solarcore: (#14572981)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-27 03:27 am (UTC)(link)
Clark trades medical kit for book. Bruce's hand will need ice, some kind of NSAID, but he's done his bit, careful and particular.

Now, his attention turns to pages, pausing over the first drawing before he begins leafing through. The cast of characters, expanding, diminishing. His presence, and his absence. The blasted landscape, worse than he'd previously imagined the world looking like under Darkseid's influence. Parademons like locusts, stripping down cities. The dates, the notes. Once he stops seeig and starts reading, he can kind of imagine it more like a branching tree, but with pieces missing.

He spends the time, absorbing it all, expression serious. Like he wants to share this, wants to stand where Bruce is standing, where Vic is standing. It has occurred to him he could feel a way about Bruce keeping this from him, but what's the point, when he can understand why?

He starts from the beginning with better context, but doesn't get all the way back to the end again before commenting.

"A fixed point," Clark says. "Darkseid, on earth." Lois, dead. Clark, taken. "And then variations. Even if they look similar, they're not set in stone."
solarcore: (#11893084)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-27 04:08 am (UTC)(link)
Clark looks up, an open kind of puzzlement at the proposition that these dreams mean nothing, that they aren't authentic views of a possible and disastrous future. He suppposes he hadn't come down on either side until viewing Vic's notes solidified them one way or another, along with the a premonition of Barry Allen, and if he has to think about it—

Sure, coincidence, let's try that on for size. Vic could have seen all kinds of things. Bruce could be operating beneath some subconscious aftereffect if his steel trap of a brain had ever seen Barry Allen before and noticed something different about him, if the substance of that dream had only materialised after the fact which leads to the conclusion that Bruce is unstable. An unreliable narrator.

Clark offers an alternative. "Maybe it's sabotage," he says, book open and neglected in his hand. "External psychic influence, a campaign. You brought us altogether, maybe something out there thinks they could drive us all apart with enough—of this."

He closes the book. "I think you'd know," quietly.
solarcore: (pic#14762560)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-27 06:37 am (UTC)(link)
"I don't know."

The book is set aside, focus forwards, now. He believes Bruce, that he's not afraid of him, and the summoning of the fact that it has to be said prickles cold over his heart, but it's part of the deal. Whatever their deal is.

"I'm sorry you are," Clark adds. You don't deserve it. Like Bruce Wayne needs encouragement to place the world on his shoulders. "And if I could take it away, I would. But if there is anyone on this whole world who could do something good with it, whatever it might be, whatever it means, it's you."

Faith is a two-way street. One of those simple concepts that a scared and isolated little boy in Kansas had a hard time with, the adult version not much better, not until lately.
Edited 2021-03-27 06:38 (UTC)
solarcore: (pic#14762446)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-27 07:28 am (UTC)(link)
Clark scoots nearer, having claimed a rolly chair to sit and read. Near enough that he can reach out and snag Bruce's unfucked hand, use it to lever himself closer. They've exchanged enough tenderness between wild swings on waking and now that he feels it won't be unwelcome.

"You," he says, "brought me back. After these dreams started."

And maybe they'd been dismissed as nightmares only at the time, but he doesn't think so. Is that what he looks like?, written beside his portrait. Bruce believed, either way, that regardless of the risk, Superman was better to have than have not. That whatever he'd seen in him, in those last moments of hardly knowing each other, and whatever came after, had been enough.

Believing right back feels natural. Necessary. He thinks about saying that, and then says instead, "You know I love you, right?"
solarcore: (pic#14762577)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-27 09:29 am (UTC)(link)
"Good."

Vitals point to that it hadn't sunk in, but Clark's not about to make him out to be a liar. He's going to smile at him (dimmer, the occasion puts kind of a pall over the place, but no less warm), and then duck his head and bring Bruce's hand closer to his mouth so he can lay a kiss against his knuckles. And linger there, a short sigh felt against his skin, a flutter of eyelashes.

It should be crippling, this kind of pressure. Maybe later, if signs indicate that Bruce is receiving actionable intel on something inevitable, Clark will be appropriately scared shitless. Maybe. It takes a lot. (This is a lot.) But the way Bruce says that, of what he is, doesn't sound like expectation, but like fact.

But it's not just what Clark does or does not become. It's the thing that Bruce is hurtling to, supposedly, something terrible. Lois' death, unacceptable, and Bruce deserves better than being locked into some awful mistake, whether it's fear of his own making or something real.

"We'll figure it out," Clark says.
Edited 2021-03-27 09:30 (UTC)
solarcore: (pic#14762441)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-28 12:03 am (UTC)(link)
Clark's arm curls loose around the back of Bruce's thighs. Easy to lean into his hip, and just stay there, both of them half held, in the odd silence of—all this. Bruce says he should have told him sooner while he's calculating the worth in telling Lois, and it feels like something he will inevitably do. It's less he doesn't want to distress her

which he doesn't

and more that he's not sure what she could do with that information, and she always wants to do something with information. But who knows. She's good at finding angles.

He doesn't verbalise an answer here, and now, and instead just hugs Bruce a little tighter before he lists backwards, looking back up at him. "How's sleep sound?" A subtle :/-ish smile, conscious that sleep probably sounds, like, bad, and rephrases; "Do you want to try?"
solarcore: (pic#14762535)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-28 04:14 am (UTC)(link)
There's a lot of thinking happening up there, probably, and Clark is content to sit patiently while it happens. Bruce's hand in his hair is nice, too.

Bruce is human and humans don't have prophetic dreams. It's a thought he turns over in his own mind, a concept smooth as a river stone and curious all the same. There was a good portion of Clark's childhood where he'd believed himself human-but-different, and maybe even long after, until he stepped foot inside the Kryptonian scout ship and spoke to the holographic memory of Jor-El and learned of his home planet, and maybe even after then, sometimes.

The concept of human-but-different feels easy. The hard line logic of his ancestry doesn't take away from it. He finds that he can believe that Bruce Wayne, human, has visions of the future. That such things can happen. Who's to say they don't?

If they're not sleeping, he thinks about options. Breakfast, obviously. A walk outside while the night is pulled back from the sky. Maybe something's on TV.

He smiles when Bruce asks that question, crinkled amusement at the corners of his eyes, and says, "No, I haven't. They open?"
solarcore: (pic#14762446)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-28 05:59 am (UTC)(link)
Clark's face does that thing, listening at a distance, focusing on the sound of early morning traffic in Gotham City (which sounds distinct to the late night traffic of Gotham City) and blinking his acknowledgment. Time flies when you're having fun.

"That would be funny," he agrees, standing. "I don't think I knew you guys had an aquarium."

Mild shade. Reflex. Either Metropolese or Kansan, pick one, or both.

Retaliatory banter is (maybe) deflected with a quick smile and moving on past Bruce's shoulder to go sort through the clothes he has here, contemplate for a second a quick fly over back to his place to broaden his selection before settling instead on blue jeans, plaid shirt in deep green, thick-framed glasses with prescription lenses he can ignore at will.

A Clark Kent costume, in case of emergencies. Like this one.
solarcore: (c#14572975)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-28 07:40 am (UTC)(link)
"Well, I've considered incorporating ethically sourced eggs," says Clark, terminal fan of breakfast, conflict written clear into his expression as he considers the building through the windshield. "They call that 'vegganism'."

A beat, and then—he just gets out of the car.

Tofu is not on the menu for this place, but apparently the question is asked enough that they can throw something together involving potato hash and beans, and force him to admit out loud that he would not like any cheese in his breakfast burrito. A large coffee to go, a decision to eat in the Mercedes with Clark's unprompted promise not to spill anything.

He is already a bite in while they cross the parking lot. Barry does this too. They'd probably corroborate the thing about high metabolisms.
solarcore: (#14572979)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-28 08:55 am (UTC)(link)
There's probably a lot of things that Clark is doing with his life and choices that might have had Jon Kent throw his hat on the ground, and not even eating cheese might be one of them (because voting for Clinton over Dole was going to go to Clark's Kryptonian grave).

Still, he has no complaints about his purchase, a couple of big bites in to curb hunger before contentedly taking his time, fussily tearing and rerolling wrapping to manage salsa and other bits.

"Uh huh," Clark says, returning to his coffee. "Sometimes. I could usually talk dad into letting me take the truck out, and they didn't do much to check ID or anything. Classics and horror movies, mostly. Shut down a few years ago, or longer." A quizzical head tip of recollection. "I think there's a Dillons there now."

Sips coffee. "You?"
solarcore: (#14572983)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-28 10:52 am (UTC)(link)
"Disrespectful," Clark agrees, around his next bite, quick on the back of that comment.

It's an easy memory lane to go down. A highly awkward date with Lana Lang immediately springs to mind, at an age where girls seemed to have five years experience at acting like adults than every boy he knew, including (especially) himself. Other times, alone. Friends and making them hadn't come so easy, even if he was allowed to drive around on the occasional Friday night at age fifteen, which is.

Impressive, on reflection. What a nerd.

"I took a girl out to see Godzilla. The one from 1950-something. I thought it was pretty great," in the tone of someone who still thinks it was pretty great, awful American dub work and all. "I take it your taste runs a little more..." What's the word. "Less lizard monsters." Nailed it.
solarcore: (pic#14762535)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-29 07:48 am (UTC)(link)
"I stand corrected," Clark says, pleasantly.

And pleased. Bruce Wayne likes movies, and movies he likes. He starts describing with enthusiasm the plot of the second one he ever saw, unable to recall the name, and enough cross-reference between them identifies it as Invasion of Astro-Monster which also tells on him for his taste levels, in spite of a strong opener.

A hard pivot, then, asking, "Did you ever see The Day the Earth Stood Still? I could probably watch Wise movies all day," as he balls up the burrito wrapper, containing all debris within. He is, at least, a neat eater.

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