doesn’t get that option.”
The words snapped out, harsh and final, slicing through whatever argument she was about to make.
Diana exhaled slowly, rubbing a hand over her face. For a moment, she said nothing, just looked at him, something unreadable shifting behind her eyes. He knew what she was thinking. He knew what everyone was already thinking.
That Clark was gone.
That he was chasing a ghost.
He needed to stop before he drove himself into the ground.
But they didn’t understand.
Clark had been right there. Speaking. Breathing. Alive.
And then--
Bruce turned back to the city, the glow of distant fires reflecting in the lenses of his cowl. The skyline was fractured, broken, pieces of Metropolis still burning like dying embers in the dark. Smoke curled upward in thick tendrils, twisting through the skeletal remains of buildings that had once stood tall. It smelled like charred metal and ozone, like something gutted and left to rot.
“I’ll have J’onn keep scanning for anomalies,” Diana said finally. Her voice was quieter now, but it held the weight of something immovable--something final. “But you need to step back. Just for a few hours.”
He didn’t answer.
Didn’t move.
Didn’t even acknowledge her.
She studied him for a long moment, her gaze lingering. Then, without another word, she was gone--the sound of her footsteps lost in the howling wind, swallowed by the distant wail of sirens.
Bruce barely noticed.
His mind was already racing through possibilities, through calculations, through the countless what ifs and what nows.
He wasn’t going to stop.
Not until he found Clark.
Days blurred together, indistinct and restless, bleeding into one another like ink in water.
Bruce had worked cases for days at a time before, had pushed his body beyond exhaustion and kept moving on sheer willpower. But this--this was different. This wasn’t a case. This wasn’t something that could be neatly contained within evidence files and crime scene reports. This was Clark.
And Clark was gone.
His body ran on caffeine and raw determination, his mind trapped in a relentless cycle of footage, reports, theories--every lead turning to dust in his hands. The numbers on his screens blurred at the edges, his vision tunneling as he picked apart every detail, every frame, every half-second of data leading up to the moment Clark vanished.
Every second was spent looking.
Hacking through private databases, breaching government black sites, forcing his way into places even the League had been barred from. His fingers flew over the keyboard, pulling classified experiments from the depths of abandoned programs, exposing underground facilities buried beneath bureaucratic red tape, combing through old League records for anything-- anything --he might have overlooked.
And when the digital world failed him, he turned to the streets.
The criminal underworld learned very quickly that Batman was looking for something-- someone. And he was not patient. Informants found themselves cornered in dark alleyways, whispered rumors were dragged into the light, supply lines were disrupted with surgical precision, entire operations were obliterated in his wake. A shattered jaw here. A broken wrist there. Every encounter left behind a warning--raw, bloody, and undeniable.
But still, there was nothing.
Not a whisper. Not a trace. Not a single goddamn thing.
Every time he sat still, his mind played it again.
That moment. That exact moment.
Clark’s voice, mid-sentence--something ordinary, something unremarkable, something Bruce should have remembered but didn’t, because everything after had erased it. That second of sound, then-- nothing.
The space where he had been.
The unnatural stillness in the air, like the universe itself had taken a breath and held it.
The silence afterward.
It was the kind of silence Bruce had only heard once before-- Crime Alley, fresh snow, warm blood. A silence that came when something irrevocable had been taken.
And every time he closed his eyes, his mind whispered:
What if he’s dead?
A simple thought. A quiet one. But it coiled inside his ribs like barbed wire, wrapped around his lungs and tightened every time he inhaled. What if he’s dead? What if Clark wasn’t just missing, wasn’t just gone, but--
Bruce clenched his teeth, shoved the thought aside with brute force.
No. No, he couldn’t-- wouldn’t-- accept that.
The comm crackled in his ear.
“You’re going to break yourself.”
Diana. Low, steady. Measured, the way she always was when she thought he was about to do something stupid.
Bruce didn’t look up. His fingers flew over the keys, his cowl’s lenses reflecting the cold glow of the monitors. Satellite scans flickered across the screen, streams of data running faster than human eyes could track. Energy signatures. Displacement readings. Something. Anything.
“Then I break,” he said.
The League started to accept the worst.
Bruce didn’t.
The first week, they had searched with him. Side by side, combing through every lead, running every possible analysis, tearing through the data at speeds even Barry could barely keep up with. They coordinated sweeps, pored over security feeds, scoured the city, the country, the planet.
The second week, they searched for him. Not Clark-- him.
Their voices were quieter, their reports less frequent. They urged him to rest, slipping concern between the cracks of their words. They started handing off tasks, taking things off his plate without asking, trying to lessen a burden they didn’t understand he needed to carry.
By the third week, they had stopped mentioning Clark at all.
Bruce noticed.
Noticed the way reports shifted to League activity, city recoveries, damage assessments--anything but this. Noticed the way J’onn no longer sent him scan results unprompted, the way Diana’s updates became vaguer, the way Barry hesitated before saying his name.
Noticed the way, when they spoke about Clark, it was in past tense.
Bruce’s jaw locked.
“Bruce, you need to stop.”
Barry, hesitant. Uneasy.
“We’ve searched everywhere. If he was alive, we would have--”
“We keep looking.”
A pause. Silence stretching too long, too thick.
He could hear it in the way Barry faltered, in the weight of it pressing against the comms. The unspoken, quiet certainty that the rest of them had already settled into.
Bruce didn’t care.
He wasn’t stopping.
He kept looking.
He started chasing ghosts.
Every lead turned to ash in his hands, every trail ran cold, but his desperation only sharpened, honed into something razor-thin and cutting. It wasn’t just about searching anymore--it was about hunting.
He combed through his enemies, through past threats, through every name scrawled in the margins of unfinished battles. Who had the resources? Who had the motive? Who had wanted Clark gone badly enough to orchestrate something this clean ?
One name stood out.
Amanda Waller.
Bruce’s mind locked onto it with the force of impact. Waller was a strategist, a manipulator. A woman who didn’t just eliminate problems--she erased them. If anyone knew how to make a man disappear so completely he may as well have never existed, it was her.
And if she had taken Clark--
If she had even touched him--
Bruce moved through the shadows of the ARGUS facility like a phantom--silent, relentless, a force of nature wrapped in Kevlar and fury. The guards never stood a chance. They crumpled before they could sound the alarm, taken down with brutal efficiency, their weapons stripped, their radios cut to static.
By the time Waller arrived, her security detail lay sprawled across the cold floors, some groaning, others utterly still. The heavy doors to her office hung open, the reinforced steel bent and wrenched out of shape like cheap tin.
She barely looked surprised.
Her gaze flickered over the damage, assessing, calculating, before settling on the dark figure standing in the wreckage of her doorway.
“Batman,” Waller greeted, her voice smooth, unreadable. Not an ounce of hesitation. Not a flicker of surprise. Just the same calm, measured indifference she always wore, like a second skin. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Bruce didn’t move. Didn’t blink. He was a statue carved from shadow and fury, the dim office lights catching the sharp edges of his cowl. His voice, when it came, was low. Unforgiving.
“Superman’s missing.”
No preamble. No wasted words. No room for negotiation.
Waller didn’t so much as blink.
Which meant she already knew.
The tension in Bruce’s shoulders coiled tighter, his breathing controlled but shallow, chest rising and falling in slow, measured intervals. His hands twitched at his sides, the ghost of movement suppressed through sheer force of will. He could feel the weight of his batarangs, the comforting solidity of his gear. A dozen ways to make her talk. A dozen more to make her regret staying silent.
He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, his boots heavy against the polished floor.
Waller stayed rooted in place, expression unreadable. But he could see the way her fingers flexed at her sides.
Good.
She wasn’t afraid.
But she was preparing for something.
"Where is he?"
A beat.
Just long enough for the air to go razor-thin between them. Just long enough for Bruce to catch the flicker of something behind Waller’s eyes--calculating, assessing.
Then-- the faintest hint of a smirk.
"You're getting warm, Bats."
The words had barely left her mouth before Bruce moved. Fast. Precise. Merciless.
The impact sent a violent crack through the room as he slammed her against the desk, the force rattling everything in its path. A pen holder hit the floor, scattering across the polished tile. Papers burst into the air, fluttering down in a chaotic mess. The overhead lights flickered, casting sharp, stuttering shadows along the walls.
Waller didn’t struggle.
Didn’t fight.
Didn’t flinch.
Bruce’s forearm pressed hard against her throat, pinning her in place. His grip was ironclad, but controlled--always controlled. He could feel her pulse under his wrist, steady and deliberate. Like she wasn’t the least bit surprised to find herself here.
Like she had expected this.
She tilted her head slightly, expression unreadable, but there was something almost amused in the way she spoke, her voice smooth despite the weight against her windpipe.
"You’re slipping, Wayne," she murmured, every syllable slow and deliberate, like she was indulging him. "You don’t make threats you won’t follow through on."
His breath remained even, controlled. A predator waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Lethal.
"Try me."
The words came low, edged with something dark, something final. A promise, not a threat.
A tense beat of silence followed, stretching between them like a wire pulled too tight.
Then Waller exhaled, slow and measured, shaking her head with something between amusement and inevitability.
"He's alive."
The words slammed into Bruce like a live wire. A jolt. A spark. A violent shock to a system that had been running on nothing but raw, fraying determination.
His grip tightened without thought, his gauntlet creaking against the pressure of his own strength.
"Where?"
Waller only smiled, slow and sharp, her eyes gleaming with something unreadable.
"That’s the question, isn’t it?"
There was a challenge in her tone. A dare.
And Bruce--Bruce had never backed down from a fight in his life.
His heart pounded like a war drum, each beat rattling against his ribs, reverberating through the hollow spaces exhaustion had carved into him.
Clark was alive.
Alive.
And that meant Bruce wasn’t stopping. Not until he had him back. Not until he saw him, heard his voice, knew for certain that Waller wasn’t playing him, wasn’t dangling false hope in front of him just to watch him snap.
The nightmares started that same night. As Waller’s words sank in, as they settled --as they took root in the restless, ragged corners of his mind.
"He's alive."
Over seventy-two hours without sleep, but his body didn’t care. His mind was still a machine, still grinding forward on raw willpower, but his body--his body betrayed him, dragging him under before he was ready.
And in the space between waking and unconsciousness, something shifted.
Something broke.
It wasn’t a normal dream.
This was something else. Something deeper. Something real.
At first, there was nothing--just a void, humming low and steady, thrumming like a distant heartbeat beneath his skin. It rattled through his bones, seeped into his lungs, settled heavy in his chest.
Then--flashes.
Metal glinting under harsh, artificial light. The sterile gleam of smooth steel, stretching out in tight, suffocating corridors. A smell--something metallic , something wrong , curling in the back of his throat like blood on his tongue.
A cell.
A red sun cell.
Bruce could feel it before he saw it--the oppressive weight of it pressing down like a lead blanket, leeching the strength from the air itself. The walls hummed , pulsing with energy, dull red light bleeding through the reinforced seams.
There were chains. Thick, industrial, bolted deep into the walls.
And there was Clark.
On his knees. Wrists shackled. Head bowed.
His shoulders moved with slow, uneven breaths, ribs rising and falling under the dull glow of the overhead lights. His hair hung in damp strands across his face, slick with sweat, sticking to his skin.
Bruce couldn’t see his eyes.
But he felt him.
And something was wrong.
Not just the chains. Not just the way he was kneeling--spine hunched, arms taut with tension--but the sheer, suffocating wrongness of him. Of this.
Of Clark Kent--Superman--brought to his knees, shackled, caged.
And it felt like something was crawling under Bruce’s skin, digging in sharp, needle-thin claws, whispering the same, sickening thought over and over again.
He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be here.
But he was.
The dream bent around Bruce’s awareness, warping, twisting--pulling him in until he was there.
Not an observer. Not a specter watching from the edges of consciousness.
He was standing just beyond the containment field.
The air inside the cell was wrong. Thick. Heavy. Red sun radiation buzzed through the walls like static, a dull hum vibrating in the back of his skull. His throat felt tight, muscles locking up as something deep in his instincts screamed at him-- move, do something, get him out of there--
His foot lifted. Stepped forward.
The second it crossed the threshold, Clark flinched.
Not a subtle shift. Not a twitch.
A flinch.
Bruce froze.
The reaction hit him harder than it should have. Clark never reacted to him like that. Not in a fight. Not in an argument. Not even at his worst, not even when Bruce had pushed and prodded and provoked.
But this Clark--this Clark didn’t recognize him.
"Clark."
His own voice sounded distant. Warped. Like it didn’t belong to him.
Clark stirred. The chains rattled, a sharp clink breaking the heavy silence.
Slowly, sluggishly, he lifted his head.
Blinking through the haze of exhaustion and pain, eyes unfocused, pupils blown wide under the dim, red light.
His gaze found Bruce’s.
And his entire body went rigid.
Not just startled. Not just tense.
Rigid.
Like a wire stretched too tight, one wrong move away from snapping.
"Bruce?"
Clark’s voice was hoarse, cracked at the edges, like his throat had been wrung dry. Like he hadn’t spoken in days.
His brows knit together, confusion flickering across his face--faint at first, but growing, deepening into something unsettled. Something not quite right.
Bruce took another step forward.
Clark’s posture didn’t ease. If anything, it got worse. His muscles coiled, his shoulders tightening, the shackles biting deeper into his wrists. His breath, already uneven, hitched.
His eyes darkened.
The confusion shifted.
And Bruce saw it--the moment it changed.
The moment confusion wasn’t confusion anymore.
The moment it became something else.
Something Bruce recognized in criminals on the streets, in cornered animals, in people who saw him as a threat.
Not shock. Not relief.
Not trust.
Something that made the base of Bruce’s spine go cold.
"You never came."
The words barely carried, nothing more than a whisper.
But Bruce felt them like a blade between his ribs.
His breath stuttered, chest tightening in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion, nothing to do with the red glow soaking into his skin.
Clark’s form flickered. Just for a second.
The cell warped--walls stretching unnaturally, chains shifting, the entire space twisting like something out of a nightmare. The red sun lights pulsed, a heartbeat of dull, suffocating energy, and Clark--Clark looked wrong .
His body was slumped, but his eyes--his eyes burned.
Bruce took another step forward.
The red light flared.
Clark blurred.
And then the cell shattered--swallowed whole by the dark.
Bruce woke up gasping.
The Batcave’s ceiling stretched above him, vast and cold and suffocating. For a moment--just a moment--he wasn’t sure where he was. The glow of the monitors painted the cavern walls in shifting light, the low hum of the Batcomputer filling the silence, but it felt wrong. Too distant. Too hollow.
His pulse slammed against his ribs. His breath came short, uneven.
It wasn’t real.
It wasn’t real.
His fingers curled against the cot, the fabric bunching under his grip. His body was stiff, muscles wound tight like he’d been fighting in his sleep. Like he was still there, still trapped in that cell, watching Clark bleed red light.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
But he could still hear it. That voice--hoarse, broken, accusing.
"You never came."
The words stuck like a splinter under his skin, like a wound too deep to heal.
Bruce exhaled slowly, dragging a hand over his face.
Then he stood.
He didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
The next time Bruce stepped into the Watchtower, Diana was already waiting.
She stood near the main console, her arms crossed, her posture rigid. The glow from the monitors cast long shadows across her face, highlighting the sharp edge of her frown, the way her brows pulled together. She wasn’t just waiting. She was expecting him.
Hal was there too, standing just off to the side, his ring dim against his knuckles. His usual easy confidence was gone--replaced by something heavier, something uneasy. His jaw was set, tension running through his frame like a drawn wire.
Bruce didn’t slow.
He didn’t need to. He knew exactly what this was.
He’d seen that look before, felt the weight of it pressing down on him too many times to count. It was the look people gave before a talk. Before they said things like you need to stop and you’re going too far and this isn’t healthy.
An intervention.
His teeth clenched.
Diana’s gaze never wavered as he approached.
Bruce barely spared them a glance as he moved past, his steps precise, unhurried. Purposeful. He crossed the room in a few strides, heading straight for the nearest terminal, already scanning through the information he’d left running overnight.
“You haven’t slept in days,” Diana said. Her voice was even, steady, but he could hear the tension beneath it. The unspoken this isn’t sustainable.
"I don’t have time to sleep."
His fingers flew over the keyboard, inputting commands before the previous ones had even finished processing. Satellite feeds, surveillance logs, ARGUS files--he ripped through them at a relentless pace, searching for something. Anything he hadn’t already seen a hundred times. Anything that wasn’t another dead end.
The data blurred in front of him. The same timestamps. The same security reports. The same nothing.
Behind him, a chair scraped against the floor, loud in the quiet hum of the Watchtower. Hal sat down heavily, exhaling like he was bracing for something.
“You know,” he said, tone edged with something that wasn’t quite humor, “I used to think you couldn’t get any more obsessive.” A pause. Then, flatly: “I was wrong.”
Bruce ignored him.
Diana stepped closer, her voice quieter now, deliberate. “Bruce.”
His hands hovered over the keyboard, but he didn’t type.
Didn’t move.
“We all want him back,” she continued, each word measured, careful, like she was speaking around something fragile. “But you--this isn’t just about Superman.” A pause, heavy, pressing into the space between them. “This is about Clark.”
His jaw tightened.
The air felt thinner.
Like the pressure in his chest had turned physical, a weight pressing down on his ribs, making it harder to breathe.
Hal leaned forward with a sigh, elbows braced against his knees, watching Bruce like he was waiting for something--some sign of life, some crack in the armor. “It’s not just the League talking about it,” he said. “Gotham’s noticing.”
Bruce didn’t react.
Not outwardly.
“You haven’t been home in weeks,” Hal continued. “There are rumors you’ve left the city permanently. You’re not even pretending to keep up appearances.”
Bruce’s fingers curled against the desk, slow, deliberate.
Hal exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “Dick’s wearing the cowl again.” His voice dropped, like he didn’t want to say it, like he already knew it wouldn’t make a difference. “People know it’s not you.”
Diana’s expression flickered, her frown deepening. “And Damian? The kids?”
Silence.
A beat too long.
“They’ve worried about you,” she said, quieter now, careful. “We all are.”
Tim. Dick. Damian. Alfred. Even Jason, in his own Jason way. They had been calling. Checking in. Showing up at the manor even when it was empty, when it had been empty for weeks , as if they thought he would just be there one day, like he always was. Like they could will him back through sheer stubbornness alone.
Diana waited.
Hal waited.
The air in the Watchtower stretched, too still, too heavy.
And then Bruce turned back to the screen, fingers flying over the keyboard, already pulling up another set of feeds, another round of satellite images, another series of reports he had already memorized.
Because Clark had vanished--too cleanly, too seamlessly, too perfectly.
No distress signal. No warning. No evidence, not a shred of proof that he had been taken at all. It was like he had never existed in the first place, like someone had erased him with surgical precision, cutting away every trace, leaving only empty space where he should have been.It was too perfect. Too deliberate. Too much like someone had orchestrated it down to the last detail, ensuring that even he --with all his resources, all his knowledge, all his relentless, unyielding drive--could find nothing.
And now--now, the dreams.
The flickering, fractured images that clawed into his mind every time he let his guard slip. The sterile, artificial glow of red sun radiation bleeding into the air, pressing against Clark’s skin like a second, suffocating layer. The sharp scent of metal and something else--something worse, something wrong. The way Clark had lifted his head in slow, agonizing increments, his eyes unfocused, shadowed with something Bruce had never seen there before.
The way he had flinched when Bruce moved toward him.
The way his voice had cracked on words that Bruce could still hear, still feel, rattling through his skull like a blow he hadn’t been fast enough to block.
"You never came."
Bruce exhaled sharply, but it did nothing to ease the tension coiled tight in his chest. His nails bit into his palm, deep enough that the sting barely registered.
He had to find him.
He would find him.
Diana sighed, the sound heavy with something almost like resignation. “Bruce, you--”
“I’m not stopping.”
The words were quiet, clipped, but there was no room for argument in them. No space for doubt. They weren’t a plea, weren’t an explanation--just a fact, cold and immovable as stone.
Diana hesitated. Her gaze lingered on him, searching for something--hesitation, uncertainty, anything that might mean he could be reasoned with. But there was nothing. Just the same sharp focus, the same relentless, ruthless edge that had driven him for weeks .
Then, finally--she exhaled, stepping back, her shoulders settling with something like reluctant understanding.
Hal shook his head beside her, rubbing a hand over his face. “Man, I really hate when you get like this.”
Bruce didn’t answer. There was nothing to answer. He was already moving again, his hands flying over the console, pulling up the same data, the same reports, the same leads that had taken him nowhere before. But it didn’t matter. He’d go through them a thousand times, ten thousand if he had to.
Because Clark was alive.
And Bruce was going to find him.
The breakthrough came at 3:47 AM.
Bruce had been awake for sixty-two hours.
The Watchtower was silent. Too silent. The kind of silence that didn’t exist on Earth, that shouldn’t exist anywhere, pressing in from all sides like a vacuum waiting to collapse inward. A silence so absolute it felt alive, watching , settling deep into his bones, stretching out in the space between his ribs.
Beyond the reinforced glass, the stars burned cold and distant, scattered against the void in a way that had never unnerved him before. But now--now, they felt wrong . Endless, unreachable, empty. A reflection of something he refused to name.
The only sound was the quiet hum of the servers, the whisper of data streams threading through miles of cables, the distant buzz of the oxygen systems cycling through the station. His own breath, steady, measured, mechanical.
His fingers moved across the console, each motion sharp, precise, calculated--but his body was beginning to turn on him. His eyes burned, raw and gritty from strain, every muscle wound tight from hours spent locked in place. His stomach twisted, protesting the absence of food, of water, of anything but caffeine and sheer force of will.
He ignored it.
Ignored everything that wasn’t the screen in front of him.
Because there--
There it was.
A flicker. A pulse. A distortion buried so deep in the data that it was almost imperceptible.
Almost.
Bruce exhaled slowly. His fingers went still over the keys, his posture locked in place. Every muscle in his body was coiled tight, waiting for the signal to move. To act. To do something . The restraint it took not to react immediately was suffocating, pressing against his ribs like iron bands, holding him back when every instinct screamed at him to go now, now, now--
He had spent ten weeks tearing through everything .
Every surveillance feed, every satellite scan, every scrap of intercepted communication from criminal networks and black-market channels. He had run every conceivable algorithm, rewritten entire code sequences just to squeeze another fraction of a percentage out of his search parameters. He had combed through the League’s old case files, looking for even a whisper of something familiar, something that matched the seamless, impossible way Clark had vanished.
He had chased down ghosts .
Broken into systems no one should have been able to break into. Pushed his mind and body to the edge, and then past the edge, because stopping wasn’t an option.
And it had led to nothing.
Whoever had taken Clark had been careful. Too careful. This wasn’t just about covering their tracks--it was about control . They hadn’t merely erased evidence; they had designed its absence. Crafted it like a masterwork, layer upon layer of obfuscation, every missing fragment precisely engineered to lead nowhere.
Not just that. They had left something behind.
A false trail. A carefully curated mess of meaningless blips, empty leads, dead-end signals meant to waste his time, to bleed him dry in a chase that could only ever spiral back on itself. That was what had driven him to the edge--what had scraped away the last of his patience, whittled him down to something raw and sharpened. This wasn’t just a kidnapping. This wasn’t just an attack on Superman.
It was a message.
One specifically crafted for him .
They had taken Clark. Erased him. Wiped away every trace so cleanly that even he-- he , with all his knowledge, all his resources, all his relentless, crushing determination--could find nothing. And then, just to make sure he kept running in circles, they had given him this . Carefully placed misdirection. A distorted whisper of something just real enough to chase, just false enough to break against.
Deliberate.
Calculated.
And that meant only one thing.
They had never planned for him to find the truth.
But Bruce had spent his entire life breaking through the impossible. He had built himself out of sheer force of will, clawed his way through every barrier placed in front of him, carved a path where none existed. He had made a career-- a legend --out of seeing what others missed, out of finding cracks in the perfect facades of gods and monsters alike.
No one could hide forever.
Not from him.
His fingers pressed against the console’s edge, the tension thrumming through his muscles so tightly it felt like he might snap. The screen in front of him flickered, feeding out raw data--unassuming at first glance, just another endless stream of numbers and reports. But Bruce knew what he was looking at.
It had taken ten weeks.
Ten weeks of tearing through every satellite feed, every communications log, every classified document he could get his hands on. Ten weeks of dead ends, of running in circles, of grasping at ghosts. But here-- here was something. A fracture in the silence. A single inconsistency buried so deep in the power grid records that most analysts wouldn’t have looked twice.
A fraction of a percent. A fluctuation so small, so insignificant, that it was almost laughable.
Almost.
But Bruce had personally overseen the shutdown of every LexCorp black-site. He knew their energy signatures the way he knew Gotham’s skyline--the exact pulse of their systems, the way they had been powered before being decommissioned. And this?
This was wrong .
The facility had been marked as dismantled. Officially, it didn’t exist anymore--no power, no personnel, no operational systems. Just another abandoned LexCorp husk, gutted and left to rot like the rest of Luthor’s discarded projects.
And yet, there was a power draw.
Small. Controlled. Barely more than a whisper beneath the standard fluctuations of the grid, hidden so neatly within expected variances that it would have been dismissed as nothing. A rounding error. Background noise. But it wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a pulse--steady, deliberate. Just enough to sustain something.
Or someone.
The realization struck like a physical blow. Bruce exhaled sharply, chest tightening as his mind spun through the implications. It fit too well, slotted into place with the kind of precision that made his stomach twist.
If he were going to hide someone--if he needed a facility erased from government records, one fortified with the exact tech and infrastructure required to keep Clark contained, to keep him weak and unable to fight back--this was where he would do it.
And whoever had taken him?
They had counted on Bruce never looking there.
His hands curled into fists against the console, nails pressing deep into his palms. The pressure bit into skin, sharp and grounding, but it wasn’t enough to settle the fire tearing through his veins. His heartbeat remained steady--too steady, too controlled--but his blood was burning.
They had Clark.
They had Clark --and for ten weeks, they had kept him locked away, erased from existence, buried in the dark under what Bruce knew had to be red sun radiation. Weakened. Isolated.
Seventy days.
Seventy days of silence. Seventy days of waiting. Seventy days of Clark expecting him to come.
And he almost hadn’t.
A breath ripped through his lungs, sharp and jagged. His body wanted to move. Needed to. His muscles coiled, every fiber wound tight as a drawn wire, a predator locked onto its prey. His nerves were electric, his mind already three steps ahead, calculations flashing behind his eyes--routes, strategies, entry points. He could feel the suit settling over him, the weight of the cowl, the press of the gauntlets against his wrists.
But he didn’t move.
Not yet.
His body was coiled, primed, every muscle ready to launch into motion, but his mind held him back. Because this --this was the moment. The one that decided everything.
His fingers hovered over the console. A single command, and the League would be here in minutes. He could bring in Diana, Barry, Hal. Mobilize every resource they had. Coordinate a full-scale operation, flood the facility with powerhouses who could tear through whatever security had been put in place.
But that wasn’t an option.
The people who had taken Clark had planned for the League. They had planned for Superman. They had calculated every possible response, covered every contingency. But they had left a trail for him.
That meant something.
It meant they were waiting. Watching. It meant that if they saw an army coming, they would be ready.
And if they were ready--if they even suspected an attack was imminent--Clark would be the first casualty.
Bruce’s jaw locked, teeth grinding hard enough to ache. His lungs dragged in a slow breath, forcing restraint into his bloodstream. No hesitation. No second thoughts. He had already made his decision, and there was only one way forward.
This wasn’t just another mission. It wasn’t another case to solve or another enemy to outmaneuver.
This was personal.
They had taken Clark from him.
And he was going to take him back.
Alone.