hii for your WIP ask game, i’d love to know more about the soul bond fic and variance omg
The Soulbond fic was originally a adopt-an-idea prompt from the Superbat server, basically DCEU Bruce nearly drowns to death and Clark revives him via old fashioned CPR with what does the mouth kissy breathy. But whoops, turns out Kryptonian's can soul bond with a person they deeply love and cherish via a kiss. It also allows a small amount of telepathy between the bond.
At first they don't even know what's going on, mainly they just noticed they keep thinking about the other more often and are suddenly very in sync in combat scenarios. Then stuff starts getting creepily weird, as seen in the snippet below:
"How did you find me?" Clark asked, curiously. There was an odd tone to his voice Bruce didn't think sounded alarming, but wasn't quite right either.
Bruce shrugged and continued to discard the charred pieces of the suit. "I knew you would be there."
"But…how did you know that?"
For goodness sake, "Because I—"
How did he know Clark was at that warehouse?
Bruce ran his mind over the string of thought, pulling into himself. At first it had been the most likely warehouse in the Slums that Bruce had thought the kidnappers would have taken the hostages, but now that he thought about it, there was two other such suitable locations nearby. It could have been any of the three. Had he gotten lucky?
No. It was too perfect. He had been running on pure adrenaline and instinct, but even instinct wouldn't have taken Bruce to the exact part of the warehouse where Clark and the others had been held in.
The deeper Bruce delved, the more inconsistencies he found.
He thought back to their recent fights. During other battles in the past two months, he'd noticed a similar peculiarity to his current situation. It had been the way they moved together in battle. The precise teamwork that they had never been so subscribed to before. During the fight with Magpie, Bruce hadn't seen any particular tell that Clark was going to move. No shifts in his flight pattern, or a twist of his torso in that direction. Bruce had just…known that's what Clark was doing. Moving into the exact position to catch her once Batman made his next move
He ran the scene back in his mind again. They hadn't practiced that maneuver before. Not in training, nor any other battle. Bruce wouldn't initiate a move like that on his own without knowing beforehand that his partner understood the maneuver and the sign for it explicitly. To keep themselves and their foes relatively safe. In fact, he hadn't even given the sign. Bruce only did that if he and his partner were in perfect sync for a fight, like when they'd used the maneuver routinely in combat. Specifically, he'd only done such things thus far with Robin.
Now that he thought about it, this wasn't the first time he and Clark had been in such perfect, uncanny sync together.
Hearing his name snapped him out of his deep thoughts, and he realized he'd gone silent for far too long. And for some reason, he knew Clark's face was radiating concern before he'd even looked at the man. Before the tone in how he said Bruce's name registered inside of the detective's mind, because something else had settled there first and done it for him.
Clark raised a brow at him. "You don't?"
And they stumble across the answers back at the Kryptonian Ship. Soulbond, babyyyy. Turns out, it's permanent. You can't break it without death itself. They also weren't together nor had feelings before this (but they will hehehe).
Bruce is feeling guilty that he took something this precious away from Clark (whom he thinks might have lost his original bond with Lois...but surprise surprise they never had one before Clark died), and Clark is feeling bad he accidentally forced Bruce into an extremely intimate bond, with little to no privacy, without knowing or being able to put a stop to it.
They end up working with J'onn to learn to navigate the bond without too much slipping through the cracks...and whoops..are they...in love, your honor??
(Side note, I'm calling it Tamaranian style because in ye old NTT comics, Tamaranian marriage worked in a similar way, but less telepathy and more actually soul bonded for life, forever, permanently. Dunno if it's been retconned, probably has, shrug)
Variance is my chronic pain Bruce AU where the JLA finds out about it. Like, they just straight up didn't know he had chronic pain of any kind until a good chunk of the League gets forced into quarantine on the Watchtower and they end up running out of pain meds. Bruce suffers, the League actually realizes there's been consequences this entire time for like, ya know, that one human member who gets beaten half to death all the time? Yeah he's got spinal hardware and neuralgia and a medical chart ten miles long. Bonding and adjustments to their purview of Bruce is had, and maybe Bruce learns to stop hiding this shit so much from them because they really ought to have known about it sooner, should anything hella fucked gone wrong because of it.
Here's a snippet I really like from it:
Hal finally got shaken out of his train of thought when Diana spoke, picking a medical tablet and navigating through the screen to what looked like a chart. "I've not needed to read your file in recent years. You don't often let anyone other than Ray treat your more serious wounds up here, and you value your privacy."
"True," Bruce smiled briefly before his face fell back to a flat tone, "While I appreciate your courtesy, we never know what new injuries or contraindications someone might have gained since their previous treatment up here. With our line of work, it's more common than you think."
"Very much so. I should not have assumed the same could not apply to you."
J'onn chimed in, "The scanner should be ready."
"Hey, wait a sec," Hal cut in, more so out of habit and morbid curiosity than anything else, "What if one of you guys weren't here? One of the medics?"
"We have a protocol for that, too. All member's files are accessible by any member in emergency cases for treatment, although it is preferably with oversight from a med team or senior member, but I understand that isn't always possible." Bruce explained, almost nonchalantly. A little too unconcerned. Like it wasn't a big deal at all that, if they had brought him into the medbay unconscious and Diana or whomever hadn't been around, and they had thought to preform an MRI on him without consulting his chart first, they'd have injured him more, if not outright killed him.
Oh, wow that was an image Hal didn't want inside of his head. Fuck.
He winced and out of the corner of his eye, saw Diana's jaw tighten a bit. He couldn't say he blamed her any. She probably just had the same thought he had. Surely one of them would have double checked the medical file in the database beforehand in this cooked up scenario?
Bruce must've sensed the quiet dread radiating in the air, because he cut in with, "I know what you're thinking. Part of the MRI protocol is triple checking for any contraindications per the charts. The machine won't start without an updated chart review and a full body xray. It's part of the safety protocols. You would have found out anyways had it gone that far."
Somehow, after hearing that, Hal thought none of them would have believed it. Regardless of the MRI conundrum now. It could have been something as simple as giving Bruce a medication that he could have been allergic to simply because they assumed he wasn't, and the result would be the same. Even if it was listed in bright bold letters in the database, scrawled multiple times onto record, there would be that sliver of doubt. The double-take at the words on the screen.
There was a barrier in place, Hal had noticed, a circle of knowledge they refused to break through. A very specific facade the League held in regards to Bruce in particular. Something deeply rooted and seemingly unshakable the notion that Bruce was like them, immune to the effects of most collateral damage from being a vigilante, outside of death itself.
It was something Hal found himself picking up on more and more, but not looking too deeply at whenever it showed. As the years grew, moments like these, ones that shook up the illusion, grew too. Sometimes Hal forgot Bruce was a regular human, considering everything Batman and Bruce Wayne could do. That Hal had witnessed with his very eyes. Everything Bruce had survived.
It was at times like this that Hal was struck with the sudden sharp, chilling realization that the Bruce they knew, the one who'd routinely been beaten down night after night and continued to get up again for the next fight, their unflinching tactician who could cross a battlefield in seconds and leave limp bodies behind in his wake, was the same person as the one sitting in front of him now with the multitude of fresh scars and bruises, shrapnel, and fresh bloodied wounds.
The more Hal thought about it, the more he realized it was a miracle Bruce was still breathing at all. Hal remembered the times he saw Bruce take a hit and had the immediate thought of "This is it. This is what kills him."
I had written a good chunk of this a while back, but...what I wrote just ain't it chief. It needs a major rework in a bad way, especially the beginning where I more or less infodumped so much that it made getting to the point of the fic very confusing...I'll get around to it eventually.
Anyhoo, thanks for the ask Puff!
