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The churchyard isn’t quiet. That’s what catches Clark Kent’s attention when he can’t stand the sight of Bruce Wayne’s stoic tears. The pain hidden in the lines at his eyes, the corners of his sharp mouth. He has to blink away tears of his own, as he takes Bruce in amid the din.
The sights and sounds are overwhelming. It’s not just that Clark’s superhuman hearing picks up the delighted screams of children playing a state over or the trilling birdsong in Gotham Cemetery; it’s the constancy of the quiet chatter of guests, the condolences offered by the broad swath of society who so dearly loved Alfred Pennyworth. The substance of all that noise. There are so many, at every level of Gotham’s stratified society, who want to honor the memory of an aged British man who lived his life in service—not just to the Wayne estate, but to a deeper, altruistic purpose.
The support of a young orphan and the kind, charitable man he became. But Clark knows there's more to it, more to the impact of that paternal relationship. The care Alfred gave to Bruce enabled him to grow and spread his wings as the Caped Crusader. The care toward others that Alfred modeled informs so much of Batman’s mission and moral code, even with Alfred gone and buried.
Clark remembers the last time they did this, nearly a decade ago, when the car crash took Martha and Jonathan from him. Bruce flew in wearing his Batsuit, all affectedly hoarse voice and inappropriate display of heroic musculature. Fucking nipples. The Batsuit was ill suited for such a funereal occasion.
The ceremony to mark Clark’s second orphaning.
At least the Batsuit was black. Here, dressed in primary colors and his own bone-deep grief, looking at Bruce in his perfectly tailored black wool suit, Clark feels out of place.
It breaks his heart, that Bruce has to go through the same strange pain of losing an adoptive father—the unbearable ache of a loss felt twice. Theirs is a wound that life’s suffering ought to heal rather than tear open anew.
They’re that age, though. For all Kryptonians live so many millennia, Clark certainly feels like he’s in his forties. He makes his way toward Bruce, who is unhappily engaged in extracting himself with hugs and handshakes from a circle of socialites.
Bruce’s eyes meet his over a ridiculous sideways hat as he pulls himself from an elderly woman’s arms. The fascinating aesthetic of some well-to-do widow, Clark’s sure. Bruce’s eyes flick to the hat and back to Clark, a small wink of a smile, something quick and sunlit meant only for him.
And then the man of the mournful hour approaches, eyes hard on the emblem of Clark’s garish, bright Supersuit. They meet halfway, in a row of headstones with so many lives and sad accomplishments carved into gray faces.
“Mr. Wayne, my condolences,” he says, stepping closer, uncertain of whether to take his hand or his shoulder, what level of intimacy is right for this particular occasion—
“Clark, I know it’s you.”
That stops him short. In Clark’s life, he has been perceived by very few people. Even Lois had seen him naked as his two selves each, and not understood the unifying whole. Even weighed down by grief, Clark can find relief here, in being known. In the tender way Bruce says the name that’s always felt more real than Superman or Kal-El.
“Ah, well. Surprise?” He splays his hands rather than reaching out to hold, to touch. The two steps between their bodies are too often there, a boundary Clark doesn’t know how to cross.
Not since…
Time and silence stretch between them; a long, lurid history tense with longing, fraught with all of the secrets they have to keep.
The way Bruce looks at him now, it sends him back to their other selves: aged thirty-two, in mourning. Bruce was there for him when he needed him most, a shoulder he could cry on even through the black rubber of the Batsuit. He’d kissed the man, then. But it was with his eyes caked in black grease paint and veiled behind a mask.
It wasn’t the right time to ask for more.
Bruce looks at him, now, eyes hard and rimmed in red. “I’ve known for a while.”
That’s— Clark exhales raggedly. “How long?”
“Since Martha and your old man.”
Now’s not the right time either. Not with his eyes weighed down by the scales of his grief. It’s never the right time, not for them. He turns away, looking up to the church on the hill with its timeworn facade. “Oh, a while huh? Your sense of time is fucked, friend.”
“And I know you’ve known.” Bruce stops him with a hand braced on his shoulder, a bodily request to turn and face him. And Clark? He lets himself be maneuvered, overpowered. Bruce has always been superhuman. Even when Bruce was a young boy, standing in an alley, facing down the loss of his parents, Clark knows: he was strong. The start of someone brave and unshakeable and indescribably strong.
A smirk twists Clark’s lips. “Are you going to apologize?”
“Only if you will.”
They’ve both kept this secret, however poorly. Clark can see skeletons. He’s known the very bones of Bruce, even if he’s never told him as much.
As an alien, he is supernaturally strong, a species so powerful he has no equal on this entire planet. And still, Bruce has faced him down, pulled him back from the brink and the breaking of his own moral code more times than he can count.
There’s undeniable strength in that, something superhuman. Clark envies it as much as he admires Bruce for it. The unshakeable moral center, the bravery as a mere human to face one’s limits, and the ingenuity required to overcome them.
Clark could never be half as clever. But Bruce is kind enough to pretend.
To know Bruce has known. He turns this information over in his head. How long has he known? Why hasn’t he said anything? This was Clark’s one earthly advantage, for all the alien ones.
That competitive streak rears its head once more. Even as a well-meaning friend, whose intentions involve comfort, consolation…
Clark can’t help but speed his stride, racing ahead, destination set on the small church up the hill.
Bruce knows. He knows, and he’s said nothing.
And he’s dragged his feet for so long when it comes to this greater truth. Clark walks even faster, letting Bruce fall back.
Clark is tired of pretending not to want his friend and vigilante colleague in his mouth and his bed and every crevice of his fortress. Solitude is overrated; he wants to wake up every morning to smudges of greasepaint on his pillows.
Today is a reminder, if nothing else, that time is fleeting. That they’ve been wasting it.
This is all so fucking stupid.
“Hey, wait for me, you fuck,” Bruce calls out from behind.
“I’m already walking at your Earthling pace,” he replies over his shoulder. “Catch up.”
⛪
Nothing inspires awe in Clark quite like the intricacy and effort of Earthling architecture. What Kryptonians could construct in a day with nanobots and a well developed understanding of physics, Earth aliens take years to plot and plan. The load-bearing capacity of a beam, the volume space of a ceiling.
And unlike Krypton, these beings with their lighter gravity give so much attention to the aesthetic. The church interior is an ode to Earth’s aesthetic and love of ceilings that cover and then mimic the sky. Above them is a mural made of rich planetary hues and inhuman body proportions. The space beyond, the heavenly bodies that hold each other in elliptical orbit around the sun. And in the foreground: depictions, Clark knows, of other alien visitors with their own strange anatomy. A truth lost to Earthling history and the long arc of time: on planets ruled by hypergravity, infants really do have abs.
Bruce arrives just a step behind, standing at his side and looking to the rotunda above. Clark’s eyes cut to him, watching from the periphery as Bruce takes in the swooping curve, his focus heavy.
There’s gravity here, a universal pull, but it’s just the two of them.
Silence stretches between their bodies; outside, sound expands and contracts, expands, contracts. The lungs of mourners and songbirds and spiracles of small insects that he tunes out in his effort to be here, to listen to Bruce’s slow breathing.
“God, I’m going to miss him,” Bruce ekes out, eyes still on the painted sky above. “I really thought we’d have more time— I knew he was getting on in years, but…”
When Clark looks, trying to see what he’s seeing, a bit of chipping paint catches his eye, a layer of lead he can’t see through for the fading ceruse paint, but beneath the rest he spies the sketches of first attempts, the multiple revisions. How many tries until the artist got it right? Three, by Clark’s count. And as he extends an arm over Bruce’s shoulder, he thinks this is only their second attempt.
The timing is wrong. They’ve just buried someone the whole world should stop to grieve. But there’s never enough time. And after today, there’s always that third try—
Bruce leans against him, body warm and solid despite how frail he sounds as he says: “Thank you for being here, Clark. It means a lot to me.”
“Alfred was important to me too.” He feels like a total tool in his red cape and visible underwear—an old brand that’s too much of his image to discard, now.
“I thought you two didn’t get along.”
“We got along just fine once I started remembering to take my shoes off indoors.” Clark turns his face into Bruce’s cheek, breathes in his aftershave, the salt of his tears. “No, but… he took care of you—that counts for a lot, to me. Even if he did hate my dirty boots and barn manners.”
“As Clark.”
“As Clark,” he confirms.
Bruce’s damp laugh breaks the relative silence of the space. “He had a Superman action figure, you know.”
“Fuck off.” Elsewhere, the idle chatter of the funeral-goers. In the distance, a nasally voice wonders where Alfred’s pseudo-son has wandered off to, and Clark feels indignation, that urge to defend, burning hot in his throat. The smoke of lit candles along the altar fills his lungs and Clark exhales the ash of his protective impulses.
“No, actually. The man was a big fan,” Bruce says with a soft nudge.
“Well, now I feel bad about tracking mud into his foyer.”
Bruce’s breath tickles his ear, an almost laugh, a definite sigh, and then his hand is on the small of Clark’s back. It’s a tentative, questioning touch that Clark can barely feel through the layers of latex. He savors the heat of it all the same.
Light shining through stained glass brushes Bruce’s skin, shapes that flutter like bats on his temple until Clark looks up to confirm, no, that's a moth blocking the light of the moon in the planetary sky-scape of the window, a different sort of lunar eclipse, and he’s just gone insane with Bruce’s touch, the uncertainty of the question that hangs between them.
When he looks into Bruce’s dark eyes, there’s a question there too, in expanding pupils. In the way those piercing eyes dip to Clark’s mouth.
It’s hard to say what they are to each other—what they’ve always been—and Clark can’t answer that question for himself, so he hasn’t asked.
But this.
The answer is easy. He leans in, breaths tangling, lips touching, a smile curving under the press of his own. Here is a question he can answer with the slide of his tongue and the groan he licks from Bruce’s mouth, the way their bodies interlock as they turn fully into each other, as Clark walks him backward to the altar at the center of this ecclesiastical stage.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d say something,” Bruce gets out between the nipping kisses Clark leaves on his lips.
Clark, also, has wondered. When they kissed as Batman and Clark, it went nothing like this. All gnashing teeth and prying tongues in the heat of the wrong moment. One that didn’t, couldn’t last. Because it wasn’t time. He wasn’t ready. And there were streets to prowl, innocents to save, a subject to dance around together lest they stop moving for long enough to open a box they’d never get closed again.
There’s something holy and wholly blasphemous about the meeting of their mouths here and now, as themselves. “I was wondering if you knew,” Clark says, pulling back to meet dark, open eyes.
“I didn’t think—” Bruce pushes forward, another kiss during which he tugs the cape from Clark’s shoulders, fingers digging hard into his shoulder blades as he exerts that planetary force to which Clark is forever subject. “If you wanted this too, I assumed you would have said something.”
Clark bends to kiss the line of his collar, tasting his skin with each gentle press. “Am I too late?” He licks the punctuation mark of that loaded question against Bruce’s skin.
The throat under his tongue bobs, just once. An answer. “No— you’re right on time.”
A hand finds his growing erection. Bruce’s palm, hot and strong and everything Clark has ever wanted, everything he’s feared asking for, slides against the front of his suit.
“Let me just—” In his haste to undress, Clark tears the material of his Supersuit. He has others, but there’s only one Bruce, and this might be his only chance to show him what they could be to each other.
His dick throbs eagerly, excruciatingly, when Bruce’s hand returns to pull at him. “Oh fuck you, Man of Steel has a dick to match because of course you do.”
Clarks just tilts his head, his own quiet question. Bruce removes his belt slowly, carefully. Sets it aside with slow care on the altar at his back. Nods as Clark unzips his pants to reveal that Bruce is a hypocrite, because there beneath his designer boxer-briefs is the most perfect dick.
Clark falls to his knees, a god praying at his own altar, hands wrapping around Bruce’s hips, fingers digging into the muscle of his ass as he licks the length of his vein, registering the uptick in Bruce’s heartrate. The beating, bleeding eagerness for more. It’s not just him.
He sucks Bruce into his mouth without preamble, draws him down his throat without warning. And there, the rapid pulse, the urgent need as Bruce’s dick flexes against his soft palate. As Clark swallows the leaking precum and proceeds to bob up and down along the hard length. Looks up into those deep eyes, wide and focused on him.
Bruce’s hand braces on the altar behind him, the other threading into Clark’s hair, pulling, pushing, moving as though he means to guide but can only follow in the face of Clark’s inhuman strength.
Clark sets his own pace; the timing of this act is the only thing he can control. He refocuses on the dick in his mouth, casts his eyes downward as his hands grip Bruce’s hips more tightly. Chants of “fuck, fuck, fuck— I can’t—” sound from above, like church bells ringing out Bruce’s desperation to come.
It’s better, though, to draw it out. To extend the memory this will become if this remains a second try and not a final successful attempt. He pulls off reluctantly and straightens, stands, their eyes meeting on a level playing field once more.
Bruce breathes hard, and Clark can hear the way his heart works overtime to feed oxygen into that taxed system.
Clark, also, struggles to breathe. He’s absolutely dripping with precum. He’s never been this hard before. He wets his hand that way, on the arousal pooling at his tip. Uses that same slick fluid to palm Bruce, to satisfy the fantasies of marking him, making him his.
Bruce’s pants fall to the ground as Clark turns him around by his hips, tugs him back so his ass is flush against his hard length and Clark can thrust against the beautiful, firm muscle of him.
He bends forward, pushing Bruce down to whisper in his ear: “Do you happen to have anything body safe in that utility belt I know you have hidden somewhere?”
Bruce groans against the tease of Clark’s hand on his dick. “Of course I do—who do you think I am?” He reaches out for the belt he tossed on the altar, turning it over on the wooden surface to reveal a string of chrome vials. Bruce grips one and tosses it up and behind, where Clark can catch it easily.
“Fuck, why is that so hot.” He scrapes his teeth along the line of muscle that limns this overprepared, unbelievably attractive man’s neck. “You’re such a nerd.”
“Says the man whose disguise is glasses.”
“They’re hypnotic, you literal pest.” Clark teases at his hole with his knuckle, letting him feel the promise of a future intrusion.
“Fuck,” Bruce bites out, “Is it a bird, a plane, no— it’s the world’s most annoying alien.”
“Sky rat,” Clark hums as he drips the lube into his palm. In his dry hand, he grips the firm muscle of Bruce’s thigh, digging his thumb into an ass he’s stared at on many a long, dark night.
He teases, twists, turns a slick finger inside, up to his second knuckle, relishes Bruce’s helpless moan. “Clark, you motherf— I swear to fucking god—”
“In a church? Really?” He adds a second finger, thrusting hard.
Bruce moans. The heat of the man beneath his hands is something throbbing and alive, so human, an affirmation against the very thought of death. It’s overwhelming, how long Clark’s wanted this, knowing he’s about to finally get it. Clark, for all his godlike power, feels as though he’s been turned inside out and set on fire. He’s burning, thrusting his fingers in, and out, and in, savoring the responding squeeze around his knuckles—
“If you don’t fuck me right now I’m going to—” Bruce cuts off on a groan as Clark spreads the lube more fully against his entrance before he applies the rest to his cock, a slick grip that he tightens around his own moan because fuck— He’s painfully hard.
It’s the anticipation of years of almosts and maybes and flying home to an ice palace to beat off in solitary disgrace. The knowledge that the actualization of all of this longing will be too brief, fleeting like Earth’s time and Earthling lifespans. He looks to window—the stained glass rendering of this solar system, the sunlit backdrop of phthalo blue glass, a sky swirling around Earth’s moon, Mars, the heavenly bodies Clark can see mid-flight—and thinks Bruce is still the most beautiful thing he’s ever known.
“Clark?” he asks, an edge of worry to the lilting call of his second, truer, name. He is only ever himself, when Bruce is near.
“I’m right here,” he says, thumb circling Bruce’s asshole as he jerks himself harder with his other hand. “I’m right here, it’s okay.”
Slowly, gently, excruciatingly, he lines himself up and starts to push inside. Inch by inch, until there’s no more room for him to take, until he’s fully inside. He wraps his arm around Bruce’s chest, pulling him into his body, holding him as close as he’s dreamed of doing innumerable times before. On midnight rooftops and in neon-lit alleys. Every justice-minded excursion. Every bat signal Clark caught from half a world over, and flew in just to watch, just to drop in.
The sound of footsteps comes from outside, approaching from yards away, still too close to intruding on the one form of solitude Clark wants. He looks, hard, at the metal handle of the door. Lets pure energy leave his irises, a beam of light so bright it burns and melts and locks them in together, where he can keep Bruce safe and drunk on his dick long enough to forget the pain, however long this interlude lasts.
It’ll be all too brief, he knows, but for the time being, he has him.
“What are you—?”
He bends to pull his earlobe into his mouth, to suck and tease with the edge of his teeth, to bite. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about that,” he murmurs into Bruce’s ear as he slides his hand down the man’s abdomen to take his throbbing, leaking dick in hand. A few tugs and Bruce is gasping; rasping breaths that block out the sounds of would-be intruders.
“God, fucking—” Bruce cuts out on a rich groan as Clark thrusts harder, grips him tighter, feels Bruce push back hard onto each thrust. Clark rewards his desperation by releasing Bruce’s dick to slide that hand up his sternum, to caress his throat and cradle his jaw and finally, shove three fingers into Bruce’s open, moaning mouth.
“I’m going to take you here next time.” He can picture it, a next time he wants more than anything, knowing there’s nothing Bruce does poorly. Even taking his dick right now like a champion, thrusting in kind with Clark’s movements, behaving like the greedy asshole Clark knows he can be, filthy rich and just plain filthy.
Bruce sucks his fingers, tongues his way along, and around as he moans, a low, desperate noise.
“Yeah? Does that feel good?”
“So good, fuck. So fucking good.”
He slows his thrusts, wanting to make this moment last as long as he can, holding Bruce’s hips with a declarative firmness, a reminder that he’s here, that he has him. That it’s okay, even for Gotham’s guardian, to fall apart.
Just this once.
Clark has him.
And when Bruce comes, the urgent, outraged groan of his pleasure blankets over every other noise, his cum scorching Clark’s hand while the sounds of him overwhelm every other sense. He’s all Clark hears, for one single, blissful moment before he comes too, spilling white hot into his oldest friend. Filling him up while Clark empties himself of the worst of his longing, resigning himself to this one aching truth: Bruce is the center of his universe, and Clark is going to spend the rest of their lives proving that to him.
They redress slowly, too. Clark takes every opportunity to touch and tease and distract as Bruce puts himself back one piece of funeral attire at a time. Clark wears the actual black tailored suit he meant to change into, when he meant to come as himself. Plans changed when he heard the sadness exuded by Bruce’s every cell.
His plans always change and remake themselves around the shape of Bruce’s need. The curve of his orbit always bends around Bruce’s proximity, but right now Clark isn’t superhuman. He’s not a god. He’s no heavenly body. He’s falling to Earth, holding Bruce as close as he can.
“Can we stay awhile?” Bruce asks.
Hope thrums in Clark’s chest. There’s a timidity he’s unused to seeing, in any version of this man he’s ever known. And a smile, as bright as the sun.
It draws Clark in. “We can stay as long as you want.”
