Chapter Text
“Clark,” Bruce repeats. His throat feels thick, too filled with sweetness.
“Yeah.”
“What will you do? If Homeland Security does get its way, and declare you an illegal, ah, an undocumented immigrant? There’ll still be cats up trees, won’t there?”
“I’ll… do it quieter, I guess. I don’t know.”
“You won’t leave?”
“Oh, I’ll leave,” Clark laughs, soft and hurting, and Bruce— Bruce swallows hard. “I’ll go if they want me to go. But…”
“You should stay.”
“I should, huh?”
“You could get married.”
“Hm?”
“It would complicate things, wouldn’t it? Purely on a legal basis. If you could say you were married to an American citizen—”
“I’m not going to lie—”
“Get actually married,” Bruce snaps impatiently. “And then you could say it honestly — it would— I don’t know.” Bruce sits down on a bench. His head is— doing something. Spinning.
No it’s not. He just wishes it was. He wishes he was still drunk. Intoxication would be a good, solid excuse for the words slipping out of his mouth — but they’re measured. Each word is reasoned, logical, a step in a predetermined direction. He’s hurtling toward a conclusion he doesn’t want to look at. He should stop talking now now now—
“Last I checked,” Superm— Clark is saying, “marriage was a two-person job. Who could I marry? Who would be stupid enough to—”
“Me.” Oh god oh god oh god. “You could marry me.”
————
They get it done.
A severely hungover Elvis marries them in a dinky, falling-apart little chapel they find two blocks down from the diner. Their witnesses are a couple of tired looking twenty-somethings, dressed in cutoffs and baggy t-shirts, body glitter making their legs look shiny and holographic.
Bruce hands over eighty-five dollars and his ID card in the beginning, and accepts a marriage certificate and a husband at the end. They say their ‘I do’s at the appropriate moment, and when Elvis slurs, “You boys c’n kiss now if y’like,” Bruce leans forward and kisses Clark brusquely on the corner of his stunned mouth.
He dusts some imaginary lint off of Clark’s shoulder, as if to say, ‘There. Done,’ and doesn’t, by some impossible grace, stop to marvel at the firm rise of muscle beneath his palm.
“Anyone ever tell you you look a whole lot like Bruce Wayne?” one of the witnesses asks him afterwards, blinking slowly up at him.
“All the time,” he replies easily, and walks out into the sun.
————
When they finally get out of the cab at Henderson Executive, Bruce is fully six hours late, and Alfred, who is standing at the gate, is giving him the stink-eye.
“Alfred.”
“Oh good, I was just about to send our search parties.”
“Yeah.”
“And call the lawyers.”
“Oh god,” Bruce sighs.
Alfred’s on a roll though. “Maybe start planning some flower arrangements, for the funeral.”
“I’m late, I didn’t die.”
“Yes, well.” He shrugs. “As the philosopher Jagger once said, you can’t always get what you wan— Oh hello,” he adds, without even blinking, when Clark climbs out of the cab. “I wasn’t aware we had guests.”
“Hi,” Clark says, with a sheepish little wave. “I’m Clark. Sorry, I should’ve probably— I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. Or make Bruce late.”
“Oh, never fear, Master Clark. Sir is capable of ludicrous unpunctuality, entirely without help.”
Clark pauses. And then snickers.
Alfred looks tremendously pleased.
“Alfred,” Bruce mutters, while the cabbie drives away.
“Six hours.”
Clark’s jaw drops. “You made him wait six hours?!”
“He does receive a salary, I’m not a slavedriver.”
Alfred coughs something that sounds suspiciously like ‘Yeah, right,’ not that he'd admit it upon pain of death, even. But Clark is glaring at him and snapping, “Okay, but that’s—rude!”
“Thank you,” Bruce snaps. “It’s nice to see how this relationship is going to function. Both of you ganging up on me, that makes me feel all kinds of enthusiastic about the future.”
“Relationship,” Alfred repeats delicately, and Bruce plasters on his biggest, fakest smile, and turns to Alfred and says, saccharine-sweet, “Didn’t I mention? We just got married. Alfred, meet Superman.”
There’s a long and heavy pause, and then Clark’s yelling “BRUCE!” at the same time Alfred smacks a hand against his forehead and sighs for like a million years.
————