Tonight has taken a turn for the fraught. Clark Kent, glass in hand, tries not to look like a deer caught in the headlights.
It isn't the gallery's stark white walls that's got him feeling exposed, though they don't help. Nor is it the precise lighting, calibrated to flatter the displays and not so much the guests. It's not the side-long glances at his suit, three seasons démodé, and it isn't that he's nursed the same drink for an hour and he's already been told they're free, you know.
It's not even that someone might ask him his opinion on the paintings.
All this is fine, business as usual. In his line of work, Clark often has to deal with things that nudge up to the boundary of what's comfortable for him. Sometimes those things are alien incursions. Sometimes they're art exhibitions.
Though if he's honest, it's not the events themselves, so much as the people. And, in this instance, one particular person.
Clark has met Bruce Wayne before, just the once. It had taken a while to pry the barbs out from under his skin. Even longer to crawl up out of his grave.
Now that little misunderstanding has been resolved, they've managed to strike up a partnership--according to the news media, anyway, who talk about them in the same breathless tones they do the latest celebrity power couple.
It's more tenuous than that, but not entirely untrue, so long as Superman keeps to Metropolis and the Bat is left to his machinations deep in the belly of Gotham. The line is precise: no meddling; only come when you're called; strictly code names. Clark has never heard his real name uttered by the Bat and has taken care not to acknowledge Bruce's identity in return. In this, at least, his impenetrable wall of control issues dovetail neatly with Clark's measured courteousness.
As far as territory is concerned, social events appear to be neutral ground--or perhaps that's just the ones in Metropolis.
Flying the colors, they operate separately and intersect at opportune angles. In plain clothes, the angles feel decidedly more awkward. Clark's dodged for as long as he can, but he slipped up and now finds himself staring hard at the nearest painting so he doesn't accidentally make eye contact again. There's probably a fitting word for this situation in German.
He squints at the canvas, a painstaking rendering of something that looks like a printer test page. It's not certain what message it's trying to impart, but he wouldn't put it on his wall, personally.
He wonders how he's going to frame this article. He might finish this drink after all.
"Mr. Kent, isn't it?"
Clark winces. He knows that pitch and timbre even if it's usually scrambled by a modulator; the soft slur around the edges is a weak disguise, comparatively. He turns with a smile that he hopes doesn't look too strained, and finds that Bruce has progressed through his act to glass four or five. Still not a hair out of place, but the burn of impatience is in him. Clark wonders if he's been chosen as his ignominious out.
He really should have prepared for this inevitably. At least he's been given a lead to follow. He can do plausible deniability well enough.
"That's right," Clark says. He should offer his hand and greet Bruce Wayne in the manner to which he is accustomed, but he's taken by sudden pettiness--he's already tired of Bruce steering everything, supremely confident in his authority whether he's in leather or gabardine, so he feigns polite confusion. "Mr…?"
It's a minor slight compared to a faceful of kryptonite gas, but momentarily satisfying, nonetheless.
"Wayne," Bruce says slowly, eyes narrowing. "Bruce Wayne. Of Wayne Enterprises." The subtle weight he puts on his name makes it feels less like a slight and more like a faux pas. Clark presses his lips together in mild annoyance. Bruce might be the one to extend his hand first, but it's palm down, the businessman's power play.
"Mr. Wayne. Of course. Last year, Luthor's foundation shindig, right?" The handshake is brief, but Clark manages to shift their hands to perpendicularity by the time it's done.
"Right," Bruce says. He hasn't missed Clark's trick, probably realizes he's now exhausted his toolset for the evening and seems entertained by the fact. His eyes flick from Clark's face to his chest and back. "We got off to a rocky start, if I recall."
"I'd forgotten."
Bruce flashes him a sterile smile.
"I've got to say, you're looking remarkably well."
"The reports of my death, etcetera." Clark suspects he's making a particular face, the one people pull when trying chat casually about something horrific. "I was at ground zero when things were going down, gave my jacket to an injured guy. Had my wallet in my pocket. He wasn't in good shape, I got laid out for a while, and I guess--I guess there was some confusion."
Bruce's face echoes his expression as he raises his drink, ostensibly pained at this tragic tale but more likely at the clumsy lie, the delivery that already sounds rote. It serves well enough.
"Couldn't make it up." Bruce's voice is lost in his glass as he polishes off the last drops of his champagne. He watches Clark over the rim.
"Stranger than fiction," Clark says agreeably.
There's a slightly awkward pause; a patron jostles Clark's elbow and he rolls with it out of habit. Bruce reaches out as though he needs steadying.
"Listen," Bruce says, his hand on Clark's arm slightly too tight. He gives Clark another once over, taking his time with an open study, mouth to chest to lower, and just as slowly back.
Clark reminds himself that Bruce has looked at him this way before, and prepares for a sudden evisceration. It doesn't hold off the upswell of heat, which is just as blindsiding as when the Bat offers him a backhanded compliment; barks an order; grunts from a hard blow, giving or taking.
("I'll take take care of the rest," Superman says, as the Bat spits blood onto the sidewalk.
"And you think," the Bat rasps, "I'd let you do that?")
But there's no lunge for his--or Superman's--jugular this time. Bruce drags his lower lip between his teeth as though briefly calculating something, then says, "Can I buy you a drink?"
"Um." There's another question implicit. Clark is still looking at his mouth. "They're free, you know," he says, stupidly.
Bruce laughs breezily and guides him by the arm he still hasn't let go of. "I know a place, best Martinis in Metropolis." He leans in to speak in Clark's ear as they leave, like they're sharing a joke, or a secret. "I like them very dirty."
*
They don't get as far as Bruce's fabled bar. They don't get a whole lot further than around the corner of the art gallery. The cool white light spilling from the windows cuts across Bruce's face as he walks Clark into an alley, up against the wall. It shadows his eyes, makes the line of his mouth grim and reminds Clark of exactly who he's dealing with.
"Bruce." Clark is hard before his shoulders hit the brickwork. He's not as surprised as he should be.
"Clark." Bruce takes a quick tight breath. Clark hears his heart lurch but his hands are sure. One he jams between Clark's legs, thumb flush against his erection, rubbing the fabric of his pants. The other curls at the nape of Clark's neck, bringing him in so they can kiss. Clark's glasses bump out of position, and he pulls back. He should tuck them into a pocket in case things get--in case they get lost, or broken.
"Leave them," Bruce says, and kisses him--a tame brush of his lips, not at all what Clark was expecting after the unapologetic hand on his dick, and there's no accounting for the way it makes Clark bristle. Maybe that's why he plunges into it with the minimal restraint he can allow, bringing his arms up around Bruce's neck, pulling the man against him shoulder to thigh and into a frustrated kiss.
Bruce makes a muffled noise, half a laugh, and Clark realizes he's been goaded into doing exactly what Bruce wants, but Bruce is also encouraging his lips apart with the press of his tongue until their mouths are wide and open. Clark just tilts his head to fit their mouths tighter together, deep as he can get. His jacket clings to the rough brick, dragging as Bruce pushes against him.
He doesn't need to breathe, could do this for hours with his universe apertured down to the heat of their mouths and the pressure of Bruce's knee and Bruce's dick insistent against his hip, but Bruce doesn't have that luxury. He breaks the kiss first with a wet, self-satisfied sound. Then it's just their loud breathing in the semi-dark, Bruce's hand against Clark's chest, fingers slid between the buttons of his shirt.
This, Clark thinks, dazed as though the drink he'd nursed all evening could have gone to his head. This might be what they need.
A vehicle passing in the road adjacent sends it headlights skittering over their impropriety. Bruce's eyes glint dangerously and he goes for Clark's mouth again, and the fly of his slacks at the same time. He isn't a man to do things by halves and apparently that includes whenever he decides to unclench.
"God," Clark says, between rough bites from his mouth. "Do you always--we can't do this here."
"Hm," Bruce says, and there's a long moment where Clark wonders if he should just--there's nobody around and he could get them somewhere more private in a matter of seconds, but something tells him that would unbalance whatever equilibrium has been struck here.
This is reinforced when Bruce doesn't order him up into the sky and instead stops pushing and starts pulling instead, brings them back out onto the sidewalk under the illumination of the streetlamps. Bruce is faintly pink across his cheekbones but somehow looks otherwise unruffled, running a hand through his hair as strides to the curbside, managing to hail a cab immediately.
Clark looks a mess, if his reflection in the cab's window is anything to go by.
The driver asks where to. Clark waits for Bruce to assert himself, as usual. It'll be the Metropolis Grand--or the Lexor, maybe, just mess with him--the Presidential suite either way, all sleek polish and glass and chrome, unpriced wine and attentive room service, but Bruce just waits for him with a questioning lift of his brow.
"Feel like roughing it tonight, huh?"
"Doesn't hurt to know how the other half lives, Mr. Kent." His smile is infuriatingly urbane.
Well, if that's how he wants to play it. Clark tries not to take it personally. He directs the driver to Clinton Street.
The journey is short but borderline unbearable. Bruce drapes his arm over the back of the seats like the world's least subtle cinema date, his thumb brushing the nape of Clark's neck. Clark remains achingly hard for the duration, and from the way the passing streetlights cast their shadows over his rucked-up slacks, so does Bruce, but he chats amicably with the driver about the weather, the game last night, and the slow, even strokes of his thumb don't falter even when the subject turns to the Superman and his miraculous return to life.
It gives Clark some time to collect himself, enough breathing space to let it sink in for a minute--they're going to do this, this is real--and then, of course, to start overthinking things. The Bat handles Superman with a generous measure of suspicion and caution because that is his nature. Bruce Wayne, however, has little reason to be circumspect when it comes to the assiduously ordinary Clark Kent. Could be that simple, but seems unlikely.
The masks have not been set aside here, just new ones laid on top. Another game, another set of rules. Clark understands this, at least: break them and the charade, whatever its purpose, will crumble. They'll part with the same tension they do on any other night. The stakes aren't devastating if he fails. Bruce is, by all appearances, superb at compartmentalizing, and has contrived enough distance that Clark could weather it, given time.
Clark also understands: Bruce wants this enough to construct a scenario around it. Maybe because that he can't risk it being too real--or maybe because he gets off on forcing Clark to hold back, his game like an invisible restraint. Honor bondage. Control.
Or maybe, Clark thinks, maybe he just doesn't know how to do this unless he's being somebody else.
In the morning that might seem pitiable. For the time being, though, it's--
Clark shifts in his seat, glancing over at Bruce's face, at his austere profile. Bruce glances back. Clark lets out an unsteady breath, and thinks--hopes--if Bruce Wayne is a performance, that it's an indulgent one.
Bruce's thumb caresses Clark's neck once more, slight drag of a manicured thumbnail that leaves him shivering, then the cab is drawing up to the curb.
Fill: A Few Pages from this Closed Book: Bruce/Clark, Identity kink [1/3]
It isn't the gallery's stark white walls that's got him feeling exposed, though they don't help. Nor is it the precise lighting, calibrated to flatter the displays and not so much the guests. It's not the side-long glances at his suit, three seasons démodé, and it isn't that he's nursed the same drink for an hour and he's already been told they're free, you know.
It's not even that someone might ask him his opinion on the paintings.
All this is fine, business as usual. In his line of work, Clark often has to deal with things that nudge up to the boundary of what's comfortable for him. Sometimes those things are alien incursions. Sometimes they're art exhibitions.
Though if he's honest, it's not the events themselves, so much as the people. And, in this instance, one particular person.
Clark has met Bruce Wayne before, just the once. It had taken a while to pry the barbs out from under his skin. Even longer to crawl up out of his grave.
Now that little misunderstanding has been resolved, they've managed to strike up a partnership--according to the news media, anyway, who talk about them in the same breathless tones they do the latest celebrity power couple.
It's more tenuous than that, but not entirely untrue, so long as Superman keeps to Metropolis and the Bat is left to his machinations deep in the belly of Gotham. The line is precise: no meddling; only come when you're called; strictly code names. Clark has never heard his real name uttered by the Bat and has taken care not to acknowledge Bruce's identity in return. In this, at least, his impenetrable wall of control issues dovetail neatly with Clark's measured courteousness.
As far as territory is concerned, social events appear to be neutral ground--or perhaps that's just the ones in Metropolis.
Flying the colors, they operate separately and intersect at opportune angles. In plain clothes, the angles feel decidedly more awkward. Clark's dodged for as long as he can, but he slipped up and now finds himself staring hard at the nearest painting so he doesn't accidentally make eye contact again. There's probably a fitting word for this situation in German.
He squints at the canvas, a painstaking rendering of something that looks like a printer test page. It's not certain what message it's trying to impart, but he wouldn't put it on his wall, personally.
He wonders how he's going to frame this article. He might finish this drink after all.
"Mr. Kent, isn't it?"
Clark winces. He knows that pitch and timbre even if it's usually scrambled by a modulator; the soft slur around the edges is a weak disguise, comparatively. He turns with a smile that he hopes doesn't look too strained, and finds that Bruce has progressed through his act to glass four or five. Still not a hair out of place, but the burn of impatience is in him. Clark wonders if he's been chosen as his ignominious out.
He really should have prepared for this inevitably. At least he's been given a lead to follow. He can do plausible deniability well enough.
"That's right," Clark says. He should offer his hand and greet Bruce Wayne in the manner to which he is accustomed, but he's taken by sudden pettiness--he's already tired of Bruce steering everything, supremely confident in his authority whether he's in leather or gabardine, so he feigns polite confusion. "Mr…?"
It's a minor slight compared to a faceful of kryptonite gas, but momentarily satisfying, nonetheless.
"Wayne," Bruce says slowly, eyes narrowing. "Bruce Wayne. Of Wayne Enterprises." The subtle weight he puts on his name makes it feels less like a slight and more like a faux pas. Clark presses his lips together in mild annoyance. Bruce might be the one to extend his hand first, but it's palm down, the businessman's power play.
"Mr. Wayne. Of course. Last year, Luthor's foundation shindig, right?" The handshake is brief, but Clark manages to shift their hands to perpendicularity by the time it's done.
"Right," Bruce says. He hasn't missed Clark's trick, probably realizes he's now exhausted his toolset for the evening and seems entertained by the fact. His eyes flick from Clark's face to his chest and back. "We got off to a rocky start, if I recall."
"I'd forgotten."
Bruce flashes him a sterile smile.
"I've got to say, you're looking remarkably well."
"The reports of my death, etcetera." Clark suspects he's making a particular face, the one people pull when trying chat casually about something horrific. "I was at ground zero when things were going down, gave my jacket to an injured guy. Had my wallet in my pocket. He wasn't in good shape, I got laid out for a while, and I guess--I guess there was some confusion."
Bruce's face echoes his expression as he raises his drink, ostensibly pained at this tragic tale but more likely at the clumsy lie, the delivery that already sounds rote. It serves well enough.
"Couldn't make it up." Bruce's voice is lost in his glass as he polishes off the last drops of his champagne. He watches Clark over the rim.
"Stranger than fiction," Clark says agreeably.
There's a slightly awkward pause; a patron jostles Clark's elbow and he rolls with it out of habit. Bruce reaches out as though he needs steadying.
"Listen," Bruce says, his hand on Clark's arm slightly too tight. He gives Clark another once over, taking his time with an open study, mouth to chest to lower, and just as slowly back.
Clark reminds himself that Bruce has looked at him this way before, and prepares for a sudden evisceration. It doesn't hold off the upswell of heat, which is just as blindsiding as when the Bat offers him a backhanded compliment; barks an order; grunts from a hard blow, giving or taking.
("I'll take take care of the rest," Superman says, as the Bat spits blood onto the sidewalk.
"And you think," the Bat rasps, "I'd let you do that?")
But there's no lunge for his--or Superman's--jugular this time. Bruce drags his lower lip between his teeth as though briefly calculating something, then says, "Can I buy you a drink?"
"Um." There's another question implicit. Clark is still looking at his mouth. "They're free, you know," he says, stupidly.
Bruce laughs breezily and guides him by the arm he still hasn't let go of. "I know a place, best Martinis in Metropolis." He leans in to speak in Clark's ear as they leave, like they're sharing a joke, or a secret. "I like them very dirty."
*
They don't get as far as Bruce's fabled bar. They don't get a whole lot further than around the corner of the art gallery. The cool white light spilling from the windows cuts across Bruce's face as he walks Clark into an alley, up against the wall. It shadows his eyes, makes the line of his mouth grim and reminds Clark of exactly who he's dealing with.
"Bruce." Clark is hard before his shoulders hit the brickwork. He's not as surprised as he should be.
"Clark." Bruce takes a quick tight breath. Clark hears his heart lurch but his hands are sure. One he jams between Clark's legs, thumb flush against his erection, rubbing the fabric of his pants. The other curls at the nape of Clark's neck, bringing him in so they can kiss. Clark's glasses bump out of position, and he pulls back. He should tuck them into a pocket in case things get--in case they get lost, or broken.
"Leave them," Bruce says, and kisses him--a tame brush of his lips, not at all what Clark was expecting after the unapologetic hand on his dick, and there's no accounting for the way it makes Clark bristle. Maybe that's why he plunges into it with the minimal restraint he can allow, bringing his arms up around Bruce's neck, pulling the man against him shoulder to thigh and into a frustrated kiss.
Bruce makes a muffled noise, half a laugh, and Clark realizes he's been goaded into doing exactly what Bruce wants, but Bruce is also encouraging his lips apart with the press of his tongue until their mouths are wide and open. Clark just tilts his head to fit their mouths tighter together, deep as he can get. His jacket clings to the rough brick, dragging as Bruce pushes against him.
He doesn't need to breathe, could do this for hours with his universe apertured down to the heat of their mouths and the pressure of Bruce's knee and Bruce's dick insistent against his hip, but Bruce doesn't have that luxury. He breaks the kiss first with a wet, self-satisfied sound. Then it's just their loud breathing in the semi-dark, Bruce's hand against Clark's chest, fingers slid between the buttons of his shirt.
This, Clark thinks, dazed as though the drink he'd nursed all evening could have gone to his head. This might be what they need.
A vehicle passing in the road adjacent sends it headlights skittering over their impropriety. Bruce's eyes glint dangerously and he goes for Clark's mouth again, and the fly of his slacks at the same time. He isn't a man to do things by halves and apparently that includes whenever he decides to unclench.
"God," Clark says, between rough bites from his mouth. "Do you always--we can't do this here."
"Hm," Bruce says, and there's a long moment where Clark wonders if he should just--there's nobody around and he could get them somewhere more private in a matter of seconds, but something tells him that would unbalance whatever equilibrium has been struck here.
This is reinforced when Bruce doesn't order him up into the sky and instead stops pushing and starts pulling instead, brings them back out onto the sidewalk under the illumination of the streetlamps. Bruce is faintly pink across his cheekbones but somehow looks otherwise unruffled, running a hand through his hair as strides to the curbside, managing to hail a cab immediately.
Clark looks a mess, if his reflection in the cab's window is anything to go by.
The driver asks where to. Clark waits for Bruce to assert himself, as usual. It'll be the Metropolis Grand--or the Lexor, maybe, just mess with him--the Presidential suite either way, all sleek polish and glass and chrome, unpriced wine and attentive room service, but Bruce just waits for him with a questioning lift of his brow.
"Feel like roughing it tonight, huh?"
"Doesn't hurt to know how the other half lives, Mr. Kent." His smile is infuriatingly urbane.
Well, if that's how he wants to play it. Clark tries not to take it personally. He directs the driver to Clinton Street.
The journey is short but borderline unbearable. Bruce drapes his arm over the back of the seats like the world's least subtle cinema date, his thumb brushing the nape of Clark's neck. Clark remains achingly hard for the duration, and from the way the passing streetlights cast their shadows over his rucked-up slacks, so does Bruce, but he chats amicably with the driver about the weather, the game last night, and the slow, even strokes of his thumb don't falter even when the subject turns to the Superman and his miraculous return to life.
It gives Clark some time to collect himself, enough breathing space to let it sink in for a minute--they're going to do this, this is real--and then, of course, to start overthinking things. The Bat handles Superman with a generous measure of suspicion and caution because that is his nature. Bruce Wayne, however, has little reason to be circumspect when it comes to the assiduously ordinary Clark Kent. Could be that simple, but seems unlikely.
The masks have not been set aside here, just new ones laid on top. Another game, another set of rules. Clark understands this, at least: break them and the charade, whatever its purpose, will crumble. They'll part with the same tension they do on any other night. The stakes aren't devastating if he fails. Bruce is, by all appearances, superb at compartmentalizing, and has contrived enough distance that Clark could weather it, given time.
Clark also understands: Bruce wants this enough to construct a scenario around it. Maybe because that he can't risk it being too real--or maybe because he gets off on forcing Clark to hold back, his game like an invisible restraint. Honor bondage. Control.
Or maybe, Clark thinks, maybe he just doesn't know how to do this unless he's being somebody else.
In the morning that might seem pitiable. For the time being, though, it's--
Clark shifts in his seat, glancing over at Bruce's face, at his austere profile. Bruce glances back. Clark lets out an unsteady breath, and thinks--hopes--if Bruce Wayne is a performance, that it's an indulgent one.
Bruce's thumb caresses Clark's neck once more, slight drag of a manicured thumbnail that leaves him shivering, then the cab is drawing up to the curb.
*