solarcore: (pic#14762432)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-30 10:39 am (UTC)(link)
"Was the Russian spy a beluga whale?"

It sounds familiar, a headline Clark probably scanned at some stage or another, read on his phone on a ferry ride, and he could probably bring up the memory if he didn't also want to listen to Bruce talk to him about Russian spy beluga whales. They stand shoulder to shoulder, almost, watching this particular very good cetacean spin in lazy circles, like it's flying in slow motion.

He has to make Arthur be his friend enough to get to go to Atlantis sometime. He doesn't need to breathe like he didn't really need a protein substitute in his vegan burrito like he didn't need to sleep last night beyond just enjoying the fleeting comfort of it. So he can go to Atlantis if he wants, and it'd be polite to wait for invitation. He's already lured Diana to the midwest with promise of apple pie, even if he has less chance of getting to see Themyscira than even the underwater depths of a forgotten kingdom.

As he plots, and listens, Clark's shoulder bumps into Bruce's. Very human feeling, this contact, rather than a Kryptonian shouldercheck. Probably most fully grown adult men don't go on platonic playdates to aquariums very much, but his instinct is discretion anyway, most times.
Edited 2021-03-31 09:55 (UTC)
solarcore: (pic#14762446)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-03-31 10:43 am (UTC)(link)
Necessarily, the clear wall of tank glass is pretty good against glare, likewise protecting from greasy fingerprints with a decent about of space enforced by a railing, but maybe there's a faint shadow of reflection that shows a beginning smile from Clark, a raised eyebrow that communicates go on regarding the thesis of beluga whales being the opposite of cats.

He breaks into a bigger grin when he is the last of the three to tip alongside, and the whale tips nearly upside down.

Laughing, low and quiet, he says, "This is a good aquarium."

His hand finds Bruce's, and he pulls him along at a slow wander for a few feet, the creature on the other side of the glass following them apace. "Reminds me of Woodstock," he adds, which is probably not very flattering to Sigrit, the beluga whale, but probably Clark imagines that Woodstock, the sun conure, very smart, and also prone to watching him exactly like this, following his movements. "But it's probably more like the other way around. I've met some whales."

Slow moving humpbacks, older and wiser and lazily curious about the visiting primate and his bright red plumage. Bright red at the time, anyway.
solarcore: (#11899928)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-02 04:49 am (UTC)(link)
"Mmhm. There was a family of them a ways off the coast of Australia, thought I'd drop in, see how they were doing." Clark glances back at Bruce, a smile, all self-awareness as he adds, "Nice folks."

It makes for fun 'how was your day' conversations at home.

Maybe Clark should have more hang ups than he does, given givens. That he is not as tactile in public is more about feeling comfortable in anonymity and giving Bruce a little bit of (but not too much) space. Maybe it's the Clinton-voting alien in him that doesn't carry around the worst of red state social pressures. Maybe he has plenty already to internalise on his own.

It is, anyway, just a hand, and he squeezes back.
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-02 06:30 am (UTC)(link)
It is something to be protected. Not the literal tangle of fingers right now, maybe, but what it gestures to, what it connotes for them both. He remembers Lois realising what it meant, loving him and him being in love with her, how her instinct has been to pull back, and maybe not now but today he certainly thinks about that. It had been to protect him.

Maybe he is a cartoon character, for his own instinct being to love even more fiercely. Bruce has tried to pull away too. It seems like a normal human instinct. But they probably both know by now that Clark isn't going to let them, no matter what prophetic dreams have to say.

They go to pet the stringrays, after determining that it's closer on the map anyway.

The touch tank is low, accessible for children, but it's a school day and so it's relatively empty, where all the people going on daytime dates are more interested in mooning over sharks and otters and belugas like losers. There's a sign with instructions, asking aquarium goers to stay quiet, not to splash the water, keep your hand still and palm flat, only touch these circled parts of the stingrays and gliding reef sharks present, and Clark follows all these to the letter. He has to take off his jacket and roll his sleeve, which he does.

"Do you snorkel?" Clark says, his attention such that he looks like he's asking the smooth grey stingray that passes beneath his hand, but it is intended for Bruce.
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-02 08:48 am (UTC)(link)
There is a glance back at the nudge. Fuck around and find out, Wayne. (Neither of those things will happen. They are responsible.)

"Me neither," Clark says. "But it seems relaxing."

There is an epaulette shark circling nearer, but not near enough. Still, Clark isn't afraid of falling in, centre of gravity wherever he needs it to be, so he leans enough to brush fingers against spotted hide. Maybe they'll deserve another vacation in a future that doesn't feel like it's about to be eaten up by cosmic horrors. Maybe they'll kill an afternoon by drifting bellydown in crystal clear waters and stare at octopuses and eels and pointy-finned tropical fish, who will only see their shadows.

There's probably a lot they have to talk about. Clark evens out his hand when no fish is imminent, unconcerned about germs and stingray pee as he only just touches the surface. Earth is pretty good. The Els did alright.

Hopefully.
solarcore: (#14572979)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-02 11:32 am (UTC)(link)
"Eels, maybe."

For a given value of unusual. Clark has his hand positioned with perfect form, having patted the ray after it skated by under Bruce's fingers. The few seconds of silence feels part and parcel to this moment that he doesn't wonder too sharply after what Bruce is thinking about, save that he is always wondering a little what Bruce is thinking about. It's all meditative, like the concentric ripples from their contact with the water, colliding, cancelling one another out.

Clark lifts his hand, lets water drip off his fingers, disinclined to startle anything by shaking it dry. "Frogs and minnows. Things that wanna be left alone, probably."

But stingrays are friendly. He will probably google 'do stringrays like being petted' in the Mercedes-Benz, later. He catches eye contact with a college-age aquarium employee lingering nearby at an adjacent touch tank bank to make sure no one is fucking with the fish, including the two huge gentlemen over here, and so Clark projects a disarming smile in their direction. They smile back.

Bruce may want to do something lest he find himself standing by while Clark strikes up friendly conversation with a marine biology major.
solarcore: (#14572984)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-03 07:18 am (UTC)(link)
It doesn't seem to come up, fortunately. Names exchanged, Clark for Fiona, the latter of whom assures Clark that plenty of stingrays like to be patted, and the ones that don't will retreat into the mangroves potted in amongst the rocks further back. She's been working here for four months. She studies reefs and coral. She's originally from Nashville and she's here on a scolarship.

And maybe there is a moment where she glances past Clark towards Bruce with fleeting speculative recognition, but it drags away again when the sound of an excited child shriek echoes through the enclosure.

"It was nice to meet you," Clark says, freeing her back to her job, and then he does a pat down with his dry hand and a classic 'where'd I put my phone' swivel, immediately scoping the tank just in case. Nope. Back to Bruce, a reflexive peeling back of visual layers, clothing and skin and bone and then a ghostly outline carrying the rectangle he's looking for, all in the bredth of a second.

He smiles, and moves past him to go wrangle a paper towel for himself.
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-03 09:29 am (UTC)(link)
Yikes.

"You should follow that instinct," Clark says, and they bypass the sushi stand too. "See where that gets you."

There's also pizza, which is ultimately the direction that Clark drifts to after some prowling. It includes an option of pizza decorated in shrimp, which is politely ignored in favour of a couple of slices with veggies and crumbled quorn and something that isn't legally allowed to be called cheese. He knows better than to insist Bruce or really anyone around him to actually inhabit this habit (that Lois is struggling along with him is purely her burden to bear), but he can still make him try a bite, probably, of something he thinks isn't that bad, actually!

While waiting: "How're you feeling?"

And his plan is to bundle all the pictures and short video clips into a folder and leave them somewhere on Bruce's servers to be discovered later. Who knows, though, maybe Alfred and Diana will get to them first. He assumes he would not have to for Vic to be just ambiantly aware of the stupid contents of his phone.
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-03 11:28 am (UTC)(link)
Their table is situated next to a koi pond, off from the main cluster of seating. Some parents overlook a couple of kindergarten aged kids, some retirees sip their coffee, some college-age couples sit in comfortable silence on their phones with empty sushi trays in front of them. There is music playing from a very distant speaker and a looping female voice funneled through that sits just beyond the scope of human hearing, like she's announcing sealion feeding hours and reminders not to run from the depths of a cave.

Clark is already making a :/ face as he folds a pizza slice to eat, tolerant of slushie margaritas and criticism and certainly not waiting for his time to reply before he takes a bite. Omf. The quorn (with a q, Bruce) is fine, the 'cheese' is not great. But also, not worse than what Clark remembers as if in a distant dream like maybe five months ago coming out on normal food court pizzas, anyway. If questioned on the moral hypocrisy of his efforts, he honestly has little in the way of argument.

It just feels better. Speaking of feelings—

"Well, we still have time," he says, after the bite is swallowed. "How's your—what is that?"
solarcore: (#14572983)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-04 07:20 am (UTC)(link)
Clark shakes his head through his second qizza bite, no, not the pills, and then goes and answers his own question by reaching out and taking Bruce's remaining margarita. He helps himself to a sip of faintly tequila-flavoured ice, tips his head like not bad, and sets it back down within Bruce's reach.

Bad manners. Maybe someone has a corrupting influence. (It's Lois, or both of them, trying each others cocktails of choice.)

"Would the dramatic thing tell me how you are?"
solarcore: (pic#14762577)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-04 08:49 am (UTC)(link)
For all that Clark will strike up conversation with anyone and anywhere, seemingly immune to the tempo of a big city, or will talk about topics plucked from thin air, he isn't particularly anxious about filling the silence. There's been plenty of times where they've lain together in a quiet and peaceful tangle, or Clark has read a book he's found somewhere in the lake house while Bruce does something complex and mechanical nearby in eyeshot. Walking the rest of the shark tunnel in companionable quiet.

The social adept in him does, however, twinge a little as he waits for an answer, when his question hooks on the air between them and hangs in place, and they're sitting across from one another lke this. There's a speculative eyebrow raise, but no further pressure than that, finishing off his pizza slice in gnawing bites.

Mainly: he wants Bruce to be okay, and to say that he is. Tall order, probably. But he's supposed to, according to the script, tolerate conspicuous avoidance until Bruce cracks, and so.
solarcore: (pic#14762442)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-04 09:50 am (UTC)(link)
Maybe there's an alternate timeline where Bruce falls back on instinct, closes up, retracts, deflects. In this timeline, later, hours or days, Clark flexes his fingers through Bruce's and says I feel like there was something you wanted to say to me, and maybe Bruce does, then. Or doesn't, but it won't matter, because there may have been some unsteady and unstable time when Clark, unsure of himself, could have been shut out for good, allowed that to happen. But not in that future.

Not in this present. He is cleaning his hands when Bruce speaks, setting food court debris aside, and then stillness. No fidgeting.

His eyes do a thing, that fractional widening slightly amplified by needless lenses. His heart does a thing, no one around to hear it. It doesn't feel like new information—you know, right?—but it still feels revelationary. That's how poems work too.

Clark, gentle, reaches across the table to map his hands against the outside of Bruce's, like he could absorb that fidgeting and the feelings that create it. His thumbs resting on the heels of Bruce's palms. "I don't like the idea of you waking up alone with this," he says, quietly. "And I know you might prefer it, that way, but I want to be there. And next time, I won't let this thing hurt me, or you." For whatever 'hurt' means, flailing in the dark, invulnerability.

"You don't have anything to be sorry about," he adds. Deeply earnest, very sure.
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-04-05 04:49 am (UTC)(link)
Clark is studying their hands while Bruce closes his eyes. Similarly sized hands. Bruce's rough in places, bandaged recently, and his own look nothing like you'd expect a farmer's son from Kansas to look, smooth and unworked. If Clark had to guess, he'd say that this thing is doing to Bruce not unlike what Luthor had managed to do. Get right into the heart of things, remove Bruce's powers of calculated objectivity. Make it too close, too intimate.

He looks back up when Bruce speaks, a fond kind of smoothing of his expression. Bruce is a planner. Clark, less of one.

"I don't know. You kind of had a plan," Clark suggests, letting his tone lighten up a little. Not teasing, still serious, just not sombre. "You were information collecting even before you knew if it meant anything. You still don't know if it does. So you kept it contained. You didn't want it to hurt anyone."

Like Clark, which is very sweet, but. His grip on Bruce's hands tighten, although he avoids the sprain as he does so. "A while back, I asked you to let me help you. I seem to recall you agreed."

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