Satisfaction of apparently having Done The Thing effectively enough to catch Bruce out -- because even if he had activated his X-ray vision, it does not give Clark insight into the branching scenarios almost lazily contemplated inside of his opponent's skull -- quickly turns into a flutter of panic about what he's supposed to do next by the time Bruce's hands tighten on shirt and arm. In normal scenarios, remaining perfectly in place is a likely given. Flying backwards another one.
Presence of mind to have kept those tabled, Clark responds to full-bodied tug by startling, pitching forwards.
Bonk.
Any roll-back momentum is too immediately countered by Clark Kent landing heavy on top of him, a half-aborted attempt at breaking grip laying forearm against a shoulder, knee jabbing thigh and the other braced against mat, other hand flung out wildly to absorb some of his own weight onto the floor next to Bruce's shoulder. Face to startled face as Clark jerks his head back by an inch, zero idea of what to do next has him going still in place.
They're both lucky that Bruce speaks physical violence better than he does English, so when Kryptonian knee meets human thigh he's able to position as to not end up with his leg in two pieces - though perhaps concerning is the way he doesn't seem to find those points of contact painful, like the response is simply absent, having spent too many years getting the shit kicked out of him for this to rate.
Bruce's pulse does that thing it's been doing. It evens out - albeit at a quicker than normal pace - at the sight of Clark so startled. Rudely finding his own peace at the expense of the other man's nerves.
Beneath him, he relaxes. Broad hands are smoothed out against perfect skin and borrowed cotton. He looks at Clark, looks in those bright blue eyes and that little speck of warm brown-- he wonders if that tiny blip of heterochromia is what's supposed to have set him apart from other Kryptonians and their genetically encrypted destinies. Look, says some long-dead alien radical, he's completely natural. Ordinary. Fucked his eyes up and everything.
Nevermind the rest of him shames Greek statues.
Bruce moves one hand, slow, like approaching a wild animal. Raises it up towards Clark's temple and the wavy dark hair there -
- shoves his knee into the other man's chest and torques his body, flinging him aside.
Bruce relaxes. Clark does too, a little, making only a subtle adjustment to make the position less physically awkward, if no less-- otherwise awkward. He awaits instruction, complaint, signal to move -- should probably not wait for any of that and just roll off like a normal person -- and thinks that even with the ability to telescope his vision to identify where subtle silver has threaded itself into Batman's five o'clock stubble from two blocks away, it's different up close. Mutual absorption of detail.
Detail coming attached with opinion, like how his age suits him, how brown eyes no longer seem as murky and walled off as they usually do but like wood cut to transparency and brought to a polish, and wondering what else it might take for Bruce not to school his expression so perfectly.
Beside Bruce's shoulder, his fingers curl inwards, as conscious as a wild animal of movement, brow pulling at the centre. Tension returning, kindled differently.
And then a knee to the torso, too densely made for it to drive the breath out of him but his breath still hitches anyway. Clark rolls as heavily as a log and lands with an over loud thump of his shoulders hitting padded ground. The next breath is a semi-laugh, head falling back against the ground. Cool cool cool.
Unlucky, that Bruce speaks physical so well, now wholly cognizant of the not-nothing of that moment. He's more at ease with it than he'd be if the moment had been, heaven forbid, mid-conversation, but there's still a frisson of strange as he sits up halfway on his elbows.
Stranger still, how beautiful Clark's laugh is, how easily it throws him. Briefly, Bruce tries not to smile. Again. He turns his head away to cover it, significantly less subtle than before.
Clark looks at him from where he remains on his back, sort of playing at an exhaustion or defeat he doesn't feel. Feet slack at the ankles, hand idling on his stomach. His smile closes, less toothy, but still there. You ever feel ways about the people who trained you?
Is not an appropriate follow-up, but it scrolls through his brain like a news ticker. Considers the ceiling again, does not make comparisons about how quickly his body sheds sensation, no twinges, no aches, in contrast to where his knee thumped down on Bruce's thigh, because he lacks the proper frame of reference.
Doesn't mean he's going to forget much about it, though.
"Makes sense."
There's no Bat Academy, after all. No one thing that made Bruce what he is. The world wasn't equipped to do it, in the way Themyscira grew her soldiers, or Krypton forged gods. He remembers something, in his Kryptonite memory haze, about how Bruce had to force the world to make sense.
The feeling of Clark's weight above him, his warmth through nothing but thin layers of workout clothes, his closeness, the energy between them - it'll haunt Bruce, like his laughter. Like the feel of his dead body with a gaping hole in his chest being lowered from beside the Kryptonian monster into Diana's arms, into Lois's embrace.
Maybe, some traitorous voice whispers in his mind, you will forget what that felt like, with enough exposure to feeling him while alive.
A thought so revoltingly selfish that it casts a chill on him. A chill that should have been with him all along. Reality. Bruce sits up, rolls to his feet. Something creaks in his left knee.
Smooth.
"Showers are in with the locker room," he says, "if you're so inclined. I have a long day of wrangling construction idiots coming up in a few hours, so I should pretend to sleep for a little while."
Clark gets to his feet as Bruce does, his expression just a touch expectant that the other man will say something less utilitarian. Foolishly. Mention of showers sort of tips his brain in a whole other wrong direction but corrects itself quickly enough, frowning at the shift that's taken place instead.
Not shocking, though.
"Of course," he says, midwestern manners in place, a handwave to assure he can see himself out and everything. There's probably some disaster waiting for him in another timezone, maybe one he missed while wrestling bat. The shadow of responsibility on his time has its ebbs and flows.
Clark steps aside, even if he doesn't all the way want to, and throws out a last hook with, "Bruce," followed by, "thanks for this. Until next time?"
Query is met with a look that's searching-- as though inspecting Clark for signs of insincerity. Bruce nods. Sure. Next time.
For Bruce, the rest of the night involves a freezing cold shower and punching the granite wall during it hard enough to leave bruises on his knuckles. Stop it, he tells himself, vicious in his desire to sever the impulse under his skin to cling to the evening spent, honestly, in good company, enjoying himself. As if it's in the same universe as that simple.
He could have reached out and taken his face in his hands. He could have kissed him. He knows it.
Fuck.
You've already gotten him killed once. Stop it.
He will. He has to. No matter what Clark might think - and surely it's something misguided, if he's looking at Bruce like that at all - it's not worth letting him into, at best, the emotional blast radius of his fucking disaster of a life. Clark deserves infinitely better and-- has it, surely. (Why do you assume everyone but you is monogamous, says the same mutinous voice from earlier. Shut the fuck up, he tells it.)
It's a busy week. He's glad to lose himself in it.
Clark doesn't shower. He sheds clothing, leaves it folded somewhere obvious in a gesture of thanks, tugs on his suit, and goes a different way he came.
Because the temptation he is warring with is a different kind, the kind that wants to follow on quiet footsteps and see if they can't continue this conversation, well into the night, careless and selfish of him, really. The kind that wants him to glance through walls, and is too fully aware of that heartbeat tracking around the lake house like an echo, somehow more powerful and resonant than Alfred's resting rate.
But Clark does follow one impulse, as nosy as the others. In the quiet early hours, he takes to the sky, only to slowly lower himself where some of the roof has caved in of Wayne Manor.
Dry leaves and dirt flutters around where his feet touch down and heavy cape hem sweeps. It's cold in a way the outside is less. Cold shadows, cold marble, cold columns. The only associations that Clark Joe has with a place like this is a museum. Or a mausoleum. Hard to picture it with a fire in the hearth over there, made cosy with furniture, with a childhood lived out in these halls. Christmas decorations, a tree, a wreath on the door. Severed, he thinks, given the rate of decay, but isn't sure when. Everyone lives some kind of way, he supposes. Normal is what you're used to.
His wander is curious, a little aimless, simply looking, maybe taking the walk that he interrupted Bruce from taking. There's no focused pursuit for evidence or artefacts.
He sometimes wonders what it was like for the children of Krypton. What it might have been like for him. Wide open spaces like these, maybe. Perhaps the scout ship is as far apart as the architecture as a space shuttle would be to an earth home. Maybe they're as varied as earth homes, although he doubts it. Didn't seem a lot of room for cultural variation, from what he'd managed to learn from ghosts of the past.
He roams hallways, pushes open doors, but does not enter rooms, let alone ransack them. His treatment is at as deferential as it is invasive. Thoughtful, reflective. CCTV footage won't be able to pick up on what he's thinking, after all.
Returning to his landing spot, Clark takes off again, leaving only displaced leaves and a few dusty foot prints behind before disappearing into the night sky.
Edited (all these edits is what you get for these rude comics) 2017-12-13 10:44 (UTC)
It's shocking how quickly the world can turn back to nature without the direct interference of humans - or perhaps, it's just shocking how much work goes into maintaining the basic integrity of a building on a regular basis. Wayne Manor has been abandoned for decades, and though it seems like there should be an 'only' in there, the truth of it is that leaky ceilings and rotting beams can destroy a structure in a small handful of years. Helped along in this case by harsh eastern seaboard weather (exacerbated by Climate Change), and the age of the manor in the first place. She needed extra care. She received none.
To say nothing of the obvious fire damage.
There are portions of the house worse off than others; perhaps, before it was left empty entirely, a small family unit lived only in the bedrooms closest to the kitchens, instead of having the run of the whole palatial grounds. It would be sensible and considerate. Saving power. Carbon footprints. The Waynes were known for their good natures.
Were.
What are they known for now? Eccentricity. Excess. Decay.
The network of CCTV cameras on the expanse of his property does not have thoroughly paranoid coverage in the ruins - against type, but Bruce didn't have the heart. It's just enough to know if any drunk teenagers from the city proper have made the double-dog-dare trip out to loot a brick. Just enough to watch the last son of Kryptonian move carefully through the crumbled skeleton of his childhood.
Bruce plays the footage again and again, trying to draw concrete meaning out of his wandering, trying to will away the ache of understanding. He pushed away from a moment in which he could have pressed his mouth to Clark's-- is he pushing away a moment where he can reach out and touch the back of his hand, say We're both orphans?
Construction teams arrive. The first thing they do is clear away debris and dirt and pull out all the infringing plant life, leaving the ancient structure looking like an open wound waiting for stitches. Bruce hates looking at it. He sends updates to Diana and leaves Alfred in charge of it, relocating for the time being to his penthouse in the city.
Coward, he listlessly tells his reflection in the tall windows.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Presence of mind to have kept those tabled, Clark responds to full-bodied tug by startling, pitching forwards.
Bonk.
Any roll-back momentum is too immediately countered by Clark Kent landing heavy on top of him, a half-aborted attempt at breaking grip laying forearm against a shoulder, knee jabbing thigh and the other braced against mat, other hand flung out wildly to absorb some of his own weight onto the floor next to Bruce's shoulder. Face to startled face as Clark jerks his head back by an inch, zero idea of what to do next has him going still in place.
no subject
Bruce's pulse does that thing it's been doing. It evens out - albeit at a quicker than normal pace - at the sight of Clark so startled. Rudely finding his own peace at the expense of the other man's nerves.
Beneath him, he relaxes. Broad hands are smoothed out against perfect skin and borrowed cotton. He looks at Clark, looks in those bright blue eyes and that little speck of warm brown-- he wonders if that tiny blip of heterochromia is what's supposed to have set him apart from other Kryptonians and their genetically encrypted destinies. Look, says some long-dead alien radical, he's completely natural. Ordinary. Fucked his eyes up and everything.
Nevermind the rest of him shames Greek statues.
Bruce moves one hand, slow, like approaching a wild animal. Raises it up towards Clark's temple and the wavy dark hair there -
- shoves his knee into the other man's chest and torques his body, flinging him aside.
Bonk.
no subject
Detail coming attached with opinion, like how his age suits him, how brown eyes no longer seem as murky and walled off as they usually do but like wood cut to transparency and brought to a polish, and wondering what else it might take for Bruce not to school his expression so perfectly.
Beside Bruce's shoulder, his fingers curl inwards, as conscious as a wild animal of movement, brow pulling at the centre. Tension returning, kindled differently.
And then a knee to the torso, too densely made for it to drive the breath out of him but his breath still hitches anyway. Clark rolls as heavily as a log and lands with an over loud thump of his shoulders hitting padded ground. The next breath is a semi-laugh, head falling back against the ground. Cool cool cool.
no subject
Stranger still, how beautiful Clark's laugh is, how easily it throws him. Briefly, Bruce tries not to smile. Again. He turns his head away to cover it, significantly less subtle than before.
"I trained in a lot of places."
no subject
Is not an appropriate follow-up, but it scrolls through his brain like a news ticker. Considers the ceiling again, does not make comparisons about how quickly his body sheds sensation, no twinges, no aches, in contrast to where his knee thumped down on Bruce's thigh, because he lacks the proper frame of reference.
Doesn't mean he's going to forget much about it, though.
"Makes sense."
There's no Bat Academy, after all. No one thing that made Bruce what he is. The world wasn't equipped to do it, in the way Themyscira grew her soldiers, or Krypton forged gods. He remembers something, in his Kryptonite memory haze, about how Bruce had to force the world to make sense.
no subject
Maybe, some traitorous voice whispers in his mind, you will forget what that felt like, with enough exposure to feeling him while alive.
A thought so revoltingly selfish that it casts a chill on him. A chill that should have been with him all along. Reality. Bruce sits up, rolls to his feet. Something creaks in his left knee.
Smooth.
"Showers are in with the locker room," he says, "if you're so inclined. I have a long day of wrangling construction idiots coming up in a few hours, so I should pretend to sleep for a little while."
no subject
Not shocking, though.
"Of course," he says, midwestern manners in place, a handwave to assure he can see himself out and everything. There's probably some disaster waiting for him in another timezone, maybe one he missed while wrestling bat. The shadow of responsibility on his time has its ebbs and flows.
Clark steps aside, even if he doesn't all the way want to, and throws out a last hook with, "Bruce," followed by, "thanks for this. Until next time?"
no subject
For Bruce, the rest of the night involves a freezing cold shower and punching the granite wall during it hard enough to leave bruises on his knuckles. Stop it, he tells himself, vicious in his desire to sever the impulse under his skin to cling to the evening spent, honestly, in good company, enjoying himself. As if it's in the same universe as that simple.
He could have reached out and taken his face in his hands. He could have kissed him. He knows it.
Fuck.
You've already gotten him killed once. Stop it.
He will. He has to. No matter what Clark might think - and surely it's something misguided, if he's looking at Bruce like that at all - it's not worth letting him into, at best, the emotional blast radius of his fucking disaster of a life. Clark deserves infinitely better and-- has it, surely. (Why do you assume everyone but you is monogamous, says the same mutinous voice from earlier. Shut the fuck up, he tells it.)
It's a busy week. He's glad to lose himself in it.
no subject
Because the temptation he is warring with is a different kind, the kind that wants to follow on quiet footsteps and see if they can't continue this conversation, well into the night, careless and selfish of him, really. The kind that wants him to glance through walls, and is too fully aware of that heartbeat tracking around the lake house like an echo, somehow more powerful and resonant than Alfred's resting rate.
But Clark does follow one impulse, as nosy as the others. In the quiet early hours, he takes to the sky, only to slowly lower himself where some of the roof has caved in of Wayne Manor.
Dry leaves and dirt flutters around where his feet touch down and heavy cape hem sweeps. It's cold in a way the outside is less. Cold shadows, cold marble, cold columns. The only associations that Clark Joe has with a place like this is a museum. Or a mausoleum. Hard to picture it with a fire in the hearth over there, made cosy with furniture, with a childhood lived out in these halls. Christmas decorations, a tree, a wreath on the door. Severed, he thinks, given the rate of decay, but isn't sure when. Everyone lives some kind of way, he supposes. Normal is what you're used to.
His wander is curious, a little aimless, simply looking, maybe taking the walk that he interrupted Bruce from taking. There's no focused pursuit for evidence or artefacts.
He sometimes wonders what it was like for the children of Krypton. What it might have been like for him. Wide open spaces like these, maybe. Perhaps the scout ship is as far apart as the architecture as a space shuttle would be to an earth home. Maybe they're as varied as earth homes, although he doubts it. Didn't seem a lot of room for cultural variation, from what he'd managed to learn from ghosts of the past.
He roams hallways, pushes open doors, but does not enter rooms, let alone ransack them. His treatment is at as deferential as it is invasive. Thoughtful, reflective. CCTV footage won't be able to pick up on what he's thinking, after all.
Returning to his landing spot, Clark takes off again, leaving only displaced leaves and a few dusty foot prints behind before disappearing into the night sky.
no subject
To say nothing of the obvious fire damage.
There are portions of the house worse off than others; perhaps, before it was left empty entirely, a small family unit lived only in the bedrooms closest to the kitchens, instead of having the run of the whole palatial grounds. It would be sensible and considerate. Saving power. Carbon footprints. The Waynes were known for their good natures.
Were.
What are they known for now? Eccentricity. Excess. Decay.
The network of CCTV cameras on the expanse of his property does not have thoroughly paranoid coverage in the ruins - against type, but Bruce didn't have the heart. It's just enough to know if any drunk teenagers from the city proper have made the double-dog-dare trip out to loot a brick. Just enough to watch the last son of Kryptonian move carefully through the crumbled skeleton of his childhood.
Bruce plays the footage again and again, trying to draw concrete meaning out of his wandering, trying to will away the ache of understanding. He pushed away from a moment in which he could have pressed his mouth to Clark's-- is he pushing away a moment where he can reach out and touch the back of his hand, say We're both orphans?
Construction teams arrive. The first thing they do is clear away debris and dirt and pull out all the infringing plant life, leaving the ancient structure looking like an open wound waiting for stitches. Bruce hates looking at it. He sends updates to Diana and leaves Alfred in charge of it, relocating for the time being to his penthouse in the city.
Coward, he listlessly tells his reflection in the tall windows.