A Week of Rain (Chapter 8/8)
A Week of Rain by mithen
Chapters: 8/8
Fandom: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Characters: Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne
Additional Tags: Amnesia, Resurrection, Romance, Secret Identity, Guilt
Summary:Clark Kent seeks out Bruce Wayne when he is resurrected, but he has no memory of his time as Superman and no powers. Bruce has to deal with an unexpected visitor to his lake house-and his own grief, guilt, and attraction.
Chapter Seven (2100 words):
His hand still hurt. Clark stared at the bruised knuckles in some wonderment. Outside of the lake house, the rain fell in a steady hiss into the morning, a white noise that blotted out the rest of the world. He couldn’t hear anything beyond it: couldn’t hear his mother’s heartbeat, or the weeping of children, or the screams of the dying. Not even if he’d tried.
He closed his eyes and listened to the rain for a long, quiet space.
“What will you do now?” Bruce was sitting next to him on the floor, staring at the flames in the fireplace.
“Go back to Metropolis, I guess. I have friends that will be happy to know I’m still alive. Get back to work.”
“Work.” It wasn’t quite a question.
Clark smiled at Bruce. “Both kinds of work, assuming my powers come back.” Then he shrugged. “And if they don’t, well… I can still help in some way, I’m sure.”
“So even if you have no powers, you won’t go back to a...normal life?” Bruce kept his voice level, but Clark could hear the emotion beneath the words as clearly as if Bruce had shouted them: You won’t leave me?
“You don’t have powers, right?” Bruce’s mouth twitched wryly and he nodded. “So it can be done. I can help in some way.” Clark waved a hand at the soft whisper of rain outside, the mist lifting from the lake into the steel-gray sky. “This has been...wonderful. But it’s not my life.” He looked at Bruce. “It’s not your life.” He cleared his throat. “It’s not our life.”
“Our life,” Bruce said softly, and for a moment they simply sat together.
Then Bruce came to his feet, all business. “Okay, about the sunlight. I’ve been thinking about it and it seems Kryptonian cells absorb solar radiation and transform it into energy, so it stands to reason that if we expose you to sunlight, your powers may well come back. All we have to do is drive out of this weather system and get you into the sun and--”
“--Bruce.” Clark caught at Bruce’s hand without rising. “My powers first manifested as a child. For decades, I’ve been able to hear voices on the other side of the world. I’ve been impervious to heat, to cold, to pain. I’ve been able to see microbes.”
“Really?” For a moment Bruce’s face lit up with an almost childlike curiosity and Clark caught a glimpse of the young boy he had once been. “That sounds amazing.”
Clark couldn’t help but laugh. “It is, when it isn’t incredibly distracting. I’ve always had to find ways to...take in less, to process less, to cut myself off from the stimuli that were constantly bombarding me, or I’d have gone mad. When I have my powers, being fully here and now and not, say, hearing music in Sydney or seeing microwaves--it takes an active effort of will.”
The scientific zeal on Bruce’s face had faded into sympathy. “That sounds...difficult,” he said, frowning.
“Sometimes,” Clark admitted. “But Bruce, this last week, here with you--I’ve been fully here and now, all the time. It’s been...a gift.” He touched the smooth slate of the floor, feeling the cool of it under his hand. “A gift I only became fully aware of once I got my memories back. But now I know.” He smiled up at Bruce. “And it’s a gift I’d like to enjoy for a few hours more with you.”
Bruce sank down slowly to sit next to him on the rug once more, his stern face set in uncharacteristically hesitant lines. “Of course,” he said, and Clark saw the rest of the sentence--It’s the least I can do considering I basically murdered you--flicker through his eyes, saw him swallow the words with an effort. It was a beginning, at least. “We can enjoy the fire, I can have Alfred bring us some food--I bet you haven’t ever been able to enjoy alcohol, I have some great brandy we could--”
“Bruce,” Clark said. “I was thinking of something more...intimate.”
“Oh,” said Bruce. He had gone very still. He sat for a moment in silence, as if thinking deeply, then burst out: “Can you not have sex when you have powers? How does that work?” He caught himself. “Uh, sorry. But I’ve wondered.”
“You’ve wondered.”
“I’ve wondered a lot,” Bruce admitted.
“I can have sex,” Clark said. “It’s just…” He groped for words to describe it. Here, sitting on the floor without powers, with the soft sound of the rain and the crackle of the fire all around, it was almost hard to imagine it. “There’s always part of me that has to be working to not see or hear or feel too much. Like having intrusive thoughts that you can learn to banish, but it’s still a conscious thing you have to do. It became second nature, a habit. But it’s not the same as it would be...no. I want…” He reached out and covered Bruce’s hand with his own. “I want to see what it’s like to lose myself in it completely. With you.”
“Oh.” Bruce rubbed at his chin. “So what do you want to do?”
Clark’s heart seemed to lurch. “Everything,” he said fervently. “I can’t--you can’t ask me to choose. I trust you.”
Something complex and pained flickered behind Bruce’s eyes at Clark’s last words. He took a breath. “All right then,” he said. “If you really trust me, I have a favor to ask of you.”
Clark was lying on a blanket thrown down on the slate floor of the living room, for Bruce couldn’t bear to take him into the dark of the bedroom. No more darkness. Here, where windows let in the misty silver light, here was the right place.
There was a long, thin scratch along Clark’s midriff where some bramble had slipped through his clothes. There was a bruise on his hipbone, just above his jeans, gained from banging into something in the dark of the caves. Bruce touched his lips to both small wounds and heard Clark murmur something wordless, the sound blending with the rain. He pushed Clark’s sweater higher, exposing more and more skin, reveling in the sight of it, touching each rib almost reverently. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth came a sudden echo from his childhood, like light through stained glass windows and the scent of incense. He banished it as sternly as he had banished his thoughts about Kryptonian biology. No gods here, just two men. But his fingers trembled for a moment before he could steady them again.
He could feel Clark’s breaths quickening at his touch, and as he approached a nipple Clark suddenly squirmed out of his sweater, emerging flushed and with his hair rumpled, smiling at Bruce almost triumphantly. Bruce flicked his fingers across the nipple and Clark’s smile faltered into surprise and delight, his eyes going half-closed. “That feels…” His voice trailed off.
After a long silence, Bruce dragged his finger across to the other nipple, feeling Clark tense in anticipation before he brushed it, summoning a shaky sigh. “How does it feel?”
“Like everything,” Clark said. “Like…everything.”
“I don’t want my pleasure to be part of it,” Bruce had explained. “I want this to be about you. About me making you feel.” Feel something other than pain and fear, he hadn’t said. I want to know that I can bring you joy. “I want my pleasure to be your pleasure.”
Clark had looked at him for a long time, head slightly to the side, his gaze seeming to look at and through Bruce, reading his soul. Then he had smiled.
“This time,” he had said like a promise.
So Bruce bent over him and felt Clark’s pulse flutter in his throat against Bruce’s lips. He took Clark out of his clothes and savored the sight of him smiling then relished the way that smile faltered as he put his hands on him at last, stroking and coaxing.
“That’s--” Clark’s voice was breathless. He canted his hips upward into Bruce’s touch. “Oh.” He reached up and grabbed at Bruce’s collar like a drowning man clutching at a spar. “It’s--it’s--don’t stop.”
Bruce stopped and Clark glared at him. The glare broke off into a startled noise as Bruce shifted to kiss the bruise on his hip again, then moved to his thighs. Bruce felt his stubble scratching at the skin of Clark’s inner thighs; Clark’s erection pushed up against him harder at the sensation. Clark hissed, and his hands hovered over Bruce’s head, the fingers splayed.
Bruce reached up and took Clark’s hand and put it on his head. Then he took Clark in his mouth, revelling in the sound he made, sharp and surprised and abandoned. Clark’s fingers tightened in his hair, and Bruce let them guide him, let Clark set the pace: slow at first, luxurious. The soft and constant sound of the rain turned to a gentle whisper as they moved together, and Bruce lost himself in Clark’s delight. By the time Clark cried out, his back arching, even that had faded and there was nothing but the sound of Clark’s hoarse breaths and his own heartbeat in his ears, hammering with joy undeserved.
They lay together for a time, listening to the first birds greeting the morning. Clark’s eyes were drowsy and replete. “Thank you,” he said.
“I’m not done yet,” Bruce said. He kissed Clark’s collarbone and rested his head on his chest, reading the clues of his body: heartbeat, capillary dilation, breath rate. When he was fairly certain Clark was ready for more, he said, “Now I want to watch your face,” and reached down to take Clark in his hand again.
Clark gasped and yearned up into Bruce’s touch, sensitive and shuddering. He was hard again almost immediately (so young, Bruce thought wryly), eager under Bruce’s hands.
“Oh, I’ve never felt-- that’s too good, it’s--” Clark fell silent, his eyes closed, all his focus turned inward. The mist on the lake was lifting, the light turning from misty silver to pale gold, and Bruce watched Clark’s face as Bruce’s touch carried him back into pleasure, and then into release. He watched his former enemy abandon himself beneath his hands, and in that trust and faith found a different kind of release at last.
Some time later, Clark--cleaned up but still gloriously nude, sprawled across the blanket on the floor with lazy grace--looked out at the lake. For the first time in a week, sunlight touched the water and sent gleams of light all around the lake house. Bruce watched as a square of morning slanted across the floor, drawing close to them.
This time he didn’t move to close the shutters.
He propped himself up on an elbow and watched as Clark reached out, his bruised hand coming to rest in the oblong of light. As the sun touched his fingers, the dark marks faded away, leaving the skin unmarred, touched with gold.
They waited together as the light moved to caress Clark’s face, limning his eyelashes; the scar on his cheek vanished into radiance. Clark sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to smile at Bruce as the light moved across him. There were tears on his lashes like diamonds.
The scratch on his abdomen, the bruise on his hipbone: inch by slow inch the sunlight washed them away.
Bruce had thought when Clark’s abilities came back there would be a burst of energy, a surge of power. He hadn’t expected it to be so quiet, so gentle: Clark simply seemed to become more himself, to inhabit his own skin more fully, more truly. There was a beauty to it beyond anything Bruce had imagined, and for a fearful moment he could see a chasm open up between them again, between the sunlit god and the creature of fear and darkness.
And then Clark laughed as if he could see Bruce’s fears in his eyes, and pulled him into the hopeful sunlight for a kiss warm and bright enough to lift any shadow.
Chapters: 8/8
Fandom: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Characters: Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne
Additional Tags: Amnesia, Resurrection, Romance, Secret Identity, Guilt
Summary:Clark Kent seeks out Bruce Wayne when he is resurrected, but he has no memory of his time as Superman and no powers. Bruce has to deal with an unexpected visitor to his lake house-and his own grief, guilt, and attraction.
Chapter Seven (2100 words):
His hand still hurt. Clark stared at the bruised knuckles in some wonderment. Outside of the lake house, the rain fell in a steady hiss into the morning, a white noise that blotted out the rest of the world. He couldn’t hear anything beyond it: couldn’t hear his mother’s heartbeat, or the weeping of children, or the screams of the dying. Not even if he’d tried.
He closed his eyes and listened to the rain for a long, quiet space.
“What will you do now?” Bruce was sitting next to him on the floor, staring at the flames in the fireplace.
“Go back to Metropolis, I guess. I have friends that will be happy to know I’m still alive. Get back to work.”
“Work.” It wasn’t quite a question.
Clark smiled at Bruce. “Both kinds of work, assuming my powers come back.” Then he shrugged. “And if they don’t, well… I can still help in some way, I’m sure.”
“So even if you have no powers, you won’t go back to a...normal life?” Bruce kept his voice level, but Clark could hear the emotion beneath the words as clearly as if Bruce had shouted them: You won’t leave me?
“You don’t have powers, right?” Bruce’s mouth twitched wryly and he nodded. “So it can be done. I can help in some way.” Clark waved a hand at the soft whisper of rain outside, the mist lifting from the lake into the steel-gray sky. “This has been...wonderful. But it’s not my life.” He looked at Bruce. “It’s not your life.” He cleared his throat. “It’s not our life.”
“Our life,” Bruce said softly, and for a moment they simply sat together.
Then Bruce came to his feet, all business. “Okay, about the sunlight. I’ve been thinking about it and it seems Kryptonian cells absorb solar radiation and transform it into energy, so it stands to reason that if we expose you to sunlight, your powers may well come back. All we have to do is drive out of this weather system and get you into the sun and--”
“--Bruce.” Clark caught at Bruce’s hand without rising. “My powers first manifested as a child. For decades, I’ve been able to hear voices on the other side of the world. I’ve been impervious to heat, to cold, to pain. I’ve been able to see microbes.”
“Really?” For a moment Bruce’s face lit up with an almost childlike curiosity and Clark caught a glimpse of the young boy he had once been. “That sounds amazing.”
Clark couldn’t help but laugh. “It is, when it isn’t incredibly distracting. I’ve always had to find ways to...take in less, to process less, to cut myself off from the stimuli that were constantly bombarding me, or I’d have gone mad. When I have my powers, being fully here and now and not, say, hearing music in Sydney or seeing microwaves--it takes an active effort of will.”
The scientific zeal on Bruce’s face had faded into sympathy. “That sounds...difficult,” he said, frowning.
“Sometimes,” Clark admitted. “But Bruce, this last week, here with you--I’ve been fully here and now, all the time. It’s been...a gift.” He touched the smooth slate of the floor, feeling the cool of it under his hand. “A gift I only became fully aware of once I got my memories back. But now I know.” He smiled up at Bruce. “And it’s a gift I’d like to enjoy for a few hours more with you.”
Bruce sank down slowly to sit next to him on the rug once more, his stern face set in uncharacteristically hesitant lines. “Of course,” he said, and Clark saw the rest of the sentence--It’s the least I can do considering I basically murdered you--flicker through his eyes, saw him swallow the words with an effort. It was a beginning, at least. “We can enjoy the fire, I can have Alfred bring us some food--I bet you haven’t ever been able to enjoy alcohol, I have some great brandy we could--”
“Bruce,” Clark said. “I was thinking of something more...intimate.”
“Oh,” said Bruce. He had gone very still. He sat for a moment in silence, as if thinking deeply, then burst out: “Can you not have sex when you have powers? How does that work?” He caught himself. “Uh, sorry. But I’ve wondered.”
“You’ve wondered.”
“I’ve wondered a lot,” Bruce admitted.
“I can have sex,” Clark said. “It’s just…” He groped for words to describe it. Here, sitting on the floor without powers, with the soft sound of the rain and the crackle of the fire all around, it was almost hard to imagine it. “There’s always part of me that has to be working to not see or hear or feel too much. Like having intrusive thoughts that you can learn to banish, but it’s still a conscious thing you have to do. It became second nature, a habit. But it’s not the same as it would be...no. I want…” He reached out and covered Bruce’s hand with his own. “I want to see what it’s like to lose myself in it completely. With you.”
“Oh.” Bruce rubbed at his chin. “So what do you want to do?”
Clark’s heart seemed to lurch. “Everything,” he said fervently. “I can’t--you can’t ask me to choose. I trust you.”
Something complex and pained flickered behind Bruce’s eyes at Clark’s last words. He took a breath. “All right then,” he said. “If you really trust me, I have a favor to ask of you.”
Clark was lying on a blanket thrown down on the slate floor of the living room, for Bruce couldn’t bear to take him into the dark of the bedroom. No more darkness. Here, where windows let in the misty silver light, here was the right place.
There was a long, thin scratch along Clark’s midriff where some bramble had slipped through his clothes. There was a bruise on his hipbone, just above his jeans, gained from banging into something in the dark of the caves. Bruce touched his lips to both small wounds and heard Clark murmur something wordless, the sound blending with the rain. He pushed Clark’s sweater higher, exposing more and more skin, reveling in the sight of it, touching each rib almost reverently. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth came a sudden echo from his childhood, like light through stained glass windows and the scent of incense. He banished it as sternly as he had banished his thoughts about Kryptonian biology. No gods here, just two men. But his fingers trembled for a moment before he could steady them again.
He could feel Clark’s breaths quickening at his touch, and as he approached a nipple Clark suddenly squirmed out of his sweater, emerging flushed and with his hair rumpled, smiling at Bruce almost triumphantly. Bruce flicked his fingers across the nipple and Clark’s smile faltered into surprise and delight, his eyes going half-closed. “That feels…” His voice trailed off.
After a long silence, Bruce dragged his finger across to the other nipple, feeling Clark tense in anticipation before he brushed it, summoning a shaky sigh. “How does it feel?”
“Like everything,” Clark said. “Like…everything.”
“I don’t want my pleasure to be part of it,” Bruce had explained. “I want this to be about you. About me making you feel.” Feel something other than pain and fear, he hadn’t said. I want to know that I can bring you joy. “I want my pleasure to be your pleasure.”
Clark had looked at him for a long time, head slightly to the side, his gaze seeming to look at and through Bruce, reading his soul. Then he had smiled.
“This time,” he had said like a promise.
So Bruce bent over him and felt Clark’s pulse flutter in his throat against Bruce’s lips. He took Clark out of his clothes and savored the sight of him smiling then relished the way that smile faltered as he put his hands on him at last, stroking and coaxing.
“That’s--” Clark’s voice was breathless. He canted his hips upward into Bruce’s touch. “Oh.” He reached up and grabbed at Bruce’s collar like a drowning man clutching at a spar. “It’s--it’s--don’t stop.”
Bruce stopped and Clark glared at him. The glare broke off into a startled noise as Bruce shifted to kiss the bruise on his hip again, then moved to his thighs. Bruce felt his stubble scratching at the skin of Clark’s inner thighs; Clark’s erection pushed up against him harder at the sensation. Clark hissed, and his hands hovered over Bruce’s head, the fingers splayed.
Bruce reached up and took Clark’s hand and put it on his head. Then he took Clark in his mouth, revelling in the sound he made, sharp and surprised and abandoned. Clark’s fingers tightened in his hair, and Bruce let them guide him, let Clark set the pace: slow at first, luxurious. The soft and constant sound of the rain turned to a gentle whisper as they moved together, and Bruce lost himself in Clark’s delight. By the time Clark cried out, his back arching, even that had faded and there was nothing but the sound of Clark’s hoarse breaths and his own heartbeat in his ears, hammering with joy undeserved.
They lay together for a time, listening to the first birds greeting the morning. Clark’s eyes were drowsy and replete. “Thank you,” he said.
“I’m not done yet,” Bruce said. He kissed Clark’s collarbone and rested his head on his chest, reading the clues of his body: heartbeat, capillary dilation, breath rate. When he was fairly certain Clark was ready for more, he said, “Now I want to watch your face,” and reached down to take Clark in his hand again.
Clark gasped and yearned up into Bruce’s touch, sensitive and shuddering. He was hard again almost immediately (so young, Bruce thought wryly), eager under Bruce’s hands.
“Oh, I’ve never felt-- that’s too good, it’s--” Clark fell silent, his eyes closed, all his focus turned inward. The mist on the lake was lifting, the light turning from misty silver to pale gold, and Bruce watched Clark’s face as Bruce’s touch carried him back into pleasure, and then into release. He watched his former enemy abandon himself beneath his hands, and in that trust and faith found a different kind of release at last.
Some time later, Clark--cleaned up but still gloriously nude, sprawled across the blanket on the floor with lazy grace--looked out at the lake. For the first time in a week, sunlight touched the water and sent gleams of light all around the lake house. Bruce watched as a square of morning slanted across the floor, drawing close to them.
This time he didn’t move to close the shutters.
He propped himself up on an elbow and watched as Clark reached out, his bruised hand coming to rest in the oblong of light. As the sun touched his fingers, the dark marks faded away, leaving the skin unmarred, touched with gold.
They waited together as the light moved to caress Clark’s face, limning his eyelashes; the scar on his cheek vanished into radiance. Clark sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to smile at Bruce as the light moved across him. There were tears on his lashes like diamonds.
The scratch on his abdomen, the bruise on his hipbone: inch by slow inch the sunlight washed them away.
Bruce had thought when Clark’s abilities came back there would be a burst of energy, a surge of power. He hadn’t expected it to be so quiet, so gentle: Clark simply seemed to become more himself, to inhabit his own skin more fully, more truly. There was a beauty to it beyond anything Bruce had imagined, and for a fearful moment he could see a chasm open up between them again, between the sunlit god and the creature of fear and darkness.
And then Clark laughed as if he could see Bruce’s fears in his eyes, and pulled him into the hopeful sunlight for a kiss warm and bright enough to lift any shadow.