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.)
What do you mean, non-verbal not bad, it's awful, and Bruce's flat look says so. But it's something to brush up against the concept of taking the edge off, which is about where Bruce is on the path of wrestling with an addiction. He has the physical ability to go cold turkey, he knows, the dangers of it not as immediate for someone who does the kinds of things he can do, but he's grudgingly accepted the wisdom in a kinder, slower path. Not just for him. He and Alfred enable each other, and badly; a measured pace allows him the breathing room to see what can be done in that direction, too. His 73-year-old father figure can't hold his breath for ten minutes or regulate his own heartbeat.
So, he is drinking the rest of this freezie machine margarita, and maybe he won't have a headache. He can function with headaches, his behavior and performance levels indistinguishable, but he doesn't like them.
Would the dramatic thing tell Clark how he is. Or would he use it to build a cathedral around an answer, the empty space within beautifully lit and protected and enshrined, but still empty. This qizza is pretty bad. Part of the crust on his is burned, and it helps the texture, miraculously. Maybe he and Lois can cook for Clark sometime. Jam on toast and a kale smoothie, and scotch.
Bruce watches him, but doesn't answer. Undecided on how to. In the pond, a large koi breaks the surface with a zig-zag splash, brilliantly colored body zipping back from capturing a gnat.
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.
Time goes by, and things about Bruce that can be forgotten in the heat of his passion, or strategically applied humor, risk bubbling to the surface like the ripples in the pond beside him; pathological rudeness, shutting down, shutting out.
He taps his fingers against the table, alongside the mostly-empty margarita cup. A little anxious, a little decisive. A very human mix.
"I don't know how I'm feeling."
And I hate that.
All his control, all his planning. Bruce has let go of a lot over the past two years, between his blind dive into faith and hope and striking out in the dark to make this team and fight an unknown power. Even their collective relationship is sailing into uncharted territory. Exposing himself like this - the dreams, his poor reaction to them - makes him vulnerable. Unsteady. He should find solace in support, but he's so unfamiliar that it's just strange.
"I've loved you for a long time," he continues abruptly. "It was something I accepted and then set aside as private, because I didn't think it would ever come up. Or that it was—"
Ah. Hm.
"Your business. I guess. I thought it would be intrusive for both of us. I don't think about it too closely anymore. You startled me. I'm sorry about this morning, it was just." He twists the plastic cup where it sits on the table. "Unfortunate timing on my part."
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.
To have faith in Clark is to, in some way, have lost faith in himself. In the way he does things, in the way he forms his beliefs and executes his plans. In his place in the world entirely. It's too much to put on one person— or would be, if that person weren't Clark, always looking at him like too much is finally enough.
Bruce closes his eyes. Not to hide from the moment or block it out, but to let himself feel Clark's hands over his, to sink into what he says. An instinct is there to withdraw, because he's been hurt so many fucking times - hurt others so many fucking times - but he pushes into it instead. Makes himself feel it and accept that he wants it.
(he's wondered sometimes if the reason he can't stop and can't kill himself in his dreams is because he still loves Clark so much)
"I don't have a plan for any of this," feels like a shameful admission. Lying to Clark by withholding his dreams, endangering Lois by falling asleep next to her. Not having any idea what the fuck to do. Is this what having people is supposed to be for?
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."
Bleak humor: if Luthor had been less heavy-handed, if Bruce had not been pushed to such an unhinged state, he may have actually managed to kill Superman himself. He's wildly dangerous when he's spinning out of control, but he's far more effective when he isn't. If he has a plan and he's clear-headed, no moment of weakness is going to interrupt him. He'll always want to get back to center, no matter how angry he is.
So thanks, Lex.
Bruce presses his thumb up against Clark's grip. Returning it while caged in. Looking at him finally, brown eyes tired, but unguarded. Sitting across from him at a small table in a food court at an aquarium. A small bird has landed on the lip of the koi pond, hoping for soggy pellets not yet vacuumed up by the koi.
"And here I thought," well, this is happening, apparently, "that would be boring."
Boring and about a lamp. You midwestern asshole, Clark.
Clark gives him a smile, the smile of a man secure in the spoken fact that they are in love and so he can maybe get away with even more than he previously let himself know about.
"Boring's fine too," he says. "So any time you wanna try that out instead, I'll be there."
Said smile fades a little, faster than usual. This is all stressful. It's nice for them that their first kiss happened on Christmas Eve, on his home porch, snow blanketing his favourite place on earth, because so much other nice things seem to be borne of extremely tense situations. The world ending, nightmares, attempted mutual murder despite their mutual pulled punches, near misses with neurotoxin (:/).
Still. Holding hands next to the koi and the bird and fresh memories of otters is pretty good, no matter the looming shadow of the subject at hand. "How often?" he asks.
Bruce considers for a moment just how miserable this would be with nothing else - if they weren't touching hands right now, if they were having this discussion months in the future, in the cave or Clark's office after-hours. Their entanglement had unnerved him at first for how dangerous he saw it being, but these days he's beginning to see it as the opposite. He never imagined himself capable of working anything else; he doesn't know if it's just that Clark is that exceptionally patient (sort of) or if he himself has changed enough to allow for it (also, sort of).
He didn't want it to hurt anyone. He dismantled the chamber where he could have kept Clark contained. He's designing the red sun light to be easily destroyed.
It isn't you.
"Every few weeks. But when it happens, it might be once, or it might be a few nights in a row. This was the first one in a while."
Each time there's a lull, he wonders if they're over. Hard not to hope.
The hands around Bruce's are now looser in their hold, but engaged. Soft and intermittent fingerstrokes, gentle presses of his thumbs against sensitive points. Almost negligent while Clark nods, thinks, making the slow and slightly reluctant shift from reassuring to something more analytical. Trying to balance between both, at least.
And beneath this conversation, he's still reeling a little, circling that word, love, turning it over and over like spun sugar. And he thinks he gets it, about what is and isn't his business. Maybe. There are times when Clark has said something or done something cognizant to the fact that a normal person would probably think it's too much, too far, too quick, too soon, where mild manners aren't enough to quite throw a blanket over it. There are still, somehow, things he hasn't told Bruce for fear that there is some kind of upper limit.
Here's something crazy: sometimes he thinks he, Clark Kent, is made for someone like Bruce Wayne, and the other way around. No, not someone like. Just him, singular. From the atoms up.
Which isn't to take away from what he has with Lois, what Bruce has with Lois, with Diana, with anyone else he might open himself up to. It's just something else, a force, a magnetism, where love feels like it has its own measurable energy. Transmutable too, taking on various qualities, of violence, of awe, of hunger and desire. And all of that, a lot of the time, feels more like Clark's problem rather than something he needs to unpack, out loud, with Bruce.
(He has tried a little, with Lois, just to make sure she understood and would be accepting that something he had ran deeper than just sex. She hadn't laughed at him, just—well, smirked. That was very kind. But she was right: he has it pretty bad.)
Anyway. It's good they're not just talking about their feelings.
"I'll stay tonight," he says, and it is suggestion, in spite of the absence of a question mark lifting his tone.
Before the farmhouse on Christmas, before snow and socks in haphazard wrapping paper, they were up to their elbows in each other's atoms; there is something that happens, Bruce would say, when a life is reshaped. And even though Clark is the one that died, he's not the only one who's been brought back to life. It isn't the same, but Bruce holds it close, some small candle in a gale protected by his rough, mortal hands.
A second chance that he can't waste.
How does he explain to his kids that it wasn't them, who made him do this? To Selina? Why couldn't he have remade himself for her, or for Talia? People who loved him enough to hate the absence of him. People whose own absences have driven him mad. And then there's Clark Kent.
Bruce knows he can turn that suggestion away. Clark would never force it. Even if he kept an ear out the whole time, he'd give Bruce the illusion of privacy and maybe even hold back if he panicked in his sleep again. But he knows it's an illusion, and there's something perversely freeing in it. The decision is his, but it also doesn't matter. Clark's inescapable attention is comforting.
"You'll stay tonight."
and then the thread ended. hereafter are dvd extras.
Not that 'yay' is the appropriate reaction, really. The offer isn't being made for the purpose of a nice time, and what Clark feels is relief, mainly, that something has been settled, shifted, and he hopes for the better.
But still, slightly glad for more selfish purposes, of nearness and acceptance thereof, and while he presses a smile at Bruce, gives his hands a last squeeze, he entertains the brief fantasy of leaning across the table to kiss him in front of god and everyone. Inappropriate, too, but there it is, and it wasn't the first time today he's thought about it, and it won't be the last.
What Clark does instead is gather the remnants of their lunch and the recyclable plates and napkins it came with, leaving Bruce the cup of melting margarita slushie to do with as he likes. Reflexively tidying before the person he's with even thinks to do it themselves is probably the number one mama's boy tell he has, chief among all the other ones. They make pretty good boyfriends, his tribe.
"Seal feeding's in ten minutes," Clark says, on his way back over. "We can make it if we don't get distracted by cephalopods."
The dregs of the awful margarita are downed in one last go, and then Bruce chucks it into the bin. Two points at the buzzer in overtime, Gotham wins. He adjusts sunglasses back onto his face from being clipped into his sweater, though it's still obvious when he gives Clark a look of slightly conflicted frown.
Cephalopods are neat.
It's a near thing, but they can always walk back past more tentacles after. And Bruce finds that he's strangely - shyly? - eager to watch Clark enjoy himself, even if that enjoyment involves daintily holding out dead fish under the guidance of a wetsuited marine biologist with a crackly lav mic on. There's not much of a crowd, but the young man is going for the Oscar anyway, perhaps happy to have less pressure to practice.
Incredibly, the canned speech involves discussing behavioral reactions to the oceanic displacement incident, which catches Bruce off-guard. Not in a bad way, he thinks, after a moment's reflection. It's just doubly strange to be reminded of how much a part of the world they all really are, and not just shadowy machinations making decisions and fighting wars on its behalf.
A very well-trained sea lion blows them all kisses, and does multiple laps back to the littlest girl in the front of the small audience; she has on a giant pink bow and a Gotham U Womens Soccer shirt on, oversized and clearly mom's. Appropriately enamoured despite the overwhelming smell of fish. (Bruce is glad they had the fake pizza.)
Quiet, because Clark doesn't need to strain to hear him, "These are definitely the dogs."
They are the dogs. Unruly, loud, excitable. Bruce's barely audible observation cracks a smile out of Clark as they navigate around children and buckets of dead seafood. Big whiskered snouts open wide to catch little silver fish and slimy squid, which is both very fun, a chance to interact instead of staring through tanks wistfully, and also mildly stressful. Like it's teasing them, tossing food down by hand one at a time, and it'd be more fair to just pitch the bucketful into the pool and let them have at it, which is kind of how Clark fed the chickens way back when. Urgently and generously.
The show is satisfying, getting to watch them swim like torpedos through clear water, and then slapping their bodies up onto the concrete, grasping rubber balls in their mouths, waving their flippers. The girl with the bow and the soccer shirt is enamored, as is oversized Kryptonian further back.
If there's a news headline in a few weeks of someone sighting Superman giving a seal a bellyrub, drawing criticism from wildlife experts everywhere, Bruce only has himself to blame.
"We should go by the shark tunnel again," Clark suggests, through the last scattered applause. "To make sure."
It does seem like it would be very pleasing to reach out and pet one, cold wet fur and slimy noses, teeth formidable but not more than a golden retriever's. Mischievous friends happy to have jobs, more personable than their cousin the leopard seal, who lurks in a different tank and slides along the edges of the viewing window like an unnerving mermaid. Dinosaur fangs and overlarge eyes on a wide, oval face, looking at them too-intelligently.
Hopefully she'll get some extra fish, too. Or several penguins.
Sea lions bray loud enough to be heard still even as they begin the trek back to whence they began.
"You planned this loop," Bruce accuses, faintly amused.
Clark flashes his own set of canines in confirmation. "We can high five the octopuses again on the way," he assures, like maybe Bruce was very invested in that and he's being considerate. And because no one will try to get him in a headlock in public, probably; "High eight?"
That this directly benefits Clark too is not a secret, when he beelines back for where the giant Pacific octopus is housed. Her name is Susan.
There are also: gigantic crabs that Clark will tell no one make him slightly hungry, just conceptually and in spite of his fake aura vision thing, which is not fake, and big column tanks full of jellyfish set aglow with gentle blues and golds. Clark steals his phone back, here, to take some artful space fish pictures where some of them not so subtly capture Bruce through them, one of which he sends to Lois, harking back to some other co-owned jellyfish-related memory. There's a tank full of Nemos, all darting frantically through near-glowing fingers of anemones. They seem bigger in the movie.
It's a good way to feel less alien, if Clark ever does, hanging out with all these weird and wonderful things. But they're halfway through the tanks when it's clear he is just waiting to go back and check out the sharks again, observing plaques and tropical fish out of a sense of good manners and inclusion.
The giant octopus is spending a lot of time fitting itself into an impossibly tiny hole in some rock, then unfurling itself, then back in, as if performing a magic trick for an audience. Bruce tells a story about being chased by one while he was being made to retrieve shoes from an underwater cave. ("It kept throwing rocks at me.") Drawing the story out every time Clark inches away, until it's excruciatingly clear that he's doing it just to watch him begin to squirm for desire of sharks, and relents, trying not to laugh.
There's just something so charming about him. Happy like this. Part of him wishes he was the sort to think to do things without a crisis as a catalyst, but he isn't; at least he's gotten to this point. Thinking to come here at all. Baby steps.
Baby fins. The sharks are still huge, still swimming, the glass tunnel still pleasingly shadowed and electric blue and air-conditioned. Bruce watches more of Clark than the aquatic predators, expression on his face particular. Gentle, but restrained; headlocks not the only thing being politely avoided.
The hammerhead, for a little while, seems to hang out with them, skirting above the tunnel as a shadow and swimming lazily apace. It's not lost on Clark that most of the creatures they've gotten to admire would fare better in open ocean that aren't either dumping grounds for waste, or hunting fields for poachers, or apparently ancient battlefields between ancient beings. That they'd probably prefer to swim for miles rather than the same circuit, every day.
But the world is full of what feel like impossible ethical paradoxes, from the cruelty and slaughter of soft-eyed cattle and the exploitation and poor working conditions of human beings, through choosing to slowly stroll through the plexiglass tunnel of Gotham's aquarium with someone he loves versus spending every waking second in the sky, on the hunt for lives to save. Saving a bus full of kids or protecting a secret that was bigger than all of them. He thinks Jonathan Kent said 'maybe' that one time because he didn't have an answer to Clark's question.
And living with not having the answer while trying to find it, every day, is not just a Superman condition, but a human one. Kyrptonians thought they knew everything.
They could have never brought him back. Clark always framed the decision to do so as doing so for a reason. That there is, and was, a reason they could have chosen not to—
These odd undercurrents, cold but fleeting. He is, at the moment, nodding up at the hammerhead to call Bruce's attention to it, but catches Bruce's focus instead. His own symmetrical smile already in place then skews a little crooked, borderline subliminally picking up on the particulars in being watched as opposed to only looked at.
Richard Grayson, nine years old, sitting in the center of Bruce's bed after careening through the halls of a haunting old house, terrified of the things playing out in his head. (After that, they'd moved rooms, and Bruce was never too far away, Dick only taking the larger quarters in a more private space once he was older.) It had been a rough night, dawn just breaking. He still felt bloody, even scrubbed raw, somehow more cut open by a child clinging to his hands after a nightmare.
If you were Batman, the night my parents died, could you have saved them?
It had been a breakthrough after nearly a year of taking him in, the hell of grief and therapy, new trauma of discovering Bruce's mad secret. And it was devastating, too. Bruce held his son to his chest and knew he had doomed him to thinking of that question only, for the rest of his life. Knows he thinks of it still, as a cop in Blüdhaven. It's the only thing either of them think of, sometimes. Consumed by it.
The sharks cast shadows, distant sunlight streaming in, mingled with the blue bulbs that do their best to slice away harmful rays. Not content with simply fucking up the seas, humans also continue to burn holes through the protective layer around their own planet. Where do fish have left? Where do any of them have left?
Bruce looks at him. Expression completely open, like someone took knife and delicately flayed him like one of the creatures swimming by, slickly separating meat from bone to expose every detail. I just like you, is all. Thank you for today. Thank you for all of it.
Clark's own expression softens, like Bruce has said something other than nothing. Fond. His shoulder bumps into Bruce's without any kind of push behind it. It would be nice if the tunnel they're in would just spiral on forever, preserving just this in the cool watery shadows, the silent shapes drifting around them. Despite that sentiment—
—let's get outta here, the nudge seems to say.
Well. Almost.
Because there is a gift shop planted strategically by the exit that Clark inevitably swerves towards. Plenty of T-shirts and hoodies, metal straws to promote sustainable consumerism, a wall of plush toys. These, Clark appears tempted by, lingering over an otter, a leopard seal, a fuzzy stingray, but Lois has a threshold for adorable bullshit cluttering up her extremely good apartment and he has to be strategic.
(Also tempting: a pair of socks shaped like sharks, so it looks like they're eating your legs when pulled up. Clark does pick these up. Christmas for Arthur, sorted. One day, he'll get presents that aren't kitsch distilled.)
He identifies some respectable looking coffee keep-cups with myriads of sea creatures, picking up one patterned with seahorses speculatively, putting it back, exchanging it for the jellyfish one.
The stuffed animals are a trap; somehow, still, at nearly 50 years old, Bruce also spends some time observing the wall of them. He picks up an orca one, turns it over, some stray memory about the company that used to manufacture them drifting by his consciousness. "I used to get Richard a million of these," he says, normal, like this is something he talks about at all, "because he grew up with all these exotic animals. He was always trying to get me to buy a ten-foot boa constrictor, or a zebra. The horses were barely a compromise."
Orca goes back on the shelf. Soft and lovey-eyed. Alfred would not like it. (As if he gets Alfred anything the man would actually like.)
"Jason always wanted knives or C4. So he also got stuffed animals."
Maybe it is something he talks about. Sure, Clark can count on one hand in the past mumblemumble they've been together that he has, but it's, you know. Adding up.
But there isn't a lot of opportunity to see Bruce that way, a dad and the impossible task of being one, and his eyes crinkle at the corners after little boys wanting to be superheroes, grow up fast, being given a plush raccoon instead.
"Depends on your definition of worst," Clark says, because he was asked a question. He reaches up and picks up a mug where the handle is a garishly orange tentacle, connected to the artwork of a googly eyed octopus. The eyes are in fact googly eyes, and they roll in place as he tips it speculatively. "'Cause to someone, this is the best."
He offers it out for inspection, juggling keep-cup and socks in his other hand.
It's something he talks about inside his own head. Is all. Narrating to himself, trying not to let old film reels of memory burn up. Please return my fucking calls. Getting more than a little sad, after so many years.
But.
Bruce accepts the googly-eyed cup, listening to the faint clink of plastic googlies, giving it serious consideration. After a moment he returns it to the shelf. Rejected.
"Too obvious."
Also, it's absurd enough to deserve a customer who appreciates it for its surreal glory. Bruce peruses some more, fully aware that whatever cup he selects will end up in a storage room at the back of the manor's secondary kitchen, at best. If it's especially tasteless, a box sent to Goodwill. So there's care that must go into selecting the right one, striking a balance between annoying and entertaining Alfred. Bruce knows he still has a Tokyo Disney one in the house proper, even, he's just strategic about not showing anyone.
Clark makes eye contact with the mug, kind of shrugs at it like, sorry about him, before scanning the shelves for one that is the worst but not in an ~obvious~ way. No suggestions are forthcoming, though, more entertained at the prospect of whatever Bruce is liable to select.
The question prompts a glance down at the items in his hands. "Arthur, for Christmas," gestured with the socks, apparently while cognizant to the fact they've only just escaped the winter, "Lois, for now," with the cup. "She has two of these in black."
So. She deserves something cute too, veering from anything too brightly coloured and clutching the one with the jellyfish patterns in dreamy pastels. "I don't buy her stuff she has to wear, 'cause she will not." False. He's gotten away with a nice set of gloves on a birthday, a pretty bracelet at Christmas, an engagement ring and a wedding band. But he means kitsch: no fun hats or dolphin pendants.
So he adds, "Mostly."
You know, like Curry's gonna be thrilled for his socks.
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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?"
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So, he is drinking the rest of this freezie machine margarita, and maybe he won't have a headache. He can function with headaches, his behavior and performance levels indistinguishable, but he doesn't like them.
Would the dramatic thing tell Clark how he is. Or would he use it to build a cathedral around an answer, the empty space within beautifully lit and protected and enshrined, but still empty. This qizza is pretty bad. Part of the crust on his is burned, and it helps the texture, miraculously. Maybe he and Lois can cook for Clark sometime. Jam on toast and a kale smoothie, and scotch.
Bruce watches him, but doesn't answer. Undecided on how to. In the pond, a large koi breaks the surface with a zig-zag splash, brilliantly colored body zipping back from capturing a gnat.
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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.
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He taps his fingers against the table, alongside the mostly-empty margarita cup. A little anxious, a little decisive. A very human mix.
"I don't know how I'm feeling."
And I hate that.
All his control, all his planning. Bruce has let go of a lot over the past two years, between his blind dive into faith and hope and striking out in the dark to make this team and fight an unknown power. Even their collective relationship is sailing into uncharted territory. Exposing himself like this - the dreams, his poor reaction to them - makes him vulnerable. Unsteady. He should find solace in support, but he's so unfamiliar that it's just strange.
"I've loved you for a long time," he continues abruptly. "It was something I accepted and then set aside as private, because I didn't think it would ever come up. Or that it was—"
Ah. Hm.
"Your business. I guess. I thought it would be intrusive for both of us. I don't think about it too closely anymore. You startled me. I'm sorry about this morning, it was just." He twists the plastic cup where it sits on the table. "Unfortunate timing on my part."
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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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Bruce closes his eyes. Not to hide from the moment or block it out, but to let himself feel Clark's hands over his, to sink into what he says. An instinct is there to withdraw, because he's been hurt so many fucking times - hurt others so many fucking times - but he pushes into it instead. Makes himself feel it and accept that he wants it.
(he's wondered sometimes if the reason he can't stop and can't kill himself in his dreams is because he still loves Clark so much)
"I don't have a plan for any of this," feels like a shameful admission. Lying to Clark by withholding his dreams, endangering Lois by falling asleep next to her. Not having any idea what the fuck to do. Is this what having people is supposed to be for?
"I know how to be alone with it. That's why."
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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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So thanks, Lex.
Bruce presses his thumb up against Clark's grip. Returning it while caged in. Looking at him finally, brown eyes tired, but unguarded. Sitting across from him at a small table in a food court at an aquarium. A small bird has landed on the lip of the koi pond, hoping for soggy pellets not yet vacuumed up by the koi.
"And here I thought," well, this is happening, apparently, "that would be boring."
Boring and about a lamp. You midwestern asshole, Clark.
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"Boring's fine too," he says. "So any time you wanna try that out instead, I'll be there."
Said smile fades a little, faster than usual. This is all stressful. It's nice for them that their first kiss happened on Christmas Eve, on his home porch, snow blanketing his favourite place on earth, because so much other nice things seem to be borne of extremely tense situations. The world ending, nightmares, attempted mutual murder despite their mutual pulled punches, near misses with neurotoxin (:/).
Still. Holding hands next to the koi and the bird and fresh memories of otters is pretty good, no matter the looming shadow of the subject at hand. "How often?" he asks.
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He didn't want it to hurt anyone. He dismantled the chamber where he could have kept Clark contained. He's designing the red sun light to be easily destroyed.
It isn't you.
"Every few weeks. But when it happens, it might be once, or it might be a few nights in a row. This was the first one in a while."
Each time there's a lull, he wonders if they're over. Hard not to hope.
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And beneath this conversation, he's still reeling a little, circling that word, love, turning it over and over like spun sugar. And he thinks he gets it, about what is and isn't his business. Maybe. There are times when Clark has said something or done something cognizant to the fact that a normal person would probably think it's too much, too far, too quick, too soon, where mild manners aren't enough to quite throw a blanket over it. There are still, somehow, things he hasn't told Bruce for fear that there is some kind of upper limit.
Here's something crazy: sometimes he thinks he, Clark Kent, is made for someone like Bruce Wayne, and the other way around. No, not someone like. Just him, singular. From the atoms up.
Which isn't to take away from what he has with Lois, what Bruce has with Lois, with Diana, with anyone else he might open himself up to. It's just something else, a force, a magnetism, where love feels like it has its own measurable energy. Transmutable too, taking on various qualities, of violence, of awe, of hunger and desire. And all of that, a lot of the time, feels more like Clark's problem rather than something he needs to unpack, out loud, with Bruce.
(He has tried a little, with Lois, just to make sure she understood and would be accepting that something he had ran deeper than just sex. She hadn't laughed at him, just—well, smirked. That was very kind. But she was right: he has it pretty bad.)
Anyway. It's good they're not just talking about their feelings.
"I'll stay tonight," he says, and it is suggestion, in spite of the absence of a question mark lifting his tone.
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A second chance that he can't waste.
How does he explain to his kids that it wasn't them, who made him do this? To Selina? Why couldn't he have remade himself for her, or for Talia? People who loved him enough to hate the absence of him. People whose own absences have driven him mad. And then there's Clark Kent.
Bruce knows he can turn that suggestion away. Clark would never force it. Even if he kept an ear out the whole time, he'd give Bruce the illusion of privacy and maybe even hold back if he panicked in his sleep again. But he knows it's an illusion, and there's something perversely freeing in it. The decision is his, but it also doesn't matter. Clark's inescapable attention is comforting.
"You'll stay tonight."
and then the thread ended. hereafter are dvd extras.
Not that 'yay' is the appropriate reaction, really. The offer isn't being made for the purpose of a nice time, and what Clark feels is relief, mainly, that something has been settled, shifted, and he hopes for the better.
But still, slightly glad for more selfish purposes, of nearness and acceptance thereof, and while he presses a smile at Bruce, gives his hands a last squeeze, he entertains the brief fantasy of leaning across the table to kiss him in front of god and everyone. Inappropriate, too, but there it is, and it wasn't the first time today he's thought about it, and it won't be the last.
What Clark does instead is gather the remnants of their lunch and the recyclable plates and napkins it came with, leaving Bruce the cup of melting margarita slushie to do with as he likes. Reflexively tidying before the person he's with even thinks to do it themselves is probably the number one mama's boy tell he has, chief among all the other ones. They make pretty good boyfriends, his tribe.
"Seal feeding's in ten minutes," Clark says, on his way back over. "We can make it if we don't get distracted by cephalopods."
beep boop
Cephalopods are neat.
It's a near thing, but they can always walk back past more tentacles after. And Bruce finds that he's strangely - shyly? - eager to watch Clark enjoy himself, even if that enjoyment involves daintily holding out dead fish under the guidance of a wetsuited marine biologist with a crackly lav mic on. There's not much of a crowd, but the young man is going for the Oscar anyway, perhaps happy to have less pressure to practice.
Incredibly, the canned speech involves discussing behavioral reactions to the oceanic displacement incident, which catches Bruce off-guard. Not in a bad way, he thinks, after a moment's reflection. It's just doubly strange to be reminded of how much a part of the world they all really are, and not just shadowy machinations making decisions and fighting wars on its behalf.
A very well-trained sea lion blows them all kisses, and does multiple laps back to the littlest girl in the front of the small audience; she has on a giant pink bow and a Gotham U Womens Soccer shirt on, oversized and clearly mom's. Appropriately enamoured despite the overwhelming smell of fish. (Bruce is glad they had the fake pizza.)
Quiet, because Clark doesn't need to strain to hear him, "These are definitely the dogs."
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The show is satisfying, getting to watch them swim like torpedos through clear water, and then slapping their bodies up onto the concrete, grasping rubber balls in their mouths, waving their flippers. The girl with the bow and the soccer shirt is enamored, as is oversized Kryptonian further back.
If there's a news headline in a few weeks of someone sighting Superman giving a seal a bellyrub, drawing criticism from wildlife experts everywhere, Bruce only has himself to blame.
"We should go by the shark tunnel again," Clark suggests, through the last scattered applause. "To make sure."
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Hopefully she'll get some extra fish, too. Or several penguins.
Sea lions bray loud enough to be heard still even as they begin the trek back to whence they began.
"You planned this loop," Bruce accuses, faintly amused.
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That this directly benefits Clark too is not a secret, when he beelines back for where the giant Pacific octopus is housed. Her name is Susan.
There are also: gigantic crabs that Clark will tell no one make him slightly hungry, just conceptually and in spite of his fake aura vision thing, which is not fake, and big column tanks full of jellyfish set aglow with gentle blues and golds. Clark steals his phone back, here, to take some artful space fish pictures where some of them not so subtly capture Bruce through them, one of which he sends to Lois, harking back to some other co-owned jellyfish-related memory. There's a tank full of Nemos, all darting frantically through near-glowing fingers of anemones. They seem bigger in the movie.
It's a good way to feel less alien, if Clark ever does, hanging out with all these weird and wonderful things. But they're halfway through the tanks when it's clear he is just waiting to go back and check out the sharks again, observing plaques and tropical fish out of a sense of good manners and inclusion.
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The giant octopus is spending a lot of time fitting itself into an impossibly tiny hole in some rock, then unfurling itself, then back in, as if performing a magic trick for an audience. Bruce tells a story about being chased by one while he was being made to retrieve shoes from an underwater cave. ("It kept throwing rocks at me.") Drawing the story out every time Clark inches away, until it's excruciatingly clear that he's doing it just to watch him begin to squirm for desire of sharks, and relents, trying not to laugh.
There's just something so charming about him. Happy like this. Part of him wishes he was the sort to think to do things without a crisis as a catalyst, but he isn't; at least he's gotten to this point. Thinking to come here at all. Baby steps.
Baby fins. The sharks are still huge, still swimming, the glass tunnel still pleasingly shadowed and electric blue and air-conditioned. Bruce watches more of Clark than the aquatic predators, expression on his face particular. Gentle, but restrained; headlocks not the only thing being politely avoided.
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But the world is full of what feel like impossible ethical paradoxes, from the cruelty and slaughter of soft-eyed cattle and the exploitation and poor working conditions of human beings, through choosing to slowly stroll through the plexiglass tunnel of Gotham's aquarium with someone he loves versus spending every waking second in the sky, on the hunt for lives to save. Saving a bus full of kids or protecting a secret that was bigger than all of them. He thinks Jonathan Kent said 'maybe' that one time because he didn't have an answer to Clark's question.
And living with not having the answer while trying to find it, every day, is not just a Superman condition, but a human one. Kyrptonians thought they knew everything.
They could have never brought him back. Clark always framed the decision to do so as doing so for a reason. That there is, and was, a reason they could have chosen not to—
These odd undercurrents, cold but fleeting. He is, at the moment, nodding up at the hammerhead to call Bruce's attention to it, but catches Bruce's focus instead. His own symmetrical smile already in place then skews a little crooked, borderline subliminally picking up on the particulars in being watched as opposed to only looked at.
"What?" he asks, on a delay. Not guilelessly.
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Richard Grayson, nine years old, sitting in the center of Bruce's bed after careening through the halls of a haunting old house, terrified of the things playing out in his head. (After that, they'd moved rooms, and Bruce was never too far away, Dick only taking the larger quarters in a more private space once he was older.) It had been a rough night, dawn just breaking. He still felt bloody, even scrubbed raw, somehow more cut open by a child clinging to his hands after a nightmare.
If you were Batman, the night my parents died, could you have saved them?
It had been a breakthrough after nearly a year of taking him in, the hell of grief and therapy, new trauma of discovering Bruce's mad secret. And it was devastating, too. Bruce held his son to his chest and knew he had doomed him to thinking of that question only, for the rest of his life. Knows he thinks of it still, as a cop in Blüdhaven. It's the only thing either of them think of, sometimes. Consumed by it.
The sharks cast shadows, distant sunlight streaming in, mingled with the blue bulbs that do their best to slice away harmful rays. Not content with simply fucking up the seas, humans also continue to burn holes through the protective layer around their own planet. Where do fish have left? Where do any of them have left?
Bruce looks at him. Expression completely open, like someone took knife and delicately flayed him like one of the creatures swimming by, slickly separating meat from bone to expose every detail. I just like you, is all. Thank you for today. Thank you for all of it.
"Nothing."
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—let's get outta here, the nudge seems to say.
Well. Almost.
Because there is a gift shop planted strategically by the exit that Clark inevitably swerves towards. Plenty of T-shirts and hoodies, metal straws to promote sustainable consumerism, a wall of plush toys. These, Clark appears tempted by, lingering over an otter, a leopard seal, a fuzzy stingray, but Lois has a threshold for adorable bullshit cluttering up her extremely good apartment and he has to be strategic.
(Also tempting: a pair of socks shaped like sharks, so it looks like they're eating your legs when pulled up. Clark does pick these up. Christmas for Arthur, sorted. One day, he'll get presents that aren't kitsch distilled.)
He identifies some respectable looking coffee keep-cups with myriads of sea creatures, picking up one patterned with seahorses speculatively, putting it back, exchanging it for the jellyfish one.
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Orca goes back on the shelf. Soft and lovey-eyed. Alfred would not like it. (As if he gets Alfred anything the man would actually like.)
"Jason always wanted knives or C4. So he also got stuffed animals."
Parenting. He looks over at the mugs.
"Mm, which is the worst?"
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But there isn't a lot of opportunity to see Bruce that way, a dad and the impossible task of being one, and his eyes crinkle at the corners after little boys wanting to be superheroes, grow up fast, being given a plush raccoon instead.
"Depends on your definition of worst," Clark says, because he was asked a question. He reaches up and picks up a mug where the handle is a garishly orange tentacle, connected to the artwork of a googly eyed octopus. The eyes are in fact googly eyes, and they roll in place as he tips it speculatively. "'Cause to someone, this is the best."
He offers it out for inspection, juggling keep-cup and socks in his other hand.
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But.
Bruce accepts the googly-eyed cup, listening to the faint clink of plastic googlies, giving it serious consideration. After a moment he returns it to the shelf. Rejected.
"Too obvious."
Also, it's absurd enough to deserve a customer who appreciates it for its surreal glory. Bruce peruses some more, fully aware that whatever cup he selects will end up in a storage room at the back of the manor's secondary kitchen, at best. If it's especially tasteless, a box sent to Goodwill. So there's care that must go into selecting the right one, striking a balance between annoying and entertaining Alfred. Bruce knows he still has a Tokyo Disney one in the house proper, even, he's just strategic about not showing anyone.
"Lois?"
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The question prompts a glance down at the items in his hands. "Arthur, for Christmas," gestured with the socks, apparently while cognizant to the fact they've only just escaped the winter, "Lois, for now," with the cup. "She has two of these in black."
So. She deserves something cute too, veering from anything too brightly coloured and clutching the one with the jellyfish patterns in dreamy pastels. "I don't buy her stuff she has to wear, 'cause she will not." False. He's gotten away with a nice set of gloves on a birthday, a pretty bracelet at Christmas, an engagement ring and a wedding band. But he means kitsch: no fun hats or dolphin pendants.
So he adds, "Mostly."
You know, like Curry's gonna be thrilled for his socks.
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