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Chapter Text

Usually on Wednesdays Clark Kent shoulders his door open, carefully because it sticks, and nods at the little plant clinging to his refrigerator in his kitchen, which is easy because his apartment is so small it’s practically one room.

He knows it’s a little weird but he likes to, feels grounded, and then he shuffles into his bedroom and drops, face first, onto his bed, messenger bag and all.

He’s careful not to get his shoes onto the bedspread.

He digs out his phone and dials home on speakerphone, which he doesn’t need for hearing but because it captures his voice better. “Hello sweetie!” his mother says, picking up on the first ring, and he manages a passable “Hey mom” back.

I hate my job he doesn’t say. She hears him anyway.

“Cla-” “How’s the farm?” he says, because he can’t do this, can’t say Mom, today I wrote an article about celebrity cats. And it had ten times the hits as the one about refugees written by a Pulitzer Prize winner .

His mother takes a breath and starts telling him about the corn and the soy and the hands she wants to hire but his father keeps vetoing, because of the spaceship in the old barn , she doesn’t say.

“Oh! He opened an Instagram too, to follow you” “Not me mom the Daily Planet’s Social Sec-”

“ We opened an account, you just don’t want to learn how to use it” his father cuts in and Clark can see them in his mind’s eye, in the kitchen, his father just through the screen door in old plain and muddy boots, hip cocked cowboy cool against the frame with his mother stretching out the old yellow-green phone’s cord as far as she can so he won’t track gunk onto her floor, receiver tilted so they can both hear and speak, chins touching.

They’ve answered the phone that way for years, since before he was born.

Or before he came to them, he supposes. Who knows how long Kryptonian babies gestate?

He must make a sound because his father says “You all right there Clark?” “Fine, Pa” “Getting enough sleep?” “Yes” “And your extracurriculars?”

Extracurriculars he always says. Like Clark’s at chess club instead of stopping muggers and killer robots.

There’s a shot of him, well, of his boot, that’s the most liked picture on their Instagram. It was just supposed to be Clark Kent’s excuse for being late.

Chic was pretty pissed at him for it.

Then again, pissed at Clark is her general state of being.

He’d dethroned her shot of Bruce Wayne looking beyond drunk at some garden party. The previous one had been hers too, Carol Ferris at an auction, turned at an angle that showed off how remarkably broad shouldered she is.

The fact that it also showed off her male companion’s back and related assets didn’t exactly hurt either.

Clark’s picture has more than double their numbers.

Combined.

His dad is still talking, about the farm and feed and oh, does Clark think Rita Farr has a real shot at the Oscar this year? Because she got robbed twice already and Rosary Rodeo is already getting buzz and she’s the best part of it- and his mother huffs, and he stops hogging the phone.

“Hun, I gotta go in a minute but- and Clark knows what’s coming, can see her shooing out his father- are you happy?”

“I-Ma…”

“That’s ok, sweetheart. If you ever want to come home, the door’s open.”

He shakes his head and she sees it even if she can’t.

“I know it’s not exactly what you wanted, but your foot is in the door. And heaven knows, you can always learn something. I love you”

“I love you too” he says a little too quick and then rolls over on his too small bed and rubs his eyes.

This wasn’t the way he pictured it.

He hadn’t thought he’d get a corner office the minute he stepped through the door but it was The Daily Planet . He bitten through his spoon, full of milk and soggy cornflakes right there at the breakfast table when the email from citing him for a job interview came through and the three of them had jumped to their feet and laughed. We don’t have an opening in the area you applied to, however we might be able to find alternate placement it said.

“Hope it’s not sports” his father had laughed, because beyond some necessary interest in the Kansas City Royals, Clark’s never had much of a passion for them.

He’d been so excited he’d been fifteen minutes early to being early, landing on the roof of a corner building he’d scouted out before hand. He’d used to time to soak in the rain, because there’s no way he would have avoided it if he really was plain old Clark from Smallville. Still, he’d rushed into the lobby with a smile and copy of the Planet on his head.

“Some weather, huh?” he’d beamed at the small sullen woman waiting alongside him. She’d looked him right in the eye and said nothing at all.

That, he’d learn later, was Chic Carter all over.

They sat in mostly awkward silence, Clark trying and failing to fit comfortably into the hard plastic chairs while the secretary smiled maternally back. Doris, he’d learn later too. 

"She’ll see you now, honey” she’d said and he and Chic had shared a glance until Doris had explained that she meant Chic.

Clark’s ears followed her back, she had a harder step than you’d expect for her size, and then what had to be Tawny Young’s voice - ‘ Pleased to meet you! Now, before we get started, should I say it chick or ‘so chic’?’ ‘It’s Shick’ - and then nothing because it wasn’t polite to eavesdrop.

Usually.

Drug dealers weren’t covered by politesse.

He’d dropped his head back against the cool wall and thought: I made it. I actually made it.

Twenty minutes later he’d been called back to Tawny’s office, Chic leaving with a subtle glow of endorphins that let him know she’d been given a job on the stop and trying not to let his face show he’d been wrong.

Tawny had gone through the pleasantries, noting a few things on his resume and letting him elaborate, overager but unable to help himself. Then she’d locked her dark fingers together and said “I’ll be blunt, Mr. Kent. I don’t think you’re going to want the job I’m going to offer you. But I like you, and I don’t want to deal with a born-yesterday intern so I’m going to do it anyway”.

She’s hadn’t him offered a lot of pay, or good hours, or much institutional support, or even his name printed in the paper, even once.

“We’re building the digital section with nothing but shoestrings and guts, Kent, but it could really be something” and Clark could hear she meant in, a weary sort of pride in her heartbeat and he’d said yes.

Which is how he became the digital editor for dailyplanet.com’s lifestyle and arts sections, for which he was also, mostly, the whole staff. Except for a few interns poached from metro, politics and sports.

And a community manager: Chic, who hated his guts.

Sometimes, it was incredibly rewarding. And sometimes the article you spent hours on, the one you were proud of, was read by all of five people, two being his parents. And the one you threw together in an hour and composed mostly of .gifs hit record numbers.

But said a voice in his mind that sounded like both his fathers isn’t that always the way?

Chapter Text

“Insta hottie is at it again” Chic says, managing to sound like she’s telling Clark off.

“Huh?”

She sighs, electric grater intense deep in her throat. It’s easy to forget that, objectively, she’s petite. “The hottie. The guy. The one showing up on Ferris and Queen and even uh-is she Lance or Drake? The blonde sorta dating Queen- all their Instagrams. His ass got over a thousand likes on ours,”

Clark’s brain is still half tangled in the right gifs to go with the results to their Friday quiz so he says “I can’t look at that shot without getting stuck on her shoulders” and Chic cackles because she says Clark’s always too nice. Midwest polite she says in a way that sounds like a grave insult.

“She’s got a whole continental fucking shelf. And no, I haven’t asked her about him, because I don’t want to fuck up my relationship with a source.” “What about Queen? And Lance?”

“Ducking me” she says in a voice that says you dumbass, of course I tried that. “It could be a good story, where’d he show up now?”

She tilts her monitor and it’s a tumblr with a terrible Where’s Waldo pun in the title. The post she’s on is grainy, blown up from the original picture. Whoever he is, he looks good in a tux.

“Where is that?” he asks and Chic’s face stretches into a grin. “The Hooties”. That you fucking went to and missed him she does not add because she doesn’t have to. To be fair, that was three months ago and we had no idea he existed then Clark doesn’t say because he’s a professional and there’s no point anyway.

He’d barely been at that party.

The only noteworthy thing, except for the copy pasted descriptions he took of everyone’s outfits, had been how incredibly drunk Bruce Wayne had gotten so early in the evening.

He’d only just missed slipping down the Gotham Opera House’s main staircase, sending a potted plant careening down the steps instead, which had exploded into a mess of shards and damp earth at the landing.

Someone, a paid caretaker probably, had quietly lead him away while he slurred apologies and offered to pay for the damage, a chance the House had probably jumped on.

Then the night had turned to the usual, banal talk where everyone was avoiding saying anything that could be turned into a soundbite, bland congratulations to the winners of empty awards and the conversational staple of Gotham’s high society: Just What is Wrong with the Wayne Boy?

Clark had tuned them out, with all the careful control his mother had taught him. He knew the list by heart anyway, they trotted it out about once a month: Drugs, Sex, Drugs and Sex, Not Quite Right In The Head, The Family Had A History, and The Boy’s Just No Good.

He’d been drifting, thinking about how easy the write up would be, or how hard given that it was so boring, when he’d heard it.

A click like a pressurized latch giving way, somewhere over head, and his heart had skipped a beat.

He’d been waiting for it from the moment he’d set foot in Gotham.

It was the sound of the release on a giant set of wings, followed by a flowing hiss as they took to sky.

The Batman.

Clark had followed.

He’d lifted into the sky, looping a few times more than strictly necessary. His heart had jumped when he’d spotted the grey shape cutting through the sky.

The cloth and steel wings didn’t have the grace of something gifted with actual flight, but he managed to fall with style anyway, landing on the thing ledge of a thirtieth floor window.

“Hi” he’d said with the polite midwestern smile the Kent family had handed down for decades.

The Batman turned and shot him in the face.

The grappling hook pinged off his cheekbone and he caught it on the ricochet with a laugh.

The cowled face in front of him tilted, the mouth not quite scowling.

“Are you going to give that back?” he ground out, a naturally deep voice crossed with the harsh buzz of a voice modulator that wasn’t surprising, exactly, but still disconcerting, like playing two identical tracks that weren’t quite synchronized.

“Depends. Are you going to shoot me again?”  

There was a moment of silence.

“I’m thinking about it” he finally ground out, the double voice now a little less jarring when he was expecting it, “but I have better things to do tonight.”

“Something to do with the dockside warehouse swarming with armed men right now? The one over there?” Clark said with an aw-shucks grin and a point northeast of their location. 

He tossed the forbiddingly wicked looking hook back and Batman looked him right in the eye and shot at his face again, only off by an inch, to grab a hold in the next building over.

Clark followed with a snort; “You know I could carry you, right? Be faster.”

There was something like a heh in Batman’s throat, too low for it to be audible to a human.

“Don’t push your luck”.

Clark looped around him twice half to annoy him and half because he really did feel full of a boundless energy because he was here he was real and Clark wasn’t alone. Not now.

The warehouse was easy, just Mannheim being Mannheim, and between the two of them they’d gotten the job done in under fifteen minutes, almost like they’d practiced, and then waited from a comfortable distance while Gotham PD swarmed the place.

Relative comfort, at least, because it was an abandoned trailer slash occasional meth lab and if Clark had been human he’d have been worried about tetanus.

Instead he floated about an inch off the ground as Batman managed to meld into the shadows so completely even Clark had trouble keeping track of him, even in such a small space.

If he hadn't been able to pick up subtle cues, the smell of his sweat and the rush of his blood, through the thick body armor and whirr of gadgets he’d wouldn’t have guessed Batman was fully human underneath.

“Hmmm”.

The low hum in his throat was like a gunshot in the small space and Clark started guiltily, like his thoughts had been plainly visible.

And then he got shot in the face.

“Wah- hey! I thought we were over that!”

Even in the gloom he could see Batman’s small smirk.

“Just a test” “Of what? I caught like six bullets from those guys, you knew I was invulnerable!”

The smirk turned into a smile.

“Your character.”

Chapter Text

After that, they were friends.

Or something like it.

If friendship could be defined as the occasional terse warning about gang activity or Luthor’s schemes or a helpful hand when storming a fortress, they were best buds.

“Earth to Kent?” says Chic and pulls him back to the present.

“Just thinking. Half the Queen pictures are ringside. There’s a Vegas match coming up in a couple of weeks, might be able to catch him there” “Sure, sure, except for the fact that there’s zero chance they’re gonna give the gossip section money for airfare.”

“Oh absolutely zero, but Nelson lives in Vegas and he’s freelanced for us before. One quick phone call to get him credentials and bada bing, bada boom ” he says, dropping into an absolutely terrible impression.

She smiles, just for a second.

“Just for the record, I hate Nelson...but it’s a good call”

Clark smiles because she might be abrasive but she’s got incredible instincts. And she’s terrifyingly organized, just the way she color codes calendars would be worth a full semester of class.

There’s also the fact that he’s not too fond of Nelson either so he’ll let her call to debrief him.  Just make sure things go smooth.

He rolls his neck and turns back to his own screen and sighs. He opens up their gif maker and that’s when all hell breaks loose.

His landline and cellphone light up, and so do Chic’s and their emails go haywire.

They’re all screaming the same thing: BRUCE WAYNE TO BE A FATHER.

The son of a- of course. You file on a Friday when you don’t want attention.

But it was too big to be contained, even though it was nearing the end of August and half the country was still on vacation because Bruce Wayne was actually going to adopt the orphan boy from the circus.

He and Chic fell into a perfect rhythm, updating Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, calling sources and scouring any publicly accessible documents.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Tawny came out of her office, coffee in hand and lips pursed.

Clark looked down, then up into her eyes.

She didn't have to say it; they fucked up.

No excuses, it didn’t matter that they and everybody else thought it would never happen.

When Wayne had stepped in after the boy’s parents were murdered, at a show where he was sitting ringside, no one thought it would come to this.

They’d thought it was charity and good press, some cash for expenses and lodging while the boy testified in a trial guaranteed to drag on even with a circus tent full of witnesses because it was Gotham. It had gotten a little lip service in the papers, a few snarky tweets about tax deductibility.

They should have followed up, and they didn’t.

And now, this.

Clark walked her through what they had (not much) and what they had planned (who knows).

“Wayne isn't talking, not even an official release and his publicist turned off her phone. Even her landline’s down” Tawny nodded.

“You're on the red eye, Clark. Get me something.”

* 

The flight was awful. It always was.

He hated it, felt like he was going five miles an hour on the freeway, except packed into a tight metal tube with strangers doing their best to send him into sensory overload for two hours.

And nothing but time to consider his failures.

Their sources in Gotham had nothing. It was too local for more than lip service from AFP, AP or BBC.

Everything else he'd seen, when he scoured what was online, was just a lot of snide commentary and nauseating innuendo.

He had nothing but gossip and rumor, the strongest of which was that Wayne was staying somewhere in the city with the kid, to make the court filing easier.

The lobbies of the two buildings he was known to have penthouses at were swarmed, but he hadn't been seen. The fancier hotels had bellboys lining their pockets with not-a-bribe-just-curiosity money.

Clark didn't try any of them.

And he wasn’t about to abuse his powers that way, either.

So his best bet was the same as everyone else’s.

Gotham was big enough, and unsafe enough, to have a couple of courthouses open on Saturdays. If Wayne really wanted to fly under the radar, and knew a judge or two, which he did, he could squeeze into an already crowded docket and push past a couple of requirements. 

A quick text with a Gotham Gazette contact, someone he’d interned with during junior year of college, told him which court was prepping for him.

Afterward, there was nothing to do but wait.

The city was oddly quiet, almost like it was holding its breath but Clark didn’t sleep easy that night.

The orphan boy hit a little too close to home.

He rolled over and deliberately thought of something else.

He wondered what Batman was doing. Probably enjoying a rare night off.

How did he fill his time when he wasn’t in the cowl?

Maybe Batman wondered the same things.

Maybe he’d found out.

Clark rolled sharply, rejecting the thought out of hand, but it didn’t do much to quell the queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He curled up on his cheap motel sheets and wished for home.

Chapter Text

The Kane street courthouse is mayhem.

The steps are overflowing with people, gossip journalists jostled out of the way by crime beat reporters refusing to be pushed off their territory, wailing mothers and children caught in custody cases, snarling felons the city wanted processed as quickly as possible flanked by annoyed cops just itching to use their batons.

And somewhere deep in the building Bruce Wayne and Richard Grayson, age twelve.

With a string of repeated apologies and a broad shouldered slouch, Clark slips into the packed hall. He opens his sense to the din with a wince.

Ahead of him, he sees two photographers and a woman with a notepad tripping over themselves, arguing about where ‘he’ went.

And in a nearby service hallway, he could hear the panicked heartbeat of a twelve year old boy.

He steps into their path and turns, deflecting them from the dented, scarred wood of the door.  

No one notices him when he steps inside and neatly shuts the door behind him.

“Hello?”

His voice echoes along the narrow concrete walls. There's no answer.

“I just want to make sure you’re okay”.

Nothing but silence, to normal ears.

“I can see you there, you know. Well your sweater. Crimson doesn’t exactly blend”.

It's not exactly true. Grayson is well hidden, wedged beneath a water fountain.

The coils of his muscles are impressive in Clark’s x-ray vision.

They must start them young in contortionist school.

“What?! No way” Grayson shouts, all wounded teenage pride even if he's still a year short.

Clark’s ears pick up the sharp click of his jaw closing when he realizes what he’s done.

He walks up slowly, body language open and unthreatening, and he sits and crosses his legs when he gets to the fountain.

“Hi”

He gets a glare crossed with a pout back.

Grayson's large blue eyes were made even more striking by his olive skin. There's a streak of dust across his nose and Clark feels an overpowering swell of paternal feeling.

He wishes he could fly him out of this mess.

“I’m Clark”

In the tiny space under the metal and plastic fountain, the boy pulls back: “you’re a reporter” .

Clark blinks, then remembers his press pass. He flips it around.

“Yes, but I'm not here for that. Not right now. I just want to make sure you're ok. I promise”.

Those big blue eyes are doubtful, and Clark can't blame him.

“Is there someone I can call for you, or?”

For a half a second, Grayson looks like he's going to cry.

Underneath his skin, his capillaries dilate and his lungs ready for a sob.

Then he shakes his head.

They sit for a moment in silence. Grayson chews his lip.

Finally he sighs and whispers “You know who I am, right?”

“Richard Grayson”

The boy lets out something close to a laugh.

“No one calls me Richard. It’s Dick”.

“It’s nice to meet you, Dick” Clark says and waits. Sometimes that was all you had to do.

“I just wanted to pee”

He finally looks up, hopeful and embarrassed all at once and Clark holds his practiced please go on, I am a sympathetic listener face, honed over years of interviews.

He uses it plenty as Superman too.

“It’s just. It was so awful in the judge’s chambers even though she was so nice and she even did everything she needed me for first but I just...Bruce asked if I wanted to go to the bathroom and then there were all these reporters and I ran. I just ducked into the first open door”

Clark hums, trying to hit the right balance of emotion.

What he actually feels doesn’t matter, he tells himself, the way he always did. He needs a sympathetic ear, not Clark’s righteous anger.

Dick is trembling now, the words pouring out like he can't help himself.

“And then when I got here I realized my phone’s dead because I didn’t charge it like Alfred told me to”.

He meets Clark’s eyes, bracing for the lecture he’s been hurling at himself in his mind since he’d noticed.

Instead, Clark takes out his own phone; “Do you know which number to call?”

The boy nods hard and Clark passes it over.

“The code is 0638”

Dick takes the phone then freezes.

Clark is about to repeat the code when he hears a whispered “are these your parents?” and oh.

His lock screen and background are both his graduation photo, Clark in the middle, circled by his parents arms, his mother’s black hand covering his father’s white.

A mixed race marriage had been big news in the year his parents had married but small town life where everyone knew everyone and all their business meant that by the time Clark had come along there had been nothing remarkable about the Kents and the boy they adopted.

“They are” he says casually, and Dick looks close to tears again. You’re an orphan too .

Then he pretends to cough and scrutinize the phone’s screen as he punches in the numbers. Clark’s ears easily pick up the tinny ringing.

It goes on and on until it finally cuts off.

Dick’s face falls.

Clark takes the phone back gently.

“He probably didn’t want to answer an unknown number. We’ll send him a message expl-” the harsh buzz of the phone fills his hands and he answers instinctively.

“Hel-”  

“Who are you and how did you get this number?” says a clipped British voice.

“I’m Clark Kent, and I’m with Dick Grayson, he-”

“Master Dick? Is he safe? What have you done with him?”

“No, that’s...you know what, I’ll let him explain” he says as he hands the phone over and Dick snatches it quickly, hunching over it.

“Alfred! No, I’m fine. Just- we got split up. I promise I’m ok. Yes, he’s cool, I promise. I just dunno how to- uh. Yes, I really am ok-”

Clark raises a finger, then holds out his hand. Dick only hesitates for a moment.

“Hello, again. I’m assuming I’m talking to the famous Mr. Pennyworth?”

Wayne’s butler was something of a legend amongst Clark’s circle, somehow invisible and omnipotent. It was said there was no end to the shenanigans he could cover up, no matter how large.

There's a silence and Clark can actually feel his esteem sinking in Pennyworth’s eyes.

He clears his throat and keeps going.

“I don’t think I can get him back upstairs to Mr. Wayne without being mobbed, and I don’t think you could make it inside unnoticed either- there's a small noise on the end of the line, something like a scoff, but he lets Clark keep going- but I do think I can get him out of here safely. If you’ve got a car, there’s a little alley just of Finger Street, we can meet there”.

There's another pause and Clark feels his shoulders square up.

“That is an excellent plan, Mr., Kent was it?"- the tone said he knows it very well it is- "except there is a crucial element you have not mentioned.”

Clark can’t think of anything and says so.

“The small matter of what you’ll want as recompense”.

“Woah, hey!”

Dick’s eyes snap up and Clark shakes his head, then speaks as clearly as he can to both of them.

“I don’t want anything. Just to help someone in need. It’s the right thing to do”.

Dick hesitates for a moment, then beams at him.

Pennyworth takes a moment, then says “I will be on Finger Street in about three minutes” and neatly hangs up.

Clark lets out a breath.

Then he holds out his hand to Dick, and once he's on his feet, ruffles his hair.

Then he takes off his press pass and jacket and holds it out again.

“You really think we can do it?”

“Sure. They’re looking for Richard Grayson, pampered ward of Bruce Wayne- Dick pulls a face- not another stressed father here for a custody case”.

Dick takes his hand, and as if they’d planned it, they both hunch their shoulders and drop their eyes.

No one looka at them twice as they cross the crowded lobby and step down onto the street, even as Clark’s ears pick up the squabbling between the reporters looking for Dick.

They're only a short walk to Finger Street and when they get there they find a sleek black sedan waiting for them.

Dick rushes the car and the severe looking gentleman standing beside it. Clark, with some idea of just how old Pennyworth had to be, is impressed to see the butler take an athletic boy barreling into his chest with aplomb before deftly maneuvering him into the backseat.

“Mr. Kent” he says, as he holds his hand out to shake.

His grip is alarmingly firm and his gaze coolly unnerving.

He starts to say something, probably a sharp remark about not wanting to read about this in the papers the next morning when the window buzzes down and Dick’s arms stick out.

“It was nice to meet you!”

Clark can’t help but smile.

Pennyworth nods, crisply, at him and then they're gone.

He smiles to himself, then sighs.

*

Batman tracks him down that night, when he's in the middle of stopping an armored car heist.

Just as he wrenches the door off the getaway car to hurl into the path of a robber trying to escape on foot he hears a gravelly “Bad day?”.

He huffs, the shakes his head.

Clark was so out of it that he didn’t register the soft whoosh of his cape behind him. He can’t stop thinking about Dick.

He’d looked so small in that big black car.

As police sirens moved toward the wreckage of the failed robbery, Clark follows Batman to a roof on autopilot. They sit in silence for a while, Batman avidly scanning the skyline for trouble while Clark stares at the moon.

He’d thought about flying Dick away from the courthouse, from everything.

There was a part of him that still wanted to.  

“Want to talk about it?” Batman grinds out, and underneath the electric buzz of the device that modulates his voice, Clark can hear how difficult it was to choke the words out.

“You’ve never said that before in your life” Clark says, almost smiling.

“Maybe. But I’m trying to...do better” Batman says from his perch on the ledge and Clark hums.

The city was very nearly quiet.

The loudest sound came from a rainstorm, moving from east to west, about twenty minutes away from their position.

Even pickpockets didn’t like getting wet.

“What do you know about Bruce Wayne?” he says, finally, and he feels more than hears a sharp intake of breath quickly regulated by years of training.

A few months ago he might have missed it, before memorizing Batman’s breathing patterns without realizing it.

He doesn’t know what to make of it.

“Is this about the boy?” Batman says, cowl tilted, lensed eyes suspicious.

“Yeah, yes, I guess so. It’s just...how well do you know Wayne?”

“What makes you think I know him?”

Clark scoffs and the line of Batman’s shoulders tense, just slightly.

“You know everything about everyone worth knowing about in this city. Wayne means Wayne Industries. I’m not saying you go golfing. But. Is he...stable? Are his intentions-”

Batman uncoils and backflips into Clark’s space.

“Yes. I know Wayne. He’s. Far from perfect, but he wants to do right by Grayson. I promise you that”.

Clark nods, surprised. “You knew his name” he adds.

Batman snorts. “ Everyone in Gotham does. It’s on every gossip rag and paper. Nevermind Clayface smashing up the jewelry district, better publicly harass a traumatized twelve year old”.

Clark almost protests but doesn’t.

Batman murmurs something to himself, under his breath, but he could hear it clearly.

“Forget what?”

Batman looks up at him, cowl more unreadable than ever.

“That Wayne might be uniquely suited to help in this particular instance”.

Clark looks away, cheeks burning.

He was right.

Gotham tried to forget the way Thomas and Martha Wayne died, even when they wondered why their son was such a mess. Or seemed to be, if Batman was right and Clark felt he was.

He would have stepped in otherwise.

They sit in silence until the rain reachs them. Clark closes his eyes and tilted his face upwards. 

When he opens them again, he's alone.

Chapter Text

Clark is staring down at the ugly mustard color of his motel room floor as Tawny voice fills his ear.

They’re going to get him a ticket home, first thing tomorrow, she says. He’s clearly useless in Gotham, she doesn’t say.

Wayne had gotten away that day in the courtroom and there’s nothing left to do.

Not to mention, the Insta Hottie piece bombed so it’s bad news all around. He needs to get back, asap.

Clark sighs, agrees, and hangs up.

Half a minute later, the screen lights up again, Blocked Number filling the box.

“Hello?” he says, cautiously.

“Hello, Mr. Kent. I’m Angela Roth, Alfred Pennyworth gave me your number”.

Roth as in Wayne’s publicist, and one of the most feared and revered names in the business.

“Hi” says Clark.

“I bet you’re wondering why I’m calling” she says, voice light and warm and inviting, so much so that he almost loses track of the steel underneath.

“You know what? I am” he answers and he can feel her smile. She had him and they both knew it, even if he didn’t know quite what she had him for .

When she tells him, he actually drops, knees hitting the bed and giving out.

It’s a miracle he doesn’t break it.

“And the catch is?”

Roth laughs, light and musical “nothing but the usual. We get to look at it before it goes out, and anything too personal, well. Can’t have Wayne’s kid getting kidnapped on the first day of school” like the whole city and their grandmothers didn’t already know he’d be going to Gotham Academy like generations of Waynes and assorted Gothamite aristocracy.

“Fine. Let me call my editor and I’ll get back to you. If it plays we could say Tuesday?”

“We could say tomorrow, I’ll email you details” she says cheerfully and hangs up, because there is no way Tawny wouldn’t go for it.

It being an exclusive interview with Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. 

No holds barred she’d said, which probably wasn’t true, but still an incredible opportunity.

“Why?” Tawny says over the line, voice controlled but still excited underneath, when Clark tells her.

“Something like this takes the heat of them, you know that. One big interview exclusive and no one can top it so they back down”

“Why us ?”

Clark swallows. Because I was nice to a scared twelve year old he doesn’t say.

He goes with “I think they want to say screw you to Gotham’s papers” instead and it startles a laugh from Tawny.

“Clark Kent, I’ve never heard you use language like that. And it’s sweet that you’re not telling me that they think we’re yokels that’ll be so excited to get to sit at the big boy table that it’ll be an empty puff piece”.

Roth had had similar suspicions.

“He asked for you specifically” she’d mentioned, calculatedly sweet and carefully offhand. She hadn’t elaborated and it had taken Clark a second to realize she was fishing. Wayne must not have told her anything.

Eventually Clark and Tawny settle on trying to get at least a two part, if not three part series, out of it and then hash out a promo strategy on social media.

They agree he's going to shadow them for a while, two weeks at least, and Clark feels so much adrenaline (or that’s what it feels like, he has no idea what he actually has) and guilt at leaving Metropolis that he flies off to patrol the city as soon as he hangs up.

He gets back to Gotham as the sun was dawning and sleeps fitfully for an hour and a half.

*

Wayne Manor is twice as impressive as the same six photos everyone passed around made it look. For all his partying, Wayne was notorious for keeping his home closed off.

Clark contemplates it from the back of the car sent to get him, driven by a woman who had refused to give him a name to call her.

It settles awkwardly in his gut, even after thousands of glamorous red carpets and premieres.

He can feel the farm’s earth in the grooves of his palms even here.

The wheels crunch up the gravel drive, and something about the resonance sounds off, but before he can tune into it, they're pulling over in front of the elegant marble steps.

Clark clambers out of the car awkwardly and the driver moves it away before he can lean in to thank her.

When he looks back at the house, Pennyworth is standing ramrod straight between the narrowly open heavy oak doors. He squares up his shoulders and after a stilted greeting steps inside.

The air is much cooler in the expansive atrium and forebodingly silent.

The door clicks quietly shut behind him and Pennyworth’s footsteps are so soft that Clark jumps and x-rays him instinctively to make sure he's human and not some sort of butler android.

“This way, Mister Kent”, he says crisply and Clark follows meekly through a series of ample hallways and tall ceilings.

Everything in the house seems beautiful, tasteful and utterly soulless. Most of the house feels like a mausoleum.

He scans the building quickly, enough to spot a few old servants’ warrens running through the bones of the place, though some still seemed pretty heavily used. He pointedly refuses to think about how.  

But something unknots in his chest when he spots a messy bedroom scattered with the detritus of a young boy, stashed candy bars, dirty sneakers and discarded game controllers. It appears even the infallible Mr. Pennyworth can’t quite keep up.

Or he's giving Dick his space.

He doesn’t go as far as Wayne’s room, not quite prepared for what he might have found, but he's satisfied that behind the icy facade of the stately well, estate, Dick seems to have something like a normal life.

Pennyworth stops in front of a massive pair of french doors and motions for Clark to step through.

From the stone terrace there's a great of view of Wayne Manor’s sprawling gardens. On the rail, there's a pair of neon yellow sneakers, and Pennyworth’s face twitches with something that could have been a smile.

Or a grimace.

Clark looks out on the sloping, immaculately kept lawn.

He could cheat but he doesn’t, scanning for Dick leisurely without putting his eyes’ considerable advantages to use.  

The copse of a nearby tree shakes softly and he squints.

There's a glimpse of red between the branches.

“Hey-a Dick!” he booms and the boy falls out of the tree with a graceful flip.

He tumbles across the lawn towards Clark, gleefully showing off.

When he stops there is a very teenage pout on his face. “Did Alfred tell?” and Clark laughs.

Dick can’t help smiling at him and Clark very suddenly notices that they're alone. Pennyworth must have gone to fetch Wayne.

It might never happen again, he realizes, and the words that had been stubbornly gnawing at his stomach since Roth’s call tumble out of his mouth.

“Dick are you okay with this?”

The boy blinks at him.

“Are you comfortable with the idea? Not just talking to me, this is going to be in print and online -and oh god the internet is forever- and it’s your life. If you’re not okay with that you can tell me right now”.

Dick is silent, biting his lip.

It slips through his teeth and he says “we googled you, you know. Me and Bruce...I liked your stuff”.

Clark thanks him, because his mother raised him to be polite.

“We saw your dad’s Instagram, too” he says, with a hint of a blush. To make sure you weren’t lying to me his eyes say.

There was something else that came up if you googled Clark, very deep in the search results now that his search engine optimized articles came first. A quick note in the Smallville Sentinel : LOCAL COUPLE FINDS BABY IN BLIZZARD .

It wasn’t big news, not when everyone knew the snows could cut off farms for weeks and it might be months before you got everything up and running again smooth enough to go into town to tell the authorities anything about anything.

Back then there wasn’t any sex ed or any safe haven zones, no help and no forgiveness when your belly got big when it shouldn’t. And everyone knew the Kents had tried and tried and tried again with no luck.

His mother had told him she’d been shaking, when they finally took him into town, but the doctor had given Clark a cursory once over and found him a little underweight and sent it him home.

There had been no question of them keeping him.

“It’s supposed to be a joint account” Clark says finally. The handle is mr_mrskent.

He asks again, are you alright with this? gently.

Dick takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.

He looks like he's trying very hard to copy what he’d seen someone else do and he hadn’t done too badly.

“I have to talk to somebody, don’t I?”

Clark starts to answer but Dick keeps going “Bruce isn’t making me, he asked me like a million times if I was sure but I know it’s not gonna stop if I don’t and anyway there’s always going to be reporters hounding us but you were nice and I think...I’m sure”.

Clark swallows, tries to say something and finds that he can’t. He just clears his throat and nods.

Dick smiles at him, and he smiles back.

“Mr. Kent! Glad you could join us!” Bruce Wayne shouts from the french doors as he steps out onto the terrace.

He's smiling widely but his eyes aren’t and his pulse is a tick fast, breathing a bit hard.

He's nervous.

There's a bottle dangling from his fingertips and Clark’s heart nearly stops before he realizes it's just water.

“Want some?” he says, following Clark’s gaze just as he starts holding his hand out to shake.

He ends up awkwardly holding the bottle.

“Thank you” he says.

In the ensuing silence he can feel Wayne’s heartbeat go up a tick. His eyes aren’t bloodshot and Clark can’t pick up a discernible trace of liquor on him, from that day or the night before.

Batman was right.

He's trying.

Wayne smiles awkwardly, going for the tabloid look and failing. Clark smiles encouragingly back.

Dick cackles. “You two are weird. Wanna see me do backflips?”

Clark smiles genuinely and so does Wayne.

“Lead the way” he says and they follow Dick onto the lawn where he proceeds to contort his body as he recounts the entire history of Haly’s Circus, all the way back to the days where the fastest way to travel involved horses and wagons.

Halfway through a meandering side tale about bootleggers, Clark remembers to hand the water bottle back.

Chapter Text

The trick, he’d learned, was patience.

Clark had had a professor, back at Central Kansas, before the transfer to Metropolis U, who used to say a good reporter was really a dentist.

Because at it’s heart it was really just pulling teeth.

Dick and Wayne are like that. But Clark is patient, and calm.

When Dick’s voice caught at a passing mention of his mother, Clark gently guided him along and pulled back when it seemed to be too much.

He’d had practice.

But Dick wasn’t that difficult. There was a part of him that wanted to talk, to keep them alive, the way they were in sequined costumes under the big top, and another that wanted to see justice done.

That had gotten the longest string of words from him, plenty of them four letters long, and then a sudden stream of tears.

Clark had passed him a handkerchief (his mother had always said they’d come in handy) and assured him he wouldn’t tell the entire internet about the sobs.

Wayne is a lot harder.

He’d had practice too.

He would switch between being too vague and too detailed, trying to keep Clark out but trying to prove he was a good guardian for Dick.

It was like he couldn’t decide which persona to put on for Clark and any front he put up was quickly smashed down by Dick anyway.

It was a confusing portrait of a man Clark hadn’t even glimpsed in the titanic volume of drunken, unstable caricatures that had flooded the press for years.

Batman takes his mind off it. 

There was usually a brief cryptic text waiting for him when he left the Manor, things to keep an eye on, shipments to stop.

Not just in Gotham, which would have been more alarming, but plenty in Metropolis.

The nice thing about flying faster than the speed of sound meant he could just about be in two places at once.

It wasn’t just the help though.

Batman was different.

More open, somehow. He’d said he was trying to change and Clark could see it.

Sometimes he even came close to cracking a real smile.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, staying in Gotham to explore the bizarre world of Wayne Manor.

Bruce was still strange, unsure of himself, and Pennyworth still solidly unreadable, but Dick was sweet and bright and Clark found himself eager to crunch up the oddly resonant driveway.

Wayne had offhandedly mentioned a network of caves on the grounds and Clark kept meaning to look deeper, make sure the house was structurally sound but he never quite managed to get around to it, between Dick vaulting off the furniture and Wayne’s unfocused then suddenly intense gaze.

He's pondering it over breakfast, watered down orange juice and flaky croissants from the motel’s modest spread, when Clayface hurls a car across the intersection fifteen blocks north.

He's on his feet before he even thinks about it, halfway to the scene before he realizes he would be late, that he should call and apologize, and then he's there and the fight is on.

A batarang zooms past his face and sinks into one of the clay tendrils toying at his ankle and then explodes.

He turns and blasts at a wickedly spiked green branch zooming towards Batman’s middle.

It looks like Poison Ivy and Clayface had patched up after the last time they double crossed each other.

Superman and Batman fall into a fighting stance easily, their dynamic now finely tuned. It's over in under fifty-two minutes and they exchange quick nods as the GCPD metahuman containment team swarms their location.

And then Clark feels his phone vibrate, where it sits abandoned by his plate at the motel, and he rushes back without saying goodbye.

“-lo?” “Dick it’s me!- as if there was anyone else it would be- I’m sorry I’m late it’s-” “Clayface! I know it was all over TV and Twitter and Alfred and I were freaking out and-”

Clark suddenly realizes that Dick isn’t angry. He's worried.

“I’m fine, Dick. I promise- and it’s a fun house mirror of that first phone call- Traffic’s just impossible”.

On the other end of the line, Dick breathes heavily, struggling not to cry.

“Bruce isn’t home either. He was leaving his office when-” there's a rough hiccup on the other end of the line and Clark soothes him, gentle nonsense about how Wayne must have gone back inside the building, that he must be safe, just stuck like Clark.

He hates that he can’t just fly over and reassure Dick in person.

It feels actually, physically, painful.

Instead he mumbles promises about getting there as quick as he can and he paces, nearly wearing a hole in the cheap carpet until enough time had passed that he could plausibly show up.

When he gets there, Dick vaults down the steps and throws his arms around Clark.

They end up in the kitchen, drinking Pennyworth’s excellent hot chocolate and waiting for news from Bruce beyond a terse text message: ‘am ok. be home soon as i can’.

Clark drinks three mugs, one of them Dick’s, and compliments Pennyworth every time.

“Please, Mr. Kent. It’s been long enough. I believe you can call me Alfred”.

Clark has to bite his tongue to keep from saying something stupid, because he's genuinely touched.

He settles for a quick nod, instead.

Wayne bursts in half an hour later, flushed and panting, and quickly gets bowled over by a Dick-shaped blur of motion.

Clark scans him quickly, and beyond a surprising amount of old injuries- mountain climbing, rugby and polo, he’d said in a few interviews- Wayne isn’t hurt or high or anything else.

Between the two of them, with some carefully dry comments from Alfred, they manage to get Dick to bed even though it's still early.

They hover in the doorway, after, unsure.

Through the polished wood, Clark counts the rise and fall of his breathing. 

Wayne just stands there, hand on the doorknob, eyes fixed on the floor.

Clark wants to stay. Clark wants to leave and let Wayne step back inside and spread his hand on Dick’s back the way Clark’s mother used to, so that he could be sure he’s safe and warm and alive.

He's almost worked up the resolve to say goodnight, when Wayne slips his hand off the gleaming metal and shakes his shoulders like a wet dog.

“Let’s have a drink, Mr. Kent” he says and Clark can’t help but follow.

They end up on the stone terrace, Wayne’s favorite Clark's beginning to suspect, nursing warm mugs of tea.

Alfred had been expecting them.

It's a lovely summer night, August was a good look on Gotham, but Clark is sitting too straight, shoulders too broad.

He can’t make himself stop.

Beside him, Wayne is a study in contrasts.

He's slumped deeply, his chin on his chest. But his eyes are sharp, too alert.

One of his hands hangs limply down, the other is holding the mug like a weapon, his knuckles white.

When he finally makes a sound it takes Clark a minute to realize that he's actually talking.

He sounds like it's being dragged out of him, inch by barbed inch.

“I...I’m trying. And I just” he says and turns to Clark like he's begging for help.

“You’re doing your best. He knows that”.

Wayne’s eyes are steady on him, enormous and fathomless.

“I’m not perfect” he says.

“No one is, Mr. Wayne”.

He snorts, like he's biting something back. There's something like a smile playing near the corner of his mouth.

It isn’t pleasant.

“I’m going to fuck it up” he says, and the smile spreads like oil.

“Maybe. So do most people, in one way or another”.

When Jerry Shuster two farms down had his son, and the whole town had been over, Jerry had taken Clark’s father aside, all the way on the end of the long porch to confide that he was absolutely terrified.

“You should be- Jonathan had said- you’re going to mess each other up. That’s what fatherhood is. But just remember that it’s harder to be a son than it is to be a father. You’ll do alright”.

He’d wanted to say something, anything, at the time and he hadn’t.

Now, he says the same thing to Wayne.

He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head slowly. Finally he exhales, deep and slow, “You have a gift. For knowing what to say”.

“I got it from my father”.

*

That night, with a guilty glance at the clock, he calls Tawny. When she picks up she doesn’t sound like she was asleep.

“I need you to be honest with me. Am I in too deep?”

On the other end of the line she sighs and hums. He can picture her, twirling her glasses in her hand like she always did when she was thinking, the ends of the legs covered in microscopic marks from her teeth.

“Clark, hun, you might be. But you’re not covering the presidential election, here. This is still celebrity journalism. No one’s gonna get hurt if you’re not objective.”

Dick might, Clark thinks, but she's still talking.

“I’ve gone over your drafts, Clark. They’re good. Really good. Clear headed, and I can tell you care about this boy. And to be honest it’s brought out the best in you. When they say ‘don’t become the story’ they’re usually thinking Bialya, not Burberry’s. There’s worse things in the world than wanting to help a hurt kid”.

He lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

They talk for a while, hashing out some details, going over some sentences. She thinks he could use longer phrases, more commas, but Clark liked to use periods. It was more direct.

Finally he lets her go. “Tawny? Thanks. For everything”

He can hear her smile as the line clicks shut.

Chapter Text

Three days after that was picture day and it was somehow both worse and better than Clark imagined.

Dick laughed when Clark called it that and relaxed slightly.

He tensed back up when Jimmy Olsen introduced himself, and didn’t quite smile even when Clark told him Jimmy was an old friend.

They’d started at the Planet at the same time and they’d always gotten along.

To the point that for a while everyone thought they were dating and even now most of the office thought Clark was gay, partially because of whole working the gossip section thing.

He was actually bi, if an alien attracted to humans could be considered under those categories.

To break the ice Clark made sure they started with Instagram, messing around until they got the perfect, and perfectly filtered, picture, to tease the first part of the piece, to be published in two days’ time.

Wayne had already signed off on it.

He was smiling a little as he did, cheeks dusted by a rush of blood with a shade of pink so delicate only Clark could see it.  

Dick brightened up when they were uploading the first picture, as used to the app as most kids his age, but he tensed back up when Jimmy started the shoot in earnest.

Wayne was pretty used to it, and he was so calm that it prevented a full meltdown on Dick’s end, but he was still jittery and stiff.

As the Instagram post racked up comments and likes and spread to the rest of the internet, Alfred quietly took Dick’s phone away and forced them to take a tea break.

Jimmy spent it showing Dick the cameras up close and then telling stories that make Clark look like a dork.

Like the time they ended up running from a poodle.

He didn’t say it, but in his defense he mostly ran because it would be hard to explain how a dog could tear his entire  pant leg off but not draw blood.

Dick was more relaxed by the time they finally started again, but it still took about two more hours than it should have and by the end of it they were all exhausted.

Over Dick’s dark, drooping head Wayne caught Clark’s eye.

The squinty dart of it should have been incomprehensible but he had spent long enough in the Manor to know what he was saying. It was a sobering thought.

So Clark made sure Jimmy collected all his gear and then gave him a hug goodbye before heading back inside for dinner.

It was something baked and spiced and Dick dug in like he’d been starved.

Through frantic mouthfuls he explained what everything on the long dark table was called and what was  in it and how it differed from the way his mother made it.

Halfway through the rambling spiel Alfred intervened, probably to prevent Dick from inhaling the food into his lungs by accident.

Apparently, after listening to Dick’s description of her dishes, he managed to track down a former acrobat in Haly’s circus, a Roma woman living in Slovenia who’d finished a long career under the bigtop sometime before Dick’s father had even been born, and took lessons from her via Skype.

Dick froze, cheeks bulging like a cartoon squirrel.

Then he vaulted over the table to hug Alfred’s middle and his grin was so wide the butler didn’t even seem to mind the greasy mouth print on his crisp white shirt.

When they finished and Alfred politely cleared them away to clean everything up, he and Wayne tucked Dick in.

He was out like a light in minutes.

“Thank you for staying”, Wayne said quietly, leading Clark to a nearby door. “You’ve been...he- I’m- we’re lucky to have you” he said and sunk into the butter soft leather of a couch Clark could never, ever afford.

And they were in what he had come to recognize as the third best sitting room.

Wayne’s brows crinkled together and he rolled his head, “Mr.- Clark?” and that’s when he realized he was laughing hysterically.

Of course, of course, of course.

It had been staring him right in the face the whole time.

He dropped onto the couch, arms wrapped around his heaving sides.

Beside him, Wayne’s eyes were almost wide in alarm, because he was too disciplined to panic, hand hovering over Clark’s back.

It set off a new round of laughter and Wayne licked his lip, a tell he knew incredibly well by then, and started to rise.

Clark’s hand shot out and yanked him back down.

He took a deep breath and locked their eyes together.

He managed exactly one word: “Batman”.

And then he was laughing again.

Wayne- no, Bruce , after all that Clark got to call him Bruce, looked torn between vomiting on his shoes and giggling. He didn’t look surprised.

“Ah-heh- You knew this whole time?” Bruce nodded, half guilty half defiant.

“Oh God, it makes so much sense ”.

The hand picked interview, the weird resonance in the house, the scars and oh , the conversations.

And Alfred, of course, he had to be in on it. Even Batman couldn’t manage all that alone.

He punched Bruce in the shoulder, just soft enough to ache and not bruise.

“Are you mad?” Bruce ventured finally, and underneath the bland, neutral look that reminded him of Batman’s cowl he could sense real fear.

“No. I don’t think so. Not really...I’ll get over it”.

Something inching towards a smile started on Bruce’s face.

“How though?”

The almost smile vanished.

“I...I’d been tracking you a while. Since you appeared. And then I was just lucky, I suppose. The Hooties. We left the same party” Clark snorted, choked back another round of giggles.

“After that I just had to cross reference the Metropolis attendants. A reporter made a lot of sense and you fit the physical description. But I couldn’t be sure”.

Clark smiled at that, he put a lot of work into seeming different.

“I looked into your background and nothing jumped out until I found the blizzard story”

“Blizzards aren’t exactly unusual in Kansas in December, Bruce”

He jumped a little at that, and Clark realized it was probably the first time he’d said his name.

“No, but this particular one was especially sudden and brutal, largely due to an unexpected meteor shower that disturbed climatic conditions”. His voice was so carefully neutral that it was glaringly obvious he was doing his best to sound calm.

It was on Fox News every week like clockwork, IS SUPERMAN AN ILLEGAL ALIEN? (FROM SPACE) , and Lex Luthor’s tweets had spawned more memes than he could count, with the help of countless internet forums and academic papers and even graffiti by the deli near the Daily Planet.

He had never publicly addressed it.

“Yeah” he said, just as studiously, falsely, calm: “I’m an alien”.

“Oh” Bruce said. “Cool” and he sounded so much like Dick that Clark had to laugh. 

That time Bruce laughed with him.

Chapter Text

Clark holds out for an entire 17 hours before he calls his mother.

He finally gets to say what he's wanted to tell her since he was seven and slowly beginning to realize he was different from everyone around him: I found someone like me.

A friend he could be honest with, about every part of himself.

“Oh honey” she says and he can hear the full range of her conflicting emotions.

He tells her everything and he can feel her shooing his father away from the phone towards the end.

“Be careful, baby” she says and he could hear the rest of it too, don’t confuse relief for love.

He hangs up after promising to somehow get Bruce and Dick out to the farm, and his grin doesn’t fade for days.

It gets a boost when the first part of the series of articles comes out and immediately goes viral.

Tawny texts him “Congratulations!” when it breaks all their records for reach and popularity, and so does Chic, a series of incomprehensible emoji groupings.

Unofficially, he had finished his interviews and research with the inhabitants of Wayne Manor around the time that it went live, but he had promised them he’d be there for Dick’s first day of school.

The press attention had died down around them, because Clark’s interview had scooped everyone, but the media’s focus turned to Clark himself.

He was now a minor celebrity in the gossip press, being praised for his “firm but fair assesment” his portrayal of Bruce as “a flawed but caring father figure who is doing his best” and his “riveting description of Wayne-and now Grayson’s-world”. And slyly insinuating that it soon be Clark’s world too.

He's still wincing at that last one.

Clark had finally headed back to Metropolis to ease the pressure on them and found that he had gained not one but two texting buddies.

Three if you counted the occasional missive from Alfred.

He got at least two snaps a day from Dick, and a laconic message from Bruce.

Usually something along the lines of ‘watch out for Luthor’ and a hint as to which warehouses were seeing strange traffic.

He's thinking about the latest one, a clue that pointed him to a ship with a name from classical antiquity headed towards Ankara, when he steps out of his miniscule shower to find a strawberry blonde in a windbreaker that smells faintly of gunpowder squinting at his family photos.

“Hi?” he says, hitching the towel up a little higher.

“You should really lock your doors, you aren’t in Smallville anymore” she says, picking up a framed shot of Clark in front of his old high school, shyly holding up a chess trophy. “Cute”.

“Thank you. If you don’t mind, I’m going to put on some pants, Miss...?”

“Lane. And I only mind a little” she says with a smirk that turns into a full belly laugh when Clark blushes and scrambles for his clothes.

Lois Lane, the Lois Lane, she of the Bialyan Civil War coverage under fire, the Pulitzer Prize nominated book on the Santa Prisca prison system, the called-Lex-Luthor-a-putz-at-a-press-conference-and-lived-to-tell-the-tale fame was standing in Clark’s miniscule apartment and he hadn’t cleaned it very well.

It made him nervous enough to fumble the buttons and be ready in an amount of time reasonable for a human.

When he stumbles back into the room, Lane is stretched out along his miniscule couch, her legs too short for her combat boots to reach the glorified milk crate Clark called a coffee table.

“I- uh. Can I offer you some coffee?” “You’re out”

“Ah” and yes, a quick x-ray glance at the kitchen confirmed that.

“So. Why are you... here? Exactly?”

Lane laughs again, and Clark smiles. “I read your piece on Wayne. It was good stuff”

Clark can feel the hot rush of a blush and from Lane’s smirk she can see it too.

“Want to do some real work?” “Whu- yes. I- you’re asking me?”  

“I told you, it’s good stuff. You have a good eye and frankly, you’re wasted on gossip rags”.

Clark makes an inarticulate sound, torn between defending the section and begging Lane to take him with her to the Big Leagues.

Then he takes a deep breath and says “I think this conversation calls for coffee. There’s a good place on the corner”.

She smiles, like he’d passed some test, and says “Lead on, Macduff” and Clark manages to keep his mouth shut until they're in the stairwell and then he cracks “Actually it’s lay on-”

“Shut up, Kent” Lois says and shoves him out the building’s door.

*

The first person he tells is Tawny, technically, because when they finished their coffees Clark was half in love with Lane (“Lois, please. Only Perry calls me Lane”) and sold on the idea (“It’s gonna suck. A lot. And you’re gonna love it”).

She could see it in his eyes, the yes he hadn’t actually said, and they took the train to the Planet’s offices.

It's a Saturday but Tawny is in her office and when she sees them in the doorway all she says is “oh” and that's when she flips Lois off.

Then she congratulates Clark and they spend an hour hammering out the details.

They decide he woud work until December, slowly handing more of his duties to Chic, while she trained a replacement for her own post that he’d help find.

Then after Christmas he would to report Perry White two floors up and join the team Lois was in charge of.  

When he gets up to go, Tawny surprises him by coming around her desk and hugging him tight.

Then she whispers in his ear “You think Chic is gonna kiss you or kill you?” and he laughs.

“Both”.

*

He gets home late that night, hair mussed from a looping flight.

He’d gone straight to his parent’s home and given them the news.

They’d jumped to hug him and he’d picked them up and spun them. Then his father broke out the good whiskey and they’d sat on the porch to celebrate.

“My boy” his mother had said, framing his face with her hands, his father’s smile glowing in the dim light behind her.

They’d offered his old room but he’d chosen not to stay over, flying home in a lazy, meandering route.

When he slips inside his apartment he realizes he hadn’t locked his windows and he laughs a little, thinking of Lois Lane. Lois ‘The Pitbull' Lane. And he was going to work with her.

He's suddenly torn between dancing and vomiting all over his shoes.

He doesn’t do either, instead he drops onto his bedspread with a sigh, stretching out his legs.

Then his phone pings.

It's a quick text from Bruce, innocuous on the surface but part of a chain of secret messages he’d gotten that week.

A quick glance at his alarm clock tells him that yes, his phone was correct, it really is that late.

Early. Whatever.

He's dialing before he’s actually thought about it and Bruce picks up on the first ring.

“Giving up?” he says, voice amused, and it steals Clark’s breath for a minute.

He had never heard him sound that pleased.

Clark smiles and gives him the good news.

Even through the receiver he can hear Bruce’s jaw drop.

He can’t find something to say, stuttering through about fifteen different sentence fragments, so Clark takes pity on him: “Hey, do you wanna come to the farm for Labor Day?”

“What?”

“Labor Day. It’s a federal holiday, mostly celebrated by people with jobs. Like me”

“You wound me, Kent... Did you mean that?” Clark did.

Dick would have the day off too, and it would be the first weekend after school started, “because I guess the kids that go to Gotham Academy need all the breaks they can get”

“I’m this close, Kent” Bruce says, but he’s smiling.

And then he’s not.

“Am I to assume that your parents would, how should I put this, be aware of how we met?”

“Oh they read all my stuff religiously” he says with a grin, knowing Bruce will read between the lines.

He does, and makes a frustrated sound over the line, reminding Clark of the mountain lion that made a home close to Smallville High when he was a junior. It had loped onto the field during cheerleading practice and Lana Lang had beaned it with her baton.

“Bruce. My parents raised me. They’re discreet. And they know how to handle kids, if that’s what worries you”. On the other end Bruce grumbles, then sighs.

“Fine. See you Monday” he says and hangs up.

He means in a week, for Dick’s first day.

Clark smiles again, soft, and finally goes to sleep.

Chapter Text

“You. Fucking. Asshole" Chic says on Friday, when he and Tawny call her into Tawny’s office to tell her, now that it’s all official and has a management bow of approval.

She launches her tiny frame at Clark’s and wraps her arms around his neck.

“You’re the worst” she whispers in his ear and then pulls back enough to say “You know I wanted to beat him out of the job fair and square, Tawny. This is devious and underhanded and I’m kinda proud”.

She insists on taking Clark out for a beer, but because it’s Friday and they’re gearing up coverage for the weekend she ends up giving Clark enough money to run down to the convenience store for a six pack (“the good kind, Kent, no Natty Light”) and eventually they make their way to the roof and sit under the globe to drink.

Clark cracks open a can and hands it to her as she settles on a ledge. 

She takes it then punches him lightly on the shoulder before leaning against him.

“I can’t believe you’re such a jerk that you’re gonna make me miss you” “Same to you” he says and she laughs and it’s nice, sitting with a friend under the stars.

They talk a little, about The Planet and global affairs, the next fashion show and the best way to eat chili cheese fries. Chic makes him promise he won’t get a big head (“or I’ll deflate it for you”) and he makes her swear she’ll share all the office gossip.

When he finally says goodbye with a “See you on Tuesday” she gives him an odd look and sighs.

“Look, if what I think is happening is happening, you owe me that exclusive”.

Clark turns pink and rushes down the stairs.

He goes to dinner with Jimmy afterward, and it’s fun but his mind is a few days in the future.

Dick’s texting has taken on a frantic edge, and Bruce’s is tinged with nerves and Alfred flatly texts him that they were losing it, please come soon, in a neatly British sort of way.

He spends most of Saturday helplessly pacing his apartment, with the occasional break to stop a mugging.

He’s not actually flying, commercially anyway, into Gotham, but for verisimilitude sake he’s sticking to the schedule of Sunday’s 8:00 a.m. flight out.

Clark leaves his house at 5:00 a.m. too keyed up to pretend to be sleeping any longer.  

He circles Gotham idly, stopping one carjacking as he waits for it to get late enough that he can meet Alfred near the airport.

Dick wanted to come get him, but Bruce convinced him to help set up a welcome breakfast instead.

“Be prepared for burnt toast, Mr. Kent. I fear that for all his talents, Master Bruce has never managed to find a foothold in the culinary arts” says Alfred as they glide up the gravel drive to the house.

The toast is in fact burnt, they somehow got rind into the orange juice and the eggs are rubbery.

It immediately makes its way into Clark’s top ten breakfasts ever, hands down.

They’re both so proud that Clark can’t help but grin all the way through it even when he realizes they’ve somehow managed to get too much salt in everything.

The day itself is even better.

Alfred has set croquet up on one of the lawns, because it’s the sort of place that has lawns, plural, and Dick gives him a meandering explanation of the game that’s full of good intentions and low on information he can actually use.

Bruce fills in the blanks with a fond smile, directed at both of them.

They proceed to play horribly, Bruce on purpose so Dick won’t feel bad, Clark because he has no clue what he’s doing and Dick because he doesn’t seem to care much beyond whacking the balls as hard as he possibly can.

Over the course of the game, Bruce falls into a hedge, Dick fights a squirrel for a ball, they end up running from a wasp’s nest and Clark slips into a creek. On the way back he gives Dick a piggyback ride and he and Bruce exchange a smile.

He feels something close to peace.

Alfred is waiting for them, with perfect, unburnt late lunch and the rest of the day goes by in a perfect lazy Sunday haze. 

Dick starts yawning by the time they reach dinner, and Bruce carries him up to bed halfway through the movie they were watching in one of the cozier living rooms.

“I thought he’d be too wired to sleep” Clark whispers and Bruce smiles back, soft.

He walks Clark to his door, the ‘simple’ guestroom more opulent than anywhere he’s ever stayed.

Bruce looks like he wants to say something, but finally settles on squeezing Clark’s shoulder, thumb splayed far enough to touch his exposed collarbone.

Clark’s fingers circle his wrist briefly before whispering goodnight.

He hadn’t thought he’d sleep either, but he’s out like a light the minute his head touches the impossibly soft, impossibly expensive pillow.

*

They’re all wired in the morning anyway.

Even Alfred’s impeccably stiff upper lip wobbles, so slightly that maybe only Clark’s heightened senses pick up on it.

But they rush through breakfast and Dick clasps his hands together as they head to the car in funereal silence. Bruce looks over his head at Clark, helpless and Clark doesn’t know what to do either.

They settle for putting a hand on each of Dick’s shoulders inside the car.

Clark starts chattering, meaningless snippets of life at the Planet and Bruce grimaces his way through the appropriate responses.

“You’re gonna pick me up, right? Both of you?” Dick says suddenly, and they both fall over themselves with promises.

The drive is both too long and too brief and Clark sits alone in the car while Bruce walks Dick up because it’s what he asked for, what they agreed on, because it would be too hard to explain his presence there, especially when half the school’s secretaries had TMZ on speed dial.

When Bruce comes back to the car he slumps over and reaches out his hand.

Clark holds it all the way back to the Manor.

“Hey- he says with a little shake of his wrist- wanna go fight crime?” he says when they get there. Bruce stares. Then he cracks a smile.

“You’re a dork, Clark Kent”.

They stop Scarecrow in the morning and bust a flamingo smuggling ring after lunch because nothing in Gotham can ever come close to normal and then sit around the house waiting for it to be time to pick Dick up because criminals never fail to disappoint Clark, ever.

They watch way more HGTV than could possibly be healthy and Alfred gives them a half fond half exasperated face when he brings in snacks.

Every five minutes Clark pulls Bruce’s phone out of his hands because he needs to let Dick fend for himself. It keeps him from reaching for his own phone.

Dick checks in at lunch and sends a few more texts after.

They both pore over the messages, foreheads touching over Bruce’s phone.

Alfred clears the plates for far longer than necessary and pretends he isn’t peeking at the screen. When it’s finally, finally time they rush to the car and get there early because you wouldn't know it to look at him but Alfred’s got a lead foot.

Dick shoots into the car like an over sugared missile and he settles between them, talking a mile a minute: Math is fun, Mr. Scarlett is a little too intense, Professor Milo promised they’d get to blow things up later in the semester, and oh yeah some third year boys teased him about Bruce getting expelled back in the day, Clark did you know Bruce was expelled?, Did he know it was Hammerhead himself who did it? Yes, Bruce, he’s still alive and still at Gotham Academy, but no, nothing bad happened, Bette Kane stood up for him, she’s so cool , does Bruce know her? Oh, of course he does and Alfred are there snacks?

He keeps up the stream, barely pausing for questions, all the way into dinner and Clark is smiling so hard his face hurts.

It won’t be perfect, not by a long shot, but he can go home tonight with a weight lifted.

Dick pauses midway through the saga like tale of Dodgeball During P.E. (He Was Not Picked Last) with a wide, jaw cracking yawn.

Alfred tuts, because he didn’t cover his mouth and Dick smiles sheepishly back. 

“Guess I’m more tired than I thought” he says and he’s quieter as they plow through dessert, a strawberry pie Alfred made, with steely determination.

It’s Dick’s favorite.

As soon as he finishes he quietly sets down his fork, comes around the table and wraps his arms around Clark’s middle.

“I wish you could stay” he says and Clark starts to say something twice before he’s sure he can speak without his voice cracking.

“You’ll see me on Friday, and we’ve got the whole weekend” he says. Then he and Bruce take Dick up to his room and wish him goodnight.

They head downstairs quietly, because Dick needs to think they’ve gone to take Clark to the airport.

“It’ll let me get some work done in the Cave”, Bruce tells him.

The next thing he knows, they’re kissing.

Bruce is softer than he’d thought, pressed against him.

His lips are cracked and too firm and Clark realizes they’re not really kissing because he’s just standing there.

He squeezes Bruce’s forearms slightly and he pulls away, not meeting his eyes.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that” Bruce mumbles.

“I do” Clark says, and he does.

Bruce is just emotional, overwhelmed. Clark was there. It’s a natural reaction and he doesn’t blame him for it.

“It’s ok” he whispers and Bruce isn’t quite blushing but he seems calmer.

“I didn’t just get myself uninvited to the homestead, did I?” he says and Clark grins.

“You’ll have to try harder than that, buster” and when they laugh he knows they’ll be alright.

He steps closer and Bruce manages to not flinch.

Clark puts a hand on the soft, 700 dollar fabric that covers Bruce’s shoulder and says “I’ll call you when I get home, ok?”

Bruce nods and jerkily brings up his own hand to brush Clark’s.

*

He really does call when he gets home, with a record breaking flight time, later.

Clark rolls over in bed, trying and failing not to compare it with the plush bed and infinity thread count sheets of the guestroom the night before.

He rolls over and over and over and thinks I’ll never get to sleep, rolls over again and falls into a slumber so deep he can’t remember anything he dreamt when his alarm goes off the next day.

Chapter Text

Clark spends a whole week annoyed.

He’s fidgety, distracted and even criminals seem to be taking it easy.

Lois is in Markovia and Perry tells him it’s best not to start talking about the work yet, better if the whole team grabs lunch when she gets back to get into a groove together, so there’s no help there.

Chic alternates between too nice and too harsh and everything, everything is too much on his senses.

He is pointedly not thinking about a kiss that wasn’t, that didn’t mean anything.

He doesn’t tell his mother about it and goes back and forth on that decision every hour.

Friday can’t come soon enough but it still surprises him when it does.

There’s the usual pandemonium that comes with setting up the weekend, compounded by the fact that it’s a holiday and half their staff has left early.

He and Chic skip lunch to get done on time and she surprises him with a hug as she heads out to “pound some tequila before my flight” because she’s terrified of planes and her parents live in Green Bay.  

Clark stretches and then rushes home for his bag and a quick “omw” text to his parents before jumping into the air and soaring.

He makes it to the farm fifty-two minutes before Bruce and Dick do.

His mother is waiting on the porch, taking in the setting sun. “My, my- she says when she sees him- he really must be something special”.

He’s lucky he’s so backlit she can’t see him blush.

His father is fiddling with the oven in the kitchen, because it hasn’t and will never work right. When he sees Clark, he claps him on the shoulder and says “Breathe, son. Don’t worry about us maybe embarrassing you. We’re gonna”.

Clark startles himself with a laugh and leans down to peer into the oven. No matter how many murderbots and Life Model Decoys he’s disassembled over the years, he still can’t make heads or tails of the wires and coils that make up the steel behemoth.

They fight with it for a while, a proud Kent family tradition, and then his father slams his palm against its side and it warms up just fine.

They grin at each other and then his mother calls.

He’d been distracted, but now he can hear the smooth roll of the rented BMW on the unpaved road. It’s an SUV, at least, but he still winces a little at the beating the undercarriage is taking.

He can hear their heartbeats too: Dick’s excited, Bruce’s apprehensive.

His mother waves at them from the porch and Dick waves back, beauty queen perfect. Maybe Alfred gave him lessons.

His father directs Bruce on parking and all too soon they’re unfolding themselves out of their seats and Clark realizes he should, objectively, be terrified.

But it’s too late for that now.

His father is shaking Bruce’s hand (he doesn’t have to strain to hear the microscopic rasp of their calluses) and Dick is stammering his way through a greeting that his mother turns into a hug.

He stiffens for exactly 0.0052 seconds before melting into it.

Bruce looks a little green when Clark clasps his shoulder and he leans in to whisper “you’re doing fine”. Bruce smiles, quick and watery.

Clark gets their bags, Bruce puts up a token protest but his father grins, “That’s what sons are for!”, and when he gets back outside Dick is dangling from the oak tree in the backyard.

His mother is standing, hands on her hips, smiling fondly below it.

She looks the way she does in Clark’s earliest memories, when he ran around the same yard screaming ‘lookat me, lookat me’.

His father jars him out of his thoughts, jabbing him slightly with his elbow.

“That safe?”

“Dick is an accomplished acrobat, and he climbs the Manor’s- that is my house’s- trees all the time and not just the trees, once he-” Bruce keeps going, rhapsodic, and Clark’s father shoots him a quick, knowing smile.

Under his breath he whispers “new parent” and Clark’s grin is so wide it hurts.

They stand there for a long while, watching Dick roll and tumble, preening under the maternal attention.

He must have missed it.  

The three of them do what they can to muddle through some small talk, Bruce overly stiff and polite when he runs out of steam about Dick’s athletic capabilities.

Until he accidentally trips into an Oscar race conversation and Jonathan delivers an impressive filibuster on his picks until Clark counters with industry knowledge and before they know it it’s well after dark and his mother is saying “if you boys are finished, dinner’s ready”.

They obediently troop inside and settle around the table.

It hits Clark suddenly that this is probably the fullest he’s ever seen it.

His parents didn’t entertain much when he was growing up, couldn’t risk him tromping into the room holding a combine over his head.

They don’t talk much around the table, Dick simultaneously wolfing down his mother’s lasagna and exhibiting Alfred Pennyworth’s Very Best Table Manners and Bruce’s face stuck on his paparazzi ready smile.

Clark has no idea where to start so he focuses on his plate and his father’s never been a man to be bothered by awkward silences.

His mother beams, though. When they clear up the table she puts a hand on his elbow and kisses his cheek: “I like your friends, baby”.

He blushes and smiles back while his father shows them upstairs to their rooms. “Dick, you’re in Clark’s old bedroom, so if you hate the decór that’s on him.”

Dick grins and rushes in, belly flopping onto the bed. Something in Clark’s chest twinges at how small he looks on the big bed.

He was always a big kid.

“And Bruce you’re in the guestroom, here. Bathroom’s right down the hall”. Bruce half smiles then frowns, “What about Clark?”

“Couch” his father says without missing a beat.

It’s a small house.

Bruce starts to protest but he’s cut off “None of that. You’re a guest. Besides, it’ll be good for him. Builds character”.

Bruce looks like he’s going to say something else, but Clark catches his eye and shakes his head.

It’s not worth it and Clark’s slept on the couch plenty of times.

They go to bed early, tired from the trip and the company. Clark fidgets a little as he settles, covered by blankets that have been in the family for longer than he has.

He casts his senses around and it feels right to hear Bruce and Dick’s heartbeats along with his parents and all the sounds of the farm.

Feels like home.

Chapter Text

The next morning is a lazy one.

Dick’s body is already progressing into teenage apathy and his parents are taking advantage of the slower pace Clark’s visits provide.

Even Clark feels too comfortable to move, his mornings usually a hectic flurry of breakfast, patrol and rapid fire texts from various Daily Planet group chats.

Only Bruce wakes up early and launches into his morning workout, but he stills stays in his room and pretends.

Clark counts his reps, the sound filtering down, and feels vaguely smug from inside his blanket cocoon.

But Martha works her way downstairs eventually and Clark helps her set up breakfast.

Jonathan and Bruce join them soon after, Bruce already fully dressed and alert in a manner that gives away the fact that he’s been up for hours. Jonathan just leans his hip on the kitchen counter and reaches for the coffee.

It’s probably the only edible thing he can make, everything else ending up charred or undercooked to the point that he’s been permanently banned from even attempting to cook.

“Morning sleepyhead” Martha says to Dick when he shyly walks into the kitchen, dressed but barefoot, looking unsure. “You want America pancakes?”

His face scrunches up, eyes darting at Clark like he’s not sure if he’s being teased: “America pancakes?”

“Sure. They’re my favorite” Clark says and it’s true.

They’re just pancakes, but with blueberries and cranberries and white chocolate chips tossed in.

Martha’s been making them, and variations on them, for decades, but Clark had christened these when he was five and it had stuck.

It’s what she always makes for a homecoming breakfast.

He says as much and Dick grins, pleased, and Clark’s ears pick up a choked of sob from Bruce, who hides his emotions with a gulp of coffee.

He’s not sure what part was too much, or which emotion was behind it.

Clark settles for bumping his shoulder into Bruce’s and waiting until he gets a small smile back.

Jonathan takes them out to roam the farm, swinging Dick up into the tractor’s cab and answering all his questions about livestock and grain silos and machinery.

After lunch, Clark leads them out to a meandering brook that divides their property from the Ross’ and they pretend to fish but mostly lay in the sun.

Dick complains loudly about the lack of success, but underneath Clark can sense his relief at not having to gut a squirming, slippery thing. Bruce catches his eye and nods a little, like he’s overheard Clark’s thoughts.

They walk back to the house slowly, enjoying the sunset. Dick walks between them, and sometimes grab their arms to vault forward, pitching and tumbling and pinwheeling.

When they get home, and Clark’s heart skips a beat when he realizes he’s lumping Bruce and Dick in with the word, his mother is waiting with a thick lasagna and a smile.

They dig in and Dick chatters through it, telling Jonathan all about the creek. He smiles indulgently, pretending he hasn’t heard it all before.

He runs out of steam about halfway through the meal and Bruce’s shoulders tense, awkward in the silence.

“Mr. and Mrs. Kent...how did you meet?” he says, like he’s reading off a cue card titled ‘How To Make Smalltalk’.

It’s endearing because normally Bruce is smooth at social functions, mostly because he doesn’t actually care.

Martha grins and Jonathan smiles, ducking his head.

Clark knows what’s coming.

It’s her favorite way to tell the story: “I slapped him ‘round the face after he yanked me off my feet. He fell in love”.

Dick’s eyes go as wide as saucers and Bruce’s mouth twists awkwardly.

Clark elbows him discreetly, to give her her cue.

“Uh- pardon?” he says, and Clark can hear the Pennyworth in the words.

Martha smiles. “My daddy was the best horse breeder in Georgia. He got hired by Hiram Weaks, that’s the big white barn you’d have passed driving into town, it’s his grandson’s now, and we drove all the way here. You can imagine how cranky I’d have been, can’t you?- she smiles in Dick’s direction and he blushes slightly. He’s riveted, though- I was a few years older than Dick, of course.

Anyway, we got into town and everything seems a little too quiet, no one around.

My daddy pulled into the church parking lot, you saw the church didn’t you? Looks about the same. He and my mother tried to find someone to direct them to Weaks’ farm.

I started walking up to the church when he- she points a finger at his father who puts his hands up, and that’s part of telling the story, too- tells me that I can’t go in there.

Well I was not about to hear that - and Clark can see her, a fifteen year old spitfire of a black girl who wasn’t going to be intimidated by a gangly crew-cutted blond boy - and I just ran up the steps. And then I opened that big door” she pauses here, lets the moment hang.

Whenever she tells this story, and Clark had asked for it a bedtime for years, he knows where his burning love for writing came from.

“There wasn’t anything there. Except for a whole mess of splintered wood and loose nails- Dick is leaning forward now, rapt- I would have lost my balance and fallen in when I felt an arm around my waist and a tug and suddenly I was back on the lawn in Jonathan’s arms.

So of course I spun around and slapped him from grabbing me” she says with a laugh.

“Saved your life is what I did” his father says with a smile.

“Then my mother runs up and shakes me and tells me to apologize, shake his hand and thank him. She was terrified because while I was walking up to the church she’d run into his parents and they’d explained just what happened”

“What?” Dick and Bruce say in unison.

“A tornado. They can do that, tear up a building but pass just right to leave its face up. That’s why the town was so quiet.

Jonathan and his daddy and a lot of the boys in town pitched in to rebuild the church, they had to tear down what was left first, and you better believe my mother had me there every day after school helping pass out drinks and snacks.

We got to talking, sometimes- Jonathan is smiling at her by now, soft and full of wonder- and when the church had a dance to celebrate being reopened, he asked for the first dance. I gave it to him.

And the next and the next and the next til it was time to go home”. They’re smiling at each other now and there’s only one line left, and it’s Jonathan’s.

“Hell. I was in love from the minute you slapped me”.

Clark knows the story’s not really that simple, that people looked at Jonathan funny for weeks for asking a black girl to dance like that, and even then there was Vietnam and the Black Panthers and a “whole mess of trouble” like his grandmother used to say.

But right now Dick’s eyes are suspiciously shiny and Bruce is helping clear the table with a manic sort of determination.

He brushes Clark’s hands when they pile the plates and smiles.

Later they pile onto the old couch to watch a movie, Dick burrowing determinedly between them.

Halfway through he dozes off and Bruce looks down at him so fondly Clark has to look away.

His parents are looking at him, something in their eyes he can’t quite place.

While Bruce carries Dick to bed, his mother hugs him and kisses his cheek. “I’m glad you’re happy, baby” she whispers and Clark is surprised to find that he is.

Really and truly.

He takes his time getting ready for bed and he’s barely laid down when a scream from upstairs has him zooming up the stairs before he has time to think.

Bruce’s hand is on the doorknob when he gets there and they burst into Clark’s old room together.

Dick is tangled in the sheets, looking smaller and paler than he really is.

There are tears tracking down his cheeks and cut off noises coming from his throat.

It’s a nightmare.

Bruce wakes him carefully and Dick throws himself into the cradle of his arms, barely even half awake.

Clark settles a gentle hand on his back, feeling the breaths shake his ribs.

Over Dick’s head they share a helpless glance and shush him quietly until he drifts back off.

He probably never really woke up.

Bruce settles him back on the covers and sits for a moment, fingering the edge of the comforter. He looks gutted, and he’s biting his lower lip like that’s all that’s holding back a torrent of feeling.

Eventually Clark palms his shoulder and pulls him away.

It’s an awkward fit in the narrow doorway but they manage. Clark’s parents are standing in the hallway, looking concerned.

His father’s arm is around his mother, and part of him wants to go and be comforted.

“He’s okay” Clark whispers instead and Bruce tenses up under his hand.

His mother nods “We didn’t want to crowd” she whispers back, or make him feel embarrassed she doesn’t say.

It might be an awkward morning, tomorrow.

But they murmur goodnights and Clark leads Bruce into the guestroom, realizing too late that it’s a little odd to tuck a grown man into bed, especially if he kissed you once.

Bruce sighs and stares at the ceiling.

“I’m fucking up” he says and then flinches, like he expects Clark to agree.

“No” Clark says and squeezes his shoulder again.

Bruce is silent for a moment then his hand reaches up, haltingly, and settles on Clark’s.

So he’s helpless, so they both are, so what.

“Nightmares happen” Clark says finally and “yeah” Bruce breathes out.

They stay there for what feels like a long time, almost holding hands but not quite.

Finally, Bruce slides down under the covers, never letting go of Clark. He rests there for a moment and sighs.  

Clark moves his hand, smoothes Bruce’s hair and somehow, someway, forces himself to go back downstairs.

He doesn’t go to sleep until he can see dawn creeping up on the house.  

Chapter Text

Dick is one of the first to make it downstairs, after Clark’s mother.

He’s fully dressed this time, shoes and all, and he stares at them instead of looking at Clark.

“Do I have too much bedhead?” Clark says, raking a hand through it and intentionally making it worse.

Dick laughs suddenly and stops.

“I’m sorry” he says, and he sounds like he’s never been sorrier.

“For what?” “For...just. I don’t know. I’m just sorry”. Clark goes through a discards about fifty-two different things to say.

Finally he just puts his hands on Dick’s shoulders and waits for him to look up.

“You have nothing, absolutely nothing , to be sorry for”.

Dick swallows and looks away again.

“I just don’t want you think that I’m some dork or, or, or baby”

“There is nothing wrong with having nightmares, I have them, Bruce has them, my mother has them” the last two are an educated guess on his part, but he’s sure he’s not wrong. “You’re not weak at all, you hear me?” That’s his father’s phrase, used whenever Clark was unsure of himself.

He’d forgotten it until now.

Dick nods and Clark is opening his arms before he realizes it, and then they’re hugging and Bruce is standing on the stairs looking somehow both gutted and content.

They make it to the table eventually, his parents tactfully avoiding the previous night, and Martha piles Dick’s plate high with banana pancakes.

It’s a quiet, slow Sunday.

They spend part of it laying on the grass and then Dick goes inside to work on homework, groaning loudly over the fact that they assigned it for the first weekend.

“It’s a life lesson, Dick” Bruce says and then his face twists like he tastes something sour.

Just like Clark felt his father’s words tumble out of his mouth earlier, like they’d been hiding in there all along, he feels that phrase belongs to Thomas Wayne, or maybe Alfred.

They play endless games of Life, Risk and Trivial Pursuit, and Martha beats them at all of them.

“I can’t believe we have to go home tomorrow” Dick says with a yawn as he’s heading up to bed and Bruce freezes up on the stairs above him.

Maybe it’s the first time he’s really heard it, really felt it, the way Dick belongs at Wayne Manor.

“You’re welcome back anytime, hun, even if Clark’s not here” Martha says and Jonathan nods. 

Clark follows them upstairs, though he really doesn’t know why, and awkwardly bids everyone a goodnight.

Afterward, he tosses and turns and lies awake, lost in that twilight space of the dead night.

Upstairs, there’s a footfall.

So soft he wouldn’t have noticed it, if he wasn’t waiting for it. He hadn’t realized he’d been straining his ears until he heard it.

Bruce moves silently down the stairs, catlike and cautious.

He doesn’t look surprised to see him awake when he meets Clark’s eyes.

Clark shifts one of his thighs on the couch, just enough to make room.

They fit, though only barely, when Bruce slips into the spot.

In Clark’s x-ray vision, his core muscles work to keep him balanced. Da Vinci would eat his own heart to be able to sketch him.

“Hi” Clark says eventually.

Nothing feels real, exactly. Like they're in the borderland state between dreaming and waking.

“Hi” Bruce says back.

His eyes are overflowing with feeling, but Clark can’t read it. He feels like he’s floating, and he might be.

Bruce takes a breath, then another, his hands curl and uncurl.

“I-” he says and stops.

Clark wants to soothe him somehow, to run a hand through his hair, which has gone alarmingly vertical.

Had he been lying still, awake but unwilling to let himself toss and turn?

Probably. It was a very Bruce thing to do.

He sees his own hand reaching out, fish belly white in the blue darkness to brush a stray hair from Bruce’s forehead.

All his breath rushes out, a hot gust of wind that hits Clark’s palm and make him shiver.

“You have no idea” Bruce whispers, angry and sad and grateful all at once.

Quicksilver he thinks and when Bruce’s eyes narrow he realizes he said it out loud. “I have no idea what I’m doing” he adds.

“This was, this meant- ” Bruce says and Clark shakes his head because it was selfish, really, he wasn’t thinking- and then he has an armful of scarred, corded muscle and Bruce’s lips are on his.

They’re too firm, surprisingly clumsy for all the experience he must have and if Clark were anyone else his face would be bleeding from stubble burn.

He feels suspended, like he’s flying between two titanic moons and held fast by their competing gravities.

He has no idea how long he lets Bruce kiss him, though it’s more like a press of lips because neither of them move.

But then Clark’s brain lights up like a forest fire and he finally realizes that this isn’t a dream, not really, and he has to stop this now before someone gets hurt.

His arms come up, catching the soft fabric of Bruce's sleep shirt, something unspeakably warm and expensive, to push him away.

Bruce sucks in a soft breathe he strangles. He’s hurt and he’s trying not to show it.

“It’s okay” Clark whispers, petting his arm, “You don’t have to thank me” because that’s what’s really going on here.

Bruce’s hand comes up to stop Clark’s, grabbing so hard it would bruise anyone else.

Clark withdraws and they both sit, shoulders barely brushing, a little too close even if it’s a small couch.

After a while Bruce sighs and tries to smile at Clark.

“Did I finally get myself permanently uninvited?” he says, trying for casual.

Clark huffs a laugh.

“You’ll have to try harder than that” he says with a grin.

Bruce pretends to mull it over, something like a smile finally starting to flicker in the corner of his mouth.

“Joker toxin in the apple pie, maybe?” he says and they both break into a fit of hysterical giggles, shushing each other like drunks and casting meaningful looks at the ceiling and setting each other off again.

*

They get a late start the next morning, when Dick thunders down the stairs with a teenage perfect pout, clinging to Martha as she makes a final batch of pancakes.

Clark and Bruce keep smirking at each other when they think that no one’s looking, but it’s almost certain his mother has noticed.

Jonathan takes Dick out for a last ride on the tractor while Clark and Bruce help wash up. There’s an ease to it, like they’ve been there in the sunny glow of his parents kitchen at the end of a weekend a thousand times.

Clark speed packs Dick’s things, left deliberately strewed around the room to gain him some more time, and they line up the bags at the door before they share another companionable cup of coffee on the porch, Martha's head resting against Clark’s shoulder and Bruce almost but not quite leaning against his other side.

“Sky’s nice today” Martha says and Bruce nods.

“That one kinda looks like a tiger” Clark says with a point at a fluffy cloud and Bruce’s eyes snap to his before he laughs. Martha smiles.

The goodbyes are less painful than Clark feared.

They’re quick, Dick gives everyone close hugs and the Kents make him promise to visit soon.

Bruce briskly shakes Jonathan’s hand and awkwardly accepts a light hug from Martha.

He says he’ll have them over soon and Jonathan laughs, but not unkindly.

As Dick buckles into the front seat Bruce looks Clark in the eye, embarrassed but determined. His hand is halfway up when Clark takes it and leans forward, giving Bruce an uncomfortable half hug.

Bruce sinks into it anyway.

When he pulls away Clark thinks he might try for a kiss again but he just nods and walks to the car.

He watches them pull away for a long time, the car turning into a miniscule dot on the long straight road even with his vision, until his mother touches his shoulder and leads him inside.

They don’t talk about it. Clark wouldn’t know what to say.

Chapter Text

Clark expects things to change, but they don’t.

Even as his professional life turns from semi ordered chaos into complete bedlam as he handles finally easing off his web duties and taking on other’s for Perry’s team, all while trying to find a suitable replacement to fill Chic’s old position, Bruce and Dick remain reliable.

Dick texts him complex and often incomprehensible series of emojis and short videos and English homework he would like advice on.

Apparently Bruce’s many talents don’t include sentence composition.

He’d ask Alfred, Dick says over the phone, but British spelling and Clark can hear the butler tutting in the background about the degeneration of the language in the colonies.

The smile lasts through two grueling meetings afterward.

Bruce’s texts don’t change, to Clark’s enduring relief.

He’s gotten a terse thanks and three days of agonizing radio silence before he’d started getting mysterious puzzles and mundane updates about Dick and Gotham life again.

If anything, Bruce is messaging him more often.

Sometimes Clark feels his grouching about the state of traffic in the city is the only thing keeping him sane.

And if he might find himself daydreaming about memories of Bruce half sitting half lying next to him in the warm dark, or fantasizing about a kiss that Bruce might actually mean, that’s no one’s business but his.

Even if he’s resorted to ducking his mother’s calls because she wants to talk about it, just to understand, and Clark just can’t .

It’s his problem anyway.  

Everyone’s happy.

They’re already talking about the possibility of Thanksgiving in Wayne Manor and Bruce has hinted he might allow The Daily Planet to get an exclusive photoshoot.

Everything’s just fine.

Clark will get there eventually. He has to.

*

The weather’s starting to turn when Clark finally makes it home on a Thursday morning, with strict orders to take the day off.

He’d been just about to head to his apartment, already late in the night, wrapping up the research he was helping Lois with when their phone lines went insane again.

Some kid in Star City had gotten a blurry shot of what looked like the Green Arrow and Black Canary kissing and the internet had collectively lost it.

Clark had lost three hours attempting to moderate the shipping wars going on their comment sections, but a die hard fan had committed to making multiple accounts dedicated to posting the same photo that “proved” the Green Arrow and the Green Lantern were lovers, even though it was just an indistinct column of light.

Between that and updating with whatever they could and trying to somehow find someone that could make an actual statement it had turned into an all nighter and eventually Chic had gone on a beer run and they’d set up most of the day’s content anyway before Tawny had sent them home for a while.

Clark didn’t have to go back later but she did, and she’d flipped him off as she belly flopped into the backseat of an Uber.

“You wanted the job!” he called after her and he could pick up a minute laugh from where her face pressed into the seat.

He’s tired when he pushes open his door, already decided to just pull his shoes off and go to bed in his clothes when he registers that Bruce is sitting on his couch, incongruous in a several thousand dollar dove gray suit.

“Hi” he says and vaguely wonders if he somehow missed walking through a kryptonite fog.

Sleep deprivation can get to him after a while, but it’s never been like this.

“Hi” Bruce says back and looks down at his hands.

“I knocked first” he adds quickly.

He must have sat there all night, after breaking in.

It’s such a Bruce thing to do that Clark laughs before dropping onto the couch himself.

Bruce is nervous, but his breathing is still familiar.

“I didn’t know you were in town” he tries.

“Yeah, that’s...I didn’t tell you” Bruce answers and winces at how he sounds.

“Dick doing ok?” he’s not really worried, Bruce would have called if something was really wrong.

Bruce nods and then bites at his lip, letting go as soon as he notices what’s he’s doing.

Old habits die hard, even for someone as disciplined as Bruce Wayne.

They sit in silence for a while, Clark happy to zone out in a familiar presence.

It’s entirely possible that Bruce will just leave, nodding at Clark the way he does in the field to acknowledge his input.

He’s just starting to drift off when Bruce says his name like it hurts.

Clark is suddenly, fully awake.

“What’s wrong?” he half shouts, realizing half a second later that his hands are around Bruce’s wrists.

He reluctantly lets go.

Bruce sighs, deep in his chest, eyes locked on Clark’s.

“I’m...going to do something” he says. “I’m not drugged or hurt-” “I can tell” Clark says, suddenly breathless.

“It’s because I want to. Feel free to push me away” he says grimly, like he’s giving Clark bad news.

Around him the world blurs and stops.

Clark is dimly aware than his mind has shifted into super speed even though he hasn’t moved on his worn old couch.

Bruce’s eyes slowly slide shut and his lips flex.

It might have been ridiculous, but then Bruce is kissing him.

By choice, not obligation or duty or gratitude.

His lips are firm, just this side of chapped, and Clark moans when he feels the microscopic indents of Bruce’s teeth on the swell of his lower lip.

It startles him enough to pull away but Clark doesn’t let him, reeling him back by the lapels to slot them back together and lick the inside of his mouth.

His hands feel alive, raking through Bruce’s hair and pawing at him.

Bruce seems just as eager, thumbs stroking Clark’s face, his neck, the strip of skin between his shirt and his pants.

He pulls away eventually, gasping for air and Clark presses against him, needy and unselfconscious about it.

Bruce strokes his hair with a wonderstruck half smile.

Clark breaks into giggles at the thought of what Chic would say. Ask for pictures probably.

Beside him Bruce hums like he’s thinking.

“You pushed me away, before. Twice”.

Clark whines against his neck. “I couldn’t be sure” he says, voice thready.

He needs Bruce to understand the magnitude of that, the unrelenting carefulness Clark needs to apply every hour, every minute, every second.

“I know, baby” he says, voice soft and the tips of his ears pink, and something in Clark’s chest settles at last.

He leans in for another kiss and ruins it by breaking into a jaw cracking yawn.

Bruce laughs, running his knuckles along Clark’s cheek.

In a mirror of another night, he leads Clark into the bedroom and tucks him in.

He settles behind Clark, one strong arm hooked across his middle.

“Can you stay for a while?” Clark whispers, already dropping into sleep. “Or- your flight?”

“Sure, baby” he says and then puts his lips against Clark ear like he’s whispering a secret, “I own the plane”.

Chapter Text

Wednesdays tend to be busy days for Clark, especially now.

He and Tawny finally settled on a replacement- “There’s a new Chic in town!” he’d yelled just to hear her groan- named Cat Grant who is good but still green.

Sometimes there are days Clark feels like he’s herding cats.

But every day he gets a little more confident about the transfer, especially as he uses any and all free time he has to adding things to the research folder he and Lois are slowly curating about some odd business deals between Mannheim and Luthor.

Perry seems to have taken a shine to him, according to Lois anyway, which translates to a ton more work he’s been entrusted with.

He rushes through his morning routine, shoving down burnt clothes from last night’s run in with a bank robber armed with a flamethrower to the bottom of his hamper as he smiles at a text from Dick, who’s thinking of trying out for track.

Clark and Bruce had decided to not actually say anything, for a good while, until they could be sure he was ready. And they were too.

Clark was pretty sure Dick knew anyway.

And Alfred too, going by the rather pointed Thanksgiving invitation he received, where the fact that it was a family event was highlighted.

Twice.

His mother had called him to say they’d received one too and if it would be a appropriate to bring pie. 

Clark went with a tentative yes.

There won’t be a photoshoot this year. There’s a long road ahead before anyone might officially know about this, and they’ll tell Dick well before they tell the media but there’s still a glossy editorial written by Chic flickering in Clark’s mind. 

His phone chimes again, and it’s just a quick message from Bruce: I hope you have a good day today .

If Clark maybe levitates and does a quick twirl, he’s so happy, no one else really needs to know.

You too!!!! he sends back.

He grabs his satchel and briefly considers making himself some coffee when his door pounds.

Behind it is Lois, who somehow knocks like she’s about a hundred pounds heavier.

“Hey Kent. Ready to save the world?”

“So long as we get coffee first” he says and she punches his shoulder with a laugh.

He offers his arm and she takes it. In his bag, his phone chimes with two new messages.

All in all, Clark thinks, he’s doing all right.

The End