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.

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 (5/?)

[(Anonymous)]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa this is so self-indulgeeeeeeeeent /o\ Which is to say: angst everywhere, and I know this meme is CNTW but Bruce is a mess and there's some suicidal ideation/imagery in here. Brief! But present.



He's made a misstep.

He doesn't know what it was, but he knows it happened. Somewhere, one word or another, or his tone, the way he said it—or, of course, something he's simply given away without intending it, without sufficient fucking ability to check himself.

(He's expended so much effort, over the course of his life, to bring himself to heel. To make sure people look at him and see precisely what he wants them to see, no more and no less. His stance, his expression, his attire; the way he holds himself, his manner of speech: under ordinary circumstances, they're more than sufficient to convey any impression he wants to give. He's capable of centering himself, of focusing on what is essential and wiping his mind clean—

His conscious mind, at least. He can put emotion aside, can ignore it, can contain it.

But apparently he's never quite figured out how not to feel it.)

He can't identify the mistake, but Clark doesn't seem to be trying to hide the consequence from him: Bruce can feel the blurry bright splash of a hunch, the slow wave of realization rolling in after.

"It's because of me, isn't it?" Clark says quietly. "It's because of this."

"Clark—"

"It is," Clark says, and now he sounds sure.

And why shouldn't he? Bruce could try to lie to him—but it's more than likely that he would be able to tell, and without even intending any intrusion. He'd only have to want to look, he'd only have to try to, and he'd know.

It's almost funny, really, that Bruce should find himself once again dependent on Superman's restraint, goodwill, and bluntly intuitive sense of ethics.

At least he knows better than to discount them, this time around.

"So you're just—not going to sleep until we find that mother box? Are you serious?"

"Another solution may present itself," Bruce says. "Clark, I'm not flirting with sleep deprivation for the hell of it. For all we know, access to our unconscious minds during a simultaneous REM cycle will make this permanent."

"Yeah, I'm sure that was Steppenwolf's plan," Clark murmurs. "He'd have bound himself to my mind and then dreamed at me. You think his species has REM cycles?"

"Why not? It appears your species does," Bruce says flatly.

He's expecting Clark to snap back at him, to tell him to stop being such an asshole—he's angry with himself, fine, but he's already made Clark feel it all day. It's hardly fair for him to take it out on Clark externally, too.

But nothing happens, for one drawn-out beat of silence. And then Clark says, soft, "I guess I should have known. You never do anything unless you think you have to."

Surely that won't be all. Bruce stares into the Knightcrawler's cracked-open joint and sees nothing. He's bracing himself for multiple eventualities. For Clark to be frustrated with Bruce's stubbornness, his paranoia; for Clark to be angry with him—on Clark's own terms, this time—for insisting on carrying on this way when Bruce has already proven so blatantly unable to prevent the poisoned well of himself from brimming over. For Clark's disdain, or bewilderment, or exasperation. For Clark to reach directly into the heart of him, and pull out every word that's ever been brought to bear on the subject of Bruce and his pathological need for control.

But he waits, and what he feels inside himself, in that strange interior space that they now share, is—resignation. Resignation, deep and shadowed, welling up, a long slow way to drown.

He's done his best to avoid that place where they both are. He's tried not to touch it, not to look at it, to recite The Story of the Stone to it and otherwise stay at a distance from it. But now he can't help but turn to it—he can't help but lean a little closer, in there. Because it isn't just resignation, he thinks. Like Wagner, an opera, an orchestra, there's more than one note being played at once: resignation is the loudest, but there's a harmony beneath in a minor key, the tuning undeniably sour; bitterness, on a scraping sharp, and unhappiness, soft and drearily flat, somewhere below—

"—and I know you wouldn't risk the League over it, I do," Clark is saying quietly. "I didn't mean to make you think otherwise. Just—take care of yourself."

Bruce turns, and Clark isn't looking at him but then does—just a split-second glance, a single glimpse of those eyes, and then before Bruce can even open his mouth, Clark is gone.

(He'd lost that race with Barry. But not by much.)

Gone, but not gone, because of course he's still right there in Bruce's head.


*


Clark had slept, last night.

Clark had slept, and Bruce's suspicions had been confirmed. Conscious attention can to some degree affect what's shared, or at least what's most superficially presented at the connection's upper levels. When they're both awake, and doing their best not to look any deeper, a facsimile of some degree of privacy is possible. They aren't forced to audience each other's every thought. During the day, Clark had focused himself elsewhere, had gone about his usual routine without listening at the threshold of that wide-open door between them—and without shouting across it himself, for that matter. But when conscious attention is gone—

When Clark had been asleep, he had been—there. Relentlessly, he had been there. The soft drowsy presence of him could hardly be called invasive, but it had certainly been unignorable, blurry-edged and warm. Bruce had sat at his desk with ten monitors full of vital information in front of him, and had absorbed none of it. He'd been too busy feeling.

Because he could feel it all: every flicker of reaction to what seemed to have been mostly untroubled dreams. Delight, in a bright loud burst like laughter, settling into the murmur of curiosity, interest; meandering from there to stillness and then back to determination, muddled but insistent—a different dream, Bruce had thought at the time—

And then Clark had woken, thirsty. Clark had woken, had yawned and stretched and sleepily rubbed a hand across his bare sternum. And Bruce had jerked in his chair in the Cave and made himself look at the screen in front of him until the shapes on it were words again, and hadn't allowed himself to try to decide whether he'd been able to perceive the precise texture of Clark's chest hair.

Clark didn't seem to have noticed anything. Not last night, and not today. Even without a direct line into Clark's head, Bruce has no doubt Clark's apology would have been unmistakably sincere. I don't know what came over me. He hadn't been angry, hadn't felt he had any reason to be. He hadn't understood just how thoroughly justified he would have been not only in the emotion itself but in every word he'd hurled—selfish and greedy and hypocrite.

Bruce needs to figure out how to fix this as quickly as possible, and not for the sake of any abstracted concerns over secrecy or security. Not even for the sake of preserving whatever tentative working relationship he and Clark have managed to settle into.

He needs to figure out how to fix this, simply because doing so will permanently remove any temptation to let himself believe it might not be possible.

Because it is tempting. He's scoured himself repeatedly for any indication of a physical mechanism that can be reversed or turned off or removed, and has found none. Perhaps the mother box will be enough—if they can find it, if they can deactivate it, if the connection it created is actually dependent on its energy and not already a whole and separate construction.

Bruce has never liked "if"s very much.

What he'd said to Clark hadn't precisely been a lie. For all they know, shared sleep would affect the function of their joined minds in ways they don't understand. But—

But, for all they know, this already is permanent. For all they know, shared sleep won't do a damn thing that hasn't already been done—or that Bruce hasn't already done by so carelessly letting his own relentless anger seep into the back of Clark's mind for a good eighteen hours.

(Maybe it's a matter of usage, of intensity. Maybe they'll discover that it could have been broken, if Bruce had only been able to keep himself to himself.

Maybe he's already trapped Clark better than a dozen spiked kryptonite restraints ever could.)

Except if Bruce allows himself to think that—to feel the place where Clark is in his mind and believe, even for a moment, that he will never have to give this up—

(It wouldn't matter, then. It wouldn't matter if his lapses only multiplied from here, if he gave up every effort to hold himself back. Even if Clark knew everything, even if he understood that to touch the black roiling interior of Bruce like this was to tarnish himself irrevocably, even if he hated Bruce—

He wouldn't leave.

It would be wrong, it would be vile; he wouldn't be able to leave, he would hate it, it would be unconscionable to let it happen. Bruce would walk into the bay in a three-piece suit with lead-soled shoes before he'd sit back and let Clark stay chained to him forever against Clark's will.

But—

But he wouldn't walk into the bay alone. Clark would be with him, even then. And in a terrible twisted way, Bruce can't help but find that thought almost appealing. Clark would be there; Clark would grasp his willingness to implement the only remaining solution, would perceive the true measure of all his many shades and flavors of guilt and regret. And it wouldn't be his fault. He wouldn't have had to say a word, wouldn't have had to choose to make Clark aware of those feelings—would not, in doing so, have implied that Clark ought to care about him or his actions or his state of mind.

He wouldn't have to do anything except make the right choice, except walk into the water. And Clark would be there, and Clark would know everything, and Bruce wouldn't be able to prevent either—would, for once, in this single respect, be absolved of all responsibility.

Appealing. That is, undeniably, the right word. Helplessly, profoundly appealing.

Which neatly illustrates the precise degree to which the inside of his head is a tripwired, landmined hellscape that should never have had another person in it in the first place.)

—he won't be able to bear it. It can't be permitted to happen that way. He can't allow himself to permit it to happen that way.

He trusts Clark with his mind. Restraint, goodwill, a bluntly intuitive sense of ethics. But

(selfish, greedy—hypocrite)

he doesn't trust himself with Clark's. He can't. They don't know enough about how the mother boxes work, about what Steppenwolf might have had in mind or what the long-term consequences might be, for Bruce to let down his guard.

Bruce already killed Clark once. Clark, in his head, is a light—a light that Bruce has managed to thoroughly extinguish before. And he's not going to let himself do it again.