Gardens of Wayne Manor: Scarlet Knights (27/40)
Title: Chapter Twenty-Seven: Scarlet Knights
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce, Martha Kent, Alfred Pennyworth, Brainiac-5
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None necessary
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2400Summary: Clark and Bruce each do some planning, some sulking, and some discreet stalking.
“Explain your brilliant reasoning to me again, Superboy.”
Clark glared at Brainiac 5, who looked impassively back at him. “I told you, Saturn Girl has to remove the mental block from my mind.”
"That was your assertion, yes, I followed that. One's reasoning is usually the reason one gives for something. It's most typically in the form of a sentence beginning with 'because...'"
“Because I need to tell Bruce what I’ve been doing!”
Brainiac 5 raised one golden eyebrow. “Perhaps in the twenty-first century the word ‘need’ has a different nuance of meaning than it has in these more civilized times. Because it sounds to me more like you want to tell him.”
“He--he--” Clark suffered a vividly painful flashback to standing before Bruce, tongue-tied, struggling to explain the Legion to him and having to resort to calling it some kind of fan club. “He thinks I’m a dork, Brainy!”
This time Brainiac 5’s eyebrow spoke eloquent volumes.
“I just--” Clark struggled for words, to make himself clear. “I can’t stand it, Brainy! The way he looked at me--I’m telling you, if Saturn Girl won’t remove the block, I’ll find some way around it to tell him, I swear I will--”
The impassiveness fell away from Brainiac 5’s face, to be replaced by a cold fury laced with disdain. “You callow dunce! Change the course of history, and the greatest mind the universe has ever known--" He gestured at his own chest, "--could wake up in some Apokliptican slave pit tomorrow morning. You are meddling with forces you couldn't even begin to understand and you risk disaster at a level even I can barely comprehend. For what? Your pride!” His eyes narrowed. “Listen to me well, Kal-El. If you cannot bear humbling yourself for the sake of the greater good, if you cannot tolerate people misunderstanding who you truly are--then you are not the hero we were always lead to believe.”
Clark looked down at the bright costume, swallowing. “Anyone else would be all right. But it’s...Bruce,” he finished wretchedly.
He braced himself for another torrent of scolding from the Legionnaire. When none came, he looked up to catch a fleeting look of sympathy on Brainy’s face. “Superboy,” he said, almost awkwardly. “I know this is hard for you. But we trust you to do the right thing, because you’re...the world’s finest.” He grimaced as if annoyed at himself and turned to go. “Trust in the future,” he said softly at the door, face turned away. "If not in us.” Then he pivoted to look back at Clark, his expression back to its normal annoyance. “And try not to do anything too stupid,” he sneered, and was gone, leaving Clark almost relieved at the final gibe. A sympathetic Brainiac 5 was almost more alarming than fighting Mordru.
: : :
The time sphere faded away, Dream Girl and Cosmic Boy’s forms dissipating as they waved goodbye, and Clark trudged back to his little bungalow, happy to be back in his real clothing. The Legion was awesome, but sometimes it was so jarring to be called “Superboy” and “Kal-El” all the time--names which seemed to mean a lot to the Legionnaires, but were meaningless to him. He always had fun in the future, but he always missed being Clark.
His eye fell on the collection of clippings and notes on his bed and his good mood soured once again. “Juror Recants!” “Alleged Threats by Police Produced Guilty Verdict.” “Four Years Later, Smuggler May Go Free.” He picked up one clipping with a name circled in red pen: “According to Cobblepot’s attorney, famed Metropolis defense lawyer Bobby Crawford, ‘My client is a victim of a frame-up by the notoriously corrupt Gotham police.’” In the margins Clark had scribbled “New attorney? Why Metropolis?”
Clark frowned, tapping the clipping with a pen. “Metropolis...” he muttered.
“Clark?” His mother’s voice came from the kitchen. “Do you have time to prune the Scarlet Knights? I didn’t have a chance to get to them this morning.”
“Sure,” Clark said, putting down the clipping and joining his mother. “Ma, I was wondering...would you mind if I drove to Metropolis tomorrow? I was hoping to visit M.U.’s journalism department.”
“There won’t be many people on campus on a Saturday,” she frowned. “And the driving in Metropolis...”
“Ma, I drive in Gotham all the time! That’s way worse than Metropolis.”
“But it’s an unfamiliar city,” she started, then let the sentence trail off. Clark saw her purse her lips. “Good heavens,” she said, sounding almost irritated with herself. “Why am I fretting about your safety?”
“Because you’re my Ma?” he suggested, and enjoyed her smile in response.
“Mothers are allowed to worry about their boys, no matter how special they are.” She kissed him on the cheek, then turned away to dry some dishes. “Are you...serious about M.U.?”
Clark glanced up, but she was focusing intently on a glass. “I’d come back every weekend.”
“Of course you would,” Martha said heartily. “And M.U. is an excellent university.”
“I might not even get accepted there,” Clark said. “And Hudson’s really good too...”
“But your heart is set on Metropolis,” Martha finished.
“Well, not exactly,” said Clark, but he could hear the irresolution in his words. The truth was he had fallen in love with Metropolis. But not the actual city--no, his love was all for the gleaming megalopolis it would become in a thousand years, with its fluted spires and brilliant lights. The real Metropolis seemed rather mundane in comparison. In his mind, Metropolis would always be the City of Tomorrow, the city where he was first a hero.
The Legion had never given him details, but he assumed Gotham was going to be his home base when he was an adult. After all, Gotham needed so much more help than her more sedate sister. He hoped he could have something to do with Metropolis becoming the ever-bright vision it would be in the future, but Gotham had to be his main focus.
His mother suddenly flicked the tail end of the drying cloth at him, and Clark broke out of his reverie. “I’m sorry?”
“I said you had better get to work on those Scarlet Knights,” she said pointedly, and Clark laughed and bowed before heading out.
He had finished clipping the stemmy branches of the roses--in a few months they’d have heavy crimson blooms, but right now they were just a bare tangle of briars--and was going to check on the Polar Stars in the moon garden when he caught a flicker of faraway movement out of the corner of his eye. There was something in the gazebo at the southeast corner of the gardens, the one overlooking the ocean.
He should just go home, he shouldn’t even--but his alien vision seemed to collapse the distance between him and the gazebo involuntarily, the yards crumpling into nothingness, until it was as if he stood within, looking at Bruce Wayne.
Bruce was doing push-ups, his eyes fixed on the floor of the gazebo, his arms moving mechanically up and down. There was sweat beading and dripping off his brow, and his breath was coming hard and hoarse, but his pace didn’t slacken, even though his arms were trembling.
He was also shirtless, Clark realized abruptly. Sweat was trickling down his sides, glistening on ribs far too prominent, his chest heaving with his breaths. And he wasn’t stopping even though he had to be far past the limits of his endurance. Clark could nearly hear his muscles and sinews screaming protest as they pressed the skin, and he just kept going, pushing, driving himself beyond bearing.
Clark felt some kind of sound struggling in the back of his throat, a groan of protest or denial. He wanted to rush to the gazebo and yell at Bruce to stop this insanity--he wanted to knock his arms out from under him, force him to rest, hold him until his breaths eased--he wanted to hold him--he wanted to--
Bruce’s arms gave out as if someone had taken a sword to them, and then he collapsed and lay there face down, his body shuddering with panting breaths. For a long time he just lay there, sobbing with exhaustion. Then he finally, laboriously rolled over. Long, sweat-soaked hair stuck to his face as he stared at the ceiling, his pale eyes clouded and glassy with pain.
Clark tried to relax and realized his hands were clenched; looking down, he saw the twisted remains of the pruning shears, bent into a tesseract of anguish. How long had he been watching Bruce? It felt like hours of helplessness. His chest was aching as though he’d breathed pure vacuum, locked tight around a snarled knot of emotions. Bruce...
Bruce was still lying on his back. A pale spring breeze stirred his damp hair and he closed his eyes at its touch on his face.
Then he rolled over and started doing push-ups again with ruthless precision.
Clark turned from the sight, from his own reaction, and fled homeward.
: : :
“You can’t keep doing this,” Alfred noted as he entered the bedroom.
Bruce kept his eyes closed, in part because he was afraid to discover he was too exhausted to open them. His whole body was aching, his arms felt like the nerves had been replaced with white-hot needles--but it was the pain of weariness, not the pain of withdrawal, and he reveled in it. He was weakened, he needed to build up his muscle mass, his endurance. But he wasn’t broken.
“I have to,” he said.
Alfred sighed and closed the curtains so the early afternoon sun didn’t fall on Bruce’s face, then started to lay out a lunch beside the bed. Bruce could hear the clink of china and silver, smell orange juice and steamed spinach.
“You didn’t tell me about Cobblepot’s retrial,” Bruce said
The quiet sounds of meal preparation paused. “I didn’t wish to disturb your convalescence.”
“It’s ridiculous. Claiming Gordon intimidated a juror. He wouldn’t do that. Who would say that? And why?” Bruce opened his eyes and pulled himself to a sitting position with some effort. “It was an open and shut case. The police wouldn’t need to frame him.”
“I would never underestimate the mendacity of the Gotham police, sir.”
“And why bring in a famous lawyer from Metropolis? How could Cobblepot even afford him?” Impotent anger roiled in Bruce’s gut. Gordon’s reputation smeared, Cobblepot free again, all the good work he and Clark had done together undone--
He and Clark together--
“Sir,” Alfred said, his voice alarmed, “Are you all right?”
Bruce realized he was panting, furious gasps for breath, his whole body shaking with anger. He forced himself to relax. “I'm going to Metropolis tomorrow.”
“Sir--”
“--I saw in the paper that the Wayne Enterprises branch in Metropolis has had excellent profits last quarter. I’d like to give the manager there my regards,” Bruce said. He looked up at Alfred steadily.
After a moment Alfred bent back to preparing lunch. “I’ll pick out a suit for you,” he said softly.
: : :
Twilight was falling as Bruce put down his notebook and rubbed his eyes. He’d finished recording all his thoughts about the physiological and psychological effects of heroin addiction an hour ago, and had moved on to making notes about the Cobblepot case. The jurors on the case were a matter of public record, but he’d have to go to the library and search the newspapers and legal documents. Then he’d have to go through and investigate each one, looking for any unexplained changes in their lives recently, anything that might hint at why someone would recant now.
He stood up and went to the window. His eyes went involuntarily to the Kents’ bungalow, a glimmer of light among the firs. Slightly to the north, he could see the spreading beech where their treehouse had been. And under it--
Bruce drew back into the shadows of his room for a second, then realized that the figure sitting at the base of the tree was lost in a book and hadn’t noticed him watching.
Clark was sitting on the ground, turning the pages of a large book he was holding on his knee. It was almost too dark to read, but Clark hadn’t seemed to notice. Bruce couldn’t see the title of the book from his vantage point, but he could see Clark push his glasses irritably up on his nose. There was a glint of metal on his hand--that ring, Bruce realized, the one with the “L” on it. L for...League? Bruce wondered what Clark’s group of friends called themselves. Clark wouldn’t have called another group the League of Valor. Would he?
He was being ridiculous, Bruce thought. He was the one who’d walked away. Did he think Clark would never talk about Zorro or Narnia or Lensmen with anyone but him? Besides, that was all make-believe. He’d put all that away.
So why, he wondered with a sinking, wretched feeling, would he almost have preferred the ring belong to Clark’s girlfriend?
Of course, Clark had probably had girlfriends in the last year, too. Like Roxy. Bruce could remember vividly--far too vividly--the night he had helped Clark practice for his date with her. Clark’s tongue teasing his. Clark’s hand tightening on his shoulder, pulling him close.
Clark’s voice saying Roxy’s name.
Had he kissed Roxy later? Had it ended there? If he’d kissed Roxy the same way he’d kissed Bruce, Bruce had no doubt Roxy would have been willing to do anything at all with Clark. Anything at all.
Bruce realized his hand was clenched in the heavy brocade curtains, the fabric trembling like water in his grip. He let go of it and turned away from the sight of Clark Kent reading where the Secret Fortress used to be, would never be again. He had turned his back on all that, and Clark had no reason to hold him in anything but contempt.
He sat down and did situps until he was almost too tired to move, too tired to imagine Clark’s hands and mouth.
Almost.
( Chapter 28)
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce, Martha Kent, Alfred Pennyworth, Brainiac-5
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None necessary
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2400Summary: Clark and Bruce each do some planning, some sulking, and some discreet stalking.
“Explain your brilliant reasoning to me again, Superboy.”
Clark glared at Brainiac 5, who looked impassively back at him. “I told you, Saturn Girl has to remove the mental block from my mind.”
"That was your assertion, yes, I followed that. One's reasoning is usually the reason one gives for something. It's most typically in the form of a sentence beginning with 'because...'"
“Because I need to tell Bruce what I’ve been doing!”
Brainiac 5 raised one golden eyebrow. “Perhaps in the twenty-first century the word ‘need’ has a different nuance of meaning than it has in these more civilized times. Because it sounds to me more like you want to tell him.”
“He--he--” Clark suffered a vividly painful flashback to standing before Bruce, tongue-tied, struggling to explain the Legion to him and having to resort to calling it some kind of fan club. “He thinks I’m a dork, Brainy!”
This time Brainiac 5’s eyebrow spoke eloquent volumes.
“I just--” Clark struggled for words, to make himself clear. “I can’t stand it, Brainy! The way he looked at me--I’m telling you, if Saturn Girl won’t remove the block, I’ll find some way around it to tell him, I swear I will--”
The impassiveness fell away from Brainiac 5’s face, to be replaced by a cold fury laced with disdain. “You callow dunce! Change the course of history, and the greatest mind the universe has ever known--" He gestured at his own chest, "--could wake up in some Apokliptican slave pit tomorrow morning. You are meddling with forces you couldn't even begin to understand and you risk disaster at a level even I can barely comprehend. For what? Your pride!” His eyes narrowed. “Listen to me well, Kal-El. If you cannot bear humbling yourself for the sake of the greater good, if you cannot tolerate people misunderstanding who you truly are--then you are not the hero we were always lead to believe.”
Clark looked down at the bright costume, swallowing. “Anyone else would be all right. But it’s...Bruce,” he finished wretchedly.
He braced himself for another torrent of scolding from the Legionnaire. When none came, he looked up to catch a fleeting look of sympathy on Brainy’s face. “Superboy,” he said, almost awkwardly. “I know this is hard for you. But we trust you to do the right thing, because you’re...the world’s finest.” He grimaced as if annoyed at himself and turned to go. “Trust in the future,” he said softly at the door, face turned away. "If not in us.” Then he pivoted to look back at Clark, his expression back to its normal annoyance. “And try not to do anything too stupid,” he sneered, and was gone, leaving Clark almost relieved at the final gibe. A sympathetic Brainiac 5 was almost more alarming than fighting Mordru.
: : :
The time sphere faded away, Dream Girl and Cosmic Boy’s forms dissipating as they waved goodbye, and Clark trudged back to his little bungalow, happy to be back in his real clothing. The Legion was awesome, but sometimes it was so jarring to be called “Superboy” and “Kal-El” all the time--names which seemed to mean a lot to the Legionnaires, but were meaningless to him. He always had fun in the future, but he always missed being Clark.
His eye fell on the collection of clippings and notes on his bed and his good mood soured once again. “Juror Recants!” “Alleged Threats by Police Produced Guilty Verdict.” “Four Years Later, Smuggler May Go Free.” He picked up one clipping with a name circled in red pen: “According to Cobblepot’s attorney, famed Metropolis defense lawyer Bobby Crawford, ‘My client is a victim of a frame-up by the notoriously corrupt Gotham police.’” In the margins Clark had scribbled “New attorney? Why Metropolis?”
Clark frowned, tapping the clipping with a pen. “Metropolis...” he muttered.
“Clark?” His mother’s voice came from the kitchen. “Do you have time to prune the Scarlet Knights? I didn’t have a chance to get to them this morning.”
“Sure,” Clark said, putting down the clipping and joining his mother. “Ma, I was wondering...would you mind if I drove to Metropolis tomorrow? I was hoping to visit M.U.’s journalism department.”
“There won’t be many people on campus on a Saturday,” she frowned. “And the driving in Metropolis...”
“Ma, I drive in Gotham all the time! That’s way worse than Metropolis.”
“But it’s an unfamiliar city,” she started, then let the sentence trail off. Clark saw her purse her lips. “Good heavens,” she said, sounding almost irritated with herself. “Why am I fretting about your safety?”
“Because you’re my Ma?” he suggested, and enjoyed her smile in response.
“Mothers are allowed to worry about their boys, no matter how special they are.” She kissed him on the cheek, then turned away to dry some dishes. “Are you...serious about M.U.?”
Clark glanced up, but she was focusing intently on a glass. “I’d come back every weekend.”
“Of course you would,” Martha said heartily. “And M.U. is an excellent university.”
“I might not even get accepted there,” Clark said. “And Hudson’s really good too...”
“But your heart is set on Metropolis,” Martha finished.
“Well, not exactly,” said Clark, but he could hear the irresolution in his words. The truth was he had fallen in love with Metropolis. But not the actual city--no, his love was all for the gleaming megalopolis it would become in a thousand years, with its fluted spires and brilliant lights. The real Metropolis seemed rather mundane in comparison. In his mind, Metropolis would always be the City of Tomorrow, the city where he was first a hero.
The Legion had never given him details, but he assumed Gotham was going to be his home base when he was an adult. After all, Gotham needed so much more help than her more sedate sister. He hoped he could have something to do with Metropolis becoming the ever-bright vision it would be in the future, but Gotham had to be his main focus.
His mother suddenly flicked the tail end of the drying cloth at him, and Clark broke out of his reverie. “I’m sorry?”
“I said you had better get to work on those Scarlet Knights,” she said pointedly, and Clark laughed and bowed before heading out.
He had finished clipping the stemmy branches of the roses--in a few months they’d have heavy crimson blooms, but right now they were just a bare tangle of briars--and was going to check on the Polar Stars in the moon garden when he caught a flicker of faraway movement out of the corner of his eye. There was something in the gazebo at the southeast corner of the gardens, the one overlooking the ocean.
He should just go home, he shouldn’t even--but his alien vision seemed to collapse the distance between him and the gazebo involuntarily, the yards crumpling into nothingness, until it was as if he stood within, looking at Bruce Wayne.
Bruce was doing push-ups, his eyes fixed on the floor of the gazebo, his arms moving mechanically up and down. There was sweat beading and dripping off his brow, and his breath was coming hard and hoarse, but his pace didn’t slacken, even though his arms were trembling.
He was also shirtless, Clark realized abruptly. Sweat was trickling down his sides, glistening on ribs far too prominent, his chest heaving with his breaths. And he wasn’t stopping even though he had to be far past the limits of his endurance. Clark could nearly hear his muscles and sinews screaming protest as they pressed the skin, and he just kept going, pushing, driving himself beyond bearing.
Clark felt some kind of sound struggling in the back of his throat, a groan of protest or denial. He wanted to rush to the gazebo and yell at Bruce to stop this insanity--he wanted to knock his arms out from under him, force him to rest, hold him until his breaths eased--he wanted to hold him--he wanted to--
Bruce’s arms gave out as if someone had taken a sword to them, and then he collapsed and lay there face down, his body shuddering with panting breaths. For a long time he just lay there, sobbing with exhaustion. Then he finally, laboriously rolled over. Long, sweat-soaked hair stuck to his face as he stared at the ceiling, his pale eyes clouded and glassy with pain.
Clark tried to relax and realized his hands were clenched; looking down, he saw the twisted remains of the pruning shears, bent into a tesseract of anguish. How long had he been watching Bruce? It felt like hours of helplessness. His chest was aching as though he’d breathed pure vacuum, locked tight around a snarled knot of emotions. Bruce...
Bruce was still lying on his back. A pale spring breeze stirred his damp hair and he closed his eyes at its touch on his face.
Then he rolled over and started doing push-ups again with ruthless precision.
Clark turned from the sight, from his own reaction, and fled homeward.
: : :
“You can’t keep doing this,” Alfred noted as he entered the bedroom.
Bruce kept his eyes closed, in part because he was afraid to discover he was too exhausted to open them. His whole body was aching, his arms felt like the nerves had been replaced with white-hot needles--but it was the pain of weariness, not the pain of withdrawal, and he reveled in it. He was weakened, he needed to build up his muscle mass, his endurance. But he wasn’t broken.
“I have to,” he said.
Alfred sighed and closed the curtains so the early afternoon sun didn’t fall on Bruce’s face, then started to lay out a lunch beside the bed. Bruce could hear the clink of china and silver, smell orange juice and steamed spinach.
“You didn’t tell me about Cobblepot’s retrial,” Bruce said
The quiet sounds of meal preparation paused. “I didn’t wish to disturb your convalescence.”
“It’s ridiculous. Claiming Gordon intimidated a juror. He wouldn’t do that. Who would say that? And why?” Bruce opened his eyes and pulled himself to a sitting position with some effort. “It was an open and shut case. The police wouldn’t need to frame him.”
“I would never underestimate the mendacity of the Gotham police, sir.”
“And why bring in a famous lawyer from Metropolis? How could Cobblepot even afford him?” Impotent anger roiled in Bruce’s gut. Gordon’s reputation smeared, Cobblepot free again, all the good work he and Clark had done together undone--
He and Clark together--
“Sir,” Alfred said, his voice alarmed, “Are you all right?”
Bruce realized he was panting, furious gasps for breath, his whole body shaking with anger. He forced himself to relax. “I'm going to Metropolis tomorrow.”
“Sir--”
“--I saw in the paper that the Wayne Enterprises branch in Metropolis has had excellent profits last quarter. I’d like to give the manager there my regards,” Bruce said. He looked up at Alfred steadily.
After a moment Alfred bent back to preparing lunch. “I’ll pick out a suit for you,” he said softly.
: : :
Twilight was falling as Bruce put down his notebook and rubbed his eyes. He’d finished recording all his thoughts about the physiological and psychological effects of heroin addiction an hour ago, and had moved on to making notes about the Cobblepot case. The jurors on the case were a matter of public record, but he’d have to go to the library and search the newspapers and legal documents. Then he’d have to go through and investigate each one, looking for any unexplained changes in their lives recently, anything that might hint at why someone would recant now.
He stood up and went to the window. His eyes went involuntarily to the Kents’ bungalow, a glimmer of light among the firs. Slightly to the north, he could see the spreading beech where their treehouse had been. And under it--
Bruce drew back into the shadows of his room for a second, then realized that the figure sitting at the base of the tree was lost in a book and hadn’t noticed him watching.
Clark was sitting on the ground, turning the pages of a large book he was holding on his knee. It was almost too dark to read, but Clark hadn’t seemed to notice. Bruce couldn’t see the title of the book from his vantage point, but he could see Clark push his glasses irritably up on his nose. There was a glint of metal on his hand--that ring, Bruce realized, the one with the “L” on it. L for...League? Bruce wondered what Clark’s group of friends called themselves. Clark wouldn’t have called another group the League of Valor. Would he?
He was being ridiculous, Bruce thought. He was the one who’d walked away. Did he think Clark would never talk about Zorro or Narnia or Lensmen with anyone but him? Besides, that was all make-believe. He’d put all that away.
So why, he wondered with a sinking, wretched feeling, would he almost have preferred the ring belong to Clark’s girlfriend?
Of course, Clark had probably had girlfriends in the last year, too. Like Roxy. Bruce could remember vividly--far too vividly--the night he had helped Clark practice for his date with her. Clark’s tongue teasing his. Clark’s hand tightening on his shoulder, pulling him close.
Clark’s voice saying Roxy’s name.
Had he kissed Roxy later? Had it ended there? If he’d kissed Roxy the same way he’d kissed Bruce, Bruce had no doubt Roxy would have been willing to do anything at all with Clark. Anything at all.
Bruce realized his hand was clenched in the heavy brocade curtains, the fabric trembling like water in his grip. He let go of it and turned away from the sight of Clark Kent reading where the Secret Fortress used to be, would never be again. He had turned his back on all that, and Clark had no reason to hold him in anything but contempt.
He sat down and did situps until he was almost too tired to move, too tired to imagine Clark’s hands and mouth.
Almost.
( Chapter 28)