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.
Curry is absolutely going to be thrilled about socks. They're from Superman. Speaking of—
"Are you seducing Arthur for Christmas?" Archly, giving him a sidelong look. From someone else, or in circumstances that do not involve so many other partners (Lois, Diana, whatever the Gothamite woman that Bruce spends a lot of time texting but doesn't talk about is), that might sound insecure. You got me socks for Christmas, before I kissed you the first time.
But because they are what they are, it's just. Funny. Or at least it is to Bruce, standing in the middle of an aquarium gift shop side-eying Clark about apparently working his way through an entire time of superheroes and demigods with his alluring and irresistible novelty socks.
It is to Clark, who laughs. One million teeth. Surprised enough that he did not quite draw a line between these two points, but still—
"If he takes me back to his place," is bantered back in a way that leaves room for a good rimshot sound effect. He has given up on Themyscira, for feminist reasons, and while he could probably just roll up on Atlantis if he felt like it, an invitation feels required in case he aggravate some kind of diplomatic incident.
And, like, he'd expect the Justice League to ask him before crashing in on Smallville, so.
"Hmmm." About Arthur's place. How weirded out is this guy going to be, when he finds out they're all pining to see merdogs. Bruce picks up a laser-cut drinking glass, almost tasteful designs etched onto the sides. Looks back at Clark. Gives him a studious look, as if he isn't one of the most attractive people currently residing on Earth, tall and unfairly built, bright eyes, perfect predatory warm smile.
"Maybe if he doesn't already have socks."
Sure.
Puts the glass back, picks up another one, slightly further from tasteful. This one's designs include a dolphin mascot wearing a Gotham City Knights hat, in the midst of what is otherwise quite pretty fish and filagree. Deemed the winner, he returns it to the display and looks for a corresponding box beneath the shelf.
A good natured :/, and so the socks remain in his hands as he picks out the corresponding box for his gift to Lois. Much like the aquarium itself, it'd be easy to do a few circuits among the brightly-adorned displays, see what else fires off a synapse, but the impulse is resisted, Clark headed for the cashier instead.
The bored young man on the other side prompts Clark to slip a ten dollar bill into the donations box, and unprompted, Clark selects an item off the little stationery display on the countertop, attempting to achieve a balance between not looking like he's shoplifting while also not attracting Bruce's attention.
He helps load his choices into a comically small recycled paper gift bag as part of this ruse but also because of course he does, and pivots to see where he left the other giant man squeezing between overstuffed aisles of tropically coloured merchandise.
The other giant man squeezing between overstuffed aisles of tropically colo(u)red merchandise is picking at a rotating display of postcards, and not seeming to do much squeezing. For all his acting ability, Bruce has a difficult time not looking like he moves easy, despite being the broad side of a barn door. The postcards are 75cents each, or 4 for $2, and so, he picks 4.
"Does your mom want one?" he asks Clark at the counter, tapping them. Smalltalk, he's buying them anyway. Also allowing himself to be sold a book of fish stamps to go with. His haul also includes the cup, and a tiny ceramic baby Weddell seal - the trinket kind that come lightly glued to tiny white paper squares. Not even the adult, just the baby. Slightly smaller than a quarter, a little blobby and characterful for the hand-painting. Bruce could get Diana a thousand things, expensive and elegant - his tastes match hers, if he picked out jewelry he's sure she'd wear it - but her collection is fine, and this is funnier. Besides. He knows what kinds of things she keeps. Old photos and watches. She can chuck this in a drawer, forget about it for a century and a half, find it again someday. Why the hell did Bruce get me this.
(Because there are no bats at aquariums.)
The cashier takes a look at Bruce's bandaged hand, and pointedly passes his paper gift bag to Clark. Bruce does not laugh. Barely.
Clark collects up this second bag dutifully, even magnanimously, and wishes the kid a good day.
On the way out, exiting the ventilated and very specific smelling air of the aquarium they've been marinading in into the damper, rawer climate outside, he's already extracted the postcards to look at, and turns one of them to show Bruce. A picture of a sealion with its whiskered nose pointed up to investigate the camera, big glossy eyes and slick fur.
"This one?" he asks, because yes, his mom will appreciate it. There's always been a Kent dog, a tradition stubbornly maintained by the reigning matriarch,
(eventually, maybe even soon, he's going to have to stop glossing by those niggles, the ones that twinge when he has no similar anecdote for the preciously rare times Bruce shares his own reflexive narrative about his sons, or thinks about how extremely ready Martha would be for her family to grow, his own sense of unease about what that could mean for a person growing up in all of this)
and as established, this is as close as they get to the ocean equivalent. That being said, there will be some lazy night when Clark shows Bruce a YouTube video of a diver holding a placid shark by the nose, delivering calming pats with gloved hand. See?
"Oh, I'm carrying this after all?" Wow, Kent, and you didn't remember their sock anniversary, either. The romance is dead.
It always feels like a longer walk back to the car, than from. Some measure of anticipation sweeping time along gone; now they contend with reality, and all the reminders of why they showed up in the first place. A whole assorted mess, far-reaching implications, a long unpaved road to set out on to discover where it leads. Rough terrain. Orange-tinted, like on a world that never stops burning.
Surely, it would have been enough to just tell Clark what he was seeing. He didn't have to show him the sketches, or let him see that Vic has experienced similar visions. Detailing a Superman made not of nightmares, but of waking fear. Why can't honesty be kinder? Is it just not? Is that why Bruce is bad at both?
Cl-click. Car unlocked, and they can put their small shopping bags on the floor of the back seat for safety. It's a very ordinary move. Perhaps the trunk is full of old soccer equipment, or a solid block of bat-surveillance gear. Perhaps Bruce just also does mundane things like this after all; habits about grocery shopping and where to put breakable items in his fancy cars. Perhaps yet—
It's so he doesn't have to move to the driver's side yet. Pause.
A second earlier on that comment, Clark might have swerved the bag back out of reach, but it's lifted from his fingers too late. Dang it. You take/be taken by a guy on one date—
Well, they've probably had more than one hang out that constitutes as date instead of the usual existing in proximity followed by tumbling into bed or the shower or the shower and then the bed, but this one's a stand-out. Clark feels it too, that transition from one world with a set of expectations to another, the kind of thing that means they'll have to give serious consideration to the idea of: what do we do now?
And now they're just standing here, and maybe the question can be put off a little longer.
The look that snags on Bruce when Clark notices the pause is still, first, and then the familiar kind of sleepy-eyed consideration of a person who wants to kiss the other person very much. Normally, that's exactly what would happen, but instead Clark's hand wraps around Bruce's non-injured one, and there's a hint of a smile before he just goes ahead and ducks back down into the backseat of the car.
Sometimes, it's just really nice to be driving a German-made luxury car that was designed with people over five feet tall in mind, back seat included. The top of Bruce's head still makes contact with the roof of the car, but he manages to get the door shut behind them (does this look any less suspicious on security cameras than just making out leaning on the car would be? no, but). Thud. It echoes through the parking garage, sealing them into a clipped off bubble of reality.
He pulls his hat off. Hair a little funny. Leans over and kisses Clark.
Probably that kiss is more amorous than the setting warrants. But it doesn't feel like it; it feels like this is the right level, preemptively a degree higher than it should be, for several reasons. Like: how painful this morning was. The way Clark looks when he's smiling about sharks. How rare it is to be kissing in the back of a car like idiot teenagers.
Knees on seatbacks. Bruce has to be mindful not to jam a heel into the breakable mugs in their paper bags. His injured hand is gentle against Clark's chest, resting there. Safely.
Amorous level is met in kind, hands landing on Bruce as soon as he's in range. It's silly. This is silly. What are they going to do, even? Clark doesn't care, content to indulge his id in the present second, and then the next one, and the one after that.
There's a beat where Clark pulls his head back, remembering late to claw off his glasses, now half-fogged, and reach to drop them into the front seat. Back to this, pressing his mouth to Bruce's, gentle initially, then head tipped, angling to deepen contact. One hand rests on the back of Bruce's injured one, keeping it there, innocent and gentle. The other smooths up Bruce's chest, finds a place to settle on the side of his neck, thumb brushing somewhere sensitive at the base.
Feeling that butterfly flutter of heartbeat in the same way he can hear it as a deeper throb, always, whenever he thinks to.
In the slim clip of time when Clark is pseudo-distracted removing his glasses, Bruce kisses the sharp angle of his jaw, and higher near his ear, then easily swayed back to his mouth. His good hand tucks in at Clark's side below his ribs, inching further now and again as they shift - by necessity, this is a nice car but still a car - doing nothing more complicated than finding new, better angles, for the scrape of stubble and warm slide of lips and tongues, noses not bumping (and also bumping, pleasantly).
When they began, his pulse had jumped out of control every time they brushed close; uncertain, paranoid, a vicious internal clash of fascinated desire and extreme guilt. Most of all, unused to it. As they progressed, he got the hang of mastering this, too, and his heart obeyed. Remained in his control, in all but the most intense of encounters.
Now. His heart beats, unfettered, pulse ticking up. Lets himself feel it, feel everything, feel Clark. Bruce puts his trust in the other man that he can breathe harder, in between kisses, and forget to crush himself under his own iron will. It's alright, he wants it and he's wanted, in a cramped car backseat and tasting like quorn pizza still. He curls his fingers against the other man's side, does something slow and tender with his mouth. Expensive leather doesn't squeak. Just creaks a little, very faintly, like sighing.
It's not unnoticed, that uptick in heart rate, the roughness of Bruce's breathing. It's not information that Clark does anything with intellectually, but simply revels in contact, in his extrasensory perception of what it's doing to the other man, how it feels tangled up in what it's doing to him. He is receptive, responsive. Provoking.
They get better at this, the awkwardness of the geography, the placement of their bodies. Clark has an arm almost around Bruce, and the next time they part to breathe, he ducks his head, nuzzling into his throat. Breathing him in, relishing the scrape of not extremely well shaven jaw against his cheek, the warmth that comes from this curve of muscle and bone, even from someone whose temperature runs cool, usually.
This is where he'd normally push Bruce beneath him, or roll Bruce on top of him. But this is fine too, lifting his head, mouth tracing along jawline before finding mouth again, like finishng what Bruce started in slow and deep kisses, some of that initial scrabble and urgency tempered into something—not gentle, exactly, but patient.
Like an itch has been scratched already, in just this, a private moment, enough to do whatever they want.
Crazy to think he does it - his stupid vital signs dance - even with people who can't hear it. But there is an extra layer of trust, knowing that Clark can. A special note of intimacy in the awareness of it, and the thought that the Kryptonian can hear it, and know what it's saying.
Bruce makes a soft noise as Clark echoes his earlier swerve, appreciative, indulgent. They are two people who could probably do with something like this every now and again; being made to slow down. And not because someone might pass out from artificial atmospheric pressure, or keel over from broken ribs. Once in a while, Bruce wonders if the way they have a difficult time keeping their hands off each other isn't simply because of all the reasons that make sense on the surface, but also because there are a lot of years behind them with nothing at all.
What if they'd run into each other, on their winding journeys? Clark in Tibet, being peered at by a man training to be a 'monk' that the locals don't speak of; Bruce catching sight of a mysterious stranger on an oil rig. He, at least, has never been the type to let a curiosity go without investigation, even if the other would have wanted to vanish.
A loud squeal heralds a car going too fast up the ramps, and the reminder of the public venue. Bruce doesn't pull back right away, or even a beat after, but he does. And then presses a kiss to the side of Clark's mouth anyway, in no hurry, even as he slouches a bit. The windows are illegally tinted too dark, but still. None of your bees wax, world.
Bruce pulls back, and Clark almost closes back up that distance, listing forward a barely perceptible millimetre, barely perceptible if they weren't already so close. His head tips as a kiss comes back to him, contented, at least to some extent. No one's leaving anyone in the cold today.
He knows it was the appearance of Zod, that day, that forced him from hiding. Sometimes, he wonders if it was Lois, too, who tracked him down, who unearthed secrets that no one even cared to know about until her. In the canon divergent alternate universe where another investigative spirit connected dots, Clark assumes he would have just run away some more, back into all that nothing.
But maybe not. Who can say.
He lists into the seatback once some more inches of distance settle between them, his arm eased back from around Bruce, hand now clinging a hold at shirt collar. He lets them sit there in the comfortable quiet (heartbeats, winding down) before he asks, "Can I drive?" with all the confidence of someone with a terminally visible halo. (He is used to trucks, shitty rentals, and more recently, his bike. It's a nice car, okay.)
Eyebrows. Can you what? Bruce's look is not No, but it's very Bold of you to ask, dry without saying anything. He doesn't answer right away, instead bumping in close once more to run his mouth from the pulse point beneath Clark's jaw to his ear, capturing the lobe for an almost-long moment. There's a spark of something low in his stomach, like an ache; both pleasure at being required to draw it out and have this moment contained as itself, and desire to be nearly anywhere else. It's an enjoyable mix.
He sits back.
"Sure. All you farmboys can drive stick, right?"
Because of course he doesn't have a fucking automatic.
So: to the front seats they go, and he picks up his other post cards and stamps on the way, buckling in and sifting a pen from the glove box.
There are worse cars he could ask to drive. (And he never got around to apologising for wrecking the last one with his whole body.)
But Bruce leans in and does that, Clark holding almost comically still after an initial adjustment to make room. Leather creaking faintly under his hand. It makes him wish, with a sudden rising heat, that they were nearly anywhere else, but preferably somewhere with clean sheets and all the time in the world. It's open in his expression when Bruce leans back.
The toothy smile Clark deploys next definitely indicates that comment landed as a dick joke.
Into the driver's seat, then. He is careful and respectful with property that isn't his but clearly happy to be there and while it has been a minute since he drove stick, actually, you wouldn't know it. More alarming than any lapse in skill is probably the smug energy with which he drives them out of the parking lot,
and then the immediate impatience for late afternoon traffic, draining out of the city like life blood. Metropolis gets pretty bad sometimes too with all the construction, hence his own preference for ecofriendly options, but Clark would characterise gridlock there as kind of a politely crystallised frustration, everyone in it together. On this side of the river, well—
—one instance occurs where he is is slower than a Gothamite would prefer him to be to change a lane and a horn immediately screeches by, muffled profanity. "Sorry," doesn't sound sorry at all. "Jesus."
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no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
—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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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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"Are you seducing Arthur for Christmas?" Archly, giving him a sidelong look. From someone else, or in circumstances that do not involve so many other partners (Lois, Diana, whatever the Gothamite woman that Bruce spends a lot of time texting but doesn't talk about is), that might sound insecure. You got me socks for Christmas, before I kissed you the first time.
But because they are what they are, it's just. Funny. Or at least it is to Bruce, standing in the middle of an aquarium gift shop side-eying Clark about apparently working his way through an entire time of superheroes and demigods with his alluring and irresistible novelty socks.
You minx.
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"If he takes me back to his place," is bantered back in a way that leaves room for a good rimshot sound effect. He has given up on Themyscira, for feminist reasons, and while he could probably just roll up on Atlantis if he felt like it, an invitation feels required in case he aggravate some kind of diplomatic incident.
And, like, he'd expect the Justice League to ask him before crashing in on Smallville, so.
"Think it'll work?"
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"Maybe if he doesn't already have socks."
Sure.
Puts the glass back, picks up another one, slightly further from tasteful. This one's designs include a dolphin mascot wearing a Gotham City Knights hat, in the midst of what is otherwise quite pretty fish and filagree. Deemed the winner, he returns it to the display and looks for a corresponding box beneath the shelf.
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A good natured :/, and so the socks remain in his hands as he picks out the corresponding box for his gift to Lois. Much like the aquarium itself, it'd be easy to do a few circuits among the brightly-adorned displays, see what else fires off a synapse, but the impulse is resisted, Clark headed for the cashier instead.
The bored young man on the other side prompts Clark to slip a ten dollar bill into the donations box, and unprompted, Clark selects an item off the little stationery display on the countertop, attempting to achieve a balance between not looking like he's shoplifting while also not attracting Bruce's attention.
He helps load his choices into a comically small recycled paper gift bag as part of this ruse but also because of course he does, and pivots to see where he left the other giant man squeezing between overstuffed aisles of tropically coloured merchandise.
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"Does your mom want one?" he asks Clark at the counter, tapping them. Smalltalk, he's buying them anyway. Also allowing himself to be sold a book of fish stamps to go with. His haul also includes the cup, and a tiny ceramic baby Weddell seal - the trinket kind that come lightly glued to tiny white paper squares. Not even the adult, just the baby. Slightly smaller than a quarter, a little blobby and characterful for the hand-painting. Bruce could get Diana a thousand things, expensive and elegant - his tastes match hers, if he picked out jewelry he's sure she'd wear it - but her collection is fine, and this is funnier. Besides. He knows what kinds of things she keeps. Old photos and watches. She can chuck this in a drawer, forget about it for a century and a half, find it again someday. Why the hell did Bruce get me this.
(Because there are no bats at aquariums.)
The cashier takes a look at Bruce's bandaged hand, and pointedly passes his paper gift bag to Clark. Bruce does not laugh. Barely.
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On the way out, exiting the ventilated and very specific smelling air of the aquarium they've been marinading in into the damper, rawer climate outside, he's already extracted the postcards to look at, and turns one of them to show Bruce. A picture of a sealion with its whiskered nose pointed up to investigate the camera, big glossy eyes and slick fur.
"This one?" he asks, because yes, his mom will appreciate it. There's always been a Kent dog, a tradition stubbornly maintained by the reigning matriarch,
(eventually, maybe even soon, he's going to have to stop glossing by those niggles, the ones that twinge when he has no similar anecdote for the preciously rare times Bruce shares his own reflexive narrative about his sons, or thinks about how extremely ready Martha would be for her family to grow, his own sense of unease about what that could mean for a person growing up in all of this)
and as established, this is as close as they get to the ocean equivalent. That being said, there will be some lazy night when Clark shows Bruce a YouTube video of a diver holding a placid shark by the nose, delivering calming pats with gloved hand. See?
He offers back the bag, keeping the card.
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It always feels like a longer walk back to the car, than from. Some measure of anticipation sweeping time along gone; now they contend with reality, and all the reminders of why they showed up in the first place. A whole assorted mess, far-reaching implications, a long unpaved road to set out on to discover where it leads. Rough terrain. Orange-tinted, like on a world that never stops burning.
Surely, it would have been enough to just tell Clark what he was seeing. He didn't have to show him the sketches, or let him see that Vic has experienced similar visions. Detailing a Superman made not of nightmares, but of waking fear. Why can't honesty be kinder? Is it just not? Is that why Bruce is bad at both?
Cl-click. Car unlocked, and they can put their small shopping bags on the floor of the back seat for safety. It's a very ordinary move. Perhaps the trunk is full of old soccer equipment, or a solid block of bat-surveillance gear. Perhaps Bruce just also does mundane things like this after all; habits about grocery shopping and where to put breakable items in his fancy cars. Perhaps yet—
It's so he doesn't have to move to the driver's side yet. Pause.
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Well, they've probably had more than one hang out that constitutes as date instead of the usual existing in proximity followed by tumbling into bed or the shower or the shower and then the bed, but this one's a stand-out. Clark feels it too, that transition from one world with a set of expectations to another, the kind of thing that means they'll have to give serious consideration to the idea of: what do we do now?
And now they're just standing here, and maybe the question can be put off a little longer.
The look that snags on Bruce when Clark notices the pause is still, first, and then the familiar kind of sleepy-eyed consideration of a person who wants to kiss the other person very much. Normally, that's exactly what would happen, but instead Clark's hand wraps around Bruce's non-injured one, and there's a hint of a smile before he just goes ahead and ducks back down into the backseat of the car.
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He pulls his hat off. Hair a little funny. Leans over and kisses Clark.
Probably that kiss is more amorous than the setting warrants. But it doesn't feel like it; it feels like this is the right level, preemptively a degree higher than it should be, for several reasons. Like: how painful this morning was. The way Clark looks when he's smiling about sharks. How rare it is to be kissing in the back of a car like idiot teenagers.
Knees on seatbacks. Bruce has to be mindful not to jam a heel into the breakable mugs in their paper bags. His injured hand is gentle against Clark's chest, resting there. Safely.
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There's a beat where Clark pulls his head back, remembering late to claw off his glasses, now half-fogged, and reach to drop them into the front seat. Back to this, pressing his mouth to Bruce's, gentle initially, then head tipped, angling to deepen contact. One hand rests on the back of Bruce's injured one, keeping it there, innocent and gentle. The other smooths up Bruce's chest, finds a place to settle on the side of his neck, thumb brushing somewhere sensitive at the base.
Feeling that butterfly flutter of heartbeat in the same way he can hear it as a deeper throb, always, whenever he thinks to.
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When they began, his pulse had jumped out of control every time they brushed close; uncertain, paranoid, a vicious internal clash of fascinated desire and extreme guilt. Most of all, unused to it. As they progressed, he got the hang of mastering this, too, and his heart obeyed. Remained in his control, in all but the most intense of encounters.
Now. His heart beats, unfettered, pulse ticking up. Lets himself feel it, feel everything, feel Clark. Bruce puts his trust in the other man that he can breathe harder, in between kisses, and forget to crush himself under his own iron will. It's alright, he wants it and he's wanted, in a cramped car backseat and tasting like quorn pizza still. He curls his fingers against the other man's side, does something slow and tender with his mouth. Expensive leather doesn't squeak. Just creaks a little, very faintly, like sighing.
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They get better at this, the awkwardness of the geography, the placement of their bodies. Clark has an arm almost around Bruce, and the next time they part to breathe, he ducks his head, nuzzling into his throat. Breathing him in, relishing the scrape of not extremely well shaven jaw against his cheek, the warmth that comes from this curve of muscle and bone, even from someone whose temperature runs cool, usually.
This is where he'd normally push Bruce beneath him, or roll Bruce on top of him. But this is fine too, lifting his head, mouth tracing along jawline before finding mouth again, like finishng what Bruce started in slow and deep kisses, some of that initial scrabble and urgency tempered into something—not gentle, exactly, but patient.
Like an itch has been scratched already, in just this, a private moment, enough to do whatever they want.
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Bruce makes a soft noise as Clark echoes his earlier swerve, appreciative, indulgent. They are two people who could probably do with something like this every now and again; being made to slow down. And not because someone might pass out from artificial atmospheric pressure, or keel over from broken ribs. Once in a while, Bruce wonders if the way they have a difficult time keeping their hands off each other isn't simply because of all the reasons that make sense on the surface, but also because there are a lot of years behind them with nothing at all.
What if they'd run into each other, on their winding journeys? Clark in Tibet, being peered at by a man training to be a 'monk' that the locals don't speak of; Bruce catching sight of a mysterious stranger on an oil rig. He, at least, has never been the type to let a curiosity go without investigation, even if the other would have wanted to vanish.
A loud squeal heralds a car going too fast up the ramps, and the reminder of the public venue. Bruce doesn't pull back right away, or even a beat after, but he does. And then presses a kiss to the side of Clark's mouth anyway, in no hurry, even as he slouches a bit. The windows are illegally tinted too dark, but still. None of your bees wax, world.
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He knows it was the appearance of Zod, that day, that forced him from hiding. Sometimes, he wonders if it was Lois, too, who tracked him down, who unearthed secrets that no one even cared to know about until her. In the canon divergent alternate universe where another investigative spirit connected dots, Clark assumes he would have just run away some more, back into all that nothing.
But maybe not. Who can say.
He lists into the seatback once some more inches of distance settle between them, his arm eased back from around Bruce, hand now clinging a hold at shirt collar. He lets them sit there in the comfortable quiet (heartbeats, winding down) before he asks, "Can I drive?" with all the confidence of someone with a terminally visible halo. (He is used to trucks, shitty rentals, and more recently, his bike. It's a nice car, okay.)
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He sits back.
"Sure. All you farmboys can drive stick, right?"
Because of course he doesn't have a fucking automatic.
So: to the front seats they go, and he picks up his other post cards and stamps on the way, buckling in and sifting a pen from the glove box.
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But Bruce leans in and does that, Clark holding almost comically still after an initial adjustment to make room. Leather creaking faintly under his hand. It makes him wish, with a sudden rising heat, that they were nearly anywhere else, but preferably somewhere with clean sheets and all the time in the world. It's open in his expression when Bruce leans back.
The toothy smile Clark deploys next definitely indicates that comment landed as a dick joke.
Into the driver's seat, then. He is careful and respectful with property that isn't his but clearly happy to be there and while it has been a minute since he drove stick, actually, you wouldn't know it. More alarming than any lapse in skill is probably the smug energy with which he drives them out of the parking lot,
and then the immediate impatience for late afternoon traffic, draining out of the city like life blood. Metropolis gets pretty bad sometimes too with all the construction, hence his own preference for ecofriendly options, but Clark would characterise gridlock there as kind of a politely crystallised frustration, everyone in it together. On this side of the river, well—
—one instance occurs where he is is slower than a Gothamite would prefer him to be to change a lane and a horn immediately screeches by, muffled profanity. "Sorry," doesn't sound sorry at all. "Jesus."
It'll be better on the highway.
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