D: MISSED A DAY. SORRY. I'll try not to let that happen again but can't promise, because this is getting way longer than I'd anticipated.
BUT ANYWAY. Fake dating! \o/ This is a bit of an interlude - the scene I actually had planned from the beginning based on the prompt ... is in the next part. As is actual kissing, I promise.
Bruce doesn't keep the parking brake on forever, of course. After another week, they actually start going on dates.
They also defeat two supervillains, a massive army of cyborgs that comes marching through a dimensional rift over the water between Metropolis and Gotham, and some kind of fast-growing alien fungus that causes vivid and disorienting hallucinations. But the dating is harder to accept as a day-to-day fact of Clark's life. Preventing villainy and destruction is getting increasingly normal. Dating Bruce is—dating Bruce is a lot of things, and none of them are easy to get used to.
Embarrassing, for one. Deeply, deeply awkward. Bruce wasn't kidding: the photographers swarm in the beginning, and there's no avoiding them, though at least they don't actually follow Bruce and Clark inside. The first date is outright terrible—Clark looks incredibly out of place, but he's pretty sure it's not that he picked the wrong suit so much as that he doesn't own a suit that would fit in somewhere like this. Bruce's face says he agrees, and the maître d' is wearing an expression that suggests that Clark's only setting foot inside because everyone knows Bruce Wayne is waiting for him.
Never have so many people so intently watched Clark try to choke down a plate of linguine without getting sauce on his shirt.
(Bruce sends a suit before the next time—well, four of them, actually. Clark's a little afraid to put them on in case he rips something, but they fit as though Bruce had actually had Clark frogmarched to a tailor for them. Clark wonders about this briefly, and then decides that Batman probably has detailed 3-D scans of him and Diana, and leaves it at that.)
"Difficult" would also be accurate, and "complicated" begins to scratch the surface. Bruce Wayne's schedule is, of course, hell—if he weren't so willing to blow off international meetings without notice, they'd probably never go on any dates at all. But Clark can't quite bring himself to be sorry about that one, because—well.
It probably only happens because Bruce is very tired; but the day after the cyborgs, Bruce says offhandedly that he didn't have to be at that meeting with Samsung, and—
"Are you serious?" Clark blurts.
And instead of laughing at him or making some smug remark about what a rube he is, Bruce gives him an unexpectedly thin smile. "I'm an idiot, Clark," he says. "Odds are they'll be glad I'm not there."
He rubs a thumb against his temple and then suddenly laughs, makes a joke—but it's not enough to erase Clark's memory of his face in that one instant. And yeah, Clark kind of thinks Bruce is a sleazeball; but he also knows that Bruce is Batman—that Bruce is physically and mentally skilled in astonishing ways, that he regularly risks his life helping the League take down the biggest threats on the planet. He might be a dick, but that doesn't mean he's foolish, and it definitely doesn't mean he's incompetent.
But everybody else—everybody else has no idea. Everybody else thinks Bruce Wayne actually is just a jackass in a really expensive suit.
And suddenly Clark can't not break into whatever clever offhand remark Bruce is making next to say, "Don't do that."
Bruce breaks off and raises his eyebrows, like he doesn't know what Clark is talking about.
But Clark is suddenly sure that he does, and doesn't relent. "I know better," he adds, looking Bruce in the eye; and Bruce stares at him and draws in a breath, opens his mouth and says—
—nothing, because the car starts to slow, and Bruce turns over his shoulder to lower the barrier and ask the driver a question. But it doesn't matter. Clark knows what he saw.
That date gets interrupted anyway, because halfway through Clark hears someone scream, and then opens up more and is suddenly surrounded by the low roar of the fire that caused it. But even that is—is almost easy: all he has to do is stiffen in his seat, and Bruce's eyes are on him; and he leans in and says, "Bruce," and Bruce waves him off.
"Go," Bruce says, "go on," and then smiles, and it's not the pinched smile from the car but it's not the big gleaming Bruce Wayne one either. "You're supposed to be playing hard-to-get anyway."
And possibly it's the thing that happened in the car that makes Clark say, "I wouldn't play games with you, Bruce. I'm not that kind of girl either." (He gets up and heads for the restroom before Bruce can answer—it's an emergency, after all. And he should be able to speed out the back from there.)
Really, Clark's schedule is the problem almost as often as Bruce's, especially because he can't get out of being Superman the way Bruce can dodge a meeting. And even "complicated" doesn't really do justice to the time they both make it to the restaurant in one piece, Clark actually in the right suit (after Bruce had looked at him last time and sadly muttered, "Hopeless—with that tie you should have worn the midnight blue—"), and then the place promptly gets held up by three extremely angry people with very large guns.
Clark is, of course, invulnerable. But he tries extra hard not to let himself get shot anywhere that night. The best drycleaning in the world won't fix bullet holes; and he—he's starting to think that he liked the look in Bruce's eyes, when Bruce first saw him walk in.
So: dating Bruce is a lot of things. And Clark finds, to his dismay, that one of those things is "amazing". Which is—Clark tries to keep his head on straight (ha), to not let himself get carried away, but it's all so—so much. And it's all so good.
The food is always terrifyingly expensive, which Clark knows because they don't even print the prices on the menus most of the time; but it's also always fantastic. Bruce takes him to places that kind of freak him out on the outside, but once they get in and sit down it's always in some perfect quiet corner booth, some tiny table for two next to a wall so nobody can make an excuse to pass them and sneak photos. And that's not even getting into before the dinners—they go to the ballet, which Clark finds exceptionally beautiful, or a show Clark's pretty sure has been sold out for weeks; or once, totally unprompted, the aquarium, which should almost certainly be beneath Bruce's standards but somehow isn't. ("See?" he says to Clark halfway through, while they're staring, transfixed, at a stargazer's goofy flat face. "You're far from the weirdest thing on this planet.")
Of course, for all Clark knows, Bruce plans things like that, too—deliberately shows up at places with ten-dollar admission in his gazillion-dollar suits, just because he can. That's the kind of thing Bruce does. And he's still slick, glib, too sharp and too bright and always on, on, on, but he's also—he's funny sometimes, quick and wry when Clark least expects it. He's rude, but only to people like him; he never snaps at servers or valets over a spill or a wait. On the fourth date he sends his salad back over some miniscule complaint so many times Clark starts to get uncomfortable—but the tip he leaves that time must add up to at least half the bill. (He tells Clark to head out to the car before he does it; but tinted windows, the breadth of the restaurant, the candlelit dimness, aren't really a match for Superman's vision. The only thing Clark doesn't know is why Bruce didn't want to do it in front of him.) He ladles on the innuendo, of course, and makes remarks that are just this side of lewd, but it's—it's always just enough for Clark to snort at, never so much that Clark wants to get away.
None of it makes Clark want to get away. Somehow, impossibly, it's—it's wonderful, it works. It's better than Clark could ever have thought to imagine; and sometimes afterward, alone in his apartment, he stares at the ceiling with his tie undone and wonders why that thought makes his throat hurt.
FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (7/?)
BUT ANYWAY. Fake dating! \o/ This is a bit of an interlude - the scene I actually had planned from the beginning based on the prompt ... is in the next part. As is actual kissing, I promise.
Bruce doesn't keep the parking brake on forever, of course. After another week, they actually start going on dates.
They also defeat two supervillains, a massive army of cyborgs that comes marching through a dimensional rift over the water between Metropolis and Gotham, and some kind of fast-growing alien fungus that causes vivid and disorienting hallucinations. But the dating is harder to accept as a day-to-day fact of Clark's life. Preventing villainy and destruction is getting increasingly normal. Dating Bruce is—dating Bruce is a lot of things, and none of them are easy to get used to.
Embarrassing, for one. Deeply, deeply awkward. Bruce wasn't kidding: the photographers swarm in the beginning, and there's no avoiding them, though at least they don't actually follow Bruce and Clark inside. The first date is outright terrible—Clark looks incredibly out of place, but he's pretty sure it's not that he picked the wrong suit so much as that he doesn't own a suit that would fit in somewhere like this. Bruce's face says he agrees, and the maître d' is wearing an expression that suggests that Clark's only setting foot inside because everyone knows Bruce Wayne is waiting for him.
Never have so many people so intently watched Clark try to choke down a plate of linguine without getting sauce on his shirt.
(Bruce sends a suit before the next time—well, four of them, actually. Clark's a little afraid to put them on in case he rips something, but they fit as though Bruce had actually had Clark frogmarched to a tailor for them. Clark wonders about this briefly, and then decides that Batman probably has detailed 3-D scans of him and Diana, and leaves it at that.)
"Difficult" would also be accurate, and "complicated" begins to scratch the surface. Bruce Wayne's schedule is, of course, hell—if he weren't so willing to blow off international meetings without notice, they'd probably never go on any dates at all. But Clark can't quite bring himself to be sorry about that one, because—well.
It probably only happens because Bruce is very tired; but the day after the cyborgs, Bruce says offhandedly that he didn't have to be at that meeting with Samsung, and—
"Are you serious?" Clark blurts.
And instead of laughing at him or making some smug remark about what a rube he is, Bruce gives him an unexpectedly thin smile. "I'm an idiot, Clark," he says. "Odds are they'll be glad I'm not there."
He rubs a thumb against his temple and then suddenly laughs, makes a joke—but it's not enough to erase Clark's memory of his face in that one instant. And yeah, Clark kind of thinks Bruce is a sleazeball; but he also knows that Bruce is Batman—that Bruce is physically and mentally skilled in astonishing ways, that he regularly risks his life helping the League take down the biggest threats on the planet. He might be a dick, but that doesn't mean he's foolish, and it definitely doesn't mean he's incompetent.
But everybody else—everybody else has no idea. Everybody else thinks Bruce Wayne actually is just a jackass in a really expensive suit.
And suddenly Clark can't not break into whatever clever offhand remark Bruce is making next to say, "Don't do that."
Bruce breaks off and raises his eyebrows, like he doesn't know what Clark is talking about.
But Clark is suddenly sure that he does, and doesn't relent. "I know better," he adds, looking Bruce in the eye; and Bruce stares at him and draws in a breath, opens his mouth and says—
—nothing, because the car starts to slow, and Bruce turns over his shoulder to lower the barrier and ask the driver a question. But it doesn't matter. Clark knows what he saw.
That date gets interrupted anyway, because halfway through Clark hears someone scream, and then opens up more and is suddenly surrounded by the low roar of the fire that caused it. But even that is—is almost easy: all he has to do is stiffen in his seat, and Bruce's eyes are on him; and he leans in and says, "Bruce," and Bruce waves him off.
"Go," Bruce says, "go on," and then smiles, and it's not the pinched smile from the car but it's not the big gleaming Bruce Wayne one either. "You're supposed to be playing hard-to-get anyway."
And possibly it's the thing that happened in the car that makes Clark say, "I wouldn't play games with you, Bruce. I'm not that kind of girl either." (He gets up and heads for the restroom before Bruce can answer—it's an emergency, after all. And he should be able to speed out the back from there.)
Really, Clark's schedule is the problem almost as often as Bruce's, especially because he can't get out of being Superman the way Bruce can dodge a meeting. And even "complicated" doesn't really do justice to the time they both make it to the restaurant in one piece, Clark actually in the right suit (after Bruce had looked at him last time and sadly muttered, "Hopeless—with that tie you should have worn the midnight blue—"), and then the place promptly gets held up by three extremely angry people with very large guns.
Clark is, of course, invulnerable. But he tries extra hard not to let himself get shot anywhere that night. The best drycleaning in the world won't fix bullet holes; and he—he's starting to think that he liked the look in Bruce's eyes, when Bruce first saw him walk in.
So: dating Bruce is a lot of things. And Clark finds, to his dismay, that one of those things is "amazing". Which is—Clark tries to keep his head on straight (ha), to not let himself get carried away, but it's all so—so much. And it's all so good.
The food is always terrifyingly expensive, which Clark knows because they don't even print the prices on the menus most of the time; but it's also always fantastic. Bruce takes him to places that kind of freak him out on the outside, but once they get in and sit down it's always in some perfect quiet corner booth, some tiny table for two next to a wall so nobody can make an excuse to pass them and sneak photos. And that's not even getting into before the dinners—they go to the ballet, which Clark finds exceptionally beautiful, or a show Clark's pretty sure has been sold out for weeks; or once, totally unprompted, the aquarium, which should almost certainly be beneath Bruce's standards but somehow isn't. ("See?" he says to Clark halfway through, while they're staring, transfixed, at a stargazer's goofy flat face. "You're far from the weirdest thing on this planet.")
Of course, for all Clark knows, Bruce plans things like that, too—deliberately shows up at places with ten-dollar admission in his gazillion-dollar suits, just because he can. That's the kind of thing Bruce does. And he's still slick, glib, too sharp and too bright and always on, on, on, but he's also—he's funny sometimes, quick and wry when Clark least expects it. He's rude, but only to people like him; he never snaps at servers or valets over a spill or a wait. On the fourth date he sends his salad back over some miniscule complaint so many times Clark starts to get uncomfortable—but the tip he leaves that time must add up to at least half the bill. (He tells Clark to head out to the car before he does it; but tinted windows, the breadth of the restaurant, the candlelit dimness, aren't really a match for Superman's vision. The only thing Clark doesn't know is why Bruce didn't want to do it in front of him.) He ladles on the innuendo, of course, and makes remarks that are just this side of lewd, but it's—it's always just enough for Clark to snort at, never so much that Clark wants to get away.
None of it makes Clark want to get away. Somehow, impossibly, it's—it's wonderful, it works. It's better than Clark could ever have thought to imagine; and sometimes afterward, alone in his apartment, he stares at the ceiling with his tie undone and wonders why that thought makes his throat hurt.