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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: as to which may be the true; Bruce/Clark, identity porn (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2016-07-15 10:37 pm (UTC)(link)It proves to be the perfect moment for Bruce to make his escape. Martha helps Clark back inside, clucking gently about washing his hands, hadn't she raised him better than that—she glances over her shoulder at Bruce, quick, and nods once before she lets the screen door fall shut behind her. That's his cue. She's on his side about his identity as Batman, at least for now; Clark is distracted, and even if he does catch the sound of the Batplane leaving, Martha will cover for Bruce as best she can.
And Bruce needs to go, because he has a lot of work to do.
Once he's in the air again, he engages the autopilot and then finds his hand on his phone. He has no idea what's involved in reversing a certification of death in Metropolis—he doesn't even know whether city law differs from state or federal when it comes to this kind of thing. Maybe all it will take is a judge's ruling, if they have enough evidence. Not that Clark has a birth certificate, obviously. Bruce isn't sure whether the Kents ever even legally adopted him, but he must have some kind of official identification or he'd never have been able to enter the Smallville school system, let alone rent the apartment he'd been keeping in Metropolis before he died.
Probably best if they can avoid even bringing up the possibility of a DNA test.
He should do some preliminary research before he gets in touch with the Wayne Enterprises legal department about it. It's a good thing Bruce Wayne has already been seen in public more than once with Martha Kent, that Clark Kent's employment at a Wayne Entertainment company is a matter of record—doing them a favor won't be coming out of nowhere. Of course the official story will have to be that the coffin in Smallville was empty. They're lucky Clark was impaled; Martha had erred on the side of caution, not wanting anyone to notice anything amiss, and hadn't held any sort of viewing at the service before the funeral. Only a few people actually know there was a body in there, and that can be handled. Bruce won't let a detail that minor get in the way of sorting this out.
The cover had been, of course, that hapless reporter Clark Kent, out and about on a Metropolis evening, had tragically been caught in the crossfire during the fight. They can't pretend to have pulled him out of the rubble on Stryker's Island after all this time, but a head injury, amnesia, some disoriented wandering and a few months as a John Doe—no, it shouldn't be difficult to account for that side of things.
And as for Superman, it's actually for the best if Clark takes a little while to suit up again. The more time separating Clark Kent's return from the dead and Superman's mysterious resurrection, the better. And Bruce—Bruce should call Diana. She needs to know what's happened. Even if Clark decides not to reclaim Superman's mantle, some other alien enemy of his could scan the planet and find his lifesigns; that kind of thing will always be up to the League to handle, whether Clark's a part of it or not. Bruce should call Diana.
He presses his hands against the Batplane's control board until they've stopped shaking. Adrenaline—from being prepared for the worst, from the surprise of it all. Nothing unusual. Bruce just needs to let it work its way out of his system.
Diana must not be busy: she picks up right away, even though she doesn't know what there could be to pick up for. "Trouble?" she says.
"No," Bruce says, and then for a strange sharp moment his throat constricts. He knows what he wants to tell her—that Clark is alive and that Superman might be; that despite seeming wholly himself, it's still possible that someone has done this to Clark for a reason: implanted him with physical or mental triggers of some kind, altered him in ways the League needs to keep an eye out for.
But none of it will come out. He stares at the Batplane controls and breathes into the phone, and braces himself to shove past whatever the hell is wrong with him—
"Bruce?" Diana says, low, gentle.
And that's enough: the logjam is broken. "Clark's alive," Bruce says.
(Clark's alive.)
(Clark's alive.)
It would be perfectly understandable to ask whether he's sure, but Diana doesn't do it. She knows he wouldn't have called, wouldn't have said it like that, unless he were. "And he's all right," she says instead, after a moment.
"As far as I was able to determine," Bruce tells her. "Of course I'll keep you informed if I learn otherwise."
"Of course," Diana agrees. "Bruce—"
It's requiring more concentration than it should for him to keep his voice level. It doesn't matter why; it only matters that the degree of effort involved is unsustainable. This phone call needs to end right now.
"I'm sorry, Diana, I have to go."
Kindly, she takes him at his word. "Thank you for telling me," she says simply, and she's the one who hangs up first.
The path ahead of him is clear. Call Legal, make an appointment; obtain all the relevant documentation there is from Martha, from the Planet's HR department, from the necessary authorities; decide where and when Clark might have fallen into the water on the day of the fight, where a John Doe with a head wound needs to have washed up. He knows what needs to be done, and he'll do it. And in the end, it won't make any difference if he had to stare down at his hands, at the phone, and force himself to take long slow breaths for three and a half minutes first.
By the time he lands under the lake, he's arranged a meeting with Legal, and all publicly available official documents that so much as mention Clark Kent's name have begun downloading themselves onto the servers in the Cave. Fortunately, he doesn't need to wait for anyone on the HR staff to get back to him—he already has access to the internal files of Wayne Entertainment and its subsidiaries, and it's easy enough to start running a search remotely. The results might even be there by the time he gets to the computers—
"Master Wayne. What a pleasant surprise."
Bruce lets himself grimace before he wipes the expression away and turns around. He hadn't told Alfred much of anything when he'd left—there hadn't been much of anything to tell, at that point, since he still hadn't been sure that whatever was standing on Martha's porch was really Clark. But Alfred never likes it when Bruce goes charging off without a word of explanation, Master Wayne, and as your butler I've no grounds to object, but as your head of security I simply cannot abide—
"Sorry, Alfred," he says.
Alfred's eyebrows go up. "An unprompted apology," he observes slowly, as though to himself, and then addresses Bruce with a conscientious air: "Have you been struck on the head, sir, or merely drugged?"
Both, Bruce almost says. "Clark Kent is alive," he tells Alfred instead, and it should be irritating to have to explain it again—repeating himself like a parrot every ten minutes, Clark's alive! Clark's alive!
It's the kind of thing he never let himself so much as imagine, while Clark was gone. Clark had been dead; every implication of that fact, every choice Bruce had made because of it, had been predicated on the idea that the situation was fundamentally unalterable. It was something that needed to be accepted, a weight that couldn't be set down and couldn't be handed off. Considering all the ways in which the battle could have gone differently—that was tactical. That would help Bruce make quicker, clearer decisions in any similar situations in the future. Idiotic daydreams about Clark just—reappearing, recovering? Utterly without merit. Clark had been dead. What was important was figuring out how to bear it, how to integrate what Bruce had been taught by it into his actions following it. Pretending it hadn't happened or could be undone was pointless, and Bruce simply hadn't permitted himself to be so wasteful.
But now—
Now it's true. It's true and Bruce can say it all day long and it will stay true. Hell, there's a solid chance it will still be true tomorrow morning, if Clark doesn't drop dead again overnight—which is possible, but even Bruce can't convince himself it's especially likely. He hadn't gotten a look at the skin of Clark's chest, but even with a shirt on, it had been clear that there wasn't a hole in Clark anymore; if that's due to external intervention, then yes, perhaps it had been done quickly and could be undone as quickly. But if it was Clark's own healing factor, if it's the result of a long slow process of repair that's been at work since he died, then it's likely it would take trauma equivalent to the original injury to reverse it. And Zod is gone. Bruce retrieved the kryptonite, it's boxed up in lead two levels away. Lex Luthor is in prison. The confluence of factors that brought Clark down is about as unlikely to reoccur as anyone could ask for.
He glances at Alfred—who's looking back, face carefully blank, and hasn't said a word.
"He is," Bruce says, abruptly able to guess why. (He can't even resent it. A surprising number of Gotham villains favor hallucinogenic attacks of various kinds; it's hardly implausible.) "Call Martha yourself. I'm sure she'd put him on the line for you, at least if he's still awake."
"I'll take your word for it, Master Wayne, for the moment," Alfred says, and his expression doesn't change but Bruce sees the way the line of his shoulders eases. "But, if I may ask—how?"
Bruce can't restrain a snort. "How does Clark do anything? He recovered from a nuclear explosion in about five minutes. In retrospect," Bruce adds, "it was foolish to assume death would have a more permanent effect than anything else."
"When you put it that way," Alfred concedes. "And you're—all right, sir?"
As if Bruce is able to quantify it that neatly.
On the one hand—he can't pretend it's anything but a relief. Especially not to Alfred, not in a way Alfred would believe. (Alfred was there for the worst of it, in the immediate aftermath. Alfred—saw.) He had fixated on the resignation of it all, had buried himself in it about as far down as Clark's body had been: Clark was dead, and Bruce could have prevented it but had chosen not to, and there was nothing he could do about any of that afterward except find a way to live with it. The worst mistake he'd ever made, because he'd made it—with Jason, at the absolute least Bruce hadn't been the one to hand the Joker the crowbar. And now it's fixed. Miraculously undone, the terrible and unforgivable consequence erased. Not that the mistake qualifies as unmade; but Clark isn't paying the price for it in a box underground anymore. Bruce can't be anything but grateful for that.
But—
It isn't that he's sorry Clark's alive. Of course he isn't. It's just that it's—it's almost bewildering. Bruce has made something of a study of failure, penitence, regret. He's learned how to brace against their slow persistent pull; he's familiar with their mass, their particular gravity. He'd known what he was facing, after Clark's death. He'd seen the path laid out before him and he'd been prepared to walk it. There had even been a grim kind of comfort in understanding what was coming—in being aware that, plus or minus a few degrees of pitch or elevation, this was how he would feel for the rest of his life.
And now all that has changed.
Clark is alive.
"I'm fine," he says aloud, and smiles a little, claps Alfred on the shoulder as he passes. "I'll be in the Cave if you need me."
He'll figure out what they have to do and where to begin, how to start the ball rolling, and if there's anything he needs from Martha, he can go back for it tomorrow.
(Without the Batplane.)
Re: FILL: as to which may be the true; Bruce/Clark, identity porn (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2016-07-15 10:55 pm (UTC)(link)Eeeeeh, Alfred! Always happy to see Alfred. <3 He's so perfect:
Alfred's eyebrows go up. "An unprompted apology," he observes slowly, as though to himself, and then addresses Bruce with a conscientious air: "Have you been struck on the head, sir, or merely drugged?"
He recovered from a nuclear explosion in about five minutes. In retrospect," Bruce adds, "it was foolish to assume death would have a more permanent effect than anything else."
Haha, so true. Why does anyone even believe Clark is going to stay dead?
I always love introverted Bruce stuff. <3 Although I have to say that you have been teasing us a lot about getting some more Bruce&Clark interaction (for obvious reasons, considering that Clark is probably sleeping or sunbathing or something). ;) I guess I'm just impatient for them to meet again. :D Until then I will just grin like an idiot about how much I love Alfred.
Re: FILL: as to which may be the true; Bruce/Clark, identity porn (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2016-07-17 03:53 am (UTC)(link):D I'm glad! I loved movie!Alfred so much, and his relationship with Bruce was so great. ♥
Oh, well, you know me and pacing - why settle for slow when it could be glacial? But I promise they'll be spending a lot of this fill together (even if Clark sometimes doesn't know it :D). Thank you for your lovely comments, and for your patience! ♥
Re: FILL: as to which may be the true; Bruce/Clark, identity porn (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2016-07-17 10:24 am (UTC)(link)I love that this part is from Bruce’s perspective—it starts as fairly perfunctory. It reads like a Batman plan! ‘Nothing happening?’ You’ve let us in your Bruce’s head! Frankly, I’m surprised 2k+ was able to distill what goes on in that man’s head when his…Bruceness can and should fill multiple volumes of a compendium.
She knows he wouldn't have called, wouldn't have said it like that, unless he were.
Bruce knows what the normal reaction to his statement is, but Diana defies normal and simply knows Bruce well enough to have that kind of camaraderie that she understands how Bruce works! How you manage to convey so much in so little still strikes me with awe.
"Have you been struck on the head, sir, or merely drugged?"
Ah, Alfred. How I adore thee! A snarky delight!
"He is," Bruce says, abruptly able to guess why…
Once again, Bruce understands what the normal reaction is, but those closest to him must defy normalcy because they know Bruce and Bruce is nothing close to normal. This entire exchange (and of course just your Alfred, in general: see above) set me off in a fit of giggles. Bruce is so defensive and stroppy about Alfred’s quiet and nonverbal disbelief—it’s charming and adorable and provided me a window into the facet of their relationship that is more father-and-son. I do love it.
Oh, Bruce. I love how he’s so relieved that Clark is alive, but at the same time Clark’s resurrection has left him kind of unmoored—after all, how can he torture himself with Clark’s death if Clark isn’t…well, dead. And Clark being alive isn’t an automatic absolution for Bruce. How inconvenient!
(Without the Batplane.)
Ooh! Bruce Wayne in all his Wayneing glory! I can’t wait! And I shan’t! I was so thrilled to see two parts for me to consume; the most difficult part was making myself stop so that I could adulate you. I mean, I do that as I’m reading, but e-huggles aren’t quite the same as something as you can read.
Re: FILL: as to which may be the true; Bruce/Clark, identity porn (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2016-07-18 10:22 pm (UTC)(link):D And, as ever, I'm also thrilled you're still enjoying this. ;) Bruce's POV is just such an interesting exercise in - I mean, it's practically unreliable narration, really, the way he thinks about things and the way he justifies everything to himself. So it was certainly fun to WRITE 2k+ of him thinking, making a phonecall, thinking more, and having like a six-line conversation! /o\ I'm just relieved it was even a fraction as engaging to read. :D
How you manage to convey so much in so little still strikes me with awe
And that you can read it and somehow still praise me for being concise! You're far too kind, anon.
:D Haha, thank you - I really do love Alfred so much, and his long-suffering and gently snarky iteration in the movie was just such a delight! So I'm glad you liked that part.
how can he torture himself with Clark’s death if Clark isn’t…well, dead
Oh, he'll find a way, I'm sure! ;) Of course I wanted Bruce to be pleased, but it occurred to me that then again it's Bruce: he had a PLAN for how this was all going to work out after Clark's death, and a plan that's foiled by Clark resurrecting himself is just as foiled as a plan that falls victim to enemy action. BRUCE DOESN'T LIKE FOILED PLANS
:DDDDDDDDDDD YOU KNOW IT. This is so silly because you're about to get this in stereo when I reply to your OTHER lovely, kind, long comment, but thank you so, so much - I'm just over the moon that you're liking this and enthused about it, and so grateful for all your thoughts! ♥ THANK YOU.