DCEU Prompt Post #1

[dceu_kinkmod]

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.
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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.

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Re: FILL: Regroup (7/many) -- Bruce/Clark, rough hatesex

[(Anonymous)]

Author note: Seriously meme, I think I somehow my hatesex fill ended up as a 20th century novel of manners. D: Warnings for: people talking like a lot and ????

All of my love and apologies to Edith Wharton.

---

Chapter Three: Natural Hazards

* (B) *

The teacup in Clark Kent's hand trembled. It was set down on its saucer and pushed away from its owner. Clark paced away from the living room to stand in front of the lake view.

Night had come. Clark cut a striking figure--the grating tones of his plaid melted into a wash of dark color and he appeared to glow where the light touched him, limning his shoulders with a faint blue shine. The moonlight paid him the compliment of not seeming so out-of-place in the empty shell of Bruce Wayne’s life. The epitome of damning with faint praise.

Clark’s back rose and fell like he was breathing deeply. Whatever else he might be thinking, he didn't share it with the room.

Sprawled in his chair, his dressing gown thrown open, playing for an audience that wasn’t even watching him--Bruce felt tired. The strange lightness from when he’d woken had bled away, and the enormity of everything he had to do--everything he hadn’t done while he’d been injured--flattened him. Gotham, undefended, for months. Superman, unchecked in the world. His heart seethed. He didn’t even know what he grieved most: the time that had borne him away from his purpose; the obsession with Superman that had swallowed him whole; the choice he had made to fight alongside Kal; the choice he had made when he’d broken on the warehouse roof; the skin he had tasted once (and only ever once, he would bend his will with his bare hands to make sure of that); the wounded he didn’t save; the wounds he didn’t inflict.

* (A) *

The chief sin of the Wayne lineage, according to Alfred, was dwelling. Both Bruce and his father had the same bull-headed tendency to build their homes inside of failure, and let neither good fortune nor opportunity dislodge them from the moral privation of their soul. He had been stunned to see Bruce at the door, mugging for Clark, as though no time had passed.

As he watched Bruce fold in on himself like an origami crane of guilt--now, Alfred started to believe.

It really was Bruce sitting in that chair.

Bruce Wayne, scion of the House of Wayne.

All it would take was one night of lying through their teeth, and suddenly, the three months Bruce had vanished from the public eye would be explicable. Speculation that Bruce Wayne death had been hushed up by the Wayne Foundation would dry up on the vine. (The photos of the cenotaph in the Wayne family mausoleum would be harder to explain away, but they could be discredited as forgeries.) And Alfred could get back to the business of securing the Wayne family legacy, by cajoling, flattery or bribery--the unseen half of the team had that watched over Gotham for twenty years.

A tendril of warmth curled through his heart. He felt giddy. On a man of his years, it was unseemly. If he was slightly more sarcastic than usual to compensate for his bubbling sense of excitement, he could be forgiven.

“I thought the idea was rather clever,” Alfred said to no one in particular, craning his neck to watch Clark, who had been seized by a silent fit of laughter.

“Not one of your better jokes, Alfred,” Clark muttered.

Bruce was too far gone to notice the exchange.

* (A) *

A hostile but not unkind silence met his words as Alfred sketched out the plan to revive Bruce Wayne in Gotham society. Like a good conjuring trick, it relied on a dash of misdirection at customs, a sleight-of-hand trade-off between cars, and several hours in the social spotlight to convince high society that Bruce had been touring the Mediterranean coast with his paramour.

Clark wasn’t as pragmatic about the net his speculation had caught him in. He paced beside the glass walls like a caged tiger until he ran out of view, and then swung around the dividing wood wall that hid the elevator entrance to the cave. Bruce leaned forward as Clark drifted closer to the inert Kryptonian drone--what it was doing out in the living room was anyone’s guess. But Clark made a convincing show of not finding anything out of the ordinary with the décor; he picked up the cheerful pink and white medical device, regarded it abstractly, then replaced it on the end table with an aww-shucks hand to the back of his neck.

Alfred’s voice caught. Clark hadn’t pulled the shy reporter routine since the first day he’d arrived at the lakehouse in his civilian persona, messenger bag slung over his shoulder, press badge partially tucked behind his tie, and a I think I may be able to help with the publicity problem, Mr. Pennyworth. He’d nearly thrown the man off the grounds, until Clark had tipped his glasses down and said, It’s me, Alfred in the voice of Superman. Unearthly blue eyes had shone out at him, and he’d known. How Bruce could miss the connection between the two men--he had seen Superman up-close for maybe thirty minutes before the hero had commed Alfred, frantic and pleading, Bruce’s life fading away in his arms--Alfred could only speculate.

Alfred openly stared at his ward. Bruce frowned.

Fondness squeezed his heart… and suspicion crept in.

Why didn’t Bruce recognize Superman?

Alfred trusted Clark, enough to let him convert the lakehouse power grid to accommodate all of the Kryptonian tech--even knowing the wrath it would bring once Bruce was awake. But that trust was not absolute. They had had their differences of opinion. Clark had made more than his fair share of bad calls since Doomsday (but it was not Alfred’s place to offer the young man unsolicited advice--he would have had to ask Alfred, and he never had done). Alfred had worried about how fragile human bodies were, but Clark was adamant that Bruce would recover fully. Was Clark wrong?

With the studied practice of the conjuror, Alfred jostled his teacup to draw attention away from the palm he laid flat against his knee. He curled his fingers into a specific pattern, and returned them to the teacup. It was a coded signal Bruce had drilled into Alfred years ago. Its purpose was to slip Bruce Wayne an urgent message when he was in public.

Clark offered to take Alfred’s cup, as Bruce looked visibly taken aback.

Alfred waited a few seconds, and repeated the sign.

Bruce furrowed his brow.

Alfred continued to offer timetables for the flight and car service to Metropolis, ticking off the selections that absolutely wouldn’t work with Clark’s schedule. Finally, Bruce coughed into his fist, and then gave the countersign that looked like he was brushing lint off his shoulder.

Relief flooded in, even though Alfred wasn’t sure what he had proved. That Bruce remembered a private code he’d created ten years ago? That Bruce understood the reason Alfred had deployed it? That Clark Kent may know some of their secrets, but not all of them?

He chose, against all of the nightmares of the past three months, to put his faith in the idea that the Bruce that had come back to life was his Bruce after all.

“The best news I’ve had all day,” Alfred said.

* (A) *

Everything changed once Alfred initiated the code. The blank abstraction disappeared from his ward’s face. Bruce drummed out his questions rapid-fire, while he mugged vacuously for their guest. Alfred confirmed that Bruce had been out for three months. Superman had brought him back to the lakehouse after the fight, badly injured. His body had been on the verge of cellular deterioration, an effect of the creature’s energy fields. Superman had explained haltingly to Alfred that Bruce wasn’t trying to kill him anymore, and maybe he could help.

(Alfred hoped to God that Bruce never asked how he knew Bruce had failed to kill Superman--Alfred would claim to his dying day that he’d gone for a drink and a brisk jog during the resolution of the fight.)

The Batwing had been spotted in the city, but the rumor that the Bat had perished in the skirmish with Doomsday grew every day he hadn’t responded to his signal. Bruce didn’t ask about how the perished rumor started.

Good.

Alfred wasn’t ready to have that conversation yet.

When Bruce signed Where is Superman?, Alfred realized he wasn’t ready to have that conversation either.

Aloud, Bruce asked where the car would pick up Clark. Alfred took the opportunity to reply to both questions at once, and said: “That’s something of a complex question, Master Wayne.”

He couldn’t lie to Bruce. Not completely. Alfred segued the conversation into how Clark fit into the sprawl of Alfred’s plan, and hoped Bruce would forgive the deception when it was inevitably discovered.

* (B) *

Bruce Wayne barely had a preference for anything, let alone romantic partners. They tended to reflect his taste in cars: eye-catching, powerful, high maintenance. Discreet partners were thin on the ground, if Alfred thought that Clark was their best hope. He remembered Clark at the charity event: his country brown tweed had receded into the crowd, a social camouflage that had let Bruce ignore him right up until Clark had shoved his hand into his face. Bruce Wayne needed the opposite: a presence that would pull cameras to him, and then scatter them just as quickly. Someone who would put him in the limelight, but not under scrutiny.

When Alfred had finished, Clark loosened his tie, clasped his hands, and let his face fall into them--the picture of a broken man.

Clark’s complete lack of enthusiasm prickled what little ego Bruce had left. Ten years ago, he wouldn’t have had to fight this hard for a Candy-On-Arm press event. After Bane, Silver St. Cloud had hung on his arm and lied through her teeth about his yearlong absence. She had kissed his cheek after their month-long fling and whispered, Gotham missed you--the closest intimation she ever made about what Bruce did with his nights. And that had been that. They’d remained friendly, until she disappeared to Europe two years ago.

(Known to this household, Alfred said. He trusted Clark, that much was clear.)

“It’s just the one evening,” Clark started, without looking up.

Bruce tried not to indulge his vanity by combing his fingers through the gray hair at his temples. Bruce Wayne wouldn’t be rankled by Clark’s behavior.

“Ahhhh.” Alfred’s way of drawing out a syllable was an apology and a personal reproach for not thinking a problem through to its logical conclusion. Bruce was childishly glad that for once, it wasn’t aimed at him.

Alfred drummed his fingers, and flicked out his index finger in an elaborate hook. This particular code hadn’t gotten much use since the early days of training Robin, so it took a few seconds for Bruce to remember its meaning.

Do you want to explain?, Alfred had asked. Bruce quirked his eyebrow in response, unobserved by the object of their silent communication. An open palm on his knee, that brushed downwards. And ruin your fun?, Bruce signed back, with more than a little glee.

Alfred punctuated the conversation as he normally did with a very dry hmph, then cleared his throat. “I'm afraid the time commitment will be more substantial than an evening, Mr. Kent.”

Clark protested that, surely, Mr. Wayne must be too busy for social commitments. All three of them felt the hollowness of that argument. Mr. Wayne didn’t have a schedule. Not a real one, anyway. Bruce had no idea what Alfred might cram into it now that he was awake, but now that he was in on the joke, the charade of a very busy man who had nothing in the world to do turned Bruce’s smile smug. The reporter caught Bruce’s amusement and switched tactics abruptly.

“I have that thing, the Syndicate follow-up story. I’ll be unavailable for--” Clark’s hand fiddled with his glasses that were slipping down the bridge of his nose, a darting, nervous gesture that seemed to be caught between the desire to yank them off or to smash them back against his brow.

Honest men. Bruce snorted. Clark Kent was one of the worst liars he’d ever seen.

“Am I missing something?” Clark asked in an even voice, antagonized by the amount of silent fun being had at his expense.

“Bruce Wayne on a date in Metropolis with a Metropolis reporter at his favorite charity,” Alfred said carefully. “It's practically a declaration of intention.”

Clark paled.

(If Bruce were a betting man, he’d put it all on: ill at the prospect that Clark could be mistaken for the sort of man Bruce Wayne would fall head-over-heels for.)

"Two events maximum, and I retain veto power over anything you choose to wear," Alfred bargained.

Clark’s chin rose in challenge. In a halting cadence--“Do you believe that after all of this--”--he curtly gestured between himself and Bruce--“--I’d show up in the wrong suit?”

"To the contrary,” Alfred said with extra gentleness. “We both know the value of appearance, don’t we, Mister Kent? We need the illusion of you being in a billionaire's pocket. We need credibility."

Bruce didn’t know what to expect. Though Kent didn’t have the wisdom granted by the long habit of living with Alfred, he had to have watched enough romantic comedies to understand the idea of the socialite makeover--the indignity done to body and soul in the pursuit of the red carpet look. Demands of time, money, exposure, influence--anything would have made sense in response to Alfred’s intention (stated explicitly or not) of parading Kent before an emergency tailor before the sun rose tomorrow morning. His inseams measured, his shoulders draped, pinned and chalked for a suit that a man as rumpled as Mr. Kent would find distasteful.

But there were no demands: only another nod.

Clark Kent had folded easier than a man with a busted flush at a no limits poker table.

Curious. Worse than curious. Suspicious. Clark Kent was easily the most suspicious honest man Bruce had ever met.

It galled Bruce how much he wanted to trust him anyway.