So, yeah, I definitely don't know how long this will be anymore, because those last two parts PLUS this part were originally supposed to be one part, and—I mean, you guys already knew I had no idea what I was doing, right? Because, yes. D:D BUT AT LEAST THEY BANG \o/
Bruce isn't often taken by surprise. But, he finds himself thinking dimly, if anyone could then it would be Superman, wouldn't it?
He had expected Clark to like the museum, and to like everyone he met—it was mass attention that Clark seemed to be uncomfortable with, as Superman; he liked people just fine when he could actually talk to each of them face-to-face. Bruce had known Diana would be there because she'd worked with the museum as a consultant, authenticating antiquities. And he'd expected her to like Clark exactly as much as she had.
(Which is good. Clark will be unhappy, when he finds out who Bruce is and what he's done, when he realizes how much Bruce has lied to him—and the lies of omission alone are uncountable by now, when every moment they're together without Bruce explaining himself constitutes another, and another, and another. He'll feel betrayed, angry, hurt; but he'll still be Superman. There will still need to be someone he can call on, and Batman can't be that person.
But Diana can. Diana was in public, and Clark evidently failed to recognize her on his own—but if Superman does return, meets Wonder Woman again somewhere other than the middle of a haze of ash and debris ten minutes before his death, he will. And Diana won't have any reason to prevent it.
Diana will only have lied once. Diana will be forgivable.)
It had all worked out exactly the way it was supposed to, everything according to plan—or at least not diverging far enough from it to cause a problem. There had always been a chance that it would run too late for Bruce to suit up afterward for patrol, especially if he couldn't send Clark on his way in time.
But Clark kissing him in the penthouse entryway hadn't been among the contingencies he'd prepared for.
Fortunately, the hitch it causes doesn't last more than a moment, because there isn't much of a decision to make. Bruce Wayne isn't known for weighing consequences. When people kiss him, Bruce Wayne doesn't blink. Bruce Wayne just kisses back.
Clark makes a noise somewhere in his throat and then eases free far enough to murmur, breathless, "Sorry, I—I should have led with 'thank you' or something there first. I didn't mean to just—"
Bruce Wayne wouldn't mind. "Luckily for you," Bruce says, letting his voice scrape a little, "I've got plenty of practice controlling my terror of being kissed by unbearably attractive men."
Clark laughs, and when he leans in a second time the kiss is hardly more than a brush, his mouth too wide with smiling for anything else. "Is that so," he says, so close Bruce can feel the words almost as well as he can hear them.
He doesn't sound like someone looking for an out; but Bruce should give him one anyway. "I'll admit," Bruce tells him, "this wasn't how I was expecting this evening to end."
Clark leans back just a little. It's so dim in here that his eyes ought to be gray at best, and yet that steady, unhesitating gaze is blue as sky. "But you don't mind, I hope," he says, the corners of his mouth still curving up.
"No." Bruce Wayne doesn't. "But if you want to say thank you, you can just say it. No need to go the extra mile."
Clark's eyebrows go up. "I wouldn't sleep with you for that," he says slowly. "I mean, I am grateful, but I just—I just wanted to—"
Ah. The thank-you would have been a thank you for a wonderful evening, I enjoyed myself—it helped, then. It helped, and Clark is feeling good about himself and his life for the first time in a while, and there's no one around but Bruce to share that feeling with. And it's Clark: generous beyond all reason.
It's also sex: Bruce Wayne wouldn't say no.
(That Bruce finds he doesn't want to say no isn't a mark against the idea—that would be giving it too much weight. Bruce's wants are neither a negative factor nor a positive one; they are not relevant to the assessment at all. That Clark's hands are warm and strong against Bruce's face—that his thigh touched Bruce's in the car and Bruce nearly shivered—that Bruce had never wanted to come back to the penthouse alone in the first place—
None of that is afforded any significance. That's the point of objectivity.)
And that's—that must be why Clark is asking. He had a good time and he wants to keep enjoying himself, and he's in a penthouse suite with Bruce Wayne. With the number of times Bruce has come on to him, it's no surprise that the idea would occur to Clark, that he might say to himself why not?
"Relax," Bruce says aloud, "there's no interview. Wanting to is all the qualification you need."
He grins at Clark, lets his eyes get heavy and leans in. Clark's mouth is still half-open on a laugh, and the laugh becomes a gasp when Bruce bites down just a little on his lip—Bruce slides a hand under Clark's suit jacket and tugs him nearer, and, oh, he needs to be careful; Clark is so hot and so pliant, Christ, letting Bruce yank him around like he couldn't throw Bruce through the wall if he wanted to. And the way he smells—
(Bruce Wayne's taste in colognes needs to be a little louche, too musky or too fruity or too dark, too much one way or another. The devil's in the details, and Bruce can't afford to get sloppy.
But Clark doesn't smell like Bruce Wayne. Clark found the bottle under the sink, the one that almost never comes out; Clark smells like Bruce.)
Together they manage to work their way to one of the sofas without knocking anything over. Clark tilts Bruce's face just how he wants it and holds him there, kisses Bruce like—like he's been thinking about it, like he'd spent time imagining how he'd wanted to do it. And maybe he has: he's so eager for it all, so honest; not hiding the shudder when Bruce slides a hand down over the slant of his hip, his ass, breaking away to breathe shakily into the side of Bruce's throat.
"Bruce, Jesus—"
"Come on," Bruce murmurs to him, "let's get comfortable," and he eases down to sit on the sofa in front of Clark and then hooks two fingers in each of Clark's front belt loops. "So you've done this before?"
"I thought you said there wasn't an interview," Clark says with a grin, sliding his hands up Bruce's arms to his shoulders, wrapping one around the back of Bruce's neck like maybe he's thinking about Bruce sucking him off.
Which Bruce can't blame him for, considering their relative positions.
But first—
"Just checking," Bruce says, light.
Clark shrugs one shoulder and then bites his lip. "A few times. Always—um, pretty fast. And mostly not with anybody who knew. It was back when I was kind of hiding," he elaborates, "so mostly not with anybody more than once, really. Except for Lois."
And of course this isn't anything like with Lois. Clark and Lois were in love.
"So I haven't done anything, uh, complicated," Clark concludes.
"Oh, I'm happy to keep it simple," Bruce says, and frees one hand to slide it up the length of Clark's dick through his pants. Clark's hard enough that the outline's very, very clear, and his response is dizzying: he gasps sharply, breath catching into a helpless noise in the back of his throat, and his eyes fall shut, his whole body swaying in toward Bruce with an artless eagerness. "So what exactly am I going to find down here?"
"I, um," Clark says, swallowing, eyes still closed; and then he manages to blink them open and adds, "What?"
"Tentacles?" Bruce says. "Spines? Two—or even three—"
"No," Clark says, evidently having caught Bruce's drift. "No, god, nothing like that. Jesus, Bruce—"
"Hmm. Pity," Bruce tells him. "Just another one of life's little disappointments." He gives Clark a considering look, and then eases his hand partway back down over Clark's dick and listens to Clark's throat click. "Well, all right, one of life's nicely generous disappointments."
"You are such a jerk," Clark says, low and warm and glad, and pushes Bruce's hand out of the way to lean down and kiss him again.
It takes a couple minutes—Clark's easily distracted by Bruce's mouth, it seems—but Bruce snakes a hand down to the back of one knee, the other, and coaxes Clark onto the sofa, kneeling over Bruce's thighs. One more tug and Clark falls into Bruce, all the glorious blazing weight of him; Bruce wraps an arm around the small of his back to hold him and then grinds up into him, and Clark makes a low torn sound and jerks helplessly, fingers digging into Bruce's shoulders. He pulls away, but not very far: presses his temple to Bruce's and says, "Oh, god, Bruce," and then deliberately rolls his hips down.
The drag of it, even through their slacks, is a kick of sparking heat up and down Bruce's spine; he finds his head dropping forward, his arm tightening around Clark's back, all of him trying to surge up into Clark—at total cross-purposes with the hand working at Clark's buttons. "Oh, god, yourself," he says, and it comes out a little more breathlessly than he wanted it to, but then he finally finally gets Clark's pants open and he doesn't care how he sounds anymore.
It's for the best that they're doing this mostly clothed, lights off—he really hadn't planned on this, all his Batman scars and marks are right there under this dress shirt. And getting a hand on Clark's cock is almost as good as getting a look at it, hot and hard and just starting to get a little slick—
Clark cries out, and for a second Bruce thinks it was somehow in pain, because he says, "Wait, wait, stop," right after—but he catches Bruce's hand before Bruce can yank it away completely and adds, "No, it's—I just didn't want to, uh," and he shifts back a little and reaches down himself for Bruce's belt. "You too, come on. You too."
They get in each other's way once, twice, and Clark tips his head back and laughs; but they manage in the end. Bruce feels a weird moment of something almost like apprehension, embarrassment: Superman, that bastion of more-than-human ultra-perfection, is looking at his dick—looking at it and can probably see it, even in this dimness, and god, he hadn't even considered that Clark could look right through Bruce's shirt if he wanted to—
But he wouldn't. Clark keeps his powers minimal unless he has a reason. And he's not looking for ways to catch Bruce out or trip him up, because he doesn't know there's anything to be caught out for or tripped up on. He doesn't know Bruce is lying to him.
"Bruce?" Clark says.
Bruce blinks up at him. His arm is still around Clark, but his other hand is on Clark's chest, holding him just a little away; when had that happened? And Bruce has stopped moving, so Clark's stopped too, looking down at him with patience, puzzlement, a tinge of concern.
And Bruce can't tell him any of the things he's thinking: not how excruciatingly good this is, not how many ways he's dreamed this, not how selfishly glad he is that Clark decided to kiss him in the entryway instead of just going home to Kansas and leaving Bruce here alone. Clark isn't sleeping with Bruce; he's sleeping with Bruce Wayne, and for Bruce Wayne this is a fun evening that's ending better than he could have expected.
So instead Bruce says, "You really are unbearably attractive," and curls his mouth into a smirk when Clark grins at him. He slides a hand into Clark's hair and drags him down for a kiss, because Bruce Wayne thinks kissing is fun and isn't worried about how it will make him feel or what it will mean; and he licks into Clark's mouth and bites into that soft lower lip again, and then wraps his hand around both of them and can practically taste the sound Clark makes.
The feeling of Clark's hips rutting up toward Bruce's hand, of his cock pushing up through Bruce's fingers—it's too much, so good Bruce can hardly stand it, and it seems like hardly any time at all before he feels his own thighs starting to tense and shake. Clark is wound tight over him, curved like a bow, not so much kissing him anymore as just breathing shakily into Bruce's mouth, cheek hot against Bruce's; and then he groans deep in his chest, once and then again, and wraps his own hand around Bruce's between them—
Bruce squeezes his eyes shut and comes in flares of light, in aching waves, so close his mouth catches against Clark's as he shudders—and Clark holds onto him and says, "Bruce, oh—my god, you—Bruce," and then comes himself, hot and gasping, trembling with it.
They sit there and catch their breath, and when Bruce opens his eyes again Clark is smiling at him, a hand gentle on his cheek. "So, um, I don't know about you," Clark says, glancing down, "but I could certainly use a shower."
And Bruce could. In the strictest literal sense, certainly; and even in the dimness there's no mistaking the look on Clark's face, the invitation to get clean and then maybe get dirty again for a few minutes. Easy enough to imagine that look through the fall of water, Clark all wet and gleaming, curls sticking to his forehead—
But Clark can't see him with his shirt off.
"How about it?" Clark says.
And Bruce Wayne smiles at him and says, dismissive, "No, no, you go on. West bathroom should be fine—I'll take a look around and see if I can find you some towels."
FILL: as to which may be the true; Bruce/Clark, identity porn (9/?)
Bruce isn't often taken by surprise. But, he finds himself thinking dimly, if anyone could then it would be Superman, wouldn't it?
He had expected Clark to like the museum, and to like everyone he met—it was mass attention that Clark seemed to be uncomfortable with, as Superman; he liked people just fine when he could actually talk to each of them face-to-face. Bruce had known Diana would be there because she'd worked with the museum as a consultant, authenticating antiquities. And he'd expected her to like Clark exactly as much as she had.
(Which is good. Clark will be unhappy, when he finds out who Bruce is and what he's done, when he realizes how much Bruce has lied to him—and the lies of omission alone are uncountable by now, when every moment they're together without Bruce explaining himself constitutes another, and another, and another. He'll feel betrayed, angry, hurt; but he'll still be Superman. There will still need to be someone he can call on, and Batman can't be that person.
But Diana can. Diana was in public, and Clark evidently failed to recognize her on his own—but if Superman does return, meets Wonder Woman again somewhere other than the middle of a haze of ash and debris ten minutes before his death, he will. And Diana won't have any reason to prevent it.
Diana will only have lied once. Diana will be forgivable.)
It had all worked out exactly the way it was supposed to, everything according to plan—or at least not diverging far enough from it to cause a problem. There had always been a chance that it would run too late for Bruce to suit up afterward for patrol, especially if he couldn't send Clark on his way in time.
But Clark kissing him in the penthouse entryway hadn't been among the contingencies he'd prepared for.
Fortunately, the hitch it causes doesn't last more than a moment, because there isn't much of a decision to make. Bruce Wayne isn't known for weighing consequences. When people kiss him, Bruce Wayne doesn't blink. Bruce Wayne just kisses back.
Clark makes a noise somewhere in his throat and then eases free far enough to murmur, breathless, "Sorry, I—I should have led with 'thank you' or something there first. I didn't mean to just—"
Bruce Wayne wouldn't mind. "Luckily for you," Bruce says, letting his voice scrape a little, "I've got plenty of practice controlling my terror of being kissed by unbearably attractive men."
Clark laughs, and when he leans in a second time the kiss is hardly more than a brush, his mouth too wide with smiling for anything else. "Is that so," he says, so close Bruce can feel the words almost as well as he can hear them.
He doesn't sound like someone looking for an out; but Bruce should give him one anyway. "I'll admit," Bruce tells him, "this wasn't how I was expecting this evening to end."
Clark leans back just a little. It's so dim in here that his eyes ought to be gray at best, and yet that steady, unhesitating gaze is blue as sky. "But you don't mind, I hope," he says, the corners of his mouth still curving up.
"No." Bruce Wayne doesn't. "But if you want to say thank you, you can just say it. No need to go the extra mile."
Clark's eyebrows go up. "I wouldn't sleep with you for that," he says slowly. "I mean, I am grateful, but I just—I just wanted to—"
Ah. The thank-you would have been a thank you for a wonderful evening, I enjoyed myself—it helped, then. It helped, and Clark is feeling good about himself and his life for the first time in a while, and there's no one around but Bruce to share that feeling with. And it's Clark: generous beyond all reason.
It's also sex: Bruce Wayne wouldn't say no.
(That Bruce finds he doesn't want to say no isn't a mark against the idea—that would be giving it too much weight. Bruce's wants are neither a negative factor nor a positive one; they are not relevant to the assessment at all. That Clark's hands are warm and strong against Bruce's face—that his thigh touched Bruce's in the car and Bruce nearly shivered—that Bruce had never wanted to come back to the penthouse alone in the first place—
None of that is afforded any significance. That's the point of objectivity.)
And that's—that must be why Clark is asking. He had a good time and he wants to keep enjoying himself, and he's in a penthouse suite with Bruce Wayne. With the number of times Bruce has come on to him, it's no surprise that the idea would occur to Clark, that he might say to himself why not?
"Relax," Bruce says aloud, "there's no interview. Wanting to is all the qualification you need."
He grins at Clark, lets his eyes get heavy and leans in. Clark's mouth is still half-open on a laugh, and the laugh becomes a gasp when Bruce bites down just a little on his lip—Bruce slides a hand under Clark's suit jacket and tugs him nearer, and, oh, he needs to be careful; Clark is so hot and so pliant, Christ, letting Bruce yank him around like he couldn't throw Bruce through the wall if he wanted to. And the way he smells—
(Bruce Wayne's taste in colognes needs to be a little louche, too musky or too fruity or too dark, too much one way or another. The devil's in the details, and Bruce can't afford to get sloppy.
But Clark doesn't smell like Bruce Wayne. Clark found the bottle under the sink, the one that almost never comes out; Clark smells like Bruce.)
Together they manage to work their way to one of the sofas without knocking anything over. Clark tilts Bruce's face just how he wants it and holds him there, kisses Bruce like—like he's been thinking about it, like he'd spent time imagining how he'd wanted to do it. And maybe he has: he's so eager for it all, so honest; not hiding the shudder when Bruce slides a hand down over the slant of his hip, his ass, breaking away to breathe shakily into the side of Bruce's throat.
"Bruce, Jesus—"
"Come on," Bruce murmurs to him, "let's get comfortable," and he eases down to sit on the sofa in front of Clark and then hooks two fingers in each of Clark's front belt loops. "So you've done this before?"
"I thought you said there wasn't an interview," Clark says with a grin, sliding his hands up Bruce's arms to his shoulders, wrapping one around the back of Bruce's neck like maybe he's thinking about Bruce sucking him off.
Which Bruce can't blame him for, considering their relative positions.
But first—
"Just checking," Bruce says, light.
Clark shrugs one shoulder and then bites his lip. "A few times. Always—um, pretty fast. And mostly not with anybody who knew. It was back when I was kind of hiding," he elaborates, "so mostly not with anybody more than once, really. Except for Lois."
And of course this isn't anything like with Lois. Clark and Lois were in love.
"So I haven't done anything, uh, complicated," Clark concludes.
"Oh, I'm happy to keep it simple," Bruce says, and frees one hand to slide it up the length of Clark's dick through his pants. Clark's hard enough that the outline's very, very clear, and his response is dizzying: he gasps sharply, breath catching into a helpless noise in the back of his throat, and his eyes fall shut, his whole body swaying in toward Bruce with an artless eagerness. "So what exactly am I going to find down here?"
"I, um," Clark says, swallowing, eyes still closed; and then he manages to blink them open and adds, "What?"
"Tentacles?" Bruce says. "Spines? Two—or even three—"
"No," Clark says, evidently having caught Bruce's drift. "No, god, nothing like that. Jesus, Bruce—"
"Hmm. Pity," Bruce tells him. "Just another one of life's little disappointments." He gives Clark a considering look, and then eases his hand partway back down over Clark's dick and listens to Clark's throat click. "Well, all right, one of life's nicely generous disappointments."
"You are such a jerk," Clark says, low and warm and glad, and pushes Bruce's hand out of the way to lean down and kiss him again.
It takes a couple minutes—Clark's easily distracted by Bruce's mouth, it seems—but Bruce snakes a hand down to the back of one knee, the other, and coaxes Clark onto the sofa, kneeling over Bruce's thighs. One more tug and Clark falls into Bruce, all the glorious blazing weight of him; Bruce wraps an arm around the small of his back to hold him and then grinds up into him, and Clark makes a low torn sound and jerks helplessly, fingers digging into Bruce's shoulders. He pulls away, but not very far: presses his temple to Bruce's and says, "Oh, god, Bruce," and then deliberately rolls his hips down.
The drag of it, even through their slacks, is a kick of sparking heat up and down Bruce's spine; he finds his head dropping forward, his arm tightening around Clark's back, all of him trying to surge up into Clark—at total cross-purposes with the hand working at Clark's buttons. "Oh, god, yourself," he says, and it comes out a little more breathlessly than he wanted it to, but then he finally finally gets Clark's pants open and he doesn't care how he sounds anymore.
It's for the best that they're doing this mostly clothed, lights off—he really hadn't planned on this, all his Batman scars and marks are right there under this dress shirt. And getting a hand on Clark's cock is almost as good as getting a look at it, hot and hard and just starting to get a little slick—
Clark cries out, and for a second Bruce thinks it was somehow in pain, because he says, "Wait, wait, stop," right after—but he catches Bruce's hand before Bruce can yank it away completely and adds, "No, it's—I just didn't want to, uh," and he shifts back a little and reaches down himself for Bruce's belt. "You too, come on. You too."
They get in each other's way once, twice, and Clark tips his head back and laughs; but they manage in the end. Bruce feels a weird moment of something almost like apprehension, embarrassment: Superman, that bastion of more-than-human ultra-perfection, is looking at his dick—looking at it and can probably see it, even in this dimness, and god, he hadn't even considered that Clark could look right through Bruce's shirt if he wanted to—
But he wouldn't. Clark keeps his powers minimal unless he has a reason. And he's not looking for ways to catch Bruce out or trip him up, because he doesn't know there's anything to be caught out for or tripped up on. He doesn't know Bruce is lying to him.
"Bruce?" Clark says.
Bruce blinks up at him. His arm is still around Clark, but his other hand is on Clark's chest, holding him just a little away; when had that happened? And Bruce has stopped moving, so Clark's stopped too, looking down at him with patience, puzzlement, a tinge of concern.
And Bruce can't tell him any of the things he's thinking: not how excruciatingly good this is, not how many ways he's dreamed this, not how selfishly glad he is that Clark decided to kiss him in the entryway instead of just going home to Kansas and leaving Bruce here alone. Clark isn't sleeping with Bruce; he's sleeping with Bruce Wayne, and for Bruce Wayne this is a fun evening that's ending better than he could have expected.
So instead Bruce says, "You really are unbearably attractive," and curls his mouth into a smirk when Clark grins at him. He slides a hand into Clark's hair and drags him down for a kiss, because Bruce Wayne thinks kissing is fun and isn't worried about how it will make him feel or what it will mean; and he licks into Clark's mouth and bites into that soft lower lip again, and then wraps his hand around both of them and can practically taste the sound Clark makes.
The feeling of Clark's hips rutting up toward Bruce's hand, of his cock pushing up through Bruce's fingers—it's too much, so good Bruce can hardly stand it, and it seems like hardly any time at all before he feels his own thighs starting to tense and shake. Clark is wound tight over him, curved like a bow, not so much kissing him anymore as just breathing shakily into Bruce's mouth, cheek hot against Bruce's; and then he groans deep in his chest, once and then again, and wraps his own hand around Bruce's between them—
Bruce squeezes his eyes shut and comes in flares of light, in aching waves, so close his mouth catches against Clark's as he shudders—and Clark holds onto him and says, "Bruce, oh—my god, you—Bruce," and then comes himself, hot and gasping, trembling with it.
They sit there and catch their breath, and when Bruce opens his eyes again Clark is smiling at him, a hand gentle on his cheek. "So, um, I don't know about you," Clark says, glancing down, "but I could certainly use a shower."
And Bruce could. In the strictest literal sense, certainly; and even in the dimness there's no mistaking the look on Clark's face, the invitation to get clean and then maybe get dirty again for a few minutes. Easy enough to imagine that look through the fall of water, Clark all wet and gleaming, curls sticking to his forehead—
But Clark can't see him with his shirt off.
"How about it?" Clark says.
And Bruce Wayne smiles at him and says, dismissive, "No, no, you go on. West bathroom should be fine—I'll take a look around and see if I can find you some towels."