Tumgik
#And to the person who anonymously asked how fit Loudspeaker is
black-and-yellow · 3 years
Text
Tumblr media
May I offer you a Loudspeaker in these trying times?
I am once again requesting you listen to Baby Don't Do It
(Click read more for the version with no filters)
Tumblr media
496 notes · View notes
agapantoblu · 5 years
Text
“High School Nostalgia” - DC
@superbatweek - Day 2 - Possessive
Also known as, I messed up and forgot to post this yesterday, I’m so sorry. Today’s prompt is coming out soon, though!
Smallville High didn’t have much funds when Clark was attending, not even that year when the football team qualified for the state competition. The gym had been held together by charity events and donations from the local families, and most of the repair works had been done by local people willing to lower the prices. Now, so many years later, it didn’t seem to have changed much. There was still even the blackened stripe on the cement outside the gym doors where Clark had accidentally used super-speed to try and make it to class on time and slipped when hastily trying to stop.
Tonight, the whole place was lit well into the evening and there was music coming from the old loudspeakers on the walls mixed with voices and loud laughter. If he’d stretched his hearing he could have told who was there and who wasn’t without the need to get out of the tiny corner beside the punch table he’d cut out for himself, but truthfully he wasn’t much interested in doing so. Clark sighed as he talked himself out of speeding his way through the crowd, claiming an emergency and disappearing, mostly because Ma’ had kicked him out of the barn to get him to come and he didn’t want to disappoint her too badly. “You didn’t even go to your own prom, Clark, let yourself have this,” she’d said, so nice and gentle.
How to tell her he really didn’t look forward to this?
Connor had laughed his ass off and Jon had begged and cried to come along. Easy for them, it wasn’t their public humiliation.
He took another deep breath and dreamed for a moment of that alternative reality version of himself that was currently sitting at the Manor eating Alfred’s pork roast or in his Metropolis’ flat typing up the new article on the Falcone family’s grip on the public tenders for the construction of some infrastructures. Perry wanted it on his desk for Monday morning, it was already Saturday evening and Clark had barely a handful of disconnected sentences to string up together and flesh out. Actually, he truly should go home and write something if he wanted to still have job on Tuesday.
“Kent? Kent!”
Another face he could recognize and would have rather not to, another player from the football club Clark used to envy with all his heart. “Ross,” he said, and the smile came to his lips as easy as fake.
Hiding by the punch table had been a tactical mistake on his part, he had to admit as much.
The man slapped him on the back, hard enough that any other nerdy journalist from Metropolis would have toppled over. Clark forced himself to fake the same. “Damn, man, didn’t think you’d show up!”
“Ah, I didn’t either, really,” and that, at least, was true. He shrugged in his too-big flannel shirt and tried to make himself look smaller. “I was around to help Ma’ with the barn roof, though, so, you know…”
Ross Warren nodded sagely. “Yeah, that old thing was already patched up when we were kids, wasn’t it?” He slapped Clark’s back again. “It’d do her good to have you around some more. And hey, maybe it’d do you some good as well, take you back to the origins, straighten you out a bit, you know. Oh, isn’t that Sarah? Sarah! Hi!”
In another situation, Clark might have felt bad for Sarah, might have even tried to actively engage Ross some more just to give her time to escape, but instead he let her blond hair pull the man away and felt not the slightest remorse when he caught the desperate flash on her face. Better her than me might have not been a very heroic way of thinking, but he’d been fending insinuations and questions the whole night and he was too tired to care. Also, he was not in his suit and Clark Kent was allowed to be human and desperate to escape.
He really, really, shouldn’t have come.
Class reunions were notoriously awful, and Clark had collected all the reasons to hate such events like a child would do with trading cards or Bruce with businesses. 
First of all, he had been all but a popular kid in school. Trying to hide his growing powers while also having no idea of where they came from had meant striving to fit into a very thin space of mediocrity and giving up on most social occasions. Any sport team had been put off the table rather firmly, by his dad, and social gatherings had become hard to join when he’d started getting his heat-vision in his teens. Sure, he’d had Pete and Chloe and Lana, but that was roughly all of his friends from back then. He wasn’t going to even consider Luthor, that was an whole other mess.
Second, he’d left town to go to college and most people seemed to struggle to understand that, yes, he very much enjoyed being a journalist and, no, it didn’t matter that he didn’t really make much, he lived in a minuscule old apartment and he still had a good portion of his student loan to pay back.
Third, well. Not knowing of Superman and all the abnormalities that came with the cape, Clark’s personal life was currently a mess. By all standards, but most of all by Smallville’s very simple but strict ones. Most people here had a job, were married, had kids. He was just short of his forties and the whole town knew now that he’d broken up with his long-term girlfriend, the one he hadn’t even married but had a child with anyway, and, my, how old is the little Jon?, no wonder he spends so much time with his grandmother, the poor thing! On the topic of Connor, instead, people seemed to be split between those who were dying to know who was the mother and those counting the years to try and decide how old Clark must have been when he’d knocked her up.
A man could only hear so many rumors before he lost his mind.
He looked at his watch but the thing, cold and unforgiving as all metal was, told him in no uncertain terms that not ten minutes had passed since the last time he checked. And no, he couldn’t escape at barely half past nine, he’d promised.
A country song came up because, of course, and Clark closed his eyes against the dancing lights. The glass in his hand was still full from the beginning of the night, his glasses kept getting dirty from people hugging him out of the blue and smashing them against his cheek, and regardless of what his medical records might say, he was pretty sure he was getting a migraine.
He thought of Lois. He'd been at work when the e-mail of the event had arrived and he'd spent, in his shock, three seconds too long staring at the bold red letters calling him to the Smallville High Class Reunion and she'd sneaked on him. In his defense, he'd been on his sixth cup of coffee and third rejected draft for Perry, deadline in two hours; he had kinda forgotten about the existence of the rest of the world outside his cubicle, the bullpen at most. 
She'd laughed, of course. 
“I'm sure you'll have fun on your Wanna Be Young Again prom, Smallville,” she'd said, not meaning it in the slightest and rather smug about it, as she clapped him on a shoulder. “You should tell your sugar daddy soon if you want him to have time to clear his schedule for the evening.”
He'd been too busy panicking to react to the crass joke and of course she'd noticed. She'd dragged him to the break room, glared at Jimmy and two colleagues from the sport section until they spontaneously left it and then placed herself arms crossed in front of the coffee machine. Clark had stared longingly at the thing. 
They had both tried to dive deep into whatever had been sending him in a frenzy of nerves and uncertainty, but the truth was that Clark himself couldn't explain it. 
He still couldn't say why he didn't tell Bruce. He told Bruce everything. It was somewhat of their thing, Bruce talking close to nothing and and Clark oversharing from dawn to dusk, a sun of himself. 
Well, a bit later than dusk, because the Bat of Gotham pulled in the night hours and needed plenty of rest or he turned into a grumpy burrito and ravaged the Manor’s supplies of coffee. Which in turn pissed off Tim, which amused Jason, which irked Dick who'd want them all to get along, which troubled Damian as he struggled to decide whether to side with Jason against Tim or with Dick against Jason. Eventually it would all get to Alfred, and nobody wanted it to get to Alfred. 
So, again, he had no idea as to why he went to the length of considering asking Lois but it never crossed his mind to ask Bruce. The thought of him had occurred, of course, he always thought of B, but the option of letting him know, asking him along, slipped out of his mind like a wet soap bar as soon as he conjured it leaving in its wake only a bad taste in his mouth and a lurching feeling at the bottom of his stomach. He’d refused to give the feeling a name but maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with shame, or rather a generic embarrassment.
As he watched his old classmates mingle and chat from his hiding spot, he felt it rise again. He’d never been the most popular kid in school; honestly, had Smallville been just a bit bigger, its people just a bit less interested in each others, and most people in here wouldn’t be able to remember his name. Anonymity had been so important to protect his secret he’d had to sacrifice a lot of experiences and wants of his teenage years. He’d never played in a team or with friends at recess, never really done anything to catch the eyes, always pushed people away the moment they got too close to find something out. So many years later, half disguised behind the single one ornamental fake plant in the whole gym, he felt just the same crushing loneliness he felt in his youth.
Perry’s deadline seemed more and more promising by the second.
“Clark?”
He’d almost choked on his drink the first time he’d caught her voice, a glimpse of her, in the room when he’d walked in, so he managed to keep some sort of control and only pretend to be surprised by her approached. It must have still been his most convincing performance to date, because when he stuttered as he said, “Lana!”
She looked good. She was wearing a light dress with a pattern of red poppies painted like watercolors on the veils of the gown and her smile was radiant. Memories of his hopeless crush on her came back rather impetuously and made him blush a bit at how naively and clumsily he’d approached those feelings, to the point that he promised himself to thank Ma’ for talking him out of the Serenade In The Cafeteria Plan that one time.
“It’s been so long,” she mused, stepping up to him. “You look good.”
It was empty politeness and they both knew it. Clark had spent hours trying clothes that would make him look better, and then he’d been caught in crisis according to which the whole town was going to hate him as a deadbeat asshole of a father and failure of a husband, that his Pa’ was rolling in his grave at his behavior and that trying to pretend he was better than truth was not going to trick anyone. In the end, Jon had walked him and excitedly picked Clark’s clothes for him. 
He didn’t even remember he had a plaid shirt in blue and red squares, honestly. He would easily say it was the ugliest thing he’d ever possessed, and he had it on right now.
“You look amazing,” he retorted, wholly honest. “How are you doing?”
They exchanged pleasantries the way Ma’ did when Mildred from the Hank’s farm came over for tea. There was fondness and a genuine wish to listen to each others, but so much water had run under that bridge and it was hard to sew together the old and the new.
Lana was a veterinarian, of all things. She was in charge of the health of almost every animal around Smallville, she explained, and she’d focused her studies on cattle, breeding and sustainability in particular.
It would have been fascinating, had the questions she was dying to ask not been so openly clear in her eyes, each a sparkling star of that curiosity that grew in places where nothing really happened. Mostly repressed, Clark would give her that; she never voiced any of them. The closest she went to do it was when she asked about Jon and explained she’d met him when she’d gone over at the barn to check on a cow. 
“He was rather adamant it was a very important cow,” she narrated as she shook her head fondly. “Never truly got why.”
“It’s not his,” Clark explained. “It’s a friend’s and Jon offered to keep her at the Barn for a while. He takes his promises very seriously.”
“That’s so sweet of him. He’s a good kid, you should be proud of him.”
“I am.” Just not of his fashion sense. “Do you—uh—”
Lana’s eyes sparkled. “Have any kids?” she laughed at Clark’s embarrassment. “No, none. It’s a good thing too. Got engaged for a while but we broke up before getting married; it would have been awful if there had been a child in the middle.”
A spike of guilt, a coughed oh. It looked like Clark himself wasn’t much better than his townspeople. Lana’s curiosity shifted under his eyes to become an offering of solidarity, an unspoken I get it. She must have had her turn as the talk of the town, the only reason he could have not heard of it was how often he’d been out on missions lately and Ma’s stubborn refusal to partake in gossiping.
He’d been striving the whole time to keep his hearing in check not to listen to what was being murmured about him, but he hadn’t been able to do anything about the looks he caught stolen from him, and it had been awful but it had been one night. Half of it, truly. Lana had been living this for a while now, and whereas her reputation was definitely stellar compared to his her pain and decisions had deserved more privacy as well.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he could only say. His supposed gift for words seemed to have abandoned him at the moment. 
Lana graciously waved his worries away. “It’s alright, it happened quite some time ago. I’m good now!” She smiled. “I hope you’re doing better too?”
“I am. My ex-wife and I are in a great relationship still and my kids are a walking mess that I wouldn’t trade for the world, so…”
“Sounds great!” She moved a hand to touch his arm, the one holding his paper cup and bent at his chest-height, and she leant forward just the tiniest bit. 
The Clark of his adolescence wouldn’t have recognized the gesture, but present Clark had been around Catwoman and Lois and Diana enough to recognize the signal. Still, he panicked just as much as he would have back then. “Uh, I—”
Lana chuckled at his embarrassment. “I’m glad to hear you’re doing fine, Clark, really. You do look good, tonight.” And she opened her mouth to say something else, maybe a more open flirt, but her eyes flickered to the side of his head for a second and then returned there. She frowned. “Isn’t that someone famous?”
For a moment, all that mattered to him was finding an excuse to slip out of the contact and try to discreetly build back some distance. He could do that, he was actually great at it when he wanted to! Plenty of practice in his youth and years of knowing Bruce had made him somewhat of an expert in keeping people at bay, at will.
It took him a moment too long for the sight to register. His head categorized all the details his eyes caught and then somehow believed, for the briefest of instances, that one of his classmates — maybe Duncan McGee?, the son of Terry McGee, owner of the local MiniMarket? — could have grown into a dark-haired blue-eyed tall beauty with shoulders as wide as a door frame and a penchant for buying expensive suits handmade by a Gothamite tailor.
Then his brain asked, why did we expect him not to know already?, and Clark’s heartbeat just stumbled in reply.
Bruce looked stunning. He’d gone for a navy suit with gray shirt, no tie, and he’d put on the kind of neutral makeup that made hot men looked heavenly on magazine covers. Nobody seemed to have noticed yet, but he was wearing the cufflinks Clark bought him last Christmas: a pair of cheap little things of gold-lacquered plastic in the shape of cowboy hats. He even somehow managed to make them look good, damn him.
Someone whispered it, Bruce Wayne, and it broke the silent spell that befallen the gym as the doors opened and the new guest introduced himself to the name-list check at the entrance. Murmurs rose, hissing of snakes in the air, but Bruce looked entirely unconcerned, as if he couldn’t even hear it.
Clark, instead, heard him perfectly as he said, “I’m Clark Kent’s plus one. He must have mentioned, most certainly?”
He most certainly did not, but Lydia was too flustered by Bruce’s smile to deny. She offered him a name tag to attach to the lapel of his suit and looked absolutely devastated as he did it, eyeing the suit jacket as if she were apologizing to it, then Bruce’s eyes found Clark’s and he forgot about the rest of the gym.
Silent conversations had grown to be their forte, despite how prone to misunderstanding they had been at the beginning of their friendship. Now, he could easily read the question in Bruce’s slightly arched brow and the falsely lax grip on the empty paper cup he’d taken from Pete’s confused hands. He nodded.
Bruce took his time making his way to them. He was unconcerned and lazy to the eye, spent the walk throwing looks around as if he were a child at the zoo just about dying to know everything about everything, but when he reached them he wasted no time putting his arm in Clark’s, curling it to rest just about on top of where Lana had just touched him.
Once he was well tucked in Clark’s side, far too close for misunderstanding, he smiled at her. “Hello, there.” His voice was smooth and charged, Brucie Wayne and his finest, but he made no move to get closer and he turned to Clark instead. “I’ve been calling you—” not on the phone, “—but you didn’t answer. I guess now I know why, uh?”
Clark sputtered, denial followed by embarrassed apologies to Lana for it coming out too fast. Bruce took pity on him after letting him flounder a few seconds longer than necessary. “Nothing to worry about, dear,” he assured. The pet-name sounded saccharine on his lips, and also terribly suspicious. “I’m truly sorry for my delay, actually. Traffic to leave from Gotham was the worst for some reason! I wasn’t expecting it, there wasn’t even any super villain attack on the water line going on!” I caught them before they could do it.
Lana chuckled awkwardly at the joke, clearly unsure where it was supposed to be funny. Clark sighed, but couldn’t stop himself and he brought his free hand to rest on top of Bruce’s on his arm. “No worries.” I’m not mad, just surprised. Then, because it felt awful not to spell the implicit out, “I’m glad you’re here.” I was freaking out without you.
Bruce arched a brow. It was not exactly accusing but the question etched in every line of his face was a simple one, expected. If it rained, why didn’t you bring the laundry in?; if it burned, why did you touch it?; if it scared you, why didn’t you tell me? 
And the thing remained, he had no idea. All he knew was the the familiar shape at his side, the heartbeat he could pick among billions, the heat he’d grown accustomed to warming his back at night, they were all switches of an old Pavlovian conditioning, since long sunk to the very marrow of his bones. He felt his shoulders and jaw unclenching, his heart rate slowing, the nagging punctures in his lung soothe and vanish; his body settling in safety and contentment without any prompting on his part.
He only realized he’d been staring at Bruce a bit longer than polite when he heard Lana’s embarrassed, “Alright.” She was touching her neck with a self-conscious hand and looking up at Bruce with some sort of look in her eyes, not resentful, rather apologetic. “I got the message.”
Clark didn’t get the message, he was pretty sure he’d missed all the messages right now, and he startled at the knowledge. 
Bruce didn’t stop brushing his thumb over the crook of Clark's wrist. “That's good to know,” he smiled, all teeth. It was a look that fell somewhere in between Brucie and Batman, apparently innocuous but dripping swirling darkness, which meant it came from that place where the real Bruce still existed despite his best efforts to dislodge himself in the many clear cut personas he usually showed the world. “I foresee a lot of work to do for myself, I fear, and I'd hate to add you to my list.”
“What list?” Clark asked, but neither considered him past a brief glance full of a certain shade of amusement, the one that shared a border with pity and was only spared from invasion through a careful set of diplomatic agreements. “What?”
“He's very smart,” Bruce told Lana, almost conspiratorially. “He just doesn't know his strengths.”
An awfully ironic claim to make in front of one of the people Clark had kept at distance with a ten feet pole just to protect her from his powers. Nonetheless, she nodded like she understood. 
He was clearly not pouting as he remarked, “I don't understand.”
Lana smiled at him gently. “I should go anyway. I've been escaping Ross the whole night and if I stay still too long he's going to catch me.” To Bruce, she offered a slightly less bright expression. “Good luck for tonight, you have your work cut out for you.”
“I like the challenge,” Bruce assured and Lana laughed before leaving toward where Chloe and Pete were now huddled to chat. It wasn't hard to guess what about as they rapidly averted their eyes when they caught his. 
He frowned again. “There was something surreal about this whole exchange.”
“Only you could say that,” Bruce replied. Secluded as they were, more of the real man seeped through the cracks. A displeased wrinkle at the left of his mouth, the microscopic twitch of nerves in his eyebrows, the fiddling habit of fixing Clark's cuffs and then neck to keep the contact, assure his presence, without having to meet his look. “How long did it took Lane to let you know she was finally into you?”
“What?” He blinked. “Wait. Are you jealous?”
“Of course not,” Bruce replied drily. “I had to hear about a social event you were so worried about from your ex-wife and I walked in to find your ex-girlfriend making a pass at you. Why would I be something as irrational as jealous?”
Clark blushed. “You know it's not what it looks like, right?”
“I know we're going to have a long talk about this later, whether I like it or not,” Bruce sighed and dropped the lapels of Clark's shirt with a betrayed expression, resentful to its lack of wrinkles to smooth. When he looked up, he didn't look mad, exactly, but neither he looked extremely pleased with the situation. “I don't imagine I can sway you into skipping the talk and passing directly to a hot session of make up sex?”
Clark laughed in spite of himself. It wouldn't be the first time that Bruce tried such approach, but they'd had many a trouble due to their lack of open communication in the past and he never conceded on this. The make up sex just had to wait a bit longer, usually. 
“I'll take that as a no,” Bruce sighed. All flair and dramatics, he took Clark's arm again and pressed closer to him. “I'll go back to tempting you later. Let's mingle, now.”
“Do we have to?” Clark asked, suddenly panicked again. “Can't we just, you know, stay here?”
“The whole night?” Bruce arched a brow at him. “Clark, let the scandal expert take charge of this. You're not going to make them stop talking about you no matter how much time you spend standing in a corner like a penitent child. Cat's out of the bag, you either own up to it or you give them something new to be scandalized about.”
“And that would be you?” Bruce didn't answer, but his words had a twisted sort of logic, the kind Clark guessed came from years under the eyes of the public scrutiny and riddled with its the merciless judgement. The kind tinted, just barely, with the shadow of self depreciation that he was not going to stand. “I'm not ashamed of being together, B.”
Without thinking, he bent forward to steal a kiss from his lover’s lips and caress the edge of his cheekbone with his fingertips. 
He was being careful, Clark realized; more than usually. Bruce was Batman, he reasoned every day, he didn't need Clark to be attentive for him. Maybe it was the place, the setting, the people; maybe he was regressing a bit into the hold habits, the don't accidentally kill them all mindset that used to plague him before. 
By his expression, Bruce had realized too and that was an whole different lecture waiting to happen, one that Clark was rather familiar with by now. He made a grimace. 
“In that case,-” Bruce said, interrupting his thoughts and his attempt at reassurance. Firmly enough that Clark had to follow him unless he wanted Bruce to get hurt, the man pulled him out of behind the plant and table and onto the makeshift floor, picked a group of people more or less discreetly checking them out and started dragging him in their direction. “-you can show me off.” For half a second Clark truly considered planting his feet and using all his strength to keep himself rooted where he was. Bruce sent him a look that said he knew every turn of gears in his mind, always. “Don't force my hand, Kent.”
Grumbling all the while, Clark followed him. He made a point of dragging his feet though. 
***
It was excruciating and irritating and mortifying and only occasionally uplifting, so overall not worth the hassle and just barely worth his mother's pride. 
It was well past midnight when Bruce allowed them to leave with the sound excuse of needing to drive all the way back to Gotham in time for a meeting the next morning, which by estimation could have worked just as well an hour or two earlier. Bruce was just a sadist who enjoyed to watch him suffer, Clark assumed. 
The air felt as sparkling water on his skin, fresh and bubbling with the freedom it carried. After the stifling atmosphere inside, only half due to the hot air and smell of alcohol and greasy food, it felt awfully nice to stroll leisurely back to the parking lot, no hurry and no powers, just a break from the world. Just the moon and the cicadas and the echo of the umpteenth 80’s song growing lower behind them. 
Still hand in hand with him, Bruce cleared his throat.
Okay, talk time would happen in the parking lot, it seemed. 
Clark screened his feelings and found himself half guilty still but sort of relieved too. The whole event was an hallucination etched in his mind and he replayed it again and again trying to give it any semblance of reality again. Even now, looking around himself, it felt all a bit out of a dream; a very specific dream he was pretty sure he did have at eighteen or something. 
The flickering lights of the lampposts by the sidewalk casted orange shades that accentuated all the sharp angles, jawlines included, and Bruce looked every inch the prom date he might have as well conjured back then, in his bedroom and with a shy hand in his pants. Chiseled, polished, a Michelangelo sculpture with an Armani suit fitting snugly at his waist and shoulders. He had styled his hair to look fashionably ruffled, but he was wearing that refined citrusy cologne Clark liked instead of the usual poignant sandalwood - in far too heavy dosage - of Brucie. Even the way he was standing against the night with a hand in his pocket and a gaunt to his walk couldn't hide the fact that he'd clearly put in the effort to look as enticing, mouthwatering, sensual as possible. 
All for an event he hadn't even been invited to. 
“You came,” Clark heard himself say, with surprise coloring every letter, just as he realized it for real and no matter that he spent the past hours hand in hand with the man. Those mere two words, and none of the thank you, I’m sorry, why, get me out of here, I needed you, I’m still scared, how did you find out, when did you buy this suit, I want to kiss you so bad, running in his brain.
Bruce didn’t turn his head to him, but observed him carefully from a corner of his eyes. Clark recognized it for the monumental effort at communication it was. “Lois called me. She told me you were freaking out.”
Of course she did. For all the grievance she’d given him for his useless overthinking about tonight, she always worried for him and she knew what a monster this event was in his mind. “She shouldn’t have.”
Cocked eyebrow, sharp voice. “No?”
“No! I mean, not...not! Just...no?”
Bruce hummed. “Metropolis young promise of journalism, indeed.”
“Fuck you.” His lips trembled under the threat of a rising smile. 
“Mr Kent!” Bruce said, voice full of dismay. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
Bruce had seen Martha when the tractor refused to start; he knew exactly where Clark’s occasional foul mouth came from.
Clark shook his head, as if it could will the words in his brain to fall in line and build into a conveyable sense. A semblance of good humor was rising up his throat and he could feel his shoulders fall a bit to drop the last of the weight they’d been carrying still. He surrendered to his brain’s undercurrent of he came, endlessness of a stuck loop, and dangled the hand holding Bruce’s a bit.
He could see the car ahead of them. He stopped walking, and Bruce just took that one extra step he needed to shift himself in front of him. Finally, he was looking straight at Clark.
He was firm, all of him. The shoulders, the height, the warmth seeping through their clothes, the hand that rose to cart through Clark’s loose bangs. Firm enough to pull the last bit from Clark’s grateful lips, “I’m an idiot.”
“I wouldn’t go so far. I respect Miss Lane too much to believe she could have ever married an idiot.”
Clark slapped his chest lightly, an attempt at chastise. “Just Lois? What about you?”
“Oh, I’m infamous for my bad taste, but you know what they say.” Bruce smirked. “Sometimes even the old dogs learn new tricks.”
He snorted. “Flatterer.”
“That, I most certainly am. Ask Hal, he’ll tell you all about my skills in praising and complimenting.” Bruce’s hand scratched lightly at Clark’s nape. “Want to try again?”
Clark huffed. Easier said than done, truly.
The wind was picking up, now, and though still warm in summer’s embrace, it was rapidly cooling down, promise of a fast approaching storm. Its fingertips reassuringly caressed his neck and forearms and face, and brushed away from his mind every word too many, unfolded the complicated knots of undefined anxiety and all the blobs of old memories, blew away the dark smoke of fear until all that was left was the core of the issue, the very one that Clark had spent days defiantly pretending not to see.
“I just knew this wasn’t going to be good,” he started, not because it was the easiest thing to say - it wasn’t, he’d loved so many of these people as a kid, he’d grown up with them - but because it was the hardest to deny. “I just didn’t think they’d be so open about their opinions.”
Ross had been a pinnacle of tact in comparison to some other people. Sure, Clark hadn’t gotten along with them even in the past, but it had still hurt. The snickering when he turned his back, the heads shaken in disapproval, the quiet comments he hadn’t been able to ignore when they spoke about Bruce, his very own dog whistle. Some had been predictable; some had been downright cruel.
Bruce moved closer to touch Clark’s waist with his free hand. “It was a night full of surprises for everyone. I, too, was rather taken aback. It’s past midnight and none of them was quite that drunk yet.”
It was a stereotyping joke just to make him feel better about it. He couldn’t really take it, not with more lines unraveling in his brain. “I heard a few of them mentioning Ma’. They think she agrees with them,” he said. If he were just a bit of a braver man, he’d admit to sharing half of the opinion at least. “I mean, it wouldn’t be too far fetched.” 
In Bruce’s sudden stillness Clark found that he’d drunk from every tiny scrape of caress, from every rise and fall of the chest under his hand, like a man lost at sea presented at last with his first sip of fresh water since days. The fingers on his waist moved gently to grab his wrist. “Clark.”
“Don’t pretend you can’t see it.”
“Clark.”
“I left Smallville as one of the two kids in the whole town who managed to snag a scholarship for academic merits to an important college and I come back from Metropolis divorced and with two kids from two different women.”
“And gay?”
The tone was calm, with a touch of gentleness, but Clark jerked at the words all the same. “No,” he whispered, pulling back to make sure he met Bruce’s eyes openly. “You know I don’t think that.”
Bruce tilted his head to the side pensively. “But some of them do.” The lights caught on the white peppering his temples and the tiny scar marring his right jawbone. Clark could see the yellowish shade of an almost healed bruise on the back of his neck, mostly hidden by the collar of his clothes. He looked older, and more tired. “You also knew that would happen.”
“That happened a long time ago as well,” he countered. “I’ve kept lots of secrets, but not that one.”
Bruce nodded slowly. “So you’re just a bisexual divorcee with two children. That’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“It’s a scoop alright, though.”
“It’s too harsh, Clark.” Bruce’s voice hardened. “You’re taking Superman out of the equation.”
He scoffed. “Well, they don’t know about Superman so it’s not like I can use it as an excuse.”
“Why do you have to offer excuses? It’s none of their business anyway.” Clark opened his mouth to counter, but Bruce kissed the words out of his mouth. “We all know you’re the most functional out of every superhero on the League, at the end of the day. And even if they don’t know that? Lois loves you still, differently but just as much. Your kids adore you, and we both know Connor is much better off with you than with Luthor.”
Clark snorted. “That’s setting the bar a bit low, isn’t it?”
“Lex lived here, didn’t he?” Bruce countered. “I’m almost disappointed he didn’t show up. That would have given the town quite some to talk.” Well, most definitely, but the Luthor’s had always been the talk of Smallville, mostly in reproachful terms. “And Clark?”
“What?”
“I think you’re underestimating how much envy stays behind most of these attacks.”
A truck drove out of the parking lot. Clark watched it disappear behind the curve as he let the words sink. “I don’t feel much like there’s anything to envy.”
“You’re too hard on yourself, as usual.” Bruce smiled again. “I’ll have to work on spoiling you.”
“Please, don’t.” Last time Bruce decided to spoil him, for their first anniversary, he’d found himself with a new flat and then straight up on a twelve days cruise around Europe. It had taken him three days to stop worrying about how much everything had costed. “I don’t think I could take it.”
The mischievous smirk on Bruce’s lips said he had all intentions of doing it again. “Stop me.” He snorted, and Bruce dragged him under his arm to break their stalemate and resume their walk toward the car. “Alright, talk done. Can we move on to the sex?”
This time, Clark couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re the worst.”
“Proudly so.” The car beeped. It was the blue Maserati, standing out like a sore thumb in the lot full of trucks and cross-countries. Bruce opened the door for him. “And Clark?”
“Yes?” he asked, already sitting.
“Your mother is not most people and she does know about Superman.” Bruce stared him in the eye, so achingly open in his own loss, in the truth of a wish not even his whole fortune could grant him. “She’s proud of every single thing about you.” He closed the door before Clark could gather his wits.
He circled the car to get to driver seat, and then he sat down with a hum. “Think we could sneak into the barn before Martha realizes we’re back already?”
“Are you propositioning me to get it on in the hay like horny teenagers?” Clark asked, amused.
“Why not?” Bruce shrugged then gestured to the gym. “You skipped your prom night, and this is as close as it gets. I thought you’d want to try the full experience.”
“Rao, you’re shameless,” he laughed.
Bruce kept on the awful jokes and he drove them back to the farm, and Clark laughed. They sneaked into the barn, on the hay, under the stars, and Clark laughed. He woke up the next morning to the sun on his skin and straws in Bruce’s disastrous hair. 
He laughed even more.
78 notes · View notes