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Somewhere in the no man’s land between the kitchenette and the bedroom, Hal had managed to wrestle Bruce’s shirt from him. In itself, that was a minor miracle. Bruce had this dumb rich-boy habit that meant he’d almost certainly turn up in one of those sexy, overly-buttoned shirts that warranted way too much dexterity and the kind of patience Hal fundamentally did not possess.
Not his fault, by the way. The buttons on those shirts were tiny as hell. Decorative, almost, and Hal had no time to deal with all that frou-frou shit when he just wanted to get laid. Last time, he’d just ripped the damn things off, listened to them scatter, and promptly regretted it when Bruce broke off their kiss to give him a detailed lecture on unnecessary damage.
It was an incredibly hypocritical thing for him to be pissy about, since he once tore Hal’s crummy old t-shirt directly off his chest — and! And he had a habit of getting himself fucking stabbed, even in his civvies, so it wasn’t like Hal was the first person to ever screw up his stupid expensive threads. But he must’ve caught the broody bastard in one of his moods, because the resulting scolding quickly fell into an argument that killed the mood so thoroughly that he didn’t even stay over.
He’d flown home that night in his jacket with no shirt underneath, mostly because he hadn't been able to find it and he wasn't going to ask, and he'd spent the whole next week telling himself this was absolutely the last time. He'd gotten to about Wednesday before he'd texted Bruce.
The embarrassing thing was, he’d apparently actually learned something from the whole situation, because tonight he’d wasted precious time unbuttoning all those stupid decorative buttons, one by one, instead of tearing the damn shirt off like he wanted to.
It meant that the evening was going exactly according to plan. Well, no, that was a huge stinking lie. The actual plan had been to fall face-down on his couch, stick on an old rerun of Jeopardy, and sleep away that post-mission fatigue that so frequently came after thirty-six days of busting his ass beyond the stars.
Finding Bruce already camped on his couch had torpedoed that agenda entirely, which Hal found he couldn't be particularly upset about.
Bruce had been watching some black and white documentary with that curious little glare he got when he was actively engaging with the material. It wasn’t the one that made the crease between his brows pop, like it did when he was pissed at something, but the quieter one. The one that made his eyes crinkle at the corners because he was in denial about needing the blue-light glasses for screens. Hal liked that look.
It had taken four minutes for Hey, baby, how’s it going to devolve into that ooga-booga caveman shit Bruce got like sometimes when he hadn’t gotten laid for a while. There was a threshold, Hal had come to understand. There was some internal pressure gauge that, once it hit critical, bypassed whatever elaborate social operating system Bruce ran the rest of his life on and left something considerably more neolithic in charge.
Hal certainly had no complaints. All he could do was let himself get manhandled backwards through the apartment and let Bruce get all efficient about things. He had some kind of internal rapid-deployment protocol even for sex. Belt buckles, zippers, the logistical problem of two large men and a doorframe. Hal's contribution to the proceedings was a noise he was never going to acknowledge making when Bruce's mouth found that spot just below his ear
The whole throw me, big boy thing Hal had developed since he started sleeping with Batman was, he told himself, a recent discovery. (Huge lie. He'd been into that shit since approximately the same time he figured out what his dick was for. There’d been a very formative situation during his very short tenure on his middle school wrestling team, and he wasn’t going to dwell on it further than that, thank you.)
Point was, Bruce's ooga-booga had him airborne for a solid second before he hit the mattress hard enough to bounce. The spring stabbing into his lower back got filed immediately as a problem for later, and Hal arranged himself in what he liked to think was an inviting manner. Legs spread, arms above his head, shit-eating grin. That whole general ‘fuck-me’ implication.
Bruce seemed to agree with the proposal, because then it was all hands and mouth and the kind of feral clothes-shedding that only really got crazy after Hal had been gone for over a month. Lips on skin, teeth on collarbone, Bruce's stupid big hands relearning the feel of his hips and waist. Exactly the kind of evening that would have the neighbours banging on the walls and Hal walking funny for at least three days.
Then, Bruce stopped.
“...Why,” he said slowly, “is there an electric kettle next to your bed?”
Breathless, Hal stared at the ceiling. He took a genuine, generous moment to make sure he’d heard that correctly, because there was probably, implausibly, a universe in which that had just been Bruce’s very strange version of dirty talk.
“What?”
“The kettle,” Bruce said. “On your nightstand. Why?”
Hal turned his head. Next to his phone charger and a book he’d been attempting to read for at least six months, was his little electric tea kettle. It was white, bought on sale from Walmart three years ago, and the wire at the plug was beginning to show signs of fray.
“I don’t know, man. Is that really the priority right now?”
“Yes.” Bruce had braced himself up on his arms so he could frown down at the kettle with the same forensic intensity he used in the cowl.
“I like to drink tea.”
“You don’t drink tea.”
“I could drink tea. I could be a tea guy. You don't know my whole journey.”
Bruce turned to level him with a flat stare. His lips were kiss-swollen and his hair was doing that stupid thing where it flopped over his forehead, all sexy and touselled. That could’ve been distracting if he weren’t so hung up on the kettle. “I don’t believe for a second that you drink tea.”
“Coffee, then,” Hal said. “I like a cup of coffee in the morning. It’s great when you don’t have to get out of bed. Now can we—” He rolled his hips up in what he felt was a very compelling argument for getting back on track.
Bruce didn't budge. “How long has it been there?”
“Long enough that I can't believe we're only having this conversation now.” Hal grabbed at Bruce's shoulders, trying to pull him back down and reintroduce some momentum to the evening. “Come on. You're really going to derail everything over kitchenware?”
“It's a fire hazard.”
“No, it’s efficient,” he snapped back. “You’re all about efficiency, right? This is efficient. Bedside teakettle. Genius. I don't want to hear fire hazard from a man who keeps — what, nitroglycerin, live ordnance, I don't even know what's in half those cases — in a cave directly underneath a residential building.”
That, at least, made Bruce look at him instead of the kettle. “That’s completely different.”
“Is it, though?”
“Yes.”
“Uh huh.” The moment was clearly put on pause, so Hal rested his hands on the small of Bruce’s back for now. “You wanna walk me through how, exactly? Because I’m having trouble with your weird logic.”
“The cave is structurally reinforced—”
“The kettle has an automatic shutoff.”
“—with dedicated ventilation systems and blast containment protocols—”
“It holds one-point-two litres of water, Bruce.”
“—and a full suppression system.” Bruce turned to glare at the nightstand again. “The kettle doesn’t have a suppression system.”
“The kettle,” Hal said, very pointedly, “makes hot water. That's the whole thing. That's the entire kettle. Look at it. It's fine. It's sitting there being fine.”
The kettle offered nothing in its defence, but it didn't need to. It was a kettle. Bruce's jaw shifted in the way that meant he was aware he'd lost the thread of the argument and was recalculating.
“You don’t have a coffee cup,” he settled on. “And you take your coffee with creamer. Where’s the creamer, Hal.”
“Maybe I drink it black now.”
“Hal.”
“I'm expanding my palate—”
“Hal.
“Or.” Hal considered the ceiling again. There was a mysterious stain he liked to look at whenever he was caught out. “Maybe I use it for cup ramen.”
“What.”
“Cup ramen,” Hal repeated. “You just— I mean, hot water, straight in. You don’t even have to get up. It’s right there.”
He sure did wish Bruce would redirect his focus back to more important things. Like their respective dicks. “You don’t make cup ramen in your bed,” he said instead.
“Picture it,” Hal continued. “It’s three in the morning and I’ve just gotten back from a big job for the Corps. I’m bruised and beaten, poor me, right? I’m lying in bed, all hot and vulnerable, and I might want some noodles. But it's late, I'm comfortable in my bed. Maybe I don’t want to go all the way to the kitchen—”
“It’s fifteen feet away.”
“Are you even listening to the scenario, Bruce? I’m bruised. I am in physical and emotional pain. My thighs are burning, my body is broken, it hurts like hell to walk—”
“You can literally fly.”
“—and the kettle is right there. I can have noodles without even sitting up fully, and it's the greatest innovation in my adult life. As my partner, I genuinely feel like you should be celebrating this with me instead of—” He gestured vaguely at the general situation. “—whatever this is.”
Bruce stared at him for a long, painful moment. “You eat ramen in bed.”
“Yes, Bruce, I eat ramen in bed,” Hal confirmed. “Like a heathen. Like some kind of monster. And guess what? I love it.”
“Unbelievable.”
“This is what breaks you? This? Baby, you’ve seen me fly into the actual sun on a dare. How the hell does a tea kettle mess with your head?”
“That’s different. That’s work. This is domestic.”
“Listen. You just don’t see the vision. One day — hear me out now — one day you're gonna wake up and you're gonna be desperately craving tea. Or soup. Or you might need a hot compress for that bad knee you won't tell anyone about—”
“My knee is fine.”
“—and then you’ll understand the genius of this setup.”
The corner of Bruce’s lip curled up, just a little. “Genius, hm?”
“E-ffi-ci-an-cy,” Hal drawled. “You gotta think ahead, Spooky. Anticipate your needs before they even happen. And look at that—” He swept a hand toward the nightstand. “—I’ve already got the perfect situation. There’s no getting up, there’s no hassle. Just hot water, on demand, for any occasion that may arise.”
“What if it’s empty?”
“Then I’m screwed. But when I remember to refill it, which is at least sixty percent of the time, it’s an indispensable part of my life and I won’t hear a word against it.”
The hand that had been working its way into Hal's pants had migrated north at some point, now resting with disappointing innocence against his hip. “The kettle,” Bruce said, “I was willing to overlook.”
“I really doubt that.”
“But the noodles, Hal.”
“Dude. Quit judging my noodles. Do I judge your dietary habits?”
“Yes. Frequently.”
“That’s— Okay, yeah, that’s fair, but the protein shakes, Spooks. Anyone would judge. And there’s only so much plain chicken and rice one man should eat in a week.”
Bruce didn’t roll off him, but he did reach over to pull the nightstand drawer open.
The drawer, in his defence, was a perfectly reasonable drawer. It contained reasonable things that reasonable people had. Like batteries and receipts and other drawer-junk detritus. His passport was in there too, as well as an emergency mini flashlight in case the power went out again. And, yes. Maybe it also currently contained four cups of instant ramen, packed together as best they could be in the limited space.
Bruce lifted them out one by one, placing them all down in a neat row with a little tap of plastic hitting wood.
Tap. Beef.
Tap. Chicken.
Tap. Chicken again. He’d grabbed two by accident last time.
Tap. Spicy hot chilli — his favourite.
As each one hit the nightstand, Bruce's expression made a journey across his face. It started at exasperated, taking a brief detour through something that might have been genuine despair, before it arrived somewhere that Hal had no name but it was very recognisably Bruce.
“Hal.”
“There’s forks in there too,” Hal offered. “Disposable. I got a pack of fifty.” He rolled his hips again, more insistently this time, just to remind Bruce that he was still very much on board with the original plan. “Now, can we please get back to it? Because all of this extended commentary on my cup noodle infrastructure is doing absolutely nothing for my boner.”
“But—”
“You heard me, asshole. Noodles are not sexy. The whole interrogation is not sexy. You know what is sexy?” Hal gestured at himself with his free hand. “Me. Right here. Ready to go. I'm extremely sexy and you're actively wasting it.”
He slung an arm around Bruce's neck and hauled him down, kissing him hard enough to derail whatever judgement was forming behind those judgemental eyes. For a second, Bruce resisted — the man had never met a tangent he couldn't chase down to the ends of the earth — but then folded with a sound caught somewhere between a sigh and a growl, and Hal felt the tension go out of his shoulders all at once.
He slid his other hand up Bruce's back, felt the muscles shift and resettle under his palm, and considered the matter closed.
Right until Bruce pulled back just far enough to murmur against Hal's lips: “Do you at least unplug it when you're done?”
“Oh my god—”
“It’s a legitimate concern—”
“Out,” Hal groaned, slapping at his back. “Get out of my house.” He shoved at Bruce’s shoulder, which accomplished exactly nothing because the man was built like a brick shithouse. “You’re really gonna let cup noodles cockblock you right now? Really, Bruce? This is the hill you’re dying on?”
“It might be.”
“Sometimes I unplug it. Sometimes. Are you satisfied? Can we move on with our lives now, or do you need to check the hotpot I’ve got under the bed?”
“You’ve got a what—”
Hal hooked a leg and threw his weight sideways. They rolled until he was straddling Bruce's hips, finally back in a position where he had some actual leverage.
“I’m kidding about the hotpot,” he lied, leaning down to bracket Bruce’s head with his hands. “We’re done talking about appliances, okay? Because if you bring up one more electrical item in the next thirty seconds I will physically remove you from this bed and you can go explain to the couch why you ruined the evening over my noodle arrangement.”
Bruce’s hands settled on Hal’s thighs. “That’s a compelling argument.”
“You’re damn right it is.”
“Though I should point out—”
Hal clamped a hand over Bruce’s mouth. “Nope. No. Whatever you’re about to say, I don’t want to hear it. Not unless it’s directly related to getting me off in the next thirty seconds.”
Bruce bit his palm.
“Ow. Asshole.”
The world rotated. Bruce flipped them again with the kind of effortless, offhand strength that Hal's higher brain knew was the product of decades of obsessive training and his lower brain simply received as important and good information. The spring dug into his spine again, and Hal stopped caring approximately zero seconds later when Bruce's mouth found his neck.
“Thirty seconds,” Bruce murmured against his skin. “That's not a lot of time.”
“Then you'd better work fast, hadn't you?”
Things got on track pretty quickly after that.