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"Well – " The international super spy says, snappy voice carefully hiding regret, "It’s 10:52. Time to glue stuff to our faces again."
"Yeah," the daytime billionaire, nighttime vigilante agrees, head still rested against Dick’s stomach. Yeah, which is not Hrm or Hnh, which is … something. He even sighs a little.
Dick rubs his bleary eyes, trying to ignore the fact that Bruce is mildly pressing on his bladder but he still kinda likes him down there, anyway. “You can borrow some wig pins if you want,” he yawns, and it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s not, not especially. “And we can split glue in front of the bathroom mirror. It’ll be fun.”
Because when they leave the ski lodge, Bruce Wayne will not be Bruce Wayne of course, he’ll be a middle-tier Swiss art dealer named Franck in a blond ponytail and a mustache. Dick has a disguise as well, he’s brought a sensitive hipster haircut and a matching thick beard, both currently strewn on the floor somewhere along with Franck’s extensions. In Dick’s case, it doesn’t matter as much, because the people watching them know who he is, underneath. He’s sure Matron will have a sarcastic look and a quip for him when he meets her for brunch, about shacking up with some European stranger while they’re away on a mission, but Dick won’t mind as long as she thinks that’s what actually happened (and Helena can be hilarious, actually, so it’s okay). For all intents and purposes, it’s really important that people believe that Dick spent the night with a dude named Franck Lindenthal. Dick isn’t too worried; they played drunk really well last night. Even did a karaoke number together in the lounge yesterday to convince everyone that the wheels had truly come off. They got away with it, this time. But they both know that this is not … they can’t really do this.
They’d sung “Love Is A Battlefield”. They’d sung it awfully.
"Yeah," Bruce mumbles again, and it’s hard to tell what he thinks or feels. Dick studies him, but all he gets from him is weariness and something broken. "Mmm. In a minute." And he closes his eyes, as if falling asleep on Dick would be so sweet. But he’s wide awake, and he knows he can’t.
Neither of them has gotten any sleep. Bruce has been resting on him like this for what feels like an hour. His warmth and weight feel good, and Dick has found himself tensing up and getting aroused again in little bouts and fits, sensation nervously swirling through his loins and his spread thighs, but he’s too drained for it. Bruce has been down there pretty much since they’ve entered the suite, putting him in his mouth as many times as they could possibly manage (which had been a lot; Dick hadn’t really been with anyone since Ursa Major had left him waiting on a rooftop with a cold pizza on last year’s Valentine’s Day). And then, whenever Dick had tried to grab him and do something in return, he’d somehow wrapped himself around him even tighter and said, “It’s okay, I don’t need anything.”
It’s okay I don’t need anything.
It had been a weird night.
Dick clenches his eyes shut, hoping he won’t sleep in either. He knows full well that Bruce needs. But apparently what he needs isn’t someone touching his dick, right now. He’s a man who puts on his stomping boots and cowl almost every night; he is also a man who, a couple weeks ago, punched Dick across multiple pieces of furniture and let him punch him in return in order to make a point; but Dick knows that, apart from all that, he also is a man whose child got murdered not too long ago, and whose family broke apart, and he’s hurting, and now he’s followed his former partner across the world for some naked time, only to end up … holding him for a couple of hours.
Dick doesn’t know what to do, and he’d be in no position to do something about it, either. About this. About them. A few hours from now, he’ll be back to talking into an inanimate object so Bruce can listen to it later.
All he can do is stroke Bruce’s tousled, matted hair a little bit, which he does now. He hears a soft hum in response. Nothing is resolved, nothing has been talked about. But now Bruce is dabbing tiny little kisses on his stomach as if he likes his stomach a lot, and it feels really nice. Dick keeps his eyes closed, and he feels sated and lazy andempty and suspended in time for a moment.
And then it’s 11:00, and they really gotta get moving.
Those mustaches don’t glue themselves on.
Dick gets up to relieve his bladder, and when he’s done, he lets Bruce come in. They take a shower together, both to save time and because they want to. It’s a little weird and not very sexy, but it’s nice. They rub each other’s backs and pass each other their products. Bruce runs his hands over Dick’s body; his body is sleek and perfect, no bruises or cuts, Spyral keeps him in great shape and they have stuff that Alfred could only dream of. If it gives Bruce pause, he doesn’t say it.
Bruce’s body is as heavy and scarred as Dick remembers it. He sees him getting aroused, like he’d been at several points last night, but it seems like such an afterthought to Bruce himself that Dick doesn’t go for it. They’re both sleepy and bump into each other sometimes, and then they kiss absent-mindedly, on the mouth.
And then, after they’ve both emerged and Dick is shuffling around in a towel to pick his hair and beard off the floor, Bruce says it, he says, “I’m sorry.”
Dick freezes in the middle of fishing for his sunglasses. He feels annoyance punch him in the gut immediately. Before he can help it, the anger is there, the anger and the disappointment and the loss, the weird, misshapen something of whatever this is they’re doing.
Bruce sounds sincere. There’s a crack in his voice, and somehow, that makes it worse. Dick is minutes away from his brunch date with his very perceptive spy partner, and he’s got to have that wide afterglow smile ready for her, and now Bruce has to dothis.
"Why," he mumbles, before he can contain it, "Why d’you … why you gotta say that now."
He can tell from the brief silence that follows that Bruce has not been expecting that. (Well, what had he expected?!) When he talks again, he sounds genuinely regretful. Resigned.
"Want me to take it back …?"
"Whatever," Dick huffs, like that teenager with the awkward crush on his mentor, and avoids looking at Bruce while he sorts out his hipster haircut. After a while, he sees Bruce move from the corner of his eye when he starts collecting his things, too.
They’re on their last few minutes together, for who knows how long, and Dick doesn’t really want to do this, but now Bruce has said that, and he must.
"What are you sorry for," he mumbles, aggressively shoving pins into his hair to make his other hair stick, "Last night? Last month? Last year? All of the above? I don’t even know anymore.”
Bruce is pale when he comes into view in the mirror, hands idly holding his stupid ponytail wig as if he can’t really bring himself to put it on. He looks exhausted, he has bags under his eyes; his overall impression is helpless.
"Not last night," he offers weakly.
Dick snorts. But then, the looming separation hits him again and his anger simmers down and he doesn’t want to end like this.
"Me neither," he admits.
"I’m glad," Bruce says, and he looks humble, still lost at what to do. Eventually, he puts his arms around Dick and embraces him again. Dick has his wig halfway fixed to his head and it looks ridiculous, but he lets himself slink against Bruce’s massive frame anyway, breathes in deep. He turns his head, puts a kiss on the taller man’s jaw, feels him stir at that.
If it could all be this easy, all the time. But it’s not.
"You’ll beat yourself up for this later, won’t you," Dick says a few minutes after, when he’s turned himself into a hip, shades-wearing snowboarder again. "For coming here."
And hopefully, you’ll beat yourself off later, too, ‘cause that can’t be healthy.
"It wasn’t smart," Franck the art dealer admits from the bed. Now that he wears his false face again, Bruce looks a little more … together. He even smirks. Wearily, but he smirks. "But worth it."
Dick returns his smile. But. Really. Was it really.
He’s not sure. Maybe it’ll hurt less when he sees Bruce close the door behind him, maybe it’ll hurt more. He’s dreading to find out, to be honest.
"You seem spread pretty thin," he says, one coy look at him before he pulls his shirt over his head.
When he pops out again, he sees Bruce still calmly sitting there, not denying it. He’s not been talking about Gotham much. All Dick knows, he knows from the news, and Bruce has not been indulging his curious questions. He says that he wants Dick to keep his head clear. But it could also be that Batman has never liked talking about things that aren’t going as good as he’d like.
"You seem – " Bruce starts, straightening his back a little, "You seem more adjusted than I would’ve -"
He pauses and winces, obviously displeased with what he was about to say. “You seem exactly as adjusted as I expected you to,” he then says instead, almost humbly so.
His face doesn’t give it away, but Dick senses the hint of sadness. This is what Bruce had wanted though, isn’t it? Dick had been the one who’d gone in kicking (sometimes literally) and screaming (that, too), and Bruce had been the one urging him. And he’d done it, and now it was underway, exactly as planned, it was working. He was working.
He walks over and plants a kiss on Bruce’s nose. The other man’s arms shoot up to hold him by the waist immediately, and he sighs again, and it would be so easy to get into his lap now, Dick’s already halfway in it. It’s easy, and it’s not as easy as that.
"Where will you be next month," Bruce asks against his lips. It’s a reasonable question, but there’s a forlorn, desperate edge to it. He doesn’t say he’s gonna come, and Dick is sure he’s telling himself he’s not gonna come. And, truth be told, he probably won’t. Bruce can be impulsive, but he can never be too impulsive, because if he is, people frequently get very hurt.
"Dunno," he says truthfully, eyes closed and breathing in Bruce’s scent, "He doesn’t give ‘em out that far in advance. I’ll get in touch."
He closes in, takes Bruce’s face in his hands, kisses his lips, savoring the taste.
"That was the last one," he announces when he lets go. They need to draw a line, or else they’ll be in here for the rest of the day, and Dick won’t hear the end of it.
Bruce looks like he wishes he’d known that beforehand. A small ripple of pain shoots across his face, but then he nods. “Yes.”
It’s funny. They never really kissed all that much. Because they never really dated, never took long strolls in the moonlight (unless it was professionally, of course) or had candlelit dinners.
You’d think if you never really were together, it wouldn’t hurt that much to be apart.
They’ve already made plans on how they’d play it. Dick – sorry, Sandy Blaster, the snowboarder – would swagger out of Franck’s suite around noon, wearing a big pair of hangover sunglasses and the radiant post-coital glow of making an awesomemistake. Franck the art dealer would crawl out of his stupor a couple hours later, apologize profusely for that “scene” at karaoke last night, pay his exorbitant tab and pack up to leave for an art show in Amsterdam.
"Well." Dick sighs, squinting at the door. "Let the walk of shame commence -"
There’s a flash of something in Bruce’s eyes. His grip on his former protégé tightens, and for a moment, Dick thinks he’ll do something squeamishly emotional again, something they can’t solve in the time left. But then he sees him grin, and –
"Allow me to help you," he growls, and buries his face against Dick’s neck. Dick hears him breathe in deep, and then he can’t but throw back his head and moan as Bruce plants a wet one on his sensitive skin. It’s a kiss turning into a bite back into a kiss, and suddenly, he has Bruce sucking on him as if he wants to swallow him up again, like he’d done all night.
"Br – mmh. Mmm."
"Mmm."
Dick’s skin seems to be glowing when they part, and across from him Bruce is glowing, too.
He still looks sad. But apart from that, he looks as alive as he hasn’t all morning. “Sorry,” he says again, much more lightly this time, and licks his lips. “I know you said it was the last one. But I couldn’t pass this up.”
Dick puts his fingers on the spot on his neck. It’s still tingling, and he knows this one will last for a few days, maybe even a week.
"Good call. Wouldn’t be real without a hickey, would it?" He rubs his neck, grinning, and realizes that he’s blushing.
"Yeah," Bruce says, mouth twitching. "… real."
Their last touch is a finger squeeze that lasts longer than it has any right to, and then Dick slips away, slips into his shoes, and heads out. He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t really want to see Bruce’s eyes as he leaves, and he has a feeling that Bruce doesn’t want him to, either.
He doesn’t know what’s next for him as he walks down the hall on the hotel’s soft, soundless carpet. He doesn’t even know, exactly, what he’s feeling. All he knows is that, if they ask him if they should fix that thing on his neck, he’ll tell them he’s going to keep it.