There's a moment where Clark thinks about saying something else, thinks about not saying it, and then it comes out of his mouth anyway as he says, fondly, "He looks like you."
Not physically, obviously. But he is speaking as someone who does not literally resemble his parents either, but you might still see Jonathan in the way he touches the top of the doorway leading into the kitchen back home, or Martha in the way he looks at people before embracing them. Likewise, Rick moves like Bruce Wayne too. Studies people like him. Wears his coats like him.
Bruce nods, slowly. Unclear if that's agreement, or just acceptance; imagining it, and the metrics that might prompt Clark to make such a comparison. Uncertain if it's good or bad that his influence is so obvious on someone who wishes to be free of it. He thought he was doing the right thing, with how he raised Rick. At the very least, he thought he was doing the honest thing.
Love's not enough, etc.
Anyway. He moves over to do the thing with the coffee maker, so Clark doesn't blow it up. Ta-da. He lingers there, still holding his own empty mug.
"Thank you," he says. "For talking to him. I don't need to know what you talked about, just. I know you."
Bruce shakes his head a little and exhales through his nose, some wordless completion of that scattered thought. I know enough about you to know you'd be kind to him, and that's all I want for my kid anymore, is shit that's not awful, and that isn't me. Some terrible creeping emotion threatens to close his throat and he runs his thumb over the edge of the mug, thinking.
There is a puzzled line drawn at his brows when Bruce thanks him, and it kind of stays there through the rest. They're closer, now, so Clark wanders a hand out to touch his waist, just a light point of connection through clothing layers, while the coffee machine does its thing.
Gee, but Bruce looks sad. He isn't really a person from whom that can be hugged away, either. Not everyone is.
"I didn't really know what I was doing," Clark says. "But he humoured me a little."
Which was nice of him, Clark thinks. He could definitely have told him to fuck off at any point, and still been polite about it.
"But he definitely didn't come here expecting me."
"But he clocked you anyway, huh." A guess, but a very educated one. Of course Richard Grayson did, he is who he is. There is something so impossibly fond in his voice, but he's still sad. Bruce knows that it's entirely possible - probable, even, sucker bet - that R(d?)ick has done his homework on Superman already, and that just
does something to him.
The next breath he takes is steadier, and his posture reorients to normal. That look leaves his face. Behold, compartmentalization so efficient as to be art. He's still silent for another moment, but eventually: "Sorry. Don't know why that got me. I'm used to it, I really am."
Ha, ha. Anyway we're cool, let's have some coffee.
Clark doesn't move, but he does manage not to stare at Bruce with open—something. Not pity, but it'd be easy to mistake it that way. He stands in place instead and studies some middle distance through Bruce's clavicle as he considers what magical right thing there is to say that makes everything better again, comes to the conclusion it doesn't exist.
So he just says what's on his mind, which is, "Sometimes I think being someone's kid is a responsibility too, when you grow up. You realise you're just two people, and you owe it to one another to act on that. You realise that one day, you have to come home, or not."
His hand wanders from Bruce's waist to his hand.
"He didn't come here to look at a building." He did come here to look at a gravestone, but Clark is ready to believe that if Rick wanted to look at a gravestone, he could have just looked at a gravestone. Or not at all. Personally, he was always in the habit of looking at the sky.
Bruce closes his eyes again, sighs. It's a kind of I know but it isn't defensive— barely. He could be, but he chooses not to.
"He did not have normal growing pains and he did not have normal examples," Bruce says, and he shrugs, opening his eyes again. "I've never been in a position to make a choice about coming home, because it's always been only mine. God only knows what that made him feel like."
Dead parents, a guardian who spent a lot of years actively downplaying and denying his role as a father. From eight years onward, this has all been Bruce's; he has no experience about the mindset concerning 'should I move out to go to college or not' or 'I'm in a fight with my dad'. He figures he must have assumed Rick felt the same way, because he never actively thought of it at all. And now what. Neither of them know how to come back over a familial rift, having only experienced the kinds that were caused by death, and thus are by default unrecoverable.
"Pushing him has always made him ice me out more. I can't— I can't just corner him, even if he shows up here. You think I wouldn't—"
Bruce scrubs a hand over his face, tips his his head back. "You think I wouldn't reach out, if I thought I could. If I thought it wouldn't be the last straw."
Defensive is certainly not what Clark was aiming for, but he ought to have known—no one keeps themselves quite on the hook like Bruce. Trying to ease him off it is about as easy as orchestrating a touching family reunion, which is to say, potentially dangerous. Painfully aware he can only really talk as someone's kid, and not someone's parent.
But Clark has his hand, so. He keeps it.
And listens, head tilted, while the coffee maker over there finishes filling his cup. Just a minute, coffee maker.
"Of course I don't think that," he says, gently. "And maybe the right thing to do was to let him be, today. Probably it was. I'm just wondering if this isn't him looking for a way back." His thumb brushes over Bruce's knuckles. "And that you shouldn't have to be used to this."
Bruce squeezes his hand. He is indeed not the kind of person for who a hug would solve anything, but maybe once in a while he'd like one. Alas, he'll die before indicating so.
"Well, it's my fault."
Stiffly. It all sucks.
It's my fault, so. He deserves to suffer, or something like that. Is there actually a worse crime than making your child hate you, Bruce isn't sure. He doesn't have a way to describe how much of a failure he feels like. Perhaps there are parents out there, biological or adopted or intentional or accidental, who can make clean breaks, who can feel content with distance and shrug it off. Bruce can't. But he also can't actually do anything about it.
"I want to be in his life, but I don't want him to hate that I'm there."
A hug might be coming. Who can say. They are proportionately more likely from Clark, as a rule, but plenty a superhug potential has gone squandered.
And Bruce can probably tell that Clark wants to refute that statement, that first one, because of course he does. Self-aware enough to know that he doesn't know enough to lift it up out of platitude, even of an extremely well-meaning kind.
But still. "He said you were a great dad," he offers, anyway. "I can't imagine that hate would enter into it, and stick around. He doesn't seem the type."
It's a very unusual thing, because he has so few modes - the normal one, blank with only little tells around the eyes and mouth, and the occasional stupefied one, which is usually more funny than anything. This is someone who's been gutted and doesn't know what to do about it. Bruce looks out through the glass wall and doesn't find anything, because there's just—
What?
"I can't actually talk about this," Bruce says, but it kind of goes up at the end. I can't actually talk about this? He's not telling Clark he doesn't want to talk about it with him, or that he'd prefer him to mind his own business, but he just. Doesn't know what the fuck to do, so that's cool.
There's a breath in, like Clark is going to say something, and when he says, "Okay," there's the sense it wasn't his first choice.
But it's the one he settles on. He curls a hand around Bruce's arm and closes in the distance between them, a kiss brushing across Bruce's cheek on the way into pulling him into an embrace, pushing past whatever invisible layers of east coast-y social distance exist with a different kind of unstoppable effortlessness that has nothing to do with cellular structures and yellow suns. A squeeze up around Bruce's ribs, regardless of buy in, chin tucked on shoulder.
"But if you want to," he says, then amends, "when you can, and want to, then," he withdraws a little, but still within that space, still holding him, "whenever you want."
He doesn't like seeing Bruce this way, and at the same time, it's better, seeing it, than knowing it lurks somewhere hidden beneath several feet of ice.
Bruce doesn't quite resist, but there's a long moment of non-reaction before he begins to unwind, almost mechanically. Standard operating procedure says he should tell Clark to mind his own fucking business, maybe leave Richard another tragic voicemail move on— he's at a loss, and yet he has endless motivation to do something, despite being unable.
Why the fuck would he say he's a great dad.
He ends up curling his arms around Clark, clinging there, head against his shoulder. Clutching too tightly, but only until he manages a deep breath out. Leans into Clark, then, hoping that he can somehow intuit an apology for being such a weirdo.
It's a while before he says,
"I miss my kids."
Is the thing. A real shitty thing to try and navigate around, the justified estrangement of one, and the brutal death of the other, which reinforces that rift between the survivors. Sandwiched in the middle of two sets of murdered parents. It's a trauma echo chamber in Wayne Manor, and they're rebuilding it. God help them.
Clark settles a hand at the nape of Bruce's neck as he leans in, staying steady and stable, thumb rubbing tiny arcs at his hairline. A wish that he could do more, expressed right there, and then stilling when Bruce speaks, says that.
Mm. His chin pokes Bruce's shoulder, head ducking, holding him tighter, like he too felt some small heartbreak at the sentiment alone.
"It's not too late with him," he says, finally, very certain for someone who has only met the guy for a few minutes. But it feels like a crucial few minutes. It feels like a few minutes that wouldn't have happened if this thing weren't true. That tight grip only lessens once he senses some even unconscious pull-back from Bruce, but otherwise remains, a steel circle of an embrace that Bruce could collapse into, if he wanted.
Clark adds, "Maybe he's just making his own way back."
He considers pulling back. Maybe it's almost there, unconsciously. It's not too late, Clark says, and Bruce watches some other world (maybe the same world where Bruce does not say anything, that day at the aquarium, does not tell Clark about being in love with him, even if it isn't any of his business) where he stands up straight and ends the conversation. It would be fine if he did, he thinks. Understandable. Both because it's so painful to Bruce, and because this is a lot to ask of Clark, honestly. He did not perhaps sign up for this particular brand of baggage, when he invited Bruce to Christmas some years ago, but here it is. Airport carousels full of it as far as the eye can see.
Not quite a collapse. Some form of unspooling. Melting into him, trusting Clark with his weight, physical and emotional. Arms around him, hands tucked up over the backs of his shoulders.
Surely there's a point where he gets better at this. (Surely there's a point where he realizes he already has.)
After a while - when did he close his eyes? Bruce isn't sure - he ventures, muffled, "We should visit your mom sometime."
See. This is funny. Parent angst. What if Martha also misses her kid. Let's go look at the fucking corn, Kent.
The not-collapse is felt more like Bruce relaxing than a real shift of weight, although Clark becomes aware of that too. Easily done, he holds Bruce to him, and stays quiet. He can, after all, do that much.
And then smiles against Bruce's shoulder, where he'd tucked his face down against it, at that suggestion.
"We'd love that," he says, cheer low-key but present. It's probably not just a tactic to change topic, maybe, but hopefully Bruce was also prepared for this to eventuate, laser-burned into his calendar, at least as far as Clark is concerned.
Gently, Clark moves his hands to Bruce's shoulders, sets him upright. Doesn't back off, though, still bracketing him in and using that proximity to touch his face, snare in eye contact. A silent kind of you okay? in big eyes and expressive eyebrows.
Bruce is very prepared. Let's go. If Clark said, alright, get in the air (named Superman?), he'd probably go right now. It's that kind of a mood. But he reels it in to look back at his lover, his own expression serious. He's okay. It's all still a lot, and he cares about every aspect, but he's also okay.
He lets his hands slip back down to Clark's sides, trying not to be so literally clingy.
Just sometimes, Clark thinks that this thing they have is selfish, or his part in it is. It's very physical, what he shares with Bruce, and intense, and strange, snared and tangled in hard edged life and death realities, past and present and future. Maybe it's also because it feels easy, like gravity, but also like base impulse, like jumping off something high, like biting down as hard as you can. Just human things.
But all of that feels overwhelmed when there are these moments, here, and Clark leans in and kisses him very sweetly, as the only reply possible to a thanks.
Clark really is so ready to kiss him at any moment. He knows that's the case with Lois, too. What a dope. Bruce finds himself leaning into it just a fraction anyway, in that quick moment, one hand against the Kryptonian's chest. Part of him still wants to scream an explanation, but there isn't actually an explanation he could get out. Clark's seen more progression than Bruce has.
So.
"Is there something wrong with the coffee maker?" He draws some nonsense shape with his thumb against Clark's shirt, makes himself still. Gives him a look that's softer than he intends (he thinks). "Or do you just want to hold my hand at Starbucks."
"I was talking about the coffee maker," Clark assures, smile tipped crooked, his hand dropping down from Bruce's face to rest on his arm. "But I do like Starbucks."
It's one of his three character flaws, along with dubious veganism-related ethics and being too good looking.
He would argue that this isn't just any moment, and maybe he's got a lot of kissing time to make up for, both in general and with Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane in particular, but also: fair. Implicitly, he'd also like to hold hands.
One arm stays around Clark, leaving a free hand to arrange coffee for them both without moving too much. The light is fading - Bruce wants to put in solar power on the manor grounds, what a joke with how overcast it always is - but he still might pull the drapes around the bedroom half of the house. Just because.
"Want to watch a movie?"
Sit in his bed with coffee, move little, hold hands.
Or—
"Mm, actually, there might be some data from Vic to sift through." Will Superman let that stand, query.
Clark needs both his hands for coffee making, given he does not take his black and intravenously, but stays close anyway, their sides touching within the bracket of Bruce's arm as he goes ahead and drowns his espresso in cream and cooking sugar. There's a deep chuckle before Clark says, "Vic's always gonna have data for you to sift through."
And arguably, there will always be movies to watch, but that's a nil on the prospect of doing more work when lounging in bed with coffee and a show is on the table.
"What's the mood? Citizen Kane or Body Snatchers?"
He's aware there are movies after 1959, it's just they have some catching up to do.
Two wolves fighting: I need to escape this emotionally vulnerable day and do something useful, vs, I like this and I want to feel better. Bruce is fine with pretending he isn't making that decision, letting Clark's dismissal of data sifting be the verdict. Pressure valve release, and feeling ... safe.
How embarrassing, for Batman. He isn't used to it. Might not hate it. What a world.
"Which one have you seen the most times?" asked in a way that implies it's a saucy question, as in, we're going to make out through most of it anyway! But without enough heat as to declare specific intent. Cuddles, mostly, he imagines.
"Body Snatchers."
Much funnier. So: shoes off, drapes closed, James Bond tv screen lifted from an invisible panel on the floor, film cued up. Bruce drags a spare pillow from the back closet (that leads to the stairwell that shouldn't exist) to have something extra to lean on. And tries not to think too hard about dead kids.
Comfortable black and white and silver, Transatlantic accents, and fresh coffee aren't bad sensations to immerse yourself in. Touch-wise, there's Clark's shoulder resting comfortably against Bruce's, the line of contact from hip to knee.
Clark does not know Rick Grayson's biometrics well enough to track him anywhere on the eastern seaboard, but while they sit quietly, he does expand his field of sensory input to include the Wayne property in general. Work has concluded with the sun sinking down under the horizon, so there's no excess of construction or stranger-noises to sift through. He can hear Alfred in his own relatively modern living space, putting something heavy and iron onto a stovetop, the creak of metal.
Birds in the trees, retiring. When he does not pick out an extra heartbeat, Clark returns to the room by bringing up his coffee to drink from, setting it aside, and then nudges at Bruce. "C'mere."
He is superior to lean against than spare pillows. Baking warmth. Ergonomic. Good spoon potential.
He thinks, when they're sitting there: it'll be nice when the manor is done. Specific rooms for this kind of thing, cozier kitchens, Alfred with his own wing again, practically. It's a world that feels strange and familiar at once. There's nothing to be done about anxiety over returning to it - has anything good come from that place? - but some undefined yearning for home is present, too.
Coffee mug clinks against the nightstand, sheets are shuffled around beneath weight. Bruce c'meres.
Clark is superior to lean against. He lets himself be guided and also nudges Clark around, settling in, getting his head on his shoulder. He remembers things like sitting cuddled up with Selina in her old town loft, watching whatever garbage daytime TV she liked to put on to feel normal. Back then, he thought it'd work, if they just cared hard enough. He still isn't sure if they didn't, or if they were just never going to make it, no matter what. Or even worse, if she counts as something lost in the destruction of his family. A relationship warped forever, like his absent ward.
What he and Clark have is too much, but it finally feels like enough, too.
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no subject
There's a moment where Clark thinks about saying something else, thinks about not saying it, and then it comes out of his mouth anyway as he says, fondly, "He looks like you."
Not physically, obviously. But he is speaking as someone who does not literally resemble his parents either, but you might still see Jonathan in the way he touches the top of the doorway leading into the kitchen back home, or Martha in the way he looks at people before embracing them. Likewise, Rick moves like Bruce Wayne too. Studies people like him. Wears his coats like him.
'Years' is a rough answer.
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Love's not enough, etc.
Anyway. He moves over to do the thing with the coffee maker, so Clark doesn't blow it up. Ta-da. He lingers there, still holding his own empty mug.
"Thank you," he says. "For talking to him. I don't need to know what you talked about, just. I know you."
Bruce shakes his head a little and exhales through his nose, some wordless completion of that scattered thought. I know enough about you to know you'd be kind to him, and that's all I want for my kid anymore, is shit that's not awful, and that isn't me. Some terrible creeping emotion threatens to close his throat and he runs his thumb over the edge of the mug, thinking.
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Gee, but Bruce looks sad. He isn't really a person from whom that can be hugged away, either. Not everyone is.
"I didn't really know what I was doing," Clark says. "But he humoured me a little."
Which was nice of him, Clark thinks. He could definitely have told him to fuck off at any point, and still been polite about it.
"But he definitely didn't come here expecting me."
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"But he clocked you anyway, huh." A guess, but a very educated one. Of course Richard Grayson did, he is who he is. There is something so impossibly fond in his voice, but he's still sad. Bruce knows that it's entirely possible - probable, even, sucker bet - that R(d?)ick has done his homework on Superman already, and that just
does something to him.
The next breath he takes is steadier, and his posture reorients to normal. That look leaves his face. Behold, compartmentalization so efficient as to be art. He's still silent for another moment, but eventually: "Sorry. Don't know why that got me. I'm used to it, I really am."
Ha, ha. Anyway we're cool, let's have some coffee.
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So he just says what's on his mind, which is, "Sometimes I think being someone's kid is a responsibility too, when you grow up. You realise you're just two people, and you owe it to one another to act on that. You realise that one day, you have to come home, or not."
His hand wanders from Bruce's waist to his hand.
"He didn't come here to look at a building." He did come here to look at a gravestone, but Clark is ready to believe that if Rick wanted to look at a gravestone, he could have just looked at a gravestone. Or not at all. Personally, he was always in the habit of looking at the sky.
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"He did not have normal growing pains and he did not have normal examples," Bruce says, and he shrugs, opening his eyes again. "I've never been in a position to make a choice about coming home, because it's always been only mine. God only knows what that made him feel like."
Dead parents, a guardian who spent a lot of years actively downplaying and denying his role as a father. From eight years onward, this has all been Bruce's; he has no experience about the mindset concerning 'should I move out to go to college or not' or 'I'm in a fight with my dad'. He figures he must have assumed Rick felt the same way, because he never actively thought of it at all. And now what. Neither of them know how to come back over a familial rift, having only experienced the kinds that were caused by death, and thus are by default unrecoverable.
"Pushing him has always made him ice me out more. I can't— I can't just corner him, even if he shows up here. You think I wouldn't—"
Bruce scrubs a hand over his face, tips his his head back. "You think I wouldn't reach out, if I thought I could. If I thought it wouldn't be the last straw."
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But Clark has his hand, so. He keeps it.
And listens, head tilted, while the coffee maker over there finishes filling his cup. Just a minute, coffee maker.
"Of course I don't think that," he says, gently. "And maybe the right thing to do was to let him be, today. Probably it was. I'm just wondering if this isn't him looking for a way back." His thumb brushes over Bruce's knuckles. "And that you shouldn't have to be used to this."
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"Well, it's my fault."
Stiffly. It all sucks.
It's my fault, so. He deserves to suffer, or something like that. Is there actually a worse crime than making your child hate you, Bruce isn't sure. He doesn't have a way to describe how much of a failure he feels like. Perhaps there are parents out there, biological or adopted or intentional or accidental, who can make clean breaks, who can feel content with distance and shrug it off. Bruce can't. But he also can't actually do anything about it.
"I want to be in his life, but I don't want him to hate that I'm there."
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And Bruce can probably tell that Clark wants to refute that statement, that first one, because of course he does. Self-aware enough to know that he doesn't know enough to lift it up out of platitude, even of an extremely well-meaning kind.
But still. "He said you were a great dad," he offers, anyway. "I can't imagine that hate would enter into it, and stick around. He doesn't seem the type."
no subject
It's a very unusual thing, because he has so few modes - the normal one, blank with only little tells around the eyes and mouth, and the occasional stupefied one, which is usually more funny than anything. This is someone who's been gutted and doesn't know what to do about it. Bruce looks out through the glass wall and doesn't find anything, because there's just—
What?
"I can't actually talk about this," Bruce says, but it kind of goes up at the end. I can't actually talk about this? He's not telling Clark he doesn't want to talk about it with him, or that he'd prefer him to mind his own business, but he just. Doesn't know what the fuck to do, so that's cool.
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But it's the one he settles on. He curls a hand around Bruce's arm and closes in the distance between them, a kiss brushing across Bruce's cheek on the way into pulling him into an embrace, pushing past whatever invisible layers of east coast-y social distance exist with a different kind of unstoppable effortlessness that has nothing to do with cellular structures and yellow suns. A squeeze up around Bruce's ribs, regardless of buy in, chin tucked on shoulder.
"But if you want to," he says, then amends, "when you can, and want to, then," he withdraws a little, but still within that space, still holding him, "whenever you want."
He doesn't like seeing Bruce this way, and at the same time, it's better, seeing it, than knowing it lurks somewhere hidden beneath several feet of ice.
no subject
Why the fuck would he say he's a great dad.
He ends up curling his arms around Clark, clinging there, head against his shoulder. Clutching too tightly, but only until he manages a deep breath out. Leans into Clark, then, hoping that he can somehow intuit an apology for being such a weirdo.
It's a while before he says,
"I miss my kids."
Is the thing. A real shitty thing to try and navigate around, the justified estrangement of one, and the brutal death of the other, which reinforces that rift between the survivors. Sandwiched in the middle of two sets of murdered parents. It's a trauma echo chamber in Wayne Manor, and they're rebuilding it. God help them.
no subject
Mm. His chin pokes Bruce's shoulder, head ducking, holding him tighter, like he too felt some small heartbreak at the sentiment alone.
"It's not too late with him," he says, finally, very certain for someone who has only met the guy for a few minutes. But it feels like a crucial few minutes. It feels like a few minutes that wouldn't have happened if this thing weren't true. That tight grip only lessens once he senses some even unconscious pull-back from Bruce, but otherwise remains, a steel circle of an embrace that Bruce could collapse into, if he wanted.
Clark adds, "Maybe he's just making his own way back."
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Not quite a collapse. Some form of unspooling. Melting into him, trusting Clark with his weight, physical and emotional. Arms around him, hands tucked up over the backs of his shoulders.
Surely there's a point where he gets better at this. (Surely there's a point where he realizes he already has.)
After a while - when did he close his eyes? Bruce isn't sure - he ventures, muffled, "We should visit your mom sometime."
See. This is funny. Parent angst. What if Martha also misses her kid. Let's go look at the fucking corn, Kent.
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And then smiles against Bruce's shoulder, where he'd tucked his face down against it, at that suggestion.
"We'd love that," he says, cheer low-key but present. It's probably not just a tactic to change topic, maybe, but hopefully Bruce was also prepared for this to eventuate, laser-burned into his calendar, at least as far as Clark is concerned.
Gently, Clark moves his hands to Bruce's shoulders, sets him upright. Doesn't back off, though, still bracketing him in and using that proximity to touch his face, snare in eye contact. A silent kind of you okay? in big eyes and expressive eyebrows.
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He lets his hands slip back down to Clark's sides, trying not to be so literally clingy.
"Thanks," he says quietly, achingly sincere.
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But all of that feels overwhelmed when there are these moments, here, and Clark leans in and kisses him very sweetly, as the only reply possible to a thanks.
"You wanna get coffee?"
no subject
So.
"Is there something wrong with the coffee maker?" He draws some nonsense shape with his thumb against Clark's shirt, makes himself still. Gives him a look that's softer than he intends (he thinks). "Or do you just want to hold my hand at Starbucks."
no subject
It's one of his three character flaws, along with dubious veganism-related ethics and being too good looking.
He would argue that this isn't just any moment, and maybe he's got a lot of kissing time to make up for, both in general and with Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane in particular, but also: fair. Implicitly, he'd also like to hold hands.
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"Want to watch a movie?"
Sit in his bed with coffee, move little, hold hands.
Or—
"Mm, actually, there might be some data from Vic to sift through." Will Superman let that stand, query.
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And arguably, there will always be movies to watch, but that's a nil on the prospect of doing more work when lounging in bed with coffee and a show is on the table.
"What's the mood? Citizen Kane or Body Snatchers?"
He's aware there are movies after 1959, it's just they have some catching up to do.
no subject
How embarrassing, for Batman. He isn't used to it. Might not hate it. What a world.
"Which one have you seen the most times?" asked in a way that implies it's a saucy question, as in, we're going to make out through most of it anyway! But without enough heat as to declare specific intent. Cuddles, mostly, he imagines.
"Body Snatchers."
Much funnier. So: shoes off, drapes closed, James Bond tv screen lifted from an invisible panel on the floor, film cued up. Bruce drags a spare pillow from the back closet (that leads to the stairwell that shouldn't exist) to have something extra to lean on. And tries not to think too hard about dead kids.
no subject
Clark does not know Rick Grayson's biometrics well enough to track him anywhere on the eastern seaboard, but while they sit quietly, he does expand his field of sensory input to include the Wayne property in general. Work has concluded with the sun sinking down under the horizon, so there's no excess of construction or stranger-noises to sift through. He can hear Alfred in his own relatively modern living space, putting something heavy and iron onto a stovetop, the creak of metal.
Birds in the trees, retiring. When he does not pick out an extra heartbeat, Clark returns to the room by bringing up his coffee to drink from, setting it aside, and then nudges at Bruce. "C'mere."
He is superior to lean against than spare pillows. Baking warmth. Ergonomic. Good spoon potential.
no subject
Coffee mug clinks against the nightstand, sheets are shuffled around beneath weight. Bruce c'meres.
Clark is superior to lean against. He lets himself be guided and also nudges Clark around, settling in, getting his head on his shoulder. He remembers things like sitting cuddled up with Selina in her old town loft, watching whatever garbage daytime TV she liked to put on to feel normal. Back then, he thought it'd work, if they just cared hard enough. He still isn't sure if they didn't, or if they were just never going to make it, no matter what. Or even worse, if she counts as something lost in the destruction of his family. A relationship warped forever, like his absent ward.
What he and Clark have is too much, but it finally feels like enough, too.