Chapter Text
The debrief ran long because Hal Jordan existed.
Forty-seven minutes on a containment operation that should have required twelve, because Hal had opinions about the structural integrity of the dimensional barrier they'd sealed and wanted those opinions heard, at length, by people with better things to do. Bruce stood at the head of the conference table with his hands clasped behind his back and his expression set to attentive and professional and delivered his tactical breakdown in precise, economical language while Hal talked over the last thirty seconds of it, and Diana caught Bruce's eye across the table with the specific look that meant I also want to leave, and Bruce gave her nothing back because he was a professional.
He was extremely professional.
He was so professional that he had spent the last twenty-two minutes being professionally aware that Clark Kent was sitting three seats to his left in a grey henley and jeans because the crisis was over and Clark had stopped performing Superman for the afternoon, which he did sometimes — shed the cape, the posture, the careful management of his own presence — and became something looser and more dangerous instead. Clark in civvies. Clark with his glasses on, which he did not need, which Bruce had long since stopped pretending was not deliberate. Clark with his ankle crossed over his knee and a paper coffee cup turning slowly in both hands, listening to Hal with what appeared to be genuine patience.
Bruce did not know how Clark did that. He had theories.
"—which brings the total interdimensional incursion count to four this quarter," Bruce said, "which suggests a pattern we should—"
"I'm just saying," Hal said, "that if we'd gone in from the northwest approach—"
"The northwest approach would have collapsed the membrane twelve seconds earlier and put us in the incursion instead of containing it." Bruce did not look at Hal. He looked at his tablet. "Next point."
Three seats to his left, Clark smiled at his coffee cup.
Bruce did not observe this. He absolutely did not observe the specific quality of that smile — private, slightly delighted, the smile of someone watching a thing they found both frustrating and entertaining. He did not observe it because he had made a decision eight months ago, six weeks into whatever this was, that he was not going to spend League debriefs cataloguing Clark Kent's microexpressions like a man with a problem.
He had been moderately successful.
He advanced to the next slide.
The slide did not change.
Bruce registered this. The system hiccupped — one clean, silent internal error — and he was already reaching to correct it when Clark's voice arrived, precisely one second behind the mistake.
"That's the same slide."
The room had gone quiet.
Bruce looked at his tablet. Then at Clark, who was watching him with an expression Bruce had spent eight months attempting to accurately file. Still hadn't managed it.
"System lag," Bruce said.
Diana covered her mouth with two fingers. Hal started talking again. Bruce advanced the slide and completed the debrief in eleven minutes and forty seconds and did not look at Clark again until the room was clearing, at which point Clark was standing at the window with his back to the table and his hands in his pockets, looking at the Earth below with the particular quality of attention he gave things he loved.
Then Clark shifted his weight slightly, and the window light caught the left side of his neck — just below the collar, just above the clavicle — and there it was. Almost nothing. The ghost of a mark on skin that didn't keep marks, a trace the yellow sun had mostly, but not entirely erased, and Bruce knew exactly what had made it because he'd been the one to find the Kryptonite fragments in the facility wall and he'd been considerably too slow about it and Clark had taken the shrapnel at close range before Bruce could pull him back.
Three seconds of exposure. That was all it had taken for Clark to bleed like something mortal.
Bruce had not been clinical about the triage.
He looked away.
He picked up his tablet and walked out.
He was in the elevator before he looked at his phone.
He typed an address. He typed a time. He stared at the message for four seconds and sent it.
The elevator descended.
Clark's response came before the ground floor.
👍
Bruce looked at it. Looked at the elevator doors. Put the phone in his jacket pocket with slightly more force than the situation required.
He had four hours.
He spent two of them in the cave, which was appropriate, and forty minutes of the remaining two in a meeting he'd scheduled three weeks ago and should have rescheduled, and the last eighty minutes doing something he would not have admitted to Alfred under enhanced interrogation.
The Manor was quiet when he got back. The lamp in the study was on — Bruce hadn't turned it on. The Macallan was already on the sideboard, opened, the correct one, two glasses beside it. Bruce looked at this for a moment. He did not examine it because there was nothing to examine. This was a house that was maintained by someone who noticed things, and Bruce would never discuss it, and neither would Alfred, and that was fine.
He went upstairs.
He showered. He changed. He stood in the bedroom doorway doing a thing he would not call preparation because preparation implied intent and intent implied — something he wasn't logging — and ran an unasked-for inventory of the last time, which had been eight days ago, which he knew without checking because he had not checked.
Of the twelve things he'd catalogued since then, the one that surfaced now and kept surfacing — in board meetings, in the cave at 3 AM, during a chase across the Gotham waterfront when he had genuinely needed his whole mind — was this: he had not taken his time. Eight days ago, he had been efficient and thorough and Clark had made every sound Bruce had documented and several Bruce hadn't, and it was by any metric exceptional, and Bruce had still left something unfinished. There was a specific thing he wanted to do slowly. He had not done it slowly.
Tonight he was going to do it slowly.
Clark knocked at 9:02 PM.
Bruce opened the door.
Clark was in a different grey henley. Bruce had a brief, irrational moment of wondering if Clark owned other colors. Clark was smiling — not the debrief smile, the other one, easy and direct and warm at the edges, the smile he deployed when he was genuinely glad to be somewhere and not performing about it.
"You said nine," Clark said.
"I know what I said."
"I'm two minutes late."
"I know that too."
Clark looked at him for a moment. Then he stepped inside, and Bruce closed the door, and Clark said, "Is that the Macallan?" and Bruce said, "Yes," and Clark said, "Great," and then Bruce had him against the wall.
No transition. No system.
Just Clark's shoulders hitting the wall and Bruce's hands at his jaw and Clark making a sound against his mouth that was neither surprise nor performance — just response, just Clark receiving what Bruce gave him and giving it back doubled, his hands coming up immediately to the back of Bruce's neck and his mouth opening and the brief, devastating moment of Clark's tongue and Clark's warmth and the specific wrongness of his temperature that Bruce had never gotten used to, had never wanted to get used to, that made the inside of Bruce's chest do something he had not named and was not going to name.
"Hi," Clark said, against his mouth.
"Shut up," Bruce said, and kissed him again.
Clark laughed.
The laugh, mid-kiss, into his mouth — Bruce had catalogued this, had known it was coming, and it still detonated something. Clark was the only person alive who laughed during this. Not at it, not at Bruce — just with it, with the fact of being wanted and wanting, like it was a pleasure he saw no reason to be dignified about. Like joy was reasonable.
Bruce bit his lower lip.
Clark's laugh went somewhere else. Something lower. His hands tightened at Bruce's neck.
Bruce pulled back two inches — not retreat, calculation — and looked at him. Clark's glasses were crooked. His mouth was already wrecked. He looked like he'd been interrupted doing something ordinary and upgraded without complaint, which was exactly what had happened, and he was looking at Bruce with an expression that did something specific to Bruce's ability to maintain.
Then Clark looked at him — just looked, for a full three seconds without moving, with something in his face Bruce couldn't locate in any file he had, something that wasn't want and wasn't warmth and wasn't any of the things Bruce had spent eight months categorizing. Something else entirely. It arrived and departed and left no forwarding address, and Clark said, "Bedroom," like it was the simplest word in the language, and Bruce's entire analytical apparatus filed it under unknown variable and moved on because there was nothing else to do.
"Obviously," Bruce said, because he was still in possession of language.
He was in possession of language until Clark dropped to his knees in the hallway.
Oh.
Not a word. Not analysis. The thought was just the shape of what was happening — Clark Kent on his knees on Bruce's floor without preamble, looking up at him with his glasses slightly fogged and his hands at Bruce's belt with the particular unhurried competence he brought to everything, like this was something he was good at and glad to be good at and not performing either of those things.
Bruce put one hand in Clark's hair and stopped pretending he was standing correctly.
"You're still dressed," Clark said, looking up at him. His voice was different from three minutes ago — lower, rougher at the edges, the press conference voice and the civilian voice both gone and this left in their place, this that Bruce had eight months of data on and still couldn't file accurately.
"Working on it," Bruce said.
"I'm working on it," Clark said. "You're just watching."
"I'm supervising."
Clark's expression — still looking up, still with his hands at Bruce's belt — shifted into something that was not quite a smile and not quite a challenge and was absolutely both, and then he opened the belt and Bruce stopped talking.
Clark's hands settled at his hips.
It was — Bruce registered it the way he registered all of Clark's physical facts, involuntarily and in full — gentle. Not tentative. Gentle as a decision, the particular quality of a man who could rearrange the continental shelf choosing not to, holding Bruce like something he'd already decided was worth not breaking. The hands of someone raised to work land and strong enough to crack it open, and not one ounce of that force present, and the absence of it more apparent than the presence would have been, and Bruce thought — with the last coherent part of his mind before Clark's mouth made thought redundant — that this was the thing he could never quite prepare for. Not the want. The care.
What Clark did with his mouth should have been illegal in twelve jurisdictions and probably was in three others, and Bruce had thought that the first time and the second time and every time since and it remained true, the kind of observation that didn't diminish with repetition. The man was thorough.
The man treated sucking cock like something worth doing properly — which was both alien and devastating, that was always the word, because Bruce had spent thirty years optimizing everything and had never turned that precision on pleasure, had never really allowed himself to consider that pleasure was a thing worth optimizing, and then Clark Kent had knelt in front of him and demonstrated with absolute sincerity that some people had simply never considered the alternative.
"Jesus," Bruce said, to the ceiling.
Clark made a sound that was not language. Low. Satisfied.
Bruce looked down.
That was a mistake. Looking down was always a mistake and he kept making it — Clark on his knees looking back up at him with the expression of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and was glad to be doing it, who experienced no apparent tension between competence and desire. His glasses were somewhere on the floor. His eyes were that particular dark blue and his mouth was — Bruce's hand tightened in his hair.
Clark took him deeper.
Bruce stopped forming thoughts.
There was Clark's hair between his fingers and Clark's hands at his hips — still gentle, still deliberate, the choice continuous and ongoing — and Clark's warmth and the specific way Clark's tongue did the thing that existed above the pay grade of language, and the sound of it in the quiet house, and Bruce's back found the doorframe again because his legs had made an executive decision.
And then Clark did something he had not done before. A specific thing, slow and precise and absolutely intentional, a particular swirl, a specific vibration, and Bruce heard himself make a sound that he would never have sanctioned in advance — not language, not performance, just a completely unmanaged response to the information that this was what Clark had meant by slowly, that Clark had apparently also been thinking about this, and the thought detonated something in the vicinity of Bruce's sternum that had nothing to do with the physical.
He had been planning to be slow tonight.
Clark had planned it first.
"Clark —"
Clark responded to his name with intent.
Bruce looked at the ceiling and abandoned the part of himself that was still trying to maintain commentary.
He came apart in stages. That was always how it happened — not all at once but in layers, the controlled exterior first, then the commentary, then the careful allocation of responses, until there was nothing left but the physical fact of Clark and the specific animal truth of how much Bruce wanted him, which was not a manageable amount, which had never been a manageable amount, which Bruce had spent eight months telling himself was fine.
It was not fine.
It was extraordinary.
Clark's mouth was extraordinary.
Bruce said something — words in an order he couldn't audit in real time, his name or Clark's name or possibly neither — and Clark took him apart with the unhurried thoroughness of someone with nowhere else to be and nothing else to want, and Bruce's hand shook once in Clark's hair, and then he stopped thinking entirely.
Afterward.
The house settled around them — small sounds, a distant creak, the particular silence of a building that had been standing for ninety years and had its own rhythms. Bruce's breathing. The specific weight of Clark beside him, shoulder to shoulder on the bedroom floor, slightly too warm, slightly too present, registering in Bruce's proprioception as something adjacent to human and not quite.
He stayed in that for a moment. Just that.
Clark's glasses were back on, slightly wrong. His mouth was still wrecked. He was completely at ease on Bruce Wayne's bedroom floor at 9:17 PM, which he appeared to be constitutionally incapable of not being, and he was looking at the far wall with an expression Bruce wasn't going to examine.
"Scotch?" Clark said.
"In a minute."
"Sure," Clark said.
The house settled again. Bruce looked at the ceiling and did not move and did not speak and did not name the thing that was happening in the room, which was not a thing he was acknowledging.
"You said you'd miss that," Clark said.
Bruce processed this. "What?"
"At the debrief. Before you got distracted." The particular tone Clark used for distracted — not pointed, not cruel, just accurate, like he was reading the minutes back and calling the moment what it was. "You were going to say something about the pattern."
"I said it in the elevator."
"To nobody."
"To myself. It counted."
Clark was quiet for a moment. Then, without changing his tone at all, "You want to tell me what you were actually thinking about for those twenty-two minutes while you were standing there being very professional?"
"Tactical projections."
"Mm."
"Resource allocation."
"Mm-hm."
"The structural implications of a fourth-quarter incursion spike."
"Sure," Clark said. He was still looking at the far wall. Patient. Unhurried. Knowing. "None of those things."
Bruce looked at the ceiling.
"None of those things," he said.
Clark turned his head. That look — the unperformed one, the one Bruce couldn't correctly categorize even with eight months of data — and he said, "Good," and then stood from the floor with infuriating ease and said, "I'll get the Scotch."
Bruce listened to him move through the house. Comfortable in it, knowing where the glasses were without asking, the particular sound of him — heavier than he looked, but quiet when he chose to be, the contrast another thing Brucehad filed and never closed.
He looked at his right hand.
Still faintly warm from Clark's hair.
He looked at it for three seconds. Put it down. Said nothing to nobody.
His heart was going too fast.
He was not logging this.