The family dinner, as Bruce phrased it, managed to go well without heart attacks or gross sobbing. Dick must have been very thorough on the phone.
Alfred took the news in in his ever nonchalant manner. His shaking hands, however, betrayed him as he passed out the utensils in a wheelchair. Damian, as a grown man, came the closest to expressing emotions without throwing a fit than he ever did. Jason grunted his acknowledgement at Bruce being alive. Tim raised his glass and gave a small smile at both Bruce and Clark. Stephanie was talking nonstop and Cassandra listened with occasional interjections. Barbara was the most ecstatic, telling Bruce all about Dick's ridiculous GCPD adventures.
It was a big table. Conversations thrown around were subtly centered around the years Bruce missed out on but would not ask about. The relationships. The marriages. The families. The adventures. The only strategic pieces left out were the accidents, the illnesses, and the deaths.
Bruce was not particularly talkative, but everyone knew he was paying attention. He appeared quite comfortable among people who were thirty years older than he remembered them. Clark answered most of the questions that were thrown his way.
Most of the food was obviously speed delivered from the city. No one questioned their origins. If Dick was about to comment on their legitimacy, Bruce's glare was enough to shut him up.
By the same token, no one mentioned the pumpkin soup at the center of the table. Alfred had cast one knowing look at the chefs when Bruce placed the steaming pot on the table. No one, save Clark, drank from the mysterious mixture. The stark orange color was not exactly natural.
Clark forced himself to swallow a mouthful and suppressed his grimace. It burned.
Dick was watching him all along, ready to splutter. He caught Clark's silent help me expression and burst out laughing. "Oh my god. There is no way that is pumpkin."
"Don't drink it." Bruce glared at Clark, who was gingerly wiping at his mouth with a napkin.
"It's memorable." Clark protested. Cooking with Bruce was no easy matter. It involved a great many arguments over cooking instructions and preferences. Much like their teamwork on the battlefield.
"Your diarrhea is gonna be memorable." Dick snickered again.
"I don't know what we did wrong." Clark murmured, twirling his spoon in his bowl. "We followed the recipe."
"We didn't." Bruce groaned into his pasta. He refused to register the artificial color of the soup.
"We did." Clark pointed out stubbornly. Then he shrugged. "Until like, one-third of the way."
Dick stood up to get a better look at the substance with all the odd potato-like matters swimming within. God it was bad. "I can't even-"
Bruce chose the same moment to stand up, both palms still planted on the table. Everyone paused to look at them both. Then Bruce wiped a napkin over his mouth and discarded it onto the table. "Excuse me." He pulled away and walked out the room, both doors still swinging in his wake.
Dick looked around in confusion and slowly sank back down into his chair.
From the other end of the table, Jason sneered. "Boy, did you make the boss mad."
Damian stare was steely. "You destroyed Father's confidence and ruined his pride."
"May I remind you, Master Damian, that you cursed and hit your knee against the table when Master Bruce put that pot in front of you?"
"It was a natural reaction." Damian glared at Alfred immediately. "I meant no disrespect, Pennyworth. Unlike him."
Clark sent Dick a comforting look. "I'll go see what he's up to." He followed Bruce in the direction of the Batcave.
Clark found Bruce bent over his desk, frantically going over the schematics. He unrolled whichever drawing on hand, skimmed through it, and moved on to the next.
"It's not right." He kept muttering under his breath. "It doesn't match up."
"What doesn't match up?" Clark asked in confusion.
"The machine and the blueprints." Bruce pointed at the drawing. "This specifies cemented tungsten carbide." He held up a piece of scorched metal. "Look at this. This is just alpha-beta alloy. Titanium. Application at max four hundred degrees Celsius. This isn't meant to withstand the amount of heat generated during time travel."
"But that detail," Clark pointed at one of the drawings and picked out a component from the heap. "It looks almost identical." He picked out another. "They all look identical, except the smaller pieces."
"Yes." Bruce muttered distractedly. "Someone built the base, stopped one-third of the way, and reconstructed it into a simpler version of the machine."
"He ran out of time." Clark said softly. He held up the piece of metal, his eyes seemingly looking far beyond the object in his hand. "The diagnosis. He found out he had cancer."
"But if he didn't follow the drawings..." Bruce thought of the large hole on the wall, where Clark had burned through to get to the metal scraps. "Why did he leave the drawings for you to find?"
Clark looked up, dumbfounded. "For me?"
"Yes, he wouldn't have known I travelled here." Bruce fell into his chair, rubbing his temples. He was staring emptily at the remains of the older Bruce's machine when something clicked in his mind. "Unless he did."
"Unless he did what?" Clark asked in confusion.
Bruce started pacing in front of the table. "Think about it. What do I have that my older self does not?"
"Time?" Clark offered hesitantly.
"Thirty years." Bruce acknowledged. "And an autopsy report."
"An autopsy report." Clark repeated. "What?"
"I can inspect my own corpse. Take dead cells from my body to find out how the cancer originated. This is what was missing in his research. I would have thirty years to find a cure." Bruce spoke with his usual clinical detachment. "This is why he sent me here."
"Wait. Who sent you here?"
"I sent myself." Bruce flicked on his screens. Quickly he scrolled through the huge amounts of data on Kryptonite-induced cancer. "This is why all this information remains in the database. For me to find."
"Then this machine…" Clark trailed off. The metal in his hand fell to the ground with a loud clank.
"This isn't the machine he meant to build. Knowing me, I would have wanted to travel back in time and do everything myself." Bruce deduced. Ironically, he knew his older self wouldn't even trust his younger self. "But I didn't have time to finish the machine, and soon I was losing physical strength. So I built a variation of the machine."
"A remote time machine." Clark uttered, astonished at the conclusion he had reached. "He chose a period that you were unconscious and instead brought you into the future."
"Exactly. Now all I have to do is reconstruct a time travel machine according to these blueprints, and return with all the information I have on the cancer that took my life." Bruce looked up and saw that Clark was gazing at him strangely. "What?"
Clark shook his head. He choked out a dry laugh. "You're crazy. You're just plain, out-of-this-world insane. I love you."
Bruce's heart did a leap at his confession. He tried to think how much of that confession Clark had meant in all seriousness. How much of that was just a momentary outburst. How much of that was meant for the older, wiser, experienced him. Or, he tried not to think about all those things.
Clark was oblivious to Bruce's inner turmoil. He bowed down to pick up the metal he had dropped. He inspected it endearingly, as if it was his only reminder of the stubborn man that refused to accept his mortality like every other human.
"Why didn't you just type up a manual and save it on your desktop?" Clark chuckled wryly. "Son of a bitch. You- He had me choking out sobs during his funeral. I wept till my eyes were dry. Pounded on the earth, just to release some of that crushing pressure that was squeezing my chest. He must have been laughing at me the entire time, thinking what pranks he could set up when he rose from the dead."
Bruce looked away. He was reading the texts on his screen. Reading between the lines, into the deliberate emotional detachment of the author. The scientific guise. The dejected undertone. It was the words of a man who was certain of his fate. Who felt hopeless to change it.
"Maybe he wasn't as hopeful as you think." He said quietly.
Clark's hand froze from touching the metal. He forced out a laugh. "Of course he was. He knew he'd beat the cards fate dealt him this whole time." He glanced nervously at Bruce, who quickly minimized the texts on his screen.
"There was a good chance that he didn't know whether his invention was successful. If he was arranging for me to carry out an autopsy, he would have wanted me to arrive as early as possible. My guess is that the remote time machine never stopped computing, until six months after his death. The moment it finished computing, it duplicated my mind and body from the past and inserted me here."
"So he didn't know…" Clark's throat went dry. Bruce standing in front of his machine, watching the pointer rotate, his heart sinking. Bruce spending his last moments on his death bed, thinking how he had failed. God forbid.
"But he had hoped." Bruce reminded him grimly. "He worked hard for it. And, ultimately, he had succeeded."
Clark was no longer watching him. His eyes had caught the databases of information that he had not been privy to. Bruce's writing. Bruce's words. Bruce's work. Bruce's attempts at survival, trying and failing, failing and trying...
Bruce glanced back at the top of the stairs and suppressed a sigh. He supposed he would tell his guests that Superman had run off to save the world again.