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“Bruce?”
Chills wrack throughout his nerves, burning the soles of his feet as if striding across a frozen lake. Must be cement, he figures — recognizing the vague formation of the cave surrounding his blurred vision. Hours might have passed stood solid as a statue, immortalized here with the bright, static screen in front of him. It’s midnight perhaps, or the last he checked the time, and he’s waiting. He’s waiting, clutching the remnants of power exuding, the possible hope inspired within even just one more time —
He registers unexpected pressure to his upper trapezius muscle. Bruce blinks, his eyes as dry as desert air in his lungs, and attempts to focus on the sudden presence close by. It’s never manifested to the extent of physical contact in the past, yet there isn’t a pattern besides lone nights and the bitter, bitter cold.
“Is that your mother?” Clark’s voice, he determines with somewhat weighted relief. A low, strong cadence intimate near his ear. Bruce glances up at his chin and how long — when did Clark arrive? Smoke clings to the air, leading him to guess that Clark might have flown here after halting a fire somewhere. He still smells good, however. Clark always smells good. His palm glides forward until his fingertips graze Bruce’s collarbones; it’s warm, stabling — bewitching despite the searing pain throughout the muscle. He failed to set it right; he didn’t have time. “She’s beautiful.”
She was, Bruce wants to say, yet he refrains out of fear of his own incoherency: tongue-tied and saliva thick in his mouth. He needs to swallow, but his throat burns from the lack of it.
As the silence prolongs, Clark finds him staring at his hand and winces, rescinding the touch with an earnest, murmured apology and why? Bruce didn’t shrug it off. Did he tense up on a reflex? He hasn’t spoken a word and yet something about him exudes it’s unwelcome, unwanted. A failure of many on his part somewhere along the line.
His skin tingles unpleasantly as he returns his attention to the screen, the blown-up picture of his parents smiling. Bruce palms over his forehead, the pressure building behind his left eye. “When did you get in?” Bruce asks, clearing out the embarrassing croak in a few coughs.
If Clark notices his current perturbed state or draws any conclusions, he doesn’t voice any. “A couple minutes ago. Alfred let me in, said to go on down.”
It’d further damn him if he minimizes the photo now; Clark’s already seen it in full, except he’s watching Bruce now, the pale, blue glow of the screen reflecting down the side of his soft face. God, he looks tired. Clark hides mental fatigue well, but Bruce learned the signs as soon as they met: the fraying edges of a smile torn between too much super and too little man.
“What is that?”
A wave of red as Clark’s cape drapes down his shoulder to lay across his arm. He sets a plate covered in foil down on the computer desk. “Leftover pie from Ma. I saved Dick a piece and put it in the fridge. She made me take it with me even though I nearly ate an entire one myself. I thought I’d drop it off for you guys instead before I went home.”
Overtly considerate, even by Clark’s standards. The Manor isn’t exactly on his way from Kansas back to Metropolis, but he knows Clark all the same, and it’s strictly a polite gesture. He wouldn’t bring Bruce a gift as a preface to asking him for something he wants.
Bruce stares at the plate. “Then why do you smell like smoke?”
“Do I?” Clark sniffs near his own shoulder before scratching the back of his head. “I’m sorry, didn’t mean to bring it with me. Pa was having a fire, burning off the leftover straw.”
Bruce nods absently. It’d be nice if he’d be able to say anything other than a question, but at least one of them had a calm night amongst the stars. He blames his next words on the four days without sleep, the fragility of his psyche or perhaps the unexpected delight of Clark near him at such an hour for no other reason than their friendship. “Share it with me,” Bruce murmurs.
Clark’s brows lift as his eyes widen out. Predictable, given Bruce hasn’t figured out how to make it known he’s allowed to stay longer than whatever case they’re working requires. It’s much simpler when Dick’s around. He’ll talk Clark’s ear off if Clark lets him, which of course happens to be always.
“Oh,” Clark says, glancing towards the plate. He must be deciding how to decline, politely of course, wanting to get home and relax in this rare reprieve from the world that needs him — “Yeah, sure. Always room for more dessert, right? Should I—”
Bruce rolls with what he’s put in motion, even though he’s already partially regretting it. He needs a bed, but he wants Clark’s company more. “Upstairs.”
“Sure,” Clark says again, his tone strange, light. “I’ll be right back down.”
Edging into delirium might be a more astute determination. He ignores the distant laugh in his head, the stab that what he seeks tonight is long lost, and takes the foil off of the plate before sitting down on the ground. He’s parallel to the computer, staring at the picture to his left until Clark returns. He doesn’t question Bruce’s choice, merely sitting down across from him on the floor.
Clark sets two forks on the plate and what seems to be two glasses of warm milk nearby. “Here,” Clark says, thrusting out a… pair of socks. “I’ve watched you break almost all of your toes at once, and I don’t want to see ‘em fall off too.”
“It’s not that cold,” Bruce mutters, but he places the socks on his feet anyway. Instantly, warmth travels up through his tinging calf muscles, the wool a soft comfort he resists shunning. Alfred must have shown him where to get them. More than anything, he appreciates the milk that feels like possible heaven down his throat. Appreciation feels like the wrong word however, and he’s unsure how to voice it out loud. He nearly cringes at his own inability to think about how Clark makes him feel properly. None of the words in the dozen languages he speaks feel worthy enough to compare to a man like him.
Clark doesn’t seem to mind his lack of verbal gratitude, at least.
Picking up one of the forks, Bruce skims the tips across the pie crust. It flew halfway across the country and it’s still flakey, buttery, and baked perfectly — rhubarb, he notices; Clark’s favorite. He doubts Dick will enjoy the particular taste, but he’ll have the manners to not say it to Clark’s face; most likely he’ll appreciate Clark considered him in the first place.
He watches Clark break off a piece and ticks an eyebrow. “Crust first?” Bruce mutters.
Clark hums. “It’s the best part.”
“Ever heard of saving the best for last?”
Clark glances up from the plate with an indulgent smile towards him. It appears inviting, wide, void of Clark’s earlier fatigue and disarming like everything else about him. Bruce’s gaze droops to the width of his chest, the slight overhang of his stomach in the Superman suit from his leg drawn up. Surely it’d be a peaceful feeling to rest against the breadth of him, to stretch his palm across Clark’s belly and feel it rise with each inhale, each laugh or bite of food.
A near nauseous guilt rolls across him for the thoughts alone. Clark’s his friend, possibly his only true one, and Bruce can’t afford the beckoning distraction with his current mental state. He can’t afford to be a distraction to Clark either, yet the thoughts exist despite so, have existed for over a year now.
He’s never felt fully in control of his own mind since he was a child, and Clark isn’t an exception.
“That doesn’t apply to desserts,” Clark says. “I always save the green bean casserole for last at Thanksgiving unless I just mix my food together.”
Bruce wrinkles his nose and refrains from commenting. He isn’t hungry at all, especially for sugar, but basic politeness hasn’t left him entirely. Sectioning off a piece grants him a pleased expression from Clark as well, so he supposes it’s worth the mechanical chewing. It’s a perfect balance of sweet and tart, the juices bursting on his palate. “It’s good,” Bruce murmurs, “give my thanks to your mother.”
“I will.”
A minute or two passes in silence except for the scrape of Clark’s fork; a silence Bruce isn’t certain how to fill. He’s never felt compelled to do so with anyone else — not without a mask. It isn’t difficult to watch Clark’s cheeks swell around his bites instead of speaking, but perhaps it’s the exhaustion creeping in steadier, the overview of his parents in his peripheral vision that inspires a vibration behind his teeth to say something he won’t be able to take back.
“How’s the city?” Clark asks suddenly. He finishes the last of the pie and shifts so he’s sitting criss-crossed.
It’s an innocent question in order to inspire conversation. He’s asked Bruce the same one multiple times in the past. Usually, he grunts out a simple affirmative that he heard it, or that it’s fine. If Clark needs to know any details, it’s because he’s helping Bruce with an aspect of his work. Yet here, on a night such as tonight, Bruce’s eyes close for a moment to steady himself. It’d be much easier for them to remain that way than to answer, yet he wants to escape into his own mind even less.
A vile, wretched part of him wants to lash out and start an argument over it, to hurt Clark as much as every second of the evening has pained Bruce until he got here, but he manages to save himself from that. Any anger shown would be entirely misdirected, and he feels watched, judged by the screen glow.
It’s not Clark’s fault for his own failures in Gotham — his lack of any appreciable change since he’s ventured out in dark alleys and neon-lit struggles. Perhaps brutal honesty will instead make Clark realize that he’s wasting his time here.
“The Joker killed 27 people at a charity ball last weekend,” Bruce says. Clark immediately winces, but out of sympathy rather than a lack of wanting to hear such horror. He’s a grown man. He deals with the same indiscriminate tragedies as Bruce in his own city. “I followed the getaway driver, a man named Buster Snibbs. The night before I made him tell me where the Joker was. Joker found out that Buster ratted him out, and Buster went home and killed his wife and daughter before the Joker could do it first.”
Clark gazes at him with those soft, round eyes awash in grief. “Goodness,” he whispers.
“I caught him about to jump off a bridge. He ended up shooting himself there in front of me instead.”
Some nights he still feels the hot blood splatter across his face, the metallic, foul taste on his quivering lips. Before closing his eyes, he sees the fixed determination, the anger on Snibbs’s face, how he shouted that he’d see Bruce in hell before everything went black and rang deafening throughout his eardrums. Even worse, he sees the faces of a woman and child he’s never met at all.
He’s never had to guess as to why sleep fails to take him the older he gets.
“I’m sorry, Bruce.”
Bruce glances away towards the depths of the cave. He’s only in a t-shirt, and he suppresses the instinct to shiver at the continuous chill engulfing his on-edge skin, the distress signals being sent to his brain that it’s past the time he leaves.
Clark isn’t a stranger to this specific experience, and it may be the only reason Bruce told him the full story. One night not long ago, Clark whispered about a horrifying time where an elderly woman threw herself into splattering lava after seeing Clark burst out of the center of a volcano. He was stuck deep inside after trying to alter the eruption, the molten ore filling his lungs in a desperate panic. He must have appeared as some sort of demon rather than their savior.
It’s difficult to fathom that sort of reaction. Clark Kent, the sweetest guy he’s ever met, inspiring such terror in those he’s trying to rescue from their fate.
Life isn’t a modicum of fair, even towards a man trying to do the right thing.
“So am I.”
Bruce’s eyes start fluttering shut on their own once neither of them continue speaking. It wasn’t intended as a confession despite the weight lifting off his chest, and he’s secretly, viscerally pleased that Clark didn’t leave after hearing it. Multiple people have told Bruce that he’s a boy who hasn’t grown up yet, and he only really feels that way when he’s in Clark’s presence. It doesn’t feel like a bad thing in the moments; imagining the two of them as misguided youths that perhaps play ball together and bond over their atypical lives.
Bruce assumes that’s what real friendship is like — the ability to say what he truly means without the bone-deep fear of loss happening as a result. At least, that’s how Clark makes him feel.
He’s exerting almost all of his force of will to stay upright, yet he nearly wishes to pass out right here, to wake up and find the night has turned into a new day at last. He’d see Clark at the next chance happening and think of him until that time.
“I saw what happened to my birth parents. My home world,” Clark says softly.
Bruce jolts upright and snaps his lids open. “What? How? When did that—”
“Remember how I freed that historian from the mineral?”
Of course he remembers; it wouldn’t be possible to forget his bafflement, his near rage he wanted to fly into once Clark explained how grateful he felt for the minerals existence, the concrete knowledge that he’s capable of being killed, yet Bruce understood at the same time.
Clark has always struggled with being so different from his peers. Bruce knows that the first girl he cared for moved out of town after Clark showed her how he could fly. How his sheer size sets him a part, how differently he must behave at his day job in order to conceal his identity. Bruce spent a whole night hating himself for the multiple reasons he felt it was his duty to acquire the mineral and hoard it here, but now to think Clark saw — that he experienced…
“Bridgewater is his name, right?”
Clark nods, staring down at his hands in his lap. A light has dimmed above his head as if someone plucked a halo and snapped it in two.
“He took me there in some sort of vision. It was beautiful before the destruction, the city bright and so different from here. When he brought me to my parents, I almost told him to stop. I thought that I looked so much like my mother, and I knew that once I saw what happened, there would be no going back, but I needed to see it. I needed to know. My parents wanted to come with me, Bruce, but the rocket wasn’t finished, and the prototype could only fit me.” Clark’s throat shifts hard. “They loved me, and they were so scared. Gone from the world in seconds.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Bruce says in a quiet voice.
Clark’s wet eyes shift minutely, yet telling enough where it’s evident he wants to glance at the computer screen. “I didn’t want to upset you.” Dragging a palm down his face, Clark lifts his head, and after a second, he smiles. A blinding, impossible smile. “That’s why we do this though, right? We owe what we do to those we failed to protect, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” Bruce whispers, his voice uncontrollably shaken, “we do… guess we’re not so different.”
Clark's smile softens, tender, almost distant in the way he’s looking at Bruce in this moment like he’s a picture without its frame. He doesn’t dare read into it any deeper until — “That’s not news to me.”
Bruce can’t fool himself any longer. His chests yawns open with the depths of his yearning — the desperate ache for Clark’s warmth, his smiles, to impossibly erase his pain and to prevent the tracks of his tears.
His limbs unfold and move on their own. He hears the surprised noise tear out of Clark’s throat once Bruce crawls the short distance into his lap, yet he can’t stop. For one perfect moment in time, he’s not thinking. He’s not calculating the effects of his actions, he’s acting on a selfish, bursting want that he can’t stuff back inside.
“Just…” Bruce whispers, his voice unable to come out louder, tugging at Clark’s suit near his waistline, “can I…I want—”
Bless him, Clark must understand something in Bruce’s fatigued mutterings and helps him lift the suit up in order to reveal his belly in full. It’s covered in dark hairs, soft with fat and life and breath. Bruce splays his hand across the enticing skin and closes his eyes, his body turned to the side in the cradle of Clark’s criss-crossed legs and his head resting against Clark’s collarbone. Warm, safe. Impossibly comforting, blissful pressure to his starved skin. Clark releases a shaky sigh as if Bruce against him is capable of inspiring the same sensations.
“Bruce?” Clark whispers, voice tinged in disbelief. Tentative arms wrap around his form, then when Bruce doesn’t resist in the slightest, they tighten into a squeeze, clinging to him return. He feels Clark’s cheek rest against the top of his head, and it’s more than anything he could have envisioned like the soothing swallows of the warm milk down his sore throat. “Do you? I…I didn’t think — I never thought that you’d—”
“You should think it,” Bruce mumbles, his voice thick, sluggish. He nuzzles his head, his eyes softly shut, squeezing his fingers into Clark’s stomach. “Every once in a while…think about me.”
Within seconds, he’s out like a light.
*
It’s still the dead of night once Bruce wakes.
He later learns it’s the next day and not the one down in the cave with Clark and his parents over watching them together. Swathed in his soft sheets, he stretches out his limbs, his muscles pulling pleasantly in a rare contentment. He immediately notices that he’s in his bed, and how he must have got up here rushes into the forefront of his mind all at once.
Bruce darts upwards into a sitting position, the sheets shuffling at his abrupt movements. Heart pounding behind his ribs, he glances around the room until he notices that he’s alone.
His spine slams backed down on a gentle, sleepy sigh when something catches his eye on his end stand. He rolls over and leans up onto his elbow, reaching out to grab the torn piece of paper laying there.
B
Every once in a while could never be enough for me
Yours,
CK
Bruce smiles, an unfamiliar tug in his facial muscles as it stretches his cheeks wide. He clenches his fist around the note and brings it to his chest, laying back down in bed until sleep takes him once more.
He doesn’t dream, yet he doesn’t see anyone or anything either.
*
Bruce crouches on the parapet with the drifts of dawning sunlight across his face. It’s well past time to call tonight's patrol, for Dick to get home and finish up his school project for tomorrow’s start of the week, but Bruce isn’t ready. He’s concealed this high up and almost stuck in the motion of watching Dick help an older woman take her clothes down from the line in the alley below.
At a light gust of wind from behind, Bruce ponders if he waited for another reason entirely. He had no way of knowing of course, only chance, and a little bit of hope.
Clark drifts down to the parapet until he’s sitting next to Bruce, his legs dangling in kicks of his feet. “How’d patrol go?” Clark asks.
He’s thought extensively about this predictable question since Clark asked him a similar one down in the cave a few nights ago. There’s many different ways he can answer him here; how they found a lab full of desperate, impoverished people looking for any way to put food on the table for their families — turning themselves over to human experiments without question. How one of those men fell to his knees in front of him after learning that his girlfriend overdosed during his time away.
He doesn’t want to tell Clark any of that. With one, singular night freed of weighted loneliness, the greedy taste of it, he’s come to an over-due realization.
He can’t change this city — not in how he’s tried for the past three years. The sole thing Bruce can change is himself, and that is the only way he’s going to make a difference for anyone anywhere going forward.
“We managed to help about a dozen who needed it,” Bruce says, shifting out of his crouch until he’s sitting in full as well. “Robin did good tonight, too.” He turns his head to stare at Clark from behind the lens in his cowl. “No pie today?”
Clark smiles. He appears wide awake here, awake, and so completely focused on Bruce next to him. “For breakfast?”
Bruce shrugs, sensing the barest tug at the corner of his mouth. “Not the strangest thing we’ve ever done.”
“I guess you’re right.” Clark looks forward towards the sunrise spreading over the Gotham rooftops. “I’ll have to remember that for next time.”
A natural lull in conversation commences. Bruce finds himself listing to the side just until their arms press together, and Clark doesn’t move away, pressing back towards him in a slight nudge.
His eye line darts down to the motion of Clark’s hand turning over, palm up on his thigh, and it’s a start. It's a terrifying, unfamiliar and novel and dare he say exhilarating, start.
Mind calm and at ease, Bruce places his gloved palm down onto Clark's own.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Bruce admits quietly.
“I don’t either…but I want to. I’d like to find out with you.”
Bruce nods, both of them looking at each other again. “Me too.”
Clark seems like he’s going to say something until suddenly his eyes zone out, his head tilting to the side before he winces. “Sorry,” he says, “I have to—”
“Go,” Bruce finishes for him, squeezing his hand before moving his own away. “I’ll be here.”
He didn’t say those words for any reason other than the truth behind them, yet Clark gazes at him then like Bruce just handed him everything he’s ever desired all at once. It makes Bruce’s pulse skip in a rapid patter, the intensity behind the stare enrapturing him, before Clark’s gone as soon as he came, leaving behind another rush of morning wind.
Bruce dips his chin to his chest with a private smile.
He stands up from the parapet once he hears Dick vault onto the roof.
“Awe, man,” Dick whines. “Did I miss Superman?”
“Sorry, chum,” Bruce says, placing a hand down on his shoulder. “He just left.”
“Is he coming back?”
Bruce gazes out to the left into the city where the clouds peak over the orange and yellow sun. “I believe you can count on that.” He jerks his head to the side and turns away with a sweep of his cape. “Come on,” he murmurs. “Let’s go home.”