Toot toot, part three! Of how many, I do not know.
Please forgive my little potshot at soccer – I’m actually a HUGE football fan and a regular at the Football RPF thread on FFA XD
Also, Bane played by Tom Hardy in this story. Because of Reasons (also I continue to just mash together continuities like a four-year-old with play dough).
---------------
Clark doesn’t remember what death felt like the first time (second time? The nuclear blast hurt, but he’s still not entirely sure if it killed him or not – he’s inclined to think ‘not’, but be still can’t be sure). He wonders if he’ll remember it this time.
He’d been doing exactly what Perry had been asking him to do, and covering the big Metropolis/Gotham soccer match when the trouble had started. The game had been going well, as far as Clark could tell – nil all – when suddenly there’d been smoke on the ground that wasn’t from the flares of the supporters, and men in black jackets had been rappelling down from the top of the stadium. Clark, sitting in the press box, had helped get the people he could see through the smoke to safety, shouting to the security guards to open the gates, to let the people out.
He’d been overcome by the smoke, then – it stung his eyes and burned his lungs, until a heavy hand had come down on the back of his neck, jerking him back.
Bane.
He’d read about this before. Bane had some kind of ‘bread and circuses’ prejudice against sports. Or perhaps he’d simply decided he needed a do-over.
“Ahh,” Bane had muttered as he reached down, fingering Clark’s press pass. “A member of the corrupt press, who claim to be uncovering truth even as they keep the people cosseted in their ignorance.”
Clark had swallowed and said nothing. He’d blinked his watering eyes, but had realised that trying to respond would only make him cough. He’s beginning to understand these things better now – what his human lungs can and can’t do.
“You, I think, will make an excellent demonstration as to the seriousness of our intent.”
Even if he’d wanted to say anything, in the next moment, Bane had shoved a shotgun under his chin, forcing his head up.
And this was when Clark had started to wonder if he might die.
The smoke had cleared, and the remains of the crowd – those who hadn’t been fortunate enough to escape – were looking down at them. His eyes still hurt, but Clark could see their faces, shocked and pale.
“Acta est fabula, Mr. Kent,” Bane says, his fingers tightening in his hair. “But I’m afraid you may not be here for your applau –” Whatever quip he was halfway though, Bane never gets to finish it. In the next second, his head snaps back, and Clark hears the dull thunk of something bouncing off his mask.
His fingers release his hair, as Bane slowly slumps to the ground.
There’s a shocked silence. Bane’s men fidget uncertainly. Everyone seems unsure of exactly what to do next.
Then the security guards seem to come to their collective senses and rush forward, overwhelming the henchmen, drawing their pistols and handcuffs and forcing them to the ground. Clark simply stays where he is, staring down at Bane’s prone form.
What happened?
Blinking, Clark shifts his gaze slightly, and his eyes fall on a player’s shoe, lying abandoned on the grass. It might have fallen off a player’s foot, except Clark doesn’t think that’s the case. There’s a tiny smear of blood on one of the cleats.
Clark looks up, glancing around, wondering who could have thrown such a thing – who had that precise an aim, and a good enough throwing arm that they could knock a man of Bane’s stature unconscious with something so un-aerodynamic?
Clark can only think of one, but Batman’s not anywhere around her –
Then his eyes lock onto the face of Bruce Wayne, where he’s standing, scowling, in the corporate sponsors pen right by the sidelines of the pitch. Bruce makes a great show of dusting off his expensive suit before raising an eyebrow and turning away.
***
Bruce stares at the swirling, inky pocket of air in the middle of the room, which is all that remains of the trans-dimensional portal, into which the seething, writhing mass of tentacles had disappeared. He’d only just gotten here in time: Doctor Fate had given him the relevant artifact and told him what was afoot, but hadn’t actually teleported him to Clark’s apartment to take care of it.
Doctor Fate is an asshole like that.
A cough over to his left draws his attention to Clark, who’s lying in the rubble of his kitchen wall (such as it was), covered in bits and pieces of plaster, splintered wood, and… what looks like some kind of sticky alien slime. When Bruce had gotten here and kicked in Clark’s door, the… thing, whatever it was, had several of its tentacles wrapped around his body and was slowly dragging him towards the portal, while Clark scrabbled ineffectively at the floor.
“What the fuck was all that about?” Bruce asks.
Clark just coughs again, before looking away. Bruce is slightly taken aback when he sees that Clark’s ears have turned bright red.
“It said it wanted to, ah, breed me,” he mumbles.
Bruce knows he heard correctly, but he wishes he didn’t.
“What?”
Clark waves a hand embarrassedly, getting slowly to his feet. “It’s… the situation is a little complex, as I understood it. Its race have been inbreeding for some time. They need… ah, fresh genetic material. Apparently the closest match they can breed with successfully is Kryptonians, and seeing as I’m the only Kryptonian left….”
Bruce stares at where the last of the portal is now beginning to slip away, its remains carried off on the breeze. “You. Are genetically similar. To that.” A second thought occurs to him. “And what about Power Girl?”
Clark laughs a little. A nervous laugh. “Well, apparently they don’t all look like that, and they have a slight ability to shape-shift. As far as the second thing goes, it seems that in their race, it’s the male who –” He cuts himself off when Bruce raises his hands.
“Stop. I literally don’t want to know.”
Clark obliges him, and stops talking. They survey the wreckage of Clark’s tiny apartment together.
“Well, this is ruined,” Bruce says, redundantly – but he wants to get the word breed out of his head.
Clark nods. “Thank goodness Lois wasn’t –” he starts to say, voice quiet, but he doesn’t finish the sentence.
Bruce does him the courtesy of not responding. Of course Lois wasn’t. Lois wasn’t,< i>isn’t and hasn’t for several months. She took a job as the BBC’s northern Africa correspondent as part of her effort to put her life back together after Clark… well. After what had happened to Clark. She’d mourned. She’d built herself up again, piece by piece, and she’d decided that she could go forward and live after all. Bruce couldn’t find it in himself to blame her if she was leery of coming back, after all that.
Neither did could Clark, he guessed. Because Clark was that sort of guy.
“Do you have somewhere else you can stay?”
Clark shakes his head. “I’ll just stay in a hotel for a few nights.”
“I can pay for this to be fixed,” Bruce tells him. He glances around. “I don’t think that wall is structural, so I don’t think we have to involve anyone else. I can put you up somewhere nice, too.”
Clark shakes his head. “That’d be a conflict of interest. I can’t have you fixing up my apartment and paying for hotel rooms.”
Bruce draws in a deep breath, and then slowly releases it. “Do you know what a bedbug is? Because you won’t like them.”
“I’ll be fine,” Clark says, looking a little ruffled.
Bruce looks him up and down. He’s still covered in plaster and alien mucus, and his glasses are cracked and sitting crooked on his nose.
“Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of evidence for that,” Bruce says. He takes a deep breath, and grits his teeth. “You could stay with me.”
He can see the way Clark’s head suddenly flicks towards him, the surprised blink behind the one still intact glasses lens. “I – well, I appreciate it,” he says slowly. “But that’s no better. I’ll just get a hotel. Trust me, Bruce – nothing is going to happen.” Clark tries to laugh, but it sounds a little shaky. “Anyway, what could be so bad, after this?”
***
“This really wasn’t my fault,” Clark argues. It does no good, though: it’s clear Bruce isn’t listening.
To be fair, Clark thinks, it’s probably taking a lot of his strength to haul him up from where he’s dangling over this pit of lava.
***
“This is the last time I’m doing this,” Bruce grinds out as he fishes Clark out of the Metropolis sound.
***
“We have a problem.”
Clark nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of Batman’s voice emanating from a dark corner of his hotel room. As it is, he drops his eggs, and he hears them crack as they fall onto the scuffed linoleum of his hotel room floor. He still hasn’t quite mastered catching things without super reflexes yet.
Sighing, he switches on the fluorescent lights, trying not to wince as they buzz to life.
“Do we?” he asks as he reaches for a broom. He’d really wanted those eggs.
“Do I really have to spell it out?” Bruce asks, his voice heavy and distorted by the cowl.
Clark swallows. “Look, I know,” he says as he throws the broken remains of his eggs into the trash. “But I honestly think that –”
“How many times, Clark?”
Clark doesn’t look up. “How many times what?”
“How many times have I had to rescue you over the last four weeks?”
Clark casts his mind back. He supposes it depends on what Bruce means by rescue, really – you can’t classify the time he pulled him out of Cat Grant’s lacquered clutches a rescue, and the thing with J’onn had been fine once Ted had arrived with more Oreos.
So…
“Seven?” Clark ventures.
“That’s a very conservative estimate.”
Clark ties off the trash bag. There’s no sense in ‘rotting egg’ being added to the already vast array of aromas he encounters on coming home from work every day. And Bruce had been right, of course – he did not like bed bugs.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” He can’t help but feel Bruce is being just a little unfair, here. This isn’t exactly something he had planned on.
“You’re coming with me. You’re staying at the lake house until your powers are sorted out. However long that takes.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Clark says, affronted. “I have a job. Responsibilities. Perry expects –”
Bruce shakes his head. Once. Firmly. “The only place Perry expects you to be is at Wayne Manor, since I told him you were the only reporter I’d allow on the property to cover the renovations for the society pages. Which means if you don’t want to lose your scoop, you’re coming with me.”
Clark stares. “You did what?”
The cowl is impassive. “Clark. This is happening. Whether you like it or not. Do not make me throw you over my shoulder.”
Clark blinks, looking at him warily. “You wouldn’t.”
The only part of Bruce’s face that he can see, his mouth, is set in a grim line. “Try me.”
Re: Bruce/Clark, depowered!Clark is the biggest damsel in distress - Part Three
Please forgive my little potshot at soccer – I’m actually a HUGE football fan and a regular at the Football RPF thread on FFA XD
Also, Bane played by Tom Hardy in this story. Because of Reasons (also I continue to just mash together continuities like a four-year-old with play dough).
---------------
Clark doesn’t remember what death felt like the first time (second time? The nuclear blast hurt, but he’s still not entirely sure if it killed him or not – he’s inclined to think ‘not’, but be still can’t be sure). He wonders if he’ll remember it this time.
He’d been doing exactly what Perry had been asking him to do, and covering the big Metropolis/Gotham soccer match when the trouble had started. The game had been going well, as far as Clark could tell – nil all – when suddenly there’d been smoke on the ground that wasn’t from the flares of the supporters, and men in black jackets had been rappelling down from the top of the stadium. Clark, sitting in the press box, had helped get the people he could see through the smoke to safety, shouting to the security guards to open the gates, to let the people out.
He’d been overcome by the smoke, then – it stung his eyes and burned his lungs, until a heavy hand had come down on the back of his neck, jerking him back.
Bane.
He’d read about this before. Bane had some kind of ‘bread and circuses’ prejudice against sports. Or perhaps he’d simply decided he needed a do-over.
“Ahh,” Bane had muttered as he reached down, fingering Clark’s press pass. “A member of the corrupt press, who claim to be uncovering truth even as they keep the people cosseted in their ignorance.”
Clark had swallowed and said nothing. He’d blinked his watering eyes, but had realised that trying to respond would only make him cough. He’s beginning to understand these things better now – what his human lungs can and can’t do.
“You, I think, will make an excellent demonstration as to the seriousness of our intent.”
Even if he’d wanted to say anything, in the next moment, Bane had shoved a shotgun under his chin, forcing his head up.
And this was when Clark had started to wonder if he might die.
The smoke had cleared, and the remains of the crowd – those who hadn’t been fortunate enough to escape – were looking down at them. His eyes still hurt, but Clark could see their faces, shocked and pale.
“Acta est fabula, Mr. Kent,” Bane says, his fingers tightening in his hair. “But I’m afraid you may not be here for your applau –”
Whatever quip he was halfway though, Bane never gets to finish it. In the next second, his head snaps back, and Clark hears the dull thunk of something bouncing off his mask.
His fingers release his hair, as Bane slowly slumps to the ground.
There’s a shocked silence. Bane’s men fidget uncertainly. Everyone seems unsure of exactly what to do next.
Then the security guards seem to come to their collective senses and rush forward, overwhelming the henchmen, drawing their pistols and handcuffs and forcing them to the ground. Clark simply stays where he is, staring down at Bane’s prone form.
What happened?
Blinking, Clark shifts his gaze slightly, and his eyes fall on a player’s shoe, lying abandoned on the grass. It might have fallen off a player’s foot, except Clark doesn’t think that’s the case. There’s a tiny smear of blood on one of the cleats.
Clark looks up, glancing around, wondering who could have thrown such a thing – who had that precise an aim, and a good enough throwing arm that they could knock a man of Bane’s stature unconscious with something so un-aerodynamic?
Clark can only think of one, but Batman’s not anywhere around her –
Then his eyes lock onto the face of Bruce Wayne, where he’s standing, scowling, in the corporate sponsors pen right by the sidelines of the pitch. Bruce makes a great show of dusting off his expensive suit before raising an eyebrow and turning away.
***
Bruce stares at the swirling, inky pocket of air in the middle of the room, which is all that remains of the trans-dimensional portal, into which the seething, writhing mass of tentacles had disappeared. He’d only just gotten here in time: Doctor Fate had given him the relevant artifact and told him what was afoot, but hadn’t actually teleported him to Clark’s apartment to take care of it.
Doctor Fate is an asshole like that.
A cough over to his left draws his attention to Clark, who’s lying in the rubble of his kitchen wall (such as it was), covered in bits and pieces of plaster, splintered wood, and… what looks like some kind of sticky alien slime. When Bruce had gotten here and kicked in Clark’s door, the… thing, whatever it was, had several of its tentacles wrapped around his body and was slowly dragging him towards the portal, while Clark scrabbled ineffectively at the floor.
“What the fuck was all that about?” Bruce asks.
Clark just coughs again, before looking away. Bruce is slightly taken aback when he sees that Clark’s ears have turned bright red.
“It said it wanted to, ah, breed me,” he mumbles.
Bruce knows he heard correctly, but he wishes he didn’t.
“What?”
Clark waves a hand embarrassedly, getting slowly to his feet. “It’s… the situation is a little complex, as I understood it. Its race have been inbreeding for some time. They need… ah, fresh genetic material. Apparently the closest match they can breed with successfully is Kryptonians, and seeing as I’m the only Kryptonian left….”
Bruce stares at where the last of the portal is now beginning to slip away, its remains carried off on the breeze. “You. Are genetically similar. To that.” A second thought occurs to him. “And what about Power Girl?”
Clark laughs a little. A nervous laugh. “Well, apparently they don’t all look like that, and they have a slight ability to shape-shift. As far as the second thing goes, it seems that in their race, it’s the male who –” He cuts himself off when Bruce raises his hands.
“Stop. I literally don’t want to know.”
Clark obliges him, and stops talking. They survey the wreckage of Clark’s tiny apartment together.
“Well, this is ruined,” Bruce says, redundantly – but he wants to get the word breed out of his head.
Clark nods. “Thank goodness Lois wasn’t –” he starts to say, voice quiet, but he doesn’t finish the sentence.
Bruce does him the courtesy of not responding. Of course Lois wasn’t. Lois wasn’t,< i>isn’t and hasn’t for several months. She took a job as the BBC’s northern Africa correspondent as part of her effort to put her life back together after Clark… well. After what had happened to Clark. She’d mourned. She’d built herself up again, piece by piece, and she’d decided that she could go forward and live after all. Bruce couldn’t find it in himself to blame her if she was leery of coming back, after all that.
Neither did could Clark, he guessed. Because Clark was that sort of guy.
“Do you have somewhere else you can stay?”
Clark shakes his head. “I’ll just stay in a hotel for a few nights.”
“I can pay for this to be fixed,” Bruce tells him. He glances around. “I don’t think that wall is structural, so I don’t think we have to involve anyone else. I can put you up somewhere nice, too.”
Clark shakes his head. “That’d be a conflict of interest. I can’t have you fixing up my apartment and paying for hotel rooms.”
Bruce draws in a deep breath, and then slowly releases it. “Do you know what a bedbug is? Because you won’t like them.”
“I’ll be fine,” Clark says, looking a little ruffled.
Bruce looks him up and down. He’s still covered in plaster and alien mucus, and his glasses are cracked and sitting crooked on his nose.
“Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of evidence for that,” Bruce says. He takes a deep breath, and grits his teeth. “You could stay with me.”
He can see the way Clark’s head suddenly flicks towards him, the surprised blink behind the one still intact glasses lens. “I – well, I appreciate it,” he says slowly. “But that’s no better. I’ll just get a hotel. Trust me, Bruce – nothing is going to happen.” Clark tries to laugh, but it sounds a little shaky. “Anyway, what could be so bad, after this?”
***
“This really wasn’t my fault,” Clark argues. It does no good, though: it’s clear Bruce isn’t listening.
To be fair, Clark thinks, it’s probably taking a lot of his strength to haul him up from where he’s dangling over this pit of lava.
***
“This is the last time I’m doing this,” Bruce grinds out as he fishes Clark out of the Metropolis sound.
***
“We have a problem.”
Clark nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of Batman’s voice emanating from a dark corner of his hotel room. As it is, he drops his eggs, and he hears them crack as they fall onto the scuffed linoleum of his hotel room floor. He still hasn’t quite mastered catching things without super reflexes yet.
Sighing, he switches on the fluorescent lights, trying not to wince as they buzz to life.
“Do we?” he asks as he reaches for a broom. He’d really wanted those eggs.
“Do I really have to spell it out?” Bruce asks, his voice heavy and distorted by the cowl.
Clark swallows. “Look, I know,” he says as he throws the broken remains of his eggs into the trash. “But I honestly think that –”
“How many times, Clark?”
Clark doesn’t look up. “How many times what?”
“How many times have I had to rescue you over the last four weeks?”
Clark casts his mind back. He supposes it depends on what Bruce means by rescue, really – you can’t classify the time he pulled him out of Cat Grant’s lacquered clutches a rescue, and the thing with J’onn had been fine once Ted had arrived with more Oreos.
So…
“Seven?” Clark ventures.
“That’s a very conservative estimate.”
Clark ties off the trash bag. There’s no sense in ‘rotting egg’ being added to the already vast array of aromas he encounters on coming home from work every day. And Bruce had been right, of course – he did not like bed bugs.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” He can’t help but feel Bruce is being just a little unfair, here. This isn’t exactly something he had planned on.
“You’re coming with me. You’re staying at the lake house until your powers are sorted out. However long that takes.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Clark says, affronted. “I have a job. Responsibilities. Perry expects –”
Bruce shakes his head. Once. Firmly. “The only place Perry expects you to be is at Wayne Manor, since I told him you were the only reporter I’d allow on the property to cover the renovations for the society pages. Which means if you don’t want to lose your scoop, you’re coming with me.”
Clark stares. “You did what?”
The cowl is impassive. “Clark. This is happening. Whether you like it or not. Do not make me throw you over my shoulder.”
Clark blinks, looking at him warily. “You wouldn’t.”
The only part of Bruce’s face that he can see, his mouth, is set in a grim line. “Try me.”