"That's who you were talking about?"

Bruce needed no further explanation. The moment he saw you running toward the bus —a bus that should have never arrived, in a town no one could leave— he knew.

Ever since the day you both had been trapped in that cursed place, where the nights belonged to creatures that wore human faces and the days were ruled by fear, Bruce had allowed himself something he hadn't in a long time: hope. Not for escape, not even for survival —but for you. For the impossible, quiet chance that maybe, in the wreckage of this nightmare, something could bloom between two broken souls.

And then he saw Clark Kent.

He saw how your whole being shifted —how the weight you carried on your shoulders seemed to lift. How your eyes, dulled by terror and exhaustion, suddenly lit up with a warmth that Bruce could only ever dream of being the cause of.

You had warned him. Gently, carefully, you had told him there was someone waiting for you beyond this nightmare. That even if you sometimes laughed with Bruce, even if you trusted him enough to share your fears, your heart had always belonged to another.

He had heard you. But he hadn’t realized how deeply he had started to hope anyway.

And now, with Clark here —as real and undeniable as the monsters outside their windows— Bruce could feel everything he had barely dared to want slipping away from him, piece by piece.

It wasn’t just the terror of being trapped in this place forever that haunted him now; it was the certainty that even if they ever found a way out, he would leave alone. That you were never his to lose —and yet losing you still shattered something inside him.

He clenched his fists at his sides, swallowing back every word, every feeling that had nowhere to go.

In the end, he forced himself to look away, because seeing you happy —truly happy— hurt more than anything the darkness could ever do to him.