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dceu_kinkmeme2016-04-14 12:37 am
dceu_kinkmod) wrote in dceu_kinkmeme2016-04-14 12:37 am
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DCEU Prompt Post #1
Welcome to Round One of the DCEU Kink Meme!
Please have a look at the extended rules here.
The important rules in short:
- Post anonymously.
- Negative comments on other people's prompts (kink-shaming, pairing-bashing etc.) and personal attacks of any kind will not be tolerated.
- One prompt per comment. Warnings for common triggers and squicks are encouraged, but not required.
- Prompts should follow the format: Character/character, prompt.
- Keep prompts to a reasonable length; prompts should not be detailed story outlines.
- No prompt spamming.
Please direct any questions to the Ask a mod post. For inspiration: list of kinks .
Prompt, write, draw, comment, and most importantly have fun! Please link to your fills on the fill post.
Here's the discussion post for all your non-prompt/fill needs.
We now have a non-DCEU prompt post for any prompts in other 'verses (comics, animated series, other movies or TV shows etc.).
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FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-05-31 10:56 pm (UTC)(link)That's about the easiest it is, of course. Once Bruce has improved to the point where he can sit and stand without posing a genuine physical risk to himself, he's a completely abysmal patient. Clark was right: he does hate pain medication. It's his incapacities that bother him, the fact that he's anything less than 100%—Batman never could stand to feel hobbled—but the constant, inescapable pain gives his frustration a vicious edge. He doesn't like needing help, doesn't like to lean on Clark; but sometimes he has to, and every time Clark is there.
(Before the injury, Clark didn't ever—he didn't really touch Bruce, not while they were in the house. Sometimes he's so glad to get to, now, that he starts to feel guilty. But he tries to imagine what it would be like, him back in Metropolis alone, Bruce struggling around the lake house and snapping at Alfred and hurt; and he can't regret it.
Even if he is enjoying it more than he should.)
It doesn't help that Bruce isn't sleeping properly. Clark discovers this on the fourth night, waking blearily at the sound of what he figures out is Bruce three floors away, trying to catch a tool before it can slide off the workbench next to him and making a small sharp sound when the movement is too much.
He doesn't think Bruce will appreciate being confronted about it, so after a moment's indecision, he lies back down.
But the next time, he wakes right when Bruce first slides out of bed—and it's undeniably embarrassing that he's tuning into Bruce that closely, but he decided he was going to be honest with himself: he's not sorry. Especially not when it means he can cut Bruce off before Bruce gets more than one floor into the Cave.
"You really should try to rest."
And it's a sign of how far down the injury has worn Bruce, Clark thinks, that that startles him. Not much—or Bruce is still good at covering for that kind of thing, even tired and distracted, even at this hour. But his head comes up just a little too fast, his gaze is just a little too sharp, for Clark not to have surprised him.
Plus he's still got an arm wrapped around himself, and a hand pressed to his side where Clark is fully aware the staples start. He almost never lets himself do that around Clark or Alfred.
"I realize you're not going to listen," Clark adds, and holds out one glass of water, keeping the other for himself. "But I feel like somehow Alfred would be able to tell if I had the chance and didn't say it, and he'd judge me for it."
"God forbid," Bruce says solemnly, and takes the glass.
"I get extra bacon in my morning omelet if I tell him what your heartrate is," Clark says. "We have a system and it works for us."
"My own paramour," Bruce murmurs, "an enemy agent," and he shakes his head, expression exaggeratedly betrayed, before he takes a sip.
He's sitting on the floor next to the stairs, back against the wall—for support, and Clark shouldn't draw attention to that unless he wants to annoy Bruce. Besides, if he sits next to Bruce, there's only one thing they'll be looking at. So he sits on the bottom step instead, and waits.
"I'm all right," Bruce says, after a second sip.
Clark waits some more.
"I was—I couldn't get comfortable," Bruce concedes; and it's not as though Batman can't deploy the silent treatment with the best of them, Clark thinks, so Bruce must not mind telling him too much.
"Sure," Clark says aloud. "And you figured exerting yourself until you strained your injuries a little would fix that. Seems reasonable."
Bruce exhales sharply, not quite a laugh. "If someone told you I was a reasonable man, Clark, they were lying." He settles back a little more firmly against the wall, eases his hand away from the staples.
And then, Clark sees with a lurch, he looks up past Clark, and his face turns grim.
"Bruce—"
But Bruce apparently isn't willing to let himself be distracted, not tonight. "Don't tell me you haven't noticed it," he murmurs, flat.
Clark swallows. Of course he has, it'd be ridiculous to claim otherwise: the stairs down into the Cave are worked around it, everything about the space is oriented toward it. It's the focus and the frontispiece and completely impossible to ignore. And it wouldn't be that way unless Bruce wanted it like that, but it's—it's almost brutal, in a way Clark is starting to think Bruce mostly only is toward himself. His worst mistake, the thing that hurts him most, deliberately and permanently exposed so he can never forget, never move on; so he can keep stringing himself up for it, every time he walks past it. God, it makes Clark sick to think about—but he doesn't have the right to tell Bruce that.
And he'd—he is a reporter. He knows who wore that uniform, whose laughter is scrawled across it. He looked it up. He knows what happened.
"I have," Clark admits. "Bruce, you don't have to tell me—"
"You should know," Bruce says. "I shouldn't—you should know."
God. The last thing Clark wants to be is another way for Bruce to punish himself; but he can't figure out how to say that in a way Bruce will listen to, and then it's too late. Bruce is already talking.
"I failed him," Bruce says quietly. "I could have killed the man who killed him before it ever happened. But I chose not to. I chose inaction—I placed my own honor, my private moral code, above the potential cost of that man's future decisions." He pauses, looking away, and then with careful deliberateness sets the glass down; and when his empty hand settles again onto his thigh, it's a fist, white-knuckled. "And then." He pauses again, uncharacteristic, and swallows. "And then you—"
"Bruce," Clark says, because suddenly he's pretty sure he sees where this is going; but Bruce shakes his head and holds out a hand. He's still not looking at Clark.
"Let me," he says. "Just let me—I didn't want to make that mistake again. And the cost of inaction with you felt—" He shakes his head again. "Incalculable."
He stops again, struggling—struggling in a really Bruce way, silently, carefully contained; but Clark can tell anyway, because he knows where to look these days. And he wants to tell Bruce to stop, not to worry about it, to go back upstairs and sleep, except maybe that won't help. Maybe this is something Bruce needs to say.
And if Bruce needs to say it, then the least Clark can do is hear it.
"I didn't realize," Bruce says slowly, "that the cost of action would be, too. I thought I had learned my lesson, that I knew how not to be wrong about this, but I—"
His jaw works; he looks at the wall, drags a breath in and lets it out.
And then he says, "You died too. I—no matter what I do, someone dies who shouldn't."
Clark looks down at his own glass, swirls the water around absently. He licks his lip, trying to think what to say, and then finds himself biting it, because—
Because he knows what to say. He knows exactly what to say.
He sets his glass down next to Bruce's, and now he understands why Bruce did it: he doesn't want to break it, and he might if he's still holding it while he talks about this.
"If you'd been there," he starts slowly, "when he died, you'd—you would have done something."
He risks a glance: Bruce has closed his eyes, bowed his head, but that doesn't mean he's not listening. "Yes," Bruce says.
"But you weren't," Clark says carefully. "You were—you regret not having acted earlier, but at the moment he died, there was nothing you could have done to stop it. And I—Bruce, you couldn't have done anything about me, either. We needed the kryptonite, nothing else would have worked—"
"Diana could have handled the spear," Bruce says flatly, "I could have handled the spear—"
"You wouldn't have lived through that either," Clark says, shaking his head. "I was—I got impaled, Bruce, Diana wouldn't have survived that and neither would you. And there wasn't time to hand it off anyway. Besides, I'm—I'm fine." And he is. He likes the dark a little less now; he dreams sometimes about looking down, finding a hole in his chest, that sudden understanding of what it means to need to breathe and not be able to. The pain. But Diana or Bruce—odds are they would've been dead, really dead. Clark died, but then he got better. He's fine. There's absolutely nothing he can regret about that, no better way that fight could have ended. He's glad it was him.
But that's not actually the point.
Clark looks at the wall—at the display case, now that it feels like he can, and the joke is on him, isn't it? He squeezes his eyes shut and makes himself say it: "When my father died, I was there."
Bruce is silent—so much so that Clark actually opens up a little to make sure he's still there.
"I was—I was right there. I was watching. And I could have—I'm Superman. There's nothing I can't do, nothing I couldn't have done—" He has to stop and swallow, suck in air, and it sounds more like a gasp than it should.
"Clark," Bruce says, but Clark doesn't want to hear it, doesn't want to listen to Bruce try to make him feel better about this.
"And he wanted me not to, but I didn't have to listen. I had a choice. I was scared and I didn't know what to do, I didn't want anyone to see me, and I was—I was selfish. I was selfish and I let him die." Clark shakes his head and can't stop himself from pressing the back of one hand against his mouth—just for a second, just to help him get a grip. He doesn't have the right to cry about this. He waits until he's pretty sure his voice won't crack; but it's still tight, hoarse, when he tells Bruce, "Whatever you did or didn't do for me, for Jason—you would have, if you could. You're a good man, Bruce. And you—you weren't wrong, to be worried I wouldn't be—"
"Clark," Bruce says again, low, much closer than Clark had expected. A hand comes up against the side of Clark's face, warm and solid and strong, and Clark keeps his eyes shut but can't help curling his fingers around Bruce's wrist.
Bruce moves. This time Clark's listening: the legs of Bruce's sweatpants brush each other, Clark's knee, and his bare feet shuffle on the concrete; the angle of his arm changes, too. He sits down beside Clark, close, and pulls—turns Clark's head, and in the end Clark's weak. He can't refuse the invitation, can't not turn his face into Bruce's shoulder.
Clark's not sure how long it lasts. Bruce's hand shifts to the back of his neck at some point, but other than that they don't move. Clark isn't—he's not crying, he can't. He just stays where he is and breathes Bruce's air, listens to his heart, and they sit there together and hold each other up.
Sooner or later, though, his brain starts working again. This is—Bruce is being so kind, so patient with him, especially coming right after he's explained to Bruce that he maybe doesn't deserve that. But this is kind of weird, and Bruce is tired and in pain; Clark shouldn't be making him sit awake on metal stairs at two in the morning, soothing Clark's hurt feelings, when they started out talking about Bruce's bad memories in the first place.
(At least Bruce learned from his. This only goes to show: Clark's exactly selfish as he ever was.)
So Clark takes a deep breath, and then makes himself pull away a little, blinks his eyes open and clears his throat and says, "Sorry—"
"Don't be," Bruce says, very low. And then—
Then he tips Clark's face up, knuckles gentle under Clark's chin, and kisses him.
It's not—there's nothing strange about it, it's nothing Bruce hasn't done dozens of times already. Clark would probably be better off if he didn't know how Bruce's mouth felt, hadn't measured the exact curve of the lower lip with his tongue a few too many times; unfortunately for him, though, he does and he has, and it's all excruciatingly familiar.
But Clark freezes beneath it anyway, because there is one thing that's different: this time, there's no one looking.
For one extraordinary moment, Bruce stays where he is, and Clark can catalogue it all—the warmth of him, the closeness; the symmetry, the two of them and a set of stairs and a dark sky somewhere over them; the perfect unbroken stillness of the utterly empty Cave around them, no Mom coming out of the kitchen with cake and no flashes snapping through a restaurant door, not one single damned shutter clicking anywhere.
And then, before Clark can even get it together enough to touch Bruce back, it's over.
"Bruce," Clark says, wanting to ask him to—to wait, to come back; but Bruce is already standing, turning away to retrieve his glass of water from the floor and then facing Clark again with an easy smile.
"You have nothing to apologize for, Clark," he says, "not to me."
"Thank you," Clark says automatically, wrongfooted. Did he—was that—he hadn't imagined it, he couldn't have; he wouldn't have, he hasn't let himself go there, because that's a terrible idea when he's staying in Bruce's house.
But Bruce's face is nothing but friendly, pleasant, as he passes Clark on the bottom step and knocks a hand lightly against Clark's shoulder. "And you win this round," he tells Clark, "I'll go back to bed. Though I can't promise I'll sleep."
"Alfred and I grade on a curve," Clark manages.
Bruce grins at him and then heads on up the stairs, further; and Clark listens to the sound of his feet crossing polished hardwood, lets out a breath, and tries to decide what the hell just happened.
Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 12:28 am (UTC)(link)and it's undeniably embarrassing that he's tuning into Bruce that closely
<333333333 I love this. And wow, Clark actually startling Bruce is downright worrying.
"I get extra bacon in my morning omelet if I tell him what your heartrate is," Clark says. "We have a system and it works for us."
"My own paramour," Bruce murmurs, "an enemy agent," and he shakes his head, expression exaggeratedly betrayed, before he takes a sip.
THIS IS AMAZING. Clark and Alfred bonding and Bruce's snarky comment, oh my god. <3 And then Bruce actually opening up a little, anon, everything that happens in this part is just so wonderful.
it's almost brutal, in a way Clark is starting to think Bruce mostly only is toward himself.
The entire paragraph is great, but especially this line, because it's so true. Bruce really is more cruel to himself than he ever is towards anyone else. And god, Bruce talking about THAT ... sure, it's another way for him to punish himself, but it's still Bruce opening up to Clark specifically.
"Just let me—I didn't want to make that mistake again. And the cost of inaction with you felt—" He shakes his head again. "Incalculable."
Gah, this is such amazing reasoning for Bruce. And then this here: "You died too. I—no matter what I do, someone dies who shouldn't." Ouch. Ouch. You really know how to hurt me. That whole conversation is just so great, Bruce sharing his pain and guilt and Clark actually ... knowing what to say. Seriously, so good. Just the fact that they're actually talking to each other, not making small talk, not talking strategy, just ... talking. And then that hug. Heart eyes, nonny. <3 Bruce hugging him. I can't. I am dead.
AND BECAUSE I WASN'T DEAD ENOUGH YET YOU HAVE THEM KISS!!! EEEEEEEEEEEH!!!!!!!!!! DEFINITELY DEAD NOW!!!! And no possible excuses this time. My heaaaaaaaart. But then Bruce seemed so weirdly relaxed afterwards and now I'm just worried??? What was Bruce thinking??? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, as always, I need to knoooow, anon. You're killing me in all the best ways.
/OP (who was so, so not prepared for this glorious, perfect fic when she prompted this little prompt ;))
Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 10:54 pm (UTC)(link)I love everything about abysmal patient!Bruce
*braintwin high-five* Seriously, I'm just stuffing every single scenario I like and haven't written yet into this thing, and I am SO LUCKY that you're not interested in calling me on it. :D All the grumpy injured Bruce, all the overly-protective Clark - I just can't stop myself! /o\
:DDDDDDD I don't even know how to tell you how thrilled I am that you liked this whole conversation, OP, I'm just. I CAN'T. It was kind of a sharp change in tone (especially from the first couple parts of this) and I wasn't 100% sure whether I'd really managed to nail it, especially when it's such a difficult talk for them to have - that it worked for you is just AMAZING. *does a wee joyous dance*
/o\ THERE'S NEVER TOO MUCH KISSING, RIGHT? :D
now I'm just worried??? What was Bruce thinking???
Oh, you know, probably something extremely reasonable about what a huge mistake he just made and how best to pretend it never happened. Something Batman-y. ;)
♥ ♥ ♥ ONLY A FEW MORE PARTS, FOR REAL THIS TIME. SOON YOU'LL KNOW EVERYTHING. Thank you thank you thank you, as always, for all your thoughts and all your enthusiasm - I REALLY hope you like the rest, you've made the whole process of writing this fill such a delight!
Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 12:52 am (UTC)(link)- Guilt from Jason and Joker... that's a very good explanation for Bruce in BvS, actually. Headcannon accepted.
But Clark freezes beneath it anyway, because there is one thing that's different: this time, there's no one looking.
- clark no. what are you doing. kiss back.
Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 10:57 pm (UTC)(link)Thank you so much, anon! I hadn't entirely figured out where I was going with this conversation when I outlined this part, only that I wanted Bruce to draw some kind of line between Jason's death and Clark's - and then I started writing it and it suddenly seemed SO OBVIOUS AND PERFECT. So I'm glad it actually does make sense and I wasn't just kidding myself. :D
clark no. what are you doing. kiss back.
But then they might actually unravel this whole ongoing misunderstanding, anon! :P
Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 01:56 pm (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 10:57 pm (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 10:50 pm (UTC)(link)BRUCE COMFORTING CLARK *cries*
BRUCE OPENING UP TO CLARK. *_____*
THAT KISS. AND THEN BRUCE PLAYING THE WAYNE CARD, NOOOOOOOOOO.
Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 11:01 pm (UTC)(link):DDDDDD
:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
... >:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
SORRY, ANON. I SWEAR THEY'LL GET THEIR SHIT STRAIGHT IN THE END?
Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 11:20 pm (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: tell all the truth (but tell it slant); Bruce/Clark, fake dating (15/18ish?)
(Anonymous) 2016-06-01 11:26 pm (UTC)(link)