I started this for the kinkmeme fest. Oops. This doesn't fully satisfy the prompt, but the OP okayed it offsite -- I hope someone else writes a fill that actually goes into the impersonation shenanigans!
Clark's posture went rigid when Bruce took a knee to get at the boot fastenings. "You know," he said, "I think I can figure it out from here."
"Alfred said he had to fit the entire thing to you himself because you got impatient and started, quote, 'yanking'." Bruce disengaged the left knee guard from the shin guard and set it aside on his office's area rug, undid the catches on the back of the boot itself, then switched sides and did it again. "Getting out is faster than getting in. Just give me a moment."
"There isn't a countdown on your life anymore, so I can just-- You know what--" Irritation entered Clark's voice, and he relaxed fractionally. "I do know how to be careful, Bruce. I had a legitimate reason for rushing, earlier. I can work out the rest now that I've seen you do the top half."
"Is there also a reason why you needed the entire tactical loadout? The Clock King doesn't rate this." And the process of removing it was twice as onerous when he was doing it for another person, who stood over Bruce uselessly with his hands out from his sides like he was afraid to touch anything. Clark had been in the midst of taking off the Batsuit's gauntlets when he decided to assert his independence; the right one hung from his still-gloved left hand.
"The more extra stuff I put over the suit, the less obvious it is that it doesn't fit me," he said. "Better than someone realizing it wasn't the real Bat. Really, just let me take it from here. You said something about a change of clothes?"
"Well, now you're annoyed," Bruce said. "The last thing I need is you tearing millions of dollars of engineering like paper to teach me a lesson about how I should just let you run off half-cocked whenever you want."
"You know perfectly well that wasn't--"
"Just hold still for the one entire minute I--"
Bruce reached for one of the buckles on the left thigh guard, and Clark finally pulled away from him, a quick flinching half-step backwards -- and Bruce forgot himself, as he sometimes did with Clark. He was one of probably three people on Earth who could compete for the honor of having examined the implications of Clark's impossible, planet-shattering strength most deeply, but moment to moment, his visceral impulse was to treat Clark as a man. He was human-shaped and human-sized and a frustrating, pervasive part of Bruce's day-to-day life, and when he stepped back from Bruce now, Bruce automatically grabbed him by the leg to hold him still.
It worked. Clark inhaled sharply and dropped the gauntlet he was holding. His hands flew to the waistband of the Batsuit as though he were afraid the bottom half of it would fall off him, but he froze where he was, with Bruce's fingers digging into the inside of his thigh and the back of his knee. Bruce looked up for the first time since he'd knelt -- up along Clark's body, past his hands, past the insignia on his chest, at his scarlet face and clenched jaw. Clark's eyes were fixed on the dark beyond the office windows, where Gotham lay glowing far below them.
"Please just let me take care of this," Clark said, in the deliberate, steady voice he used in situations that required the eternal sunny confidence with which Superman had returned from the grave. A voice that could hold up the world, no matter what Clark was feeling. The blush was creeping down his neck.
Oh.
Working closely with a man who could diagnose cancer by smell invited a certain amount of paranoia about what one's unexamined physiological reactions might be giving away. So Bruce had dusted off his biofeedback training, and seen about securing his privacy. If he'd pulled it off -- and Clark had never given him reason to believe he hadn't -- his autonomic landscape in Clark's presence was now normal for their half-convivial, half-combative working relationship. He had presented a timeline of a man moving past both his lingering disquiet in the presence of an alien who could crack the world in half and his relief at the reversal of one of the greatest mistakes of his life, and simply leveling out.
That was where the lie came in.
It was as challenging and pervasive a lie as the Bruce Wayne identity, and Bruce had applied himself to it with the same determination. It had seen him through a thousand late-night arguments and incidental touches. It had not failed the time Bruce, freefalling, had fired his grapple like a Hail Mary, and Clark had been there to pluck the hook from the end of its arc and bear Bruce to safety. The time Clark had loosened his tie and sprawled, grinning, in the open Batmobile. The time he'd seen Bruce to the cave and waited far back while Bruce dosed himself with fear toxin antidote, but had not left until he was sure Bruce would be fine.
It had not failed, because Bruce had prepared for every permutation of himself looking at Clark and thinking you showed after all or just a little more or come back. What he had never accounted for was the reverse scenario: Clark looking at him, on his knees, with his head bent almost to Clark's thigh, and thinking for him all the things he could not let himself contemplate in Clark's presence. A door flew open to a whole realm of sexual fantasy Bruce had never considered: Clark both watching and not-watching Bruce as closely as Bruce had done to him, and fighting himself, fighting his own body -- and winning, until there came a situation for which neither of them had planned and they both lost, at once, together.
"Bruce?" said Clark, in a very different voice. Superman never sounded shaken.
Bruce took his hand off Clark's knee and unbuckled the fastener that had created all this contention, the top strap of the left thigh guard. His heart thundered. He could just imagine what his galvanic skin response was at the moment. In his mind he heard the warning beep of the electrocardiogram he used for practice, like Pavlov's experiment in reverse: first salivation, then the bell.
"Bruce?" said Clark again, and put two fingers to Bruce's jaw as though he were thinking of making Bruce look up at him. It was his gloved hand, but Bruce still felt the touch like sun on a prism, like it refracted, blazing, throughout his body. He fought not to turn closer, to put his mouth to Clark's palm or the base of his thumb.
"Did you do this with Alfred too?" said Bruce. Clark snatched his hand away before the last word was out.
"What kind of question--"
"I guess he wasn't taking the suit off you --"
"Damn it, Bruce, that's not why. Of course that's not why. If you're going to deflect, would you just deflect and let me get through this conversation with a little dignity?"
"-- and I am." Bruce undid the second buckle on the thigh guard and reached for the two at the back. Clark caught his breath and stood straighter, but not so much so that the front and back of Bruce's wrist didn't touch the insides of his thighs.
"So you aren't going to deflect, but you are going to be a jerk about it?" he said tightly.
"I have to get my shots in while I'm still able to talk."
It was a full-blown gasp this time, not just the quick, surprised breath of a moment ago; Clark's whole body hitched with it. Then it hitched again, because he'd started to laugh, almost silently. "Oh my god," he said into his hands.
Bruce took advantage of Clark's distraction to unbuckle and remove the other thigh guard without the three-minute argument that every other part of this process had entailed. Clark had been right: the suit didn't fit him. It was particularly obvious on the bottom half, where the waistband hit too high in front and too low in back, and tension folds converged on the groin.
If he bit Clark's thigh now, the layer of non-Newtonian fluid armor in the Batsuit would stiffen between his teeth and neither of them would really get anything out of it. But-- He put his hand on the back of it, high up near the curve of Clark's ass, and Clark stopped laughing instantly. Bruce had seen Clark read pen impressions on a pad with his fingertips; what would he feel, through the layers of technology in the Batsuit, if Bruce leaned in, just like this, and put his mouth to the cord of muscle that had jumped a moment ago with Clark's laughter?
Maybe he felt it, or maybe the visual was enough. Clark made another breathy sound -- oh, fuck. His series of gasps had not been coincidence, or surprise; this was just how Clark sounded when he was aroused, these little voiceless noises, like he was trying to be quiet somewhere not private enough, rather than standing in a soundproof office at the pinnacle of Bruce's corporate stronghold. Whatever else happened here, Bruce would have that forever, to unpack in the dark when he needed it: the sonic reality of Clark Kent anticipating a blowjob. Bruce pressed the heel of his palm against his growing erection and moved his mouth higher, opening it against the kevlar; he tasted Gotham smog and the residue of the detergent he used on the suit, felt the minute tremor of Clark's body on his tongue.
"Do I need to be concerned," he said into Clark's hip, "about what sort of fluids you're leaving on the inside of my life's work?"
"For God's sake," Clark muttered, but his affront wasn't enough to keep him from touching Bruce. It was his bare hand this time, and Bruce was struck, as he always was on the rare occasions when they touched, by the incongruous softness of Clark's skin. Clark had the hands not just of someone who'd never had a hangnail or papercut, but of someone who had never handled farm equipment or punched an asteroid to dust. He made one tentative pass and then a firmer one, stroking back the hair disarranged in this evening's hostage debacle, and finally just let his hand rest on Bruce's head, his thumb at Bruce's hairline. "No, I, no," he said, like he was only half paying attention to his own words. "I don't know what you do when you suit up, but I wouldn't go commando in someone else's vocation."
"That's no guarantee," Bruce said. And then, aridly, "For example, I expect at least these boxers I have on to be a lost cause by the time we're finished here."
Clark bit off a little gasp, and Bruce's cock jumped against his palm in response. Clark must have seen this, or heard it, because his fingers tightened against Bruce's scalp, which sent a shiver down Bruce's neck. This chain reaction could run away with him if they weren't careful.
"I know," Clark blurted, "god, I can smell you."
The shiver walked up Bruce's spine like fingers this time. Everything about this was so goddamn intrusive. Concealing his reactions to Clark so assiduously he didn't even feel them himself has been his way of life, and here they were, in the failure state Bruce had always envisioned, where just being in a room with Clark allowed him to pry into Bruce's thoughts like no one else on Earth could. He needed to control this, he needed to get the lid back on it, but for now the thrill of being able to want Clark so flagrantly bore him along like a river rapid.
He rubbed his cheek against Clark's hip, drunk on honesty, and said, "But you're not quite as interested in that in its own right as you are in hearing me talk about it."
"What? Of course I-- Okay, you know what, are you going to make fun of me or are you going to get -- get on with things?"
"There has technically never been anything preventing you from just undressing yourself," Bruce said, and nosed at the Batsuit's groin protector. Clark definitely didn't feel that, except as pressure on his pelvis, but Bruce heard the breath flutter in his throat anyway. Would Clark's erection feel like a human's? More rigid, maybe. It must be passably humanlike in most respects, or Clark would have warned Bruce by now, if only to manage the likelihood and timing of that particular sort of rejection. Or maybe he assumed that Bruce wouldn't be doing this at all if he weren't prepared to put his mouth on whatever might be inside that cup with very little hesitation -- that Bruce would have already thought these possibilities through. That was presumptuous, but accurate.
Clark's hands went to the waistband like they had at the start of all this, then hesitated; either the sight of Bruce parting his lips and letting his teeth just brush against the cup had stopped him, or he was stymied for a way to hustle Bruce along. Politely hurrying up a blowjob was a skill Clark probably had not needed to cultivate. He was so careful of other people physically, he'd never just yank down the bottom half of the Batsuit and shove his cock into Bruce's face, though -- Bruce's heart rate spiked and he made no effort to pull it down to normal -- that would not be awful. And what reason did he have to know how much he could accomplish just by leaning into Bruce, pushing back against him instead of accepting his attentions with still politeness, or by slipping his fingers into Bruce's mouth until the temptation to have more of him there was too great to resist?
Bruce swallowed audibly. Jesus, it was working and Clark hadn't even had to do it. He took his hand off himself and reached up, hooked his fingers through the waistbands of the Batsuit's bottom half, the undersuit pants, and -- sure enough -- whatever cotton item Clark had on beneath that. Bruce put his mouth to the sliver of skin that appeared where the Batsuit gave way; Clark inhaled shakily, and Bruce felt the tension and release in the muscles of his stomach. He tasted unremarkable, quite a bit less sweaty than someone just coming out of the suit should have been.
The waistband would only come down a couple of inches, only relinquish that much of Clark's skin to Bruce's mouth, before he had to involve his other hand to get it down past Clark's hips. Those first few inches were always the most difficult, and doubly so on a body the suit didn't quite fit; but the suit gave Clark up, and all at once Bruce had Clark's bare ass in his hands and the curve of Clark's freed cock bumping his jaw. His stubble would have been no great fun for anyone else, but maybe the texture or the pressure worked for Clark, who jerked his hips forward just a fraction and then made an obvious effort to relax. Bruce sought him out blindly, until his lips touched soft hot skin, and slipped his mouth over the head.
FILL: Convergent Evolution, Bruce/Clark, Clark in the Batsuit [1/4]
Content notes: blowjob, dry humping, business suit damage, manual restraint, super-strength.
-
Clark's posture went rigid when Bruce took a knee to get at the boot fastenings. "You know," he said, "I think I can figure it out from here."
"Alfred said he had to fit the entire thing to you himself because you got impatient and started, quote, 'yanking'." Bruce disengaged the left knee guard from the shin guard and set it aside on his office's area rug, undid the catches on the back of the boot itself, then switched sides and did it again. "Getting out is faster than getting in. Just give me a moment."
"There isn't a countdown on your life anymore, so I can just-- You know what--" Irritation entered Clark's voice, and he relaxed fractionally. "I do know how to be careful, Bruce. I had a legitimate reason for rushing, earlier. I can work out the rest now that I've seen you do the top half."
"Is there also a reason why you needed the entire tactical loadout? The Clock King doesn't rate this." And the process of removing it was twice as onerous when he was doing it for another person, who stood over Bruce uselessly with his hands out from his sides like he was afraid to touch anything. Clark had been in the midst of taking off the Batsuit's gauntlets when he decided to assert his independence; the right one hung from his still-gloved left hand.
"The more extra stuff I put over the suit, the less obvious it is that it doesn't fit me," he said. "Better than someone realizing it wasn't the real Bat. Really, just let me take it from here. You said something about a change of clothes?"
"Well, now you're annoyed," Bruce said. "The last thing I need is you tearing millions of dollars of engineering like paper to teach me a lesson about how I should just let you run off half-cocked whenever you want."
"You know perfectly well that wasn't--"
"Just hold still for the one entire minute I--"
Bruce reached for one of the buckles on the left thigh guard, and Clark finally pulled away from him, a quick flinching half-step backwards -- and Bruce forgot himself, as he sometimes did with Clark. He was one of probably three people on Earth who could compete for the honor of having examined the implications of Clark's impossible, planet-shattering strength most deeply, but moment to moment, his visceral impulse was to treat Clark as a man. He was human-shaped and human-sized and a frustrating, pervasive part of Bruce's day-to-day life, and when he stepped back from Bruce now, Bruce automatically grabbed him by the leg to hold him still.
It worked. Clark inhaled sharply and dropped the gauntlet he was holding. His hands flew to the waistband of the Batsuit as though he were afraid the bottom half of it would fall off him, but he froze where he was, with Bruce's fingers digging into the inside of his thigh and the back of his knee. Bruce looked up for the first time since he'd knelt -- up along Clark's body, past his hands, past the insignia on his chest, at his scarlet face and clenched jaw. Clark's eyes were fixed on the dark beyond the office windows, where Gotham lay glowing far below them.
"Please just let me take care of this," Clark said, in the deliberate, steady voice he used in situations that required the eternal sunny confidence with which Superman had returned from the grave. A voice that could hold up the world, no matter what Clark was feeling. The blush was creeping down his neck.
Oh.
Working closely with a man who could diagnose cancer by smell invited a certain amount of paranoia about what one's unexamined physiological reactions might be giving away. So Bruce had dusted off his biofeedback training, and seen about securing his privacy. If he'd pulled it off -- and Clark had never given him reason to believe he hadn't -- his autonomic landscape in Clark's presence was now normal for their half-convivial, half-combative working relationship. He had presented a timeline of a man moving past both his lingering disquiet in the presence of an alien who could crack the world in half and his relief at the reversal of one of the greatest mistakes of his life, and simply leveling out.
That was where the lie came in.
It was as challenging and pervasive a lie as the Bruce Wayne identity, and Bruce had applied himself to it with the same determination. It had seen him through a thousand late-night arguments and incidental touches. It had not failed the time Bruce, freefalling, had fired his grapple like a Hail Mary, and Clark had been there to pluck the hook from the end of its arc and bear Bruce to safety. The time Clark had loosened his tie and sprawled, grinning, in the open Batmobile. The time he'd seen Bruce to the cave and waited far back while Bruce dosed himself with fear toxin antidote, but had not left until he was sure Bruce would be fine.
It had not failed, because Bruce had prepared for every permutation of himself looking at Clark and thinking you showed after all or just a little more or come back. What he had never accounted for was the reverse scenario: Clark looking at him, on his knees, with his head bent almost to Clark's thigh, and thinking for him all the things he could not let himself contemplate in Clark's presence. A door flew open to a whole realm of sexual fantasy Bruce had never considered: Clark both watching and not-watching Bruce as closely as Bruce had done to him, and fighting himself, fighting his own body -- and winning, until there came a situation for which neither of them had planned and they both lost, at once, together.
"Bruce?" said Clark, in a very different voice. Superman never sounded shaken.
Bruce took his hand off Clark's knee and unbuckled the fastener that had created all this contention, the top strap of the left thigh guard. His heart thundered. He could just imagine what his galvanic skin response was at the moment. In his mind he heard the warning beep of the electrocardiogram he used for practice, like Pavlov's experiment in reverse: first salivation, then the bell.
"Bruce?" said Clark again, and put two fingers to Bruce's jaw as though he were thinking of making Bruce look up at him. It was his gloved hand, but Bruce still felt the touch like sun on a prism, like it refracted, blazing, throughout his body. He fought not to turn closer, to put his mouth to Clark's palm or the base of his thumb.
"Did you do this with Alfred too?" said Bruce. Clark snatched his hand away before the last word was out.
"What kind of question--"
"I guess he wasn't taking the suit off you --"
"Damn it, Bruce, that's not why. Of course that's not why. If you're going to deflect, would you just deflect and let me get through this conversation with a little dignity?"
"-- and I am." Bruce undid the second buckle on the thigh guard and reached for the two at the back. Clark caught his breath and stood straighter, but not so much so that the front and back of Bruce's wrist didn't touch the insides of his thighs.
"So you aren't going to deflect, but you are going to be a jerk about it?" he said tightly.
"I have to get my shots in while I'm still able to talk."
It was a full-blown gasp this time, not just the quick, surprised breath of a moment ago; Clark's whole body hitched with it. Then it hitched again, because he'd started to laugh, almost silently. "Oh my god," he said into his hands.
Bruce took advantage of Clark's distraction to unbuckle and remove the other thigh guard without the three-minute argument that every other part of this process had entailed. Clark had been right: the suit didn't fit him. It was particularly obvious on the bottom half, where the waistband hit too high in front and too low in back, and tension folds converged on the groin.
If he bit Clark's thigh now, the layer of non-Newtonian fluid armor in the Batsuit would stiffen between his teeth and neither of them would really get anything out of it. But-- He put his hand on the back of it, high up near the curve of Clark's ass, and Clark stopped laughing instantly. Bruce had seen Clark read pen impressions on a pad with his fingertips; what would he feel, through the layers of technology in the Batsuit, if Bruce leaned in, just like this, and put his mouth to the cord of muscle that had jumped a moment ago with Clark's laughter?
Maybe he felt it, or maybe the visual was enough. Clark made another breathy sound -- oh, fuck. His series of gasps had not been coincidence, or surprise; this was just how Clark sounded when he was aroused, these little voiceless noises, like he was trying to be quiet somewhere not private enough, rather than standing in a soundproof office at the pinnacle of Bruce's corporate stronghold. Whatever else happened here, Bruce would have that forever, to unpack in the dark when he needed it: the sonic reality of Clark Kent anticipating a blowjob. Bruce pressed the heel of his palm against his growing erection and moved his mouth higher, opening it against the kevlar; he tasted Gotham smog and the residue of the detergent he used on the suit, felt the minute tremor of Clark's body on his tongue.
"Do I need to be concerned," he said into Clark's hip, "about what sort of fluids you're leaving on the inside of my life's work?"
"For God's sake," Clark muttered, but his affront wasn't enough to keep him from touching Bruce. It was his bare hand this time, and Bruce was struck, as he always was on the rare occasions when they touched, by the incongruous softness of Clark's skin. Clark had the hands not just of someone who'd never had a hangnail or papercut, but of someone who had never handled farm equipment or punched an asteroid to dust. He made one tentative pass and then a firmer one, stroking back the hair disarranged in this evening's hostage debacle, and finally just let his hand rest on Bruce's head, his thumb at Bruce's hairline. "No, I, no," he said, like he was only half paying attention to his own words. "I don't know what you do when you suit up, but I wouldn't go commando in someone else's vocation."
"That's no guarantee," Bruce said. And then, aridly, "For example, I expect at least these boxers I have on to be a lost cause by the time we're finished here."
Clark bit off a little gasp, and Bruce's cock jumped against his palm in response. Clark must have seen this, or heard it, because his fingers tightened against Bruce's scalp, which sent a shiver down Bruce's neck. This chain reaction could run away with him if they weren't careful.
"I know," Clark blurted, "god, I can smell you."
The shiver walked up Bruce's spine like fingers this time. Everything about this was so goddamn intrusive. Concealing his reactions to Clark so assiduously he didn't even feel them himself has been his way of life, and here they were, in the failure state Bruce had always envisioned, where just being in a room with Clark allowed him to pry into Bruce's thoughts like no one else on Earth could. He needed to control this, he needed to get the lid back on it, but for now the thrill of being able to want Clark so flagrantly bore him along like a river rapid.
He rubbed his cheek against Clark's hip, drunk on honesty, and said, "But you're not quite as interested in that in its own right as you are in hearing me talk about it."
"What? Of course I-- Okay, you know what, are you going to make fun of me or are you going to get -- get on with things?"
"There has technically never been anything preventing you from just undressing yourself," Bruce said, and nosed at the Batsuit's groin protector. Clark definitely didn't feel that, except as pressure on his pelvis, but Bruce heard the breath flutter in his throat anyway. Would Clark's erection feel like a human's? More rigid, maybe. It must be passably humanlike in most respects, or Clark would have warned Bruce by now, if only to manage the likelihood and timing of that particular sort of rejection. Or maybe he assumed that Bruce wouldn't be doing this at all if he weren't prepared to put his mouth on whatever might be inside that cup with very little hesitation -- that Bruce would have already thought these possibilities through. That was presumptuous, but accurate.
Clark's hands went to the waistband like they had at the start of all this, then hesitated; either the sight of Bruce parting his lips and letting his teeth just brush against the cup had stopped him, or he was stymied for a way to hustle Bruce along. Politely hurrying up a blowjob was a skill Clark probably had not needed to cultivate. He was so careful of other people physically, he'd never just yank down the bottom half of the Batsuit and shove his cock into Bruce's face, though -- Bruce's heart rate spiked and he made no effort to pull it down to normal -- that would not be awful. And what reason did he have to know how much he could accomplish just by leaning into Bruce, pushing back against him instead of accepting his attentions with still politeness, or by slipping his fingers into Bruce's mouth until the temptation to have more of him there was too great to resist?
Bruce swallowed audibly. Jesus, it was working and Clark hadn't even had to do it. He took his hand off himself and reached up, hooked his fingers through the waistbands of the Batsuit's bottom half, the undersuit pants, and -- sure enough -- whatever cotton item Clark had on beneath that. Bruce put his mouth to the sliver of skin that appeared where the Batsuit gave way; Clark inhaled shakily, and Bruce felt the tension and release in the muscles of his stomach. He tasted unremarkable, quite a bit less sweaty than someone just coming out of the suit should have been.
The waistband would only come down a couple of inches, only relinquish that much of Clark's skin to Bruce's mouth, before he had to involve his other hand to get it down past Clark's hips. Those first few inches were always the most difficult, and doubly so on a body the suit didn't quite fit; but the suit gave Clark up, and all at once Bruce had Clark's bare ass in his hands and the curve of Clark's freed cock bumping his jaw. His stubble would have been no great fun for anyone else, but maybe the texture or the pressure worked for Clark, who jerked his hips forward just a fraction and then made an obvious effort to relax. Bruce sought him out blindly, until his lips touched soft hot skin, and slipped his mouth over the head.