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It’s Bruce that notices it first.
They’ve landed on the ground, capes tangled together, Clark’s body over Bruce’s. He’d seen the ray of something coming for Bruce and he’d reacted on instinct—flying up to rescue Bruce before he dropped out of the sky, trying to cushion his fall as they tumbled into a landing. The thing had hit heavy against Clark’s back—not enough to cause pain but enough for him to feel it—but he’d been sure that he’d at least shielded Bruce from it.
Now, with Bruce’s body heat leaching through the too-thin fabric of Clark’s costume, the only thing Clark can think about is Bruce’s voice saying I don’t think that would be a good idea.
It hasn’t even been an hour since Bruce let Clark’s hopeful heart down, and Clark’s basically manhandling him.
“Sorry,” Clark breathes out, starting to move, but he’s stopped by Bruce’s hand suddenly latching onto his wrist.
“Stop.”
On command, Clark freezes. He’s half-hovering above Bruce now, trying to latch onto what’s causing the worried frown on Bruce’s face. It takes Clark a long second to identify the thick gold band around his wrist, and the identical one on Bruce’s, and the thin, similarly-golden chain connecting them.
“Oh.”
Clark doesn’t move his hand. The chain looks delicate, but miscalculating how easily the chain will break could end with Bruce’s arm being yanked out of its socket. There’s something in the way it sits on his wrist, a twinge like it’s pinching at his skin, that feels an awful lot like magic—no easy way out, even with his strength.
Bruce tilts his head, analyzing the battle over Clark’s shoulder. Shouts and bursts of magic ring out, and his face relaxes.
“Wonder Woman’s got the witch pinned,” Bruce reports, voice low. He moves his hand experimentally, the chain pulling taut between them. “We should have enough slack to stand up at least.”
It’s an ungraceful thing, but they manage it. Clark has plenty of practice controlling his strength, but still, he winces a little internally as he tugs on Bruce’s hand to give himself enough room to get situated. The one silver lining is that their cuffed hands are opposite each other, so they can stand side-by-side as they normally do.
But even as they stand together, Clark can’t help but think about how close their dangling hands are, how easy it would be to slide his hand into Bruce’s, interlock their fingers together. I don’t think that would be a good idea, Bruce’s voice in Clark’s head repeats, stiff and uncomfortable, and a hot spike of shame fills him.
True to Bruce’s word, the other Leaguers—Green Arrow, the Flash, and Wonder Woman—have successfully captured the witch wreaking havoc on downtown Central City. Diana sees them and approaches, her eyes on the chain between them.
“I don’t suppose she told you how to get us out of this,” Batman asks dryly, raising his hand to draw attention to the tiny gold chain keeping them together.
Diana smirks like she’s trying to hold back a full-on laugh. It’s surprisingly soothing to Clark, to see it; she doesn’t think it’s a big deal. It’s not a big deal. Bruce probably has a list of magic users who can reverse this kind of thing, and then Clark can drown his feelings in ice cream and avoid Bruce until I don’t think that would be a good idea stops playing in his ears everytime he sees the down turn of Bruce’s grimace.
He wishes he could go back in time to stop himself from ever asking in the first place, wishes that the alert had come through just a few minutes earlier. It had been easy, when the alert first went off, to settle into the Superman suit and pretend like nothing had happened between him and Batman. But now, the adrenaline from the battle was fading away, and Clark had nothing to distract him from the knowledge of how badly he might’ve just screwed up his friendship with one of the best people he knows.
Clark doesn’t think that the witch would be willing to cast a time travel spell on him, though, so Clark settles for awkwardly clambering into the zeta-tube with Batman and hoping that Batman’s list of magic-users come through.
They don’t.
Clark wants to scream.
Zatanna is off-world, with the promise of returning in a few days, and that’s the closest they get to a solution.
“You don’t think there’s a non-magical trick to these, do you?” Clark asks nervously. They’re sitting in the Watchtower, their colleagues around them.
“I don’t see a lock I could pick,” Bruce says. He slides the cuff up and down his wrist, testing it against the bulge of his thumb. “I could dislocate my hand to slip free, but—”
“Absolutely not!” Clark snaps, aghast. The only thing worse than being handcuffed to Bruce is having Bruce break his own hand just to get away from Clark.
“There’s no guarantee it would work,” Bruce continues, ignoring him. “Physically escaping the cuffs might not matter if the enchantment is still intact.”
“Have you tried breaking the chain?” Barry asks, cowl down as he ponders the distance between them. “Kal, you’ve got super-strength. Have you tried…I don’t know, pulling?”
Bruce makes a grunt of disapproval, and Clark’s glad he’s not advocating for Clark to test which thing would break first: the magic chain or the ligaments of Bruce’s arm and shoulder.
Still, there’s things he can try—melting the chain with his heat vision, making it brittle with his breath. He glances at Bruce, who gives a minute nod of approval, tensing up as he prepares for whatever Clark's doing to backfire. Instead, though, when Clark aims his eyes at the gold chain, nothing comes. He can feel the heat fading from his eyes even as he tries harder, urging his powers to cooperate, but it's as if the chain is sapping the strength right out of him.
He shakes his head at Bruce, who sighs.
“I'm not leaving Gotham,” Bruce says, as if he expects Clark to argue. Clark knows the city is more like a family member than a place to Bruce; it's one of the things he considered before even daring to broach the subject of them dating.
“If you really don't want to bend your meta rules, then we can just straddle the border for a few days,” Clark jokes.
It's a joke because Clark has always been the exception—one of them, at least—to Bruce's meta rule. Bruce has never enjoyed asking him for help, but he doesn't hate Clark's company. At least, he didn't . He already knows Bruce is going to hate being chained to another person; he already knows Bruce is going to hate navigating the shift in their relationship after Clark's confession. It hits him like a block of Kryptonite, the idea that the joke might fall flat one day. That by dragging their relationship, or his desire for one, into the light, he’s already pushed Bruce back into the shadows.
Batman and Superman have been working together for years, even before the Justice League. While it’s not quite as seamless as Batman with his children, they’ve developed a talent for wordless synchronicity over that time. Clark calls on that now to get them from the Watchtower to the Batcave without accidentally running into each other like characters in a dumb comedy.
The thing is, Clark wouldn’t have asked Bruce out if he didn’t think Bruce would yes. Even now, there’s a tiny little voice hissing temptations in the back of his head about why Bruce said it wasn’t a good idea rather than saying “no”.
It started three weeks ago—not Clark developing the feelings, of course, but Clark thinking that them being something more than friends and coworkers was something possible, achievable, realistic . Maybe it was on Clark, because Bruce made it pretty clear that he was only asking Clark Kent to be Bruce Wayne’s date for the sake of a mission. But even if the pretense of the date had been fake, the way that Bruce’s hand lingered on the small of Clark’s back was real. The quick little glances and flashes of smiles Bruce sent him throughout the night were real. The dinners in the weeks after, casual conversation during what were supposedly ‘stakeout missions’, were real.
Or maybe they weren’t.
Clark had thought he was doing everything right. He had a plan . For asking and for the date itself, planned to a T. He asked after their shared monitor duty shift, spending the whole time antsy and hoping Bruce wouldn’t ask about why.
In costume? Bruce had asked, almost confused.
No, I was thinking…us. Just you and me. On a date.
Bruce didn’t need to say a word for Clark to know what the answer would be. The guarded, almost remorseful expression on his face gave it away. But he did—in slow, measured, delicately-chosen words. And then the alarms went off, before Clark could even fly away from the whole thing. And now they were here, in the BatCave, with Clark trying to keep his hand in the right spot so Batman could use his keyboard without Clark’s presence grating on him too much.
Still, the fabric of the Superman costume is starting to irritate him, and Gotham City doesn’t sound anything like Metropolis, and he’s far too aware of the vent above them, blowing cold air down on his skin, and somewhere across the room, there’s a generator whirring and the sound of Bruce’s computer keys clacking and—
For once, trying to block out the rest of the world by focusing on one steady sound—like Bruce’s heart—doesn’t help. So Clark turns his attention to the flashy trophies and little trinkets that are scattered around the BatCave. He’s been in the Cave before, but never lingering like this, so he might as well take advantage of it.
There’s a row of little figurines—toys, really—on the top of Bruce’s monitor. Clark’s seen them before, handed out with a kids’ meal the few times he’s visited a Batburger. Of course, Clark thinks, with a fresh spike of affection that sizzles in his stomach like acid, of course Bruce would have collected each one of his kids’ figurines. But there’s a new one this time: a little Superman, standing to the left side of Batman’s own figure. There’s even a little curl to his hair, right in the middle of his forehead, and it’s a little surreal, seeing himself on Bruce’s desk.
At some point, the clacking stops, and Clark turns to see Bruce staring at him.
“Sorry,” Clark says automatically, checking his posture to make sure he isn’t being in the way.
“No, it’s fine—”
“I didn’t realize Batburger made a Superman figure.”
“They didn’t.”
Oh. Well. What is Clark supposed to do with that?
It’s Clark’s turn to stare. Bruce clears his throat, turning back to the computer, as if he hadn’t said anything. Bruce didn’t get the toy from Batburger. He went out of his way to get one, or make one—or maybe Dick gave it to him, because Dick always liked Clark, and Bruce was displaying it solely because it was something Dick made.
But still, Clark’s the one person Bruce deemed, at one point, trustworthy enough to have earned a place by his kids. And as much as Bruce is ignoring it now, Clark knows it won’t last. Feelings are liabilities and Bruce hates being weighed down; what is Clark now, but another weight? Another potential issue that he needs to factor into his plans?
Bruce tugs at Clark’s wrist again, a pointed reminder that Clark’s sole mission right now is to not impede Batman, and he’s failing miserably. He adjusts his wrist, almost smiling at the mental image of Batman giving him a strict debrief lecture about how to stay out of the way, and turns his attention to Bruce’s screen and the little bat-shaped cursor that is scrolling through a list of news articles, mostly about Batman or Bruce Wayne.
“Bat-cursor?” Clark asks.
Bruce scowls. It looks different, less scary, when Clark can see his whole face, blue eyes gleaming in the light of the screen. “Dick thought it was funny.”
The smile wipes itself from Clark’s face when he realizes what the bat-cursor is hovering over: a blurry photo of Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent leaving a restaurant in downtown Gotham, one of Bruce’s hands resting on Clark’s lower back. His face heats up as though a stage spotlight is on him.
GOTHAM’S PLAYBOY PRINCE FINALLY SETTLING DOWN? , the headline asks, in bold, glaring letters.
Clark isn’t moving, and Bruce must sense it through the bond of their little chain, and he must be annoyed by it, because Clark can feel him staring. But Clark can’t look away. Shame sinks into his stomach like a rock; he’s no better than a trashy celebrity magazine, reading into all of Bruce’s gestures, thinking he actually stood a chance .
“I warned you that this might happen,” Bruce says evenly.
Clark can feel Bruce trying to prod at him, understand his reaction. He swallows; Bruce did warn him that the press might… talk about them, when they started going on stakeout dinners together. Bruce monitored that kind of thing, of course he did, but he warned Clark that he wouldn’t be able to stop the rumors that popped up.
It isn’t that Clark would’ve minded everyone in Gotham thinking that he and Bruce were dating. He just doesn’t enjoy being reminded that he was just as bad at reading Bruce as Gotham was.
“It’s fine,” Clark says. “I don’t—I mean, you can’t control it. As long as it’s not putting our identities in danger, right?”
Bruce hums, and Clark knows if that was a serious concern, then Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne would’ve never been caught speaking on camera in the first place.
Besides, none of Clark’s coworkers would find these rumors suspicious, if they broke. They all know how he reacts anytime Bruce Wayne’s name is brought up. They know how he doesn’t complain about getting shipped over to Gotham to attend some gala that would likely get attacked by rogues. They know he’s one of the only people that won’t get annoyed at Wayne’s flirty personality and vapid responses to interview questions.
Suddenly, Clark has to swallow down the creeping prospect that people think Batman and Superman could be dating, based on the way Superman looks at Batman. He’ll have to keep an eye on that. This whole handcuff situation isn’t going to help, especially if they have to fight like this. And he especially tries not to think about the fact that if other people can see it, then Batman, the world’s greatest detective, definitely could.
God, he’d been so stupid, hadn’t he? Batman’s probably known about Clark’s feelings for years. If Batman really wanted something with Clark, he would’ve asked already; the fact that he hadn’t surely meant that he’d just been hoping Clark’s affections would fizzle out on their own, or that he thought Clark would never be stupid to actually act on them. And Clark had, anyway, giving into the kind of stupid feelings that Bruce would never—
“Is it too dark?”
“What?” Clark looks at Bruce, trying to figure out what he’s been caught doing wrong this time. His hand is in the right spot, at least, for Bruce to have adequate control over the keyboard.
“You’re tense,” Bruce replies. And it was Bruce—not the Batman, concerned with efficiency and the mission, but the man behind the mask who was teetering dangerously close to being concerned about how Clark was feeling . Clark feels that hot rush of shame all over again for being uncharitable towards his best friend; even if things got weird between them after this, as they surely would, Bruce was still kind. Clark can’t hold his unrequited feelings against him. “If you need to recharge—”
They’d battled the witch in broad daylight. The sunlight effused in his skin has nothing to do with how restless and strung-up he feels. “The Cave’s fine. I’m just wondering what’s going to happen if these don’t come off.”
Bruce stops typing and looks down at the cuffs, as if he’s truly seeing them for the first time. “The League already knows we’re out of commission. The Robins can handle Gotham, and I can get J’onn to assign a rotation to keep an eye on Metropolis. And if the need arises, we can still fight.” His eyes flicker to the training mats on the far side of the BatCave. “If you want, we could practice now. Be prepared.”
Clark’s done hand-to-hand combat training with Bruce before. Bruce insisted on it, saying there’d be a day when Clark wouldn’t have his powers and would thank him for it. With Clark’s permission, he’d turned on the red-sun lamps he’d designed, keeping him depowered without the pain of using actual green Kryptonite.
Most of those sessions had ended with Clark on the ground, Bruce pinning him to the mat, sweating and heavy above Clark, and…well. There was at least one part of him that was grateful for it right then. Now though, the memory just feels perverse, an overstep. At any rate, he really isn't in the right frame of mind to deal with that again. He’s surprised Bruce even suggested it, unless he has more confidence in Superman’s professionalism than Clark does right now.
“I think I’m good,” Clark says. “We both know you’d win, anyway.”
“Well, you wouldn’t be fighting me. That wouldn’t make any sense.”
“I’m not sparring with your kids. They’d kill me.”
“I’d lock up Damian’s Kryptonite first.”
“How sweet of you.”
The compliment makes Bruce pause, and Clark quickly clears his throat, “I’ll spar with your kids when you finally let me take you out flying.”
God, that’s an even worse thing to say, Clark scolds himself. Luckily, Bruce doesn’t seem to pick up on the romantic connotations of that.
“Absolutely not.”
“What? C’mon, B, this would be the perfect time.” He raises his hand, the chain clinking with the movement. “I can’t drop you.”
“I know you wouldn’t drop me. That’s not the problem.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights.”
Scowling at the screen, Bruce doesn’t reply. The banter falls away into a stifling kind of silence, and Clark finds himself staring at Bruce’s side profile, at the curve of his jaw, at the way his lashes reflect the blue-lit computer screen. He’s so pretty, so pretty that it threatens to tear Clark up from the inside-out. He almost wishes he hadn’t lost his chance, because he would’ve liked to tell Bruce that, but he knows the words would just be unwelcome.
After a long minute of silence, Bruce seems to steel himself, and asks, “How is your mother doing?”
“She’s fine,” Clark answers, too surprised by the question to say anything else. She’s going to be disappointed, Clark realizes, when he tells her that he messed up things with Bruce. She’d been wanting to meet him for weeks, but Clark doubted Bruce would say yes to that now.
“Good.”
More silence. It feels strained, like Bruce is on the verge of asking something else. He’s switched off of scrolling through news articles, instead sorting through data that Clark vaguely recognizes as having something to do with Wayne Enterprises. He’d ask, but on a good day Bruce would bristle at the implication that he needed any kind of help, and this isn’t a good day.
“And how’s work?” Bruce asks finally, like the question pains him.
“Work?” Clark frowns. “Like, the Daily Planet ?”
Bruce nods. It’s a little surreal, Batman giving him permission to discuss their civilian lives while they were still in costume, even if this was the BatCave.
“Fine,” Clark replies. He fishes his brain for anything even remotely interesting that he can offer Bruce. If Bruce is hoping for something specific, Clark doesn’t know what it is. “Lois’s trying to get me to cover the Gotham beat for her. The new museum exhibit. I’m sure you’ve heard about it.”
“And are you?”
“What?”
“Covering for her. Coming to the gala.”
“Well, I kind of owe her, right?” He already knows Brucie will be there, wearing a well-tailored suit, drinking apple juice disguised as expensive champagne, and letting all sorts of attractive, wealthy women hang off his arm. The more Clark thinks about it, the less he wants to go; Lois will understand, and there will be plenty of other opportunities to pay off his debts.
He groans, realizing he’s probably going to have to call out sick tomorrow. Perry wouldn’t be happy, but it would be better than having to explain to all of his coworkers why he’s handcuffed to Bruce Wayne. “You don’t have to go to work, do you?”
“Perks of being the idiot CEO,” Bruce replies, with a hint of a smirk. “Half my board members will be relieved.”
Right. Bruce had probably thought that through the minute he saw the cuffs.
I don’t think that would be a good idea, Bruce had said. There’s a part of Clark who wants to know if Bruce thought through a relationship with Clark in the same detail. If he’d envisioned himself in Clark’s apartment on a slow morning, eating breakfast after waking up beside each other. How he felt about it. If some tiny part of him wanted to, but the rest of him said no because of Gotham or the League or whatever else existed in the world, or if the words he’d used were just meant to placate Clark and minimize the fallout of the rejection.
Clark can’t ask—he can’t bring himself to, because he doesn’t really want to know. It wouldn’t help anything. Bruce said no, so even if he did want to, it wasn’t like Clark could force the issue. If he tried, he’d just get everyone thrown into another seminar about proper League conduct with regards to sexual and romantic relationships between members.
Bruce is looking at Clark now, shooting him concerned little glances out of the corner of his eye, and Clark steels himself, plastering on a smile. Just a few more days and Zatanna will be back on Earth, and she’ll come up with some sort of solution.
“What are the chances these things will just fall off by themselves?” Clark jokes, rotating his wrist in the cuff. “Preferably right now.”
He expects Bruce to be relieved about the prospect.
“Why? Do you have something better to do?”
Clark snorts. “I should be asking you that.”
“Well, Alfred would kill me if you left before dinner.”
Clark blinks. He’s ready to chalk it up to simple politeness—his Ma would never let Bruce hang around the farm for a few hours without offering him food—but he’s been by the Cave plenty of times before, and he’s never been invited for dinner. He’s pretty sure Bruce doesn’t even eat dinner if he’s in the Cave.
Bruce looks at Clark, and adds, uncharacteristically sheepishly, “He’s been asking for a while when I’m going to bring my–you over. So you still have at least another hour before he’ll let you go.”
“Alfred wants me over for dinner?”
He’s met Alfred before—he’s met all of Bruce’s family before, both as Kal-El and as Clark Kent. He’d been as polite as possible, of course, and he’d left feeling assured in the fact that Bruce’s father figure liked him well enough. He didn’t think he’d made that good of an impression that Alfred would be the one requesting Clark come over.
Clark’s traitorous mind chooses to prod at the question of why Bruce, apparently, kept refusing to actually extend the invitation. He’d ask, but again, it’s a question that he’s dreading the answer to. Especially when he can’t even fly away from it if he needs to.
“Is that so surprising?” Bruce frowns. “It’s not too soon, is it?”
Clark glances at the clock; an hour from now would be six, a perfectly reasonable time to have dinner. Unless Bruce thinks Midwesterners—or Kryptonians—have a significantly different dinner time. “Why would it be too soon?” If it’s an identity thing, well, they’ve known about each other for years. “Who else is going to be there?”
“Damian and Tim, of course, and Dick. Jason might show up, too.”
All people Clark knew. He couldn’t imagine any of them being the reason why Bruce wouldn’t want him around for dinner; maybe it’s wishful thinking, but he’s pretty sure he’s even made headway with Damian.
“They’re all fine with it,” Bruce assures him. Them.
Clark reminds himself that Bruce is kind, regardless of the nature of his feelings for Clark. And they’re friends. And there’s probably a charitable reason for why Bruce is making it sound like he doesn’t want Clark around.
Or he’s just really uncomfortable with Clark’s feelings, and Clark will just have to be okay with that. That this might be one of the last times he and Bruce will ever just sit together outside of League duties. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts , he thinks, and the words sound bitter even in his head. He watches Bruce’s bat-cursor dance around the screen and lets the clock count down to dinnertime.
Trying to get up the staircase into Wayne Manor proper is significantly harder than it was to get into the Cave. Their shoulders rub awkwardly together, the chain between them painfully short. Bruce stops halfway up, looking at Clark’s hand.
“Maybe this would be easier if we…” Bruce trails off in favor of reaching out, fingers brushing Clark’s, then intertwining, and Clark—
And Clark—
Clark pulls his hand back like Bruce’s fingers were laced with Kryptonite, the chain rattling, and Bruce sucks in a breath and leans as far away as he can.
“Right,” Bruce says. He swallows. “I overstepped. I—my apologies.”
Clark wants to cry. He doesn’t want to believe Bruce is being cruel. They’ve done such a good job ignoring the elephant in the room: the wishful little proposition Clark made before they got sucked into this mess. But Clark can’t believe that Bruce somehow forgot it entirely.
His hand still burns with the memory of the brief contact when they reach the dining room, their hands kept a stiff distance apart, as far as Clark can go without outright yanking on the chain.
There’s a moment, before Bruce opens the door for them, that Clark realizes that the him of this morning would give anything to be here, this implicit invitation into Bruce’s family. Would take it as proof that Bruce does care for him, romantic or not. The present Clark thinks nothing close to that, even when he takes his seat by Bruce’s left, staring at the collection of faces of Bruce’s kids.
There’s six—the four Bruce said, plus two girls, Cass and Steph. They’re not looking directly at Clark, which provides a little relief to the idea that he’s intruding on something private, something reserved for real family.
“Not a word,” Bruce declares to the table of pointedly-innocent expressions, using his full Batman growl.
It technically works, too, if you ignore the very loud glances Dick, Jason, Tim, and Steph keep shooting each other. Cass and Damian, on the other hand, are both looking at Clark. Clark’s never met Damian’s mother, but he’s having a hard time imagining that scowl came from anyone else but Bruce.
“We had a fight with a witch today,” Clark supplies. “She got the jump on us.”
Jason snorts. “Yep. Uh-huh. That’s exactly what we—”
“Jason,” Bruce warns.
Jason mimes zipping his lips shut.
“I, for one, am glad you’ve finally brought Mr. Kent over,” Alfred says, and Bruce shifts in his chair, looking adorably chastened. “I wasn’t sure I’d live to see the day.”
He and Bruce must be getting better at the whole handcuff thing, because Clark makes it through dinner without making a complete fool of himself. Dick makes an effort to rope Clark into their conversations, and the rest of Bruce’s kids treat him as more of an uncle figure than the alien who asked their dad out earlier today.
It’s normal, domestic, and almost painfully so; sometimes, he catches Bruce staring at him out of the corner of his eye, the barest hint of a smile shining through his normally-sober expression, and it forces Clark to imagine a world where Bruce said yes, some alternate version of Clark that had done everything right, perfect even by Bruce’s standards, and was being presented to the family as Bruce’s significant other.
In those moments, the chain suddenly weighs a hundred pounds, and Clark looks away and wishes that version of himself well.
“The kids like you,” Bruce remarks after dinner, having pulled Clark into a quiet sitting room, away from the loud liveliness of the rest of the Manor. Bruce takes a seat on the plush loveseat, so Clark sits next to him, edged up against the armrest.
Clark’s glad he said something, because he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. But then again, the kids aren’t the ones Clark needs to impress. “Does that mean you’ll be inviting me back?”
Bruce’s face softens. “Of course. You’re welcome here anytime.”
“Then why did it take you so long?” The words slip out before Clark can think better of them.
Bruce sighs. “I deserve that.” Clark hangs on that exhale, waiting for a glimpse into the quietly-clicking gears that make up Bruce’s brilliant little mind. “It’s not because of you. I just…I need—I want —this to work.”
“This?”
With his cuffed hand, Bruce gestures to the space between them. “Us. Our…partnership.”
Bruce isn’t saying anything Clark doesn’t already know: Batman and Superman are the World’s Finest. People rely on them, and especially on them working together. It was always easy before, but like ice water, the realization that it won’t be easy anymore drips down Clark’s spine. Bruce needs , he said, a relationship with Clark that didn’t have those pesky little feelings, so they could still work together and be friends and be partners like before.
And Clark fucked it all up. He understands, in this moment, that it’s Batman and Superman that are cuffed together—while they're still in their suits, Bruce is tolerating his presence, trying to stay friendly, because that’s what needs to happen for the good of the mission—and Clark and Bruce will never be this close again.
Bruce must read the ice-cold resignation on Clark’s face, because he sighs again, heavy enough to hold the weight of Gotham.
“I am trying, Clark.”
“I didn’t realize it took that much effort,” Clark snaps.
Bruce stills. Clark deflates.
“I’m sorry, that was—”
“It’s fine. If this is about earlier today, I—”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Clark interrupts, closing his eyes against the shame of Bruce needing to drag out a second rejection. “Can we just…” He looks around helplessly for something else to say, but every word in his head feels like another landmine. “Look, B, I don’t want to be stuck with you anymore than you want to.”
“I wouldn’t want to be stuck to anyone else.” The admission is so soft that Clark’s glad for his super-hearing, or else he’d be convinced he heard wrong.
He laughs, dry and wrung-out. “If I pulled too hard, I could break your bones. I know you’ve been thinking about it since the beginning. You don’t need to lie to me—”
“I’m not lying.” Bruce’s voice is thick with conviction. The most stubborn person Clark knows. “You can hurt me, but you won’t.”
I know you wouldn’t drop me. That’s not the problem. What can Clark say? He believes Bruce meant what he said.
“What are you doing?” Clark asks. “What is this?”
“The wrong thing, apparently,” Bruce grumbles, sinking back into the cushion. “Do you just want to go to bed?”
Bed. Clark hasn’t even thought about sleeping arrangements. They’ll have to share a bed, obviously—the chain won’t permit anything else. Bruce’s bed is surely big enough to fit both of them comfortably, but that really isn’t the problem.
No, the problem is Clark.
Spending the night curled up next to Bruce? Drowning in the scent of him, face on one of his pillows? Not just hearing Bruce’s heartbeat settling, but being able to feel it, the tiny exhales of his breath as Bruce lay tucked up beside him, where Clark could protect him from everything? As close as Clark has always wanted, and the whole time he’d be thinking of the ever-present countdown to when Bruce would be free of him.
It’s more than Clark thinks he can stand. “Honestly, no. I really don’t.”
“Then what do you want?” It falls from Bruce’s lips like an admission of failure.
“I don’t want anything from you.”
“Everyone wants something from me,” Bruce parries, cool and logical, and Clark feels sick to his stomach. “It’s fine. I’m used to it. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”
Bruce reaches out, crossing the distance, hand coming to lay over Clark’s. Clark jerks back so quickly that the only place left to go is to stand up, and Bruce gets tugged up right with him, because of course he does, because of course Clark can’t escape.
“What the hell, B?” Is that really what Bruce thinks of him? That he wants Bruce so badly that he doesn’t care if Bruce wants him back? That he’ll be just fine taking , that he’d be okay with Bruce offering his body like it was just another sacrifice for the mission, just another tool to keep the bomb from exploding? Heat builds up in his eyes—tears, not heat vision, and Bruce must be relieved at that, Clark thinks hysterically. “I don’t want anything from you. I especially don’t want to sleep with you. I just want space!”
The words burst out of him; Clark’s chest is heaving, face hot, and Bruce is—Bruce is just there , standing by the loveseat, heart steady, face impassive. Shut down. Cold. Analyzing the next plan for the bomb.
“Fine,” Bruce—Batman—says, and for all of Clark’s superspeed, he doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late to stop it. There’s a sickening crunch and the cuff is yanked free of Bruce’s wrist and the gold of the chain begins to tarnish in front of Clark’s eyes as his own cuff disintegrates around his skin.
“Don’t you—”
“Too late,” Bruce snaps. He pushes Clark away with his good hand, the one that doesn’t have a dislocated thumb on it. The image of the broken digit sears itself into Clark’s photographic memory. “Go. I’ll inform the League that the spell is broken.”
“Bruce—”
“Leave,” Bruce snaps. He doesn’t even bother to cradle his injured hand, as if it doesn’t matter at all. “And next time, don’t jump in the way when I’m about to get hit.”
Jaw clenched, Clark obeys.
He flies to the Fortress on autopilot. It isn’t until he touches down on the cold floor that he realizes how much he can’t stand the thought of being alone.
Lois, god bless her, shows up to Clark’s apartment with a bottle of wine and two pints of chocolate ice cream.
He changes, finally, and they sit on the carpet of his living room. He stabs at the ice cream until it isn’t solid anymore and he tells Lois everything.
“Am I allowed to call him an asshole yet?” Lois asks, licking her spoon clean after Clark reaches the part where Bruce tried to hold his hand on the staircase.
“He wasn’t being an asshole,” Clark says automatically. “He just—”
Lois raises an eyebrow. Clark falters.
“He doesn’t have to love me back—”
“He doesn’t have to be an asshole about it, either.”
Clark takes a bite of ice cream to avoid having to think about that . The universe, in its infinite grace, lets some dribble down the front of Clark’s plaid shirt, because of course it does.
Batman is incredibly efficient at whatever he puts his mind to.
Across the next three days, he puts his mind to avoiding Clark as much as humanly possible.
In a rare display of emotional intelligence, not even Hal says a word about Batman’s still-injured thumb, or the way Clark keeps looking at him like a kicked puppy. Clark wonders if Bruce threatened him into it.
It’s a small miracle that nothing bad happens—though Clark is sure that Batman and Superman would still be fine together in public when they had to be. In the Watchtower, Batman excuses himself quickly whenever Clark enters the room, barely glancing at him. During meetings, Batman’s voice is cool and professional, only addressing Clark when he needs to, and even then, his sentences are short and direct.
They don’t have monitor duty together. Barry takes the shift with Clark, and when he glances at the refined schedule, he doesn’t see Bruce’s name paired with his once.
Clark can’t tell if this is supposed to be some kind of punishment or not. At first, it’s a relief: he doesn’t know what he’d say to Batman if they were speaking. It’s space, which he said that he wanted: space to deal with everything swirling around in his stomach and space to dig through the memories of everything that went down while they were handcuffed together.
The only piece of wisdom he gets out of all that space is how badly he misses his best friend—Superman’s best friend.
Three days after Batman dislocated his thumb to get away from Clark, Clark gets a call from his mother, thanking him for the flowers.
“Flowers?”
Ma chuckles. If Clark closes his eyes, he can hear her, standing in the kitchen, a vase full of water being set down on the wooden table. “Don’t play coy. The sunflowers that showed up on my doorstep.”
God, Clark is going to strangle that man.
“You sent my ma flowers?” Clark asks, the minute he touches down on the balcony outside Bruce’s bedroom.
Bruce is halfway through changing into one of his ‘Brucie’ suits, his jacket splayed out on his bed and his tie hanging, untied, around his neck. “Dick said I should send them, but I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”
“Sunflowers are her favorites.”
“I know. You told me once.”
Yes, Clark mentioned that in passing several years ago. He didn’t expect Bruce to remember that, and he doesn’t know what to do with the fact that he did, except, well, hope .
“What are you doing, B?”
“Giving you space.” Bruce busies himself with affixing his cufflinks, not meeting Clark’s gaze.
Clark rolls his eyes. “You asked me what I wanted. I needed space to figure it out. I just want to be friends.”
“Friends.”
“Yes, friends. Like we were before all this happened.”
He expects Bruce to look relieved, then never bring up any of this again for the rest of their lives. He doesn’t expect Bruce to look so…well, resigned is the only word that Clark can think of to describe it, but it doesn’t make any sense. If he doesn’t want to be friends, why bother sending flowers at all? It isn’t like Clark demanded some sort of apology from him.
Bruce takes a deep breath, and Clark can see that stony Batman mask slotting into place--and, quite frankly, it looks a little ridiculous on Brucie Wayne’s body.
“Will you at least tell me what I did wrong?”
“What you—what?”
Lois’s asshole comments replay in his mind. But Clark hasn’t said anything about that. He isn’t holding any of it against Bruce.
“I thought,” Bruce starts, haltingly. “The cuffs. I wasn’t happy about it, but I thought it would be… useful . A convenient excuse to…I don’t know, invite you in. But you…”
Clark was distracted, and tense, and overstimulated, and heartbroken. He remembers the conversations Bruce tried to start while he was watching Bruce work, too tied up in his own feelings to be good company. But surely Bruce wouldn’t expect him to be good company when he must’ve known Clark would be upset.
Bruce clears his throat. “So it was either something I did to make you not want to… do this with me anymore, or—”
“‘Do this’?” Clark just told him he wants to be friends. “What does that even—”
Bruce makes an annoyed noise. “I tried to let you in and you broke up with me, Clark. What am I supposed to think about that?”
And just like that, the only thing Clark is certain of is the fact that he has no clue what’s going on, and he doesn’t think Bruce does, either.
“I didn’t break—I can’t break up with you. We’re not dating .”
Bruce rolls his eyes. “Fine. We’re not anymore.”
“I’m not being pedantic . I asked you on a date and you said no.”
“Is this just about the pier? Because we can go if it really matters to you. But I don’t think me saying no to one date erases all the other dates we’ve been on.”
“What other dates?”
“The dinners,” Bruce supplies, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. His heartbeat is infuriatingly steady. “The stakeouts. Everything .”
“How long do you think we’ve been dating?”
Bruce looks at him, really looks, and Clark can see the gears clicking in his brain as everything slots into place.
“It would be a month next week.”
“A month and you never kissed me?”
“I thought we were just taking things slow,” Bruce replies. “I didn’t want to rush you.”
Glacial , Clark thinks, considering how long he’s been wanting to kiss Bruce. It’d be sweet that Bruce was willing to wait for him if the whole situation wasn’t making Clark feel so hysterical. “The day you asked me to go to the gala as your fake date…”
“Trial run. To make sure you felt the way I thought you did. And then I asked you out to dinner.”
Clark remembers Bruce asking, the day after he’d posed as his date. The way Bruce looked when Clark said yes, just as eager as Clark. The way he’d shown up on Clark’s doorstep with a suit Clark hadn’t seen before, ready to take him away to one of the best restaurants in Gotham.
Clark’s an idiot. Bruce is an idiot, but Clark’s already chosen to forgive him for it. “I’m going to kiss you now.”
A pleased noise slips out of Bruce’s mouth, and then Clark is stepping forward, cupping Bruce’s chin and bringing their lips together. Bruce kisses back with fervor, his good hand pulling Clark closer to him. Clark gently catches his injured hand, pulling back from Bruce to press a light kiss to the back of Bruce’s hand.
“Why’d you say no?”
Bruce snorts. “Have you ever been to a pier?”
“It’s romantic.”
“It’s not.” Bruce leans in again, chasing Clark’s lips, and Clark melts into it. He wants to bottle this feeling, the sensation of Bruce’s soft lips against his.
“Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent would get mugged in two minutes flat,” Bruce argues, pulling away again.
Of course the Gotham pier is terrible. “I’m talking about the Metropolis one.”
“Hn.” It’s a reluctant noise of consideration, the one reserved for Bruce not wanting to admit that Clark was right about something they were arguing about. Clark has never been more in love.
“Is that a yes?”
“I don’t know, are we dating?”
Asshole. Then: “Well, the Batman and Superman on your desk looked happy, so I think we should give it a shot.”
Bruce is late to the gala he was supposed to be attending by an hour. Clark really can’t find it in himself to feel bad about that, seeing as how he was late to his own relationship by three weeks.
Bruce finds the Metropolis pier romantic.
He’d refuse to ever admit it, of course, but Clark can tell by the way Bruce is trying not to smile. It takes Bruce five minutes of walking, his fingers brushing Clark’s with every swing, before he finally takes Clark’s hand, intertwining their fingers together. They’re standing closer than they were when they were handcuffed, and all Clark has to do to kiss Bruce is turn his head to the side and look down a little—which he does, liberally, because he’s wanted it for long enough, and there’s no reason not to, now.
“You’re coming to dinner this weekend,” Clark says. “My ma wants to meet you.”
The look on Bruce’s face is the exact same one he gets while planning one of the League’s attacks, turning fear into strategy. It’s adorable, really, and Clark squeezes his hand comfortingly.
“You’ve met her before. She loves you.”
“Not as your boyfriend.”
“Well, at least I’m inviting you, instead of waiting until we’re handcuffed together again.” Clark punctuates the sentence with a kiss on Bruce’s cheek. Bruce permits it, then turns to scowl at Clark.