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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: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2018-02-11 09:24 pm (UTC)(link)Clark isn't too preoccupied to sleep. In fact, he can't shake the idea. Sleep, sleep, sleep. The thought won't leave him alone. Which, he decides, makes sense enough: a span of time where he doesn't have to think about any of this, where he won't be able to keep worrying at the corners of it; where he can't fall into the trap of feeling self-conscious about every single thing in his head, helplessly alert to Bruce's unavoidable presence.
Not that Bruce is looking. Clark thinks he can almost tell, can feel his way along the angled edges of Bruce's carefully-averted attention. But he's still there. And even with Mom, even when Clark had lived with Lois—no matter how comfortable you are together, it makes a difference, having somebody else around. It makes a difference, not being alone.
But if he's asleep, he doesn't think he'll be so excruciatingly aware of it. Even if his dreams are nothing but endless distorted opera, the Ride of the Valkyries on a loop—which, thanks for that, Bruce—it'll at least give him a break.
*
It works all right. Or at least he thinks it does. He has an impression of having woken at some point, that it had taken a little while to settle back to sleep. But his dreams, good or bad, weren't vivid enough to leave much of a mark, and overall it feels like it was a perfectly decent night's rest.
Or—it should have been. He doesn't think he can really call himself tired, without any kryptonite around. But he gets up, gets dressed, and he feels strange and slow, full of a vague background discomfort.
It might just be the aftereffects of spending so much time restrained, or healing so quickly afterward. It's probably not serious. He makes sure to eat something substantial for breakfast, and he gives himself a few minutes on the roof of the apartment building before he heads to the Planet office, soaking up some sun.
It doesn't help. The morning drags. There's a tightness creeping up into his neck, his jaw, that he can't shake, and he feels a frustration, an aimless dissatisfaction, dogging his heels. It gets so bad by midafternoon that he's actually started to see a red tinge at the edge of his vision, in the corners of his eyes. He tries to keep his mind on his work, take deep breaths and stay focused, and he just hopes whatever's wrong with him isn't spilling through to Bruce too badly.
He's almost glad when it happens: something in his head changes at the exact same moment his phone buzzes. A message from Victor, about a parademon sighting—and Bruce, Clark thinks. That's what it was, the thing that shifted. Bruce got the message, too.
He feels better, leaving the Planet behind and leaping into the sky. Not good, but better. The dissatisfaction's eased, now that he's—now that he's doing something.
The coordinates Victor gave take him to a bare flat chunk of Saskatchewan. He realizes halfway there, wind screaming, that he's just going; he should have called someone, should have arranged to meet the League at the Cave, even if he wanted to fly instead of riding in the Fox with the rest of them. But there's a sharp, driving urgency in the pit of his stomach, and he can't convince himself to turn around.
Wherever Victor picked up word of the sighting, it was accurate. Parademons are swarming over waves of tall grass, concentrated around—what is that? They're building something, Clark thinks, pausing a couple miles out to examine the structure with his vision. Metal bones, supporting something that's starting to grow into a tower; but it looks like scrap, bits and pieces they've collected from whatever small towns are closest. Clark's pretty sure he can see a refrigerator near the base, a couple of old TV sets and a rusty box spring.
And then Barry blows past him in a sparking whoosh. "Hey, slowpoke!" he yells, voice Dopplering so hard Clark's pretty sure it takes Superman's ears to even understand him.
Clark grins and hurls himself back into motion, quick enough to tag Barry's shoulderblade lightly before he swings around and throws himself up into a half-dozen parademons carrying a chunk of sheet metal.
It's easy to enjoy this. Whatever half-formed instinct the parademons are following—and it can't be more than that, Clark knows, because there's been zero indication that they have minds of their own in any real sense—they were driven to find themselves some space, to construct whatever the hell this is. Which means there's no one around, no risk of injuring civilians or causing collateral damage. Clark hears the hum of the Fox approaching, only a couple minutes behind, and it's everything he ever wanted: a whole team of people just like him, working together to keep the world safe.
Diana and Arthur leap out of the Fox with matching whoops, and Clark catches Victor's laugh over the rush of air as he flies up to catch a fleeing parademon's ankle and sling it to earth. And Bruce—
Clark reins himself in before he can trespass. Listening for Bruce's heartbeat, the soft sigh of his breath, the low scrape of his boots, isn't anything Clark wouldn't have done before. But Bruce is in his head, now, and Clark—Clark could reach for him there, too.
But he shouldn't. Bruce is still a never-ending stream of words Clark doesn't understand, and Clark has to respect that boundary. As well as he can, anyway, when a mother box tied their minds together.
He does glance over his shoulder, split-second. Just long enough to see Bruce, armored up and forbidding, framed for an instant in the Flying Fox's open bay. And inside him—
Inside him it's quiet, just for a moment. Like maybe Bruce set everything else aside to look for Clark, too.
And then Clark gets back to work.
*
This swarm isn't all the parademons who were in Steppenwolf's ship. There just aren't enough of them. Not that Clark was counting, at the time, but he remembers hearing them, the sound of their wings, their hisses and clicks and cries. There were a lot more of them, and this can't be all.
Which is good, because this swarm doesn't seem to have the mother box.
Victor can't feel it, isn't picking up its energies—and no matter how low-power a state it's in, if it were right here, he would know. Clark scans again, just to double-check that it isn't somewhere underneath the looming pile of the tower, but he can't pick out anything that looks like it's the right shape.
And then all at once he feels his jaw tense, his teeth gritting, and he makes a strangled sound and aims a sharp blow at the nearest chunk of scrap.
Which, of course, buckles around the shape of his fist, the tower shuddering with a groan of metal. He manages to pull the punch enough that the tower doesn't just topple entirely, but he—he doesn't want to; it's hard to make himself, all of him suddenly filled with hot intense frustration. They have to fix this, it's essential, and there's nothing here—
"Clark," Diana says, a careful hand on his shoulder, and Clark blinks and looks at it and then at her, and is dimly surprised to see her. Somehow he'd thought she was further away from him, but—but then he's not all that close to the Fox, is he? He's just confused.
"Sorry," he tells her. "Sorry, I just—I'm just—" Angry. Is he? Isn't he? He shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut and makes himself lower his arm and step away from the tower.
Barry looks startled, eyes round and mouth flat, and Victor—Victor's all lit up, which probably means Clark set off his armor's threat assessment system again, even if it was just for a second. Arthur's watching Clark with narrowed eyes, before his gaze flicks over to Bruce. And Bruce—
Bruce looks fine. Impassive. Not that Clark can see much of anything except his chin, without looking through the cowl, but there's no hint of expression at the corners of that level, steady mouth, and under the armor his shoulders look even.
"We'll have to keep our eyes open for signs of other swarms," he says.
And Clark isn't feeling anything from him at all. Is he? He searches inside himself and can't find anything that matches up to Bruce's face, his stance, that cool featureless internal landscape Clark had glimpsed yesterday through all that obscuring Dante, billowing like smoke.
But even if this is Clark, Bruce should be feeling it a little bit anyway, shouldn't he? Or has he figured out how to wall himself off against Clark's spillover?
He can't hold onto the thought long enough to wonder. Looking at Bruce makes it ten thousand times worse, whatever it is, and suddenly he's moving, Diana catching at his arm again, and she's saying something he can't hear over his own shouting. What is he even saying?
"—and the only thing you're ever going to do is make it worse, you know that," he catches, and jesus, jesus, what is he doing? He and Bruce might not be friends, but it's not because Clark doesn't want them to be, and this definitely isn't the right way to handle it— "you greedy, selfish hypocrite—"
He closes his eyes and grabs for Diana's hand, squeezes her fingers and with a monumental effort manages to bite his own tongue—literally, physically, to cut off the flow of words. He draws in one slow deep breath through his nose, another, and keeps holding onto Diana, who kindly doesn't shake free.
He's expecting Barry, maybe, cracking some kind of half-hearted joke. But it's Bruce who speaks, after an impossibly loud silence.
"Yes," he says, quiet and flat. "I do know that."
Clark doesn't open his eyes again until he hears Bruce turn, hears the thump of his boots against the Fox's bay floor—until he's sure it's safe.
*
He thanks Diana carefully, avoids meeting her eyes, and heads back to Metropolis the same way he came: alone. He goes back to the Planet building, but not inside it. Just over it, hovering, high enough that he's pretty sure no one can see him. And then he tips his head back and hangs there in the air, wind streaming past him, sky cool and blue and endless, until that awful hot rage starts to drain away.
It takes a long time. But gradually, slowly, it settles to a boil, a seethe, a slow resentful simmer. And when he finally feels like he has a handle on it, he knows exactly where he wants to go.
Bruce gave them all entry codes—and, more importantly, little keychain fobs disguising wireless code transmitters.
("A GDO!" Barry had said, beaming. And then, looking around at them all, "Garage door opener. You know? Gate, iris, and if you go through without a GDO you're an interplanetary pancake—wait, are you all actually too old for Stargate? Or, you know, too Kansas? That is so weird.")
So Clark Kent can walk up to the edge of the lake with a hand in his pocket, and after a second the water will part and let him in.
And of course Bruce must get some kind of notification when their codes are used. So he must know Clark is coming; he must have deliberately chosen to be elbow-deep in one leg of the Knightcrawler, when Clark finds him.
"Hi," Clark says.
Which is ridiculous, but then this whole situation is ridiculous. He didn't even have to come here; he could have just shoved all his shamefaced regret right into Bruce's head from across the bay. But that feels like cheating—like texting a thank-you instead of writing a note.
(Mom would agree with him, Clark's sure.)
Bruce doesn't turn around or look over. He just pauses, acknowledging, one long beat where those clever hands have gone still.
"I just wanted to say, about earlier? I'm sorry."
And that gets Clark another pause. "You're sorry," Bruce repeats, meditatively, to the Knightcrawler's leg panel.
"Yes," Clark says. "I didn't mean to—I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have shouted it, either. I don't know what came over me, but I'm—I'm not trying to make excuses. You didn't deserve that, and I'm sorry."
Bruce does turn, then: just his head, just enough to look over one clean white dress-shirt shoulder and meet Clark's eyes. "You really don't know."
"Don't know—?" Clark says, and then—
He doesn't even understand what's happening, for a second. Nothing about Bruce's face changes, nothing, and yet Clark can feel his own sheepish discomfort, his own mixed rue and resolve, and this is—this isn't anything like that. A sharp sick drop, a burst of bitterness at the back of his throat, the violet-black of a bruise.
Clark hasn't gotten one single word of a thought from Bruce all day, not in a language he can understand. But this isn't a thought—it's a feeling.
"Wait a minute. That was you?"
Bruce looks away again. "The connection appears to be operating on multiple levels," he tells the Knightcrawler blandly. "The conscious projection of thoughts is controllable to some degree, but not—"
"That was you. All of it?" Clark can't help asking, because—because jesus, that had felt terrible. Not just the anger, though that had been pretty overpowering, but all the shadowed undercurrents that had come along with it: the slow grinding frustration Clark had been struggling with all day, and the—the spite, the sheer dislike, with which he'd spat all that crap at Bruce.
At Bruce, Clark thinks again, more slowly. Because—because that's who Bruce had been angry with. He'd been standing there, stone-faced, no sign of it anywhere anyone else could see, and so goddamn angry with himself that feeling it secondhand had made Clark scream at him like that.
Clark looks at him. He's still poking around in the Knightcrawler's limb, as if Clark isn't even there, with a tool in his hand so specialized that there might not even be a word for it, and—
"What is that?" Clark asks at last, because the best he can do is guess that it might be one dialect or another of Chinese.
And an impression of the thought must have crossed over, because Bruce says, "Yes," before adding, "Dream of the Red Chamber. Not the whole thing, but the parts I know will last us for a while."
As if he thinks that's a reassurance Clark has been looking for. As if he thinks Clark prefers classic Chinese literature he can't follow to knowing what's actually going through Bruce's head.
"Okay," Clark says after a moment. "But you know you've done this section twice, right?" He thinks about going to sleep, knowing Bruce was still there—and waking up the same way. "Bruce, did you—have you slept at all?"
And for a moment, the recitation falters. It isn't like it was when Clark first woke up on Steppenwolf's ship, he knows what's going on now. And without the barrier of endless words, he can almost see Bruce rewinding, reviewing; he can feel the burst of rue-dismay-chagrin, can taste the salt of it. And his own half-formed thought—that even if he'd been wrong, Bruce stopping to check would still say something—drifts into the same space. He can feel Bruce perceiving it, share the reluctant acknowledgment, and then the words are back, but it's not Mandarin anymore—
"Don't tell me," Clark murmurs, "this is One Thousand and One Nights."
And that Bruce should switch to that after being nagged about his sleeping habits—Clark can't control the burst of amusement, doesn't want to. He's seen Bruce Wayne crack jokes; but he hadn't known to expect as much from this Bruce.
He realizes after a second that he'd closed his eyes, and blinks them open again. They'd been so utterly unnecessary for a minute there, with Bruce much closer than mere line-of-sight.
"I should try to find a copy in Farsi," Bruce says to the Knightcrawler. "Expand my repertoire."
"Bruce—"
"Clark," Bruce says evenly, and finally tosses Clark another one of those steady opaque glances. "I'm fine. I was doing research, I pulled an all-nighter; it happens. I'm still functioning adequately and capable of fulfilling my role with the League. If that changes, I'll suspend myself from active duty. You have nothing to worry about."
Re: FILL: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2018-02-11 11:53 pm (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2018-02-13 09:24 pm (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2018-02-12 08:23 am (UTC)(link)I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I love that Arthur seems to have a good bead on the boys' personalities. That Clark's violent outburst is unusual, but he looks to Bruce because he knows Clark is channeling Bruce.
What I adore the most is the Stargate reference! This was my formative years. And I love that it's Barry that is a fan, it makes me feel more nostalgic and less aged.
Thank you for a beautifully hurtful update!
Re: FILL: and if sun comes; Bruce/Clark, involuntary soulbonding (4/?)
(Anonymous) 2018-02-13 09:26 pm (UTC)(link)I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I love that Arthur seems to have a good bead on the boys' personalities
:D It was! I'm very fond of the idea that Arthur has a pretty good handle on Bruce, and when I was writing his reaction, I couldn't help but roll with what I thought he would do in that case.
Haha, and thank you for not taking me to task for the Stargate bit. ;D I loved Stargate (still do) and it was just such a perfect analogy - and of course Barry marathoned it at some point. I feel convinced of this in my soul. (It wouldn't even take him that long! He could probably watch it on fast-forward, as long as the subtitles were on! :D)
I'm glad you liked it - thanks so much for reading it, and for this very kind comment! ♥