Bruce/Wally/J'onn

[icarus_chained]

I'm currently running at thirty hours without sleep. Consequently, I'm in a strange humour, and this little thing suddenly appeared.

Title:  An Infinite Lightness of Touch
Rating:  PG
Pairing/Characters:  Bruce/Wally/J'onn
Wordcount:  608
Summary:  ... I don't think I can explain this one. Dreamy. Strange.

An Infinite Lightness of Touch
  

Neither of them knew it at first, but they had both taken to touching him in the same fleeting instant. Neither of them conscious of the other, in those first snatched encounters, they had passed each other by unknowing, one as much a shadow to the other as to him. It had been their shared secret, before either knew the other existed.

Their reasons were hauntingly similar. He was their touchstone, the one solid piece of reality that tied them to their world, the earthy center of their orbit. To one, who drifted through the world intangible, invisible to the minds surrounding him, he was the one impenetrable solid, the center of gravity that drew the ephemeral soul to rest like dust motes around him as an invisible suitor, to trace phantom fingers over his lips in silent gratitude. To the other, whose feet touched the world as but a faint wind, who lived at such a speed as to see all the moments of the world slip through his helpless fingers before he could grasp them, he was the frozen second that crystallised all of time into the single solid thump of an enamoured heart, the unmoving being who drew that fleeting spirit in to brush a kiss as faint as a breeze over his unfeeling cheek.

He was the center, known to both but knowing them not at all. Innocent of them, as they grew to know each other. For they had to know each other. As one, a wind through the shadows of a cave, brushed through the invisible cloud of the other around him, as twin spirits met each other and sheered back in awe. Retreating, fleeing, incomprehending. And then, touching. Faint, and from a distance. Learning. Sharing. A strange touching of two shadows, each half-removed from the only world they shared, the connection between them a strengthening web that narrowed their twinned orbit around him, their unknowing star.

But he was not unknowing for long. It was not his nature, this lord of shadows and half-told tales, to remain unseeing even of that which was invisible. With the strange intuition of a mind once unmoored by grief, he touched them in their orbit, and knew them for what they were. And even as they moved to flee, he reached out to them, the instinctive reaching of a long-lost child, and strove to show them the truth of himself.

For he was their echo. A man impenetrable, a man inviolable, a man alone. He lived a half-life of flitting shadows and the passing tides of night, even as they drifted touchless through a world of solids, or fled unnoticed through a world of impossible slowness. That was the secret of them, the understanding they reached in that moment. That they were each in their way isolated. Each in their way intangible. And each in their way fleeting. They were each an ephemeral shadow in a world of solid shapes and primary colours, disconnected in part from all but each other.

That moment was where things changed. They came to him more often after that, more openly, at least for them. The touch of a phantom hand in the shadows overlooking a fractured city. A fleeting kiss from the wind in battle. They touched each other at the speed of thought, laughingly, in passing. And every morning, in the half-light of dawn, the great moment of between, he showed them the pleasures of the tangible touch, the joys of a moment lived slow.

And so, wielded with an infinite lightness of touch, theirs was a joy to stretch over an entire world in a single instant, and always, always come home.