It’s like a noise all its own, the silence. The sudden, terrible absence of a sound you had known for so many years. Through battles where it became too rapid or poisons that made it erratic, staccato, It wasn’t the first time that it vanished, of course. Vanished from the present, from this reality, brought back by means of Lazarus pit and medical miracles and magic that it hurt him more than he’d ever admit to even think about, but there was always a feeling that it would start back up again.
For a few decades, it was so steady in the background of the world that Clark didn’t notice the gradual weakening. He was invulnerable, but Bruce was indestructible, the iron man to the man of steel.
He sits up in bed and he hears Jon getting up to feed Krypto Jr, and Titus III out in Star City.
Jon speaks so softly. He doesn’t need to yell, even halfway across the country, for his father to hear.
“Damian just got the alert—the monitor,” he starts, and pauses. There’s a roaring from above, an engine hushed below what the humans on the streets beneath can hear. “He’s on his way.”
By the time Clark arrives, Lois in his arms, Damian is rushing up from the Batcave. He hears Cassandra, Nell, Duke. From further out, the beeping, buzzing, almost inaudible sounds of alarms, calls, signals. Tim swings out of bed and straps on his leg, hissing in pain as the cybernetics misalign. He mumbles something about talking to Natasha Irons, and wakes Stephanie.
Somewhere outside of Kaunas, Dick sets an earpiece down on the desk in front of him, and chokes back a single sob.
Clark hears the bones spraining in Jason’s hand from punching the wall.
He hears Kate cautiously approaching—it’s been a long time since he heard her beat—and putting one hand down on Damian’s shoulder, the other on Bruce’s scalp. She asks—Bruce was still the child of Martha Wayne, née Kane. Should she?
Damian’s nod is barely perceptible save for the motion of the muscles beneath the skin, the bioelectrical pulse of it. Kate sees it as well as Clark does, or perhaps just knows.
The words of the Shema are dry and dusty on her lips, unpracticed, but they come forth none the less. Her knees give out at the final, barely audible ועד, and her wife holds her up. She traces the lines on Bruce’s face, a survivor in a family that knew so much loss. Her gaze and her hand move to Damian’s face. A survivor.
Cassandra doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself, muscles tensing, relaxing, standing perfectly still. Duke has a hand over his eyes, beneath which tears glint. Nell is sitting on the floor, her head between her knees.
Damian looks up at all of them, and nods for them to come closer, Clark included. They are all family, in so many ways. They should all be here, and as the others arrive, so many heartbeats fill a small space.
It isn’t raining at the funeral, which would have been perhaps too on the nose.
Clark feels like his words are drowned out by the sound of cicadas in the distance, as he delivers a eulogy. Here, he is Clark Kent, legendary investigative journalist, author, teacher. The words come out of him, and they will come again, later, for the second funeral. The less public one.
He speaks of opposites, of different backgrounds, lives, worldviews. Mistrust, frustration, reconcilation, bonding. Brotherhood.
He knows his voice is raised. He knows everyone in attendance is listening, and that the microphone is amplifying it. He can hear the sobs, the murmurs, the prayers of different faiths. He can hear the camera filming him. He can hear the insects droning on in the late summer heat.
How many years have gone by since he perfected hearing one small sound among so many, that he cannot hear himself speak? How many years since he felt adrift in a sea of sound, without an anchor? How long has he trusted in that beat, that it will continue, somewhere in the world?
He cannot hear himself, for all the silence.
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