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The first time Bruce visits the Kent farmhouse, he's greeted with a jarring clash of warmth and emptiness. The cross-stitched home-sweet-homes that line the wall of the stairwell - that used to open to anyone who came knocking - don't quite reach the second floor.
"Here it is," Clark says, voice self-conscious and lowly as they make their way down the second floor hallway. His collar's wrung out from tugging with one thick finger, pulling incessantly and scratching at a patch of skin on his neck that never irritates. He'd been fidgeting incessantly since he'd asked Bruce to come out to Smallville, to see the place where Clark was made even if the heart wasn't there anymore.
Clark shuffles toward the closed door with a Monarchs pennant tacked to it and pulls it open reverently. Childhood here is something to revel in, after all.
"Am I..." Bruce trails off as he gazes at the double bed stripped of all furnishings parked in the far corner.
"Yep," Clark says, his clipped tone belied by another swift tug on his collar. The abused shape gives a tease of perfect skin. Bruce looks down and back up again slowly, and swallows. He turns before a reaction makes him weak and sits primly at the foot of the bed. The room is small and tidy, and everything is covered in a fine layer of dust. It looks exactly how Bruce imagines it looked when Clark went off to Metropolis U over a decade ago.
Clark stares at him from the doorway, but he's not really seeing him. Bruce knows that there's something he should say, but he's never been able to reconcile his own demons, so he keeps quiet.
"Be back in a sec," Clark says after a lost second, hand gripping the doorframe as he swings out into the hallway. Bruce hears him skid effortlessly on the wooden floor, sneakers coming to a squeaking stop at the hall closet. The door creaks open, and then Bruce hears something hit the floor with a soft pat just as Clark lets out a muffled "Oof!"
A few seconds later and he's skidding back down the hall, a jumbled mess of blankets and sheets in his arms. He holds them out sheepishly and Bruce takes them, laying them out on Clark's desk chair to decipher the order they should be placed. They all have deep folding creases in them and carry a faint sweet smell, simple and indulgent. It could just be the remnants of the Kents' laundry detergent, or it could be a sense memory of a mother's love. He remembers a photo of Martha Kent in the downstairs kitchen, plump and smiling, and he wishes he knew if the sweetness suited her. Bruce closes his eyes and thinks of his own mother's perfume, rich and musky and powerful, just as she lived.
He holds up the fitted sheet and tucks the elastic bands under each corner. It's an off-white with small yellow flowers and leaves dotting across it, so stereotypically homey that he wants to laugh. The relaxed sheet is a drab pale green, worn and soft. He leans over to push the edges between the mattress and the wall, and how has he never realized how difficult it is to tuck the damn thing in?
Before he realizes it, Clark is gently lifting the mattress from the end and tucking in the bottom half. Shaking his hair out of his eyes, Bruce turns to grab the quilt, snapping it outwards with a flick of the wrist and letting it float gently over the bed. It looks homemade but Clark doesn't seem affected by it. He's busy pushing two flattened pillows into cases covered in images and slogans of the Gray Ghost. Pulling up the open corners sharply, the pillows fall into the cases with a soft snap. He looks almost bashful when he hands them to Bruce, although Bruce is unsure if this is over the pillows or the trip as a whole.
Placing them next to each other against the headboard, he looks down at his work critically. Both pillows are facing right side up, no sheets are visible from below the quilt's edges; the quilt itself needs to be pulled a bit to the left, however and --
Clark chooses that moment to flop onto the bed belly-up. He inelegantly kicks off his sneakers and reaches a hand out to Bruce who, after a brief second of hesitation, allows himself to be pulled down. He hangs onto Clark's broad shoulders to stay on the mattress, his legs locked around one of Clark's own. Clark, for his part, keeps one solid hand against Bruce's back, his arm pinned beneath his torso. Clark looks at the ceiling and Bruce looks at Clark, wondering if they'll ever talk about why they're here. If he's honest with himself, he doesn't mind if they never do.
"I used to sit here and read for hours," Clark says after a moment, breaking the comfortable silence. Bruce had known that from the moment he'd walked in and seen the flimsy bookshelf with sagging shelves packed to the brim with ratty paperbacks. "I thought that somehow I'd find an answer to myself there." Clark's eyes look far away as they catch the afternoon light.
Bruce snakes out an arm and grabs a book on the nightstand. Its spine is cracked from laying fanned out and face down on the page Clark presumably stopped on god knows how long ago. He folds it closed in his hands, holding one finger sandwiched between the pages to keep Clark's place. The cover has a monstrous creature reaching outward to a small child. The child is cowering in fear and the monster's face is miserable in the shadows.
"You weren't reading the right books," Bruce says, cringing at the prose on the back cover. Clark vibrates laughter from his core.
"You may be right about that." He turns to Bruce, a smile playing on his lips. "Read to me?"
Bruce tries to hide his surprise at the request. He can remember doing this for Dick and Jason, and for some reason he could never quite understand they had (for once in their lives) both agreed on their love for it. He'd never asked for clarification on the matter because it had never particularly bothered him. It was, after all, a thing his father had done for him on occasion when he was a small child. Reading for Clark, though? His stomach leaps at the thought.
"I'd prefer to read something a little more engaging." He untangles himself from Clark and makes his way to the bookshelf, stopping briefly to gently toe off his wingtips and scoot them under the bed. No Sherlock Holmes, or even Hercule Poirot for that matter..., he thinks, just as Clark calls out, "Don't even try to look for a detective story!"
He examines the spines before carefully pulling the one with the most wear off the shelf, taking care not to cause the rest to topple. He swiftly makes his way back to the bed, holding the book up to Clark's view.
"This is preferable." Clark's eyes light up as he scans the cover.
"How did you know that was my favorite book?" Clark asks, fingers reaching out to pull him back onto the bed. His hair is flattened from turning in the pillow. He looks like he belongs in this room, teenaged and restless and comfortable.
"I wonder," Bruce replies, allowing himself to fall back into Clark’s warmth. He shifts up on the pillow and opens the book to the inside cover. The paperback's battered and dog-eared, a distant memory of some middle school English course. Bruce can imagine Clark there, sitting in a rickety wooden desk in the middle of the room, learning for the first time the art of inconspicuousness. Bruce passes his fingers over Clark's name, relishing his pubescent hybrid scrawl. It's crowding the top left corner, the K slightly off-kilter and pushing the rest of his last name further up against the top edge. It looks so different from Clark's reporting notes, those thick block letters of efficiency. Bruce gets a sudden urge to visit the Smallville archives at city hall, to try and catch a glimpse of this Clark he's never known.
"Bruce?" Clark asks as he twists to the side, laying his head on Bruce's stomach as he props his legs up against the wall. "I know you're a stickler for thoroughness, but how long does it usually take you to get past the copyright?"
"You're making this difficult," he replies as he shifts to get comfortable under Clark's weight. Clark in close proximity makes everything difficult. "Do you drape yourself over all your houseguests?" he asks as he turns to the first page, the pages crackling with a satisfying sound.
"You'll manage," Clark says as he digs in further, eyes rolling up to see him and smile distorted by the angle. "And no, but I like feeling you talk."
Bruce hums deeply in response and Clark laughs. He holds the book loosely on his chest and begins to read.
"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow..."
----
After a chapter of reading, Bruce stops, his voice gone scratchy. In the silence he hears the unmistakable sound of snoring. The setting sun seeps through the windows of the remote Kent farm and Bruce has never felt less lonely. He lays the book on his chest and reaches to brush Clark's hair with his fingers.
He knows better than anyone that he can't give him what he needs for a special sort of grief he can hardly keep at bay for himself most days. He sighs and looks at the cornfields blowing softly in the breeze, the product of hard labor and cultivation and the keeper of memory. It's legacy and love, like the shadows of the manor that wrap themselves around him every night. He hates to think about Clark in those shadows when he belongs in the summer breeze. Bruce closes his eyes and hopes that, even when he can't give Clark everything, he gives him enough.
Stifling a yawn, Bruce blindly places the book on the nightstand over the pulp monster tale. He breathes in Martha Kent's sheets, smelling her sweetness and feeling thankful for the legacy and love she built so tenderly snoring softly on his chest as he falls asleep.