Work Text:
The cell wasn't bad, as prison cells on alien planets went.
At this point, Bruce had more basis for comparison than was strictly necessary.
The walls and floor joined seamlessly, some kind of impossibly hard material that could apparently be smoothly extruded into any shape; Bruce had been tossed in here through a door that had simply dissolved into place and then filled itself in again, leaving no visible trace of where it had been. But whatever this material was, it wasn't cold the way stone would be. The floor of the cell wasn't lined with spikes. It could have been significantly less comfortable to lie on than it was.
There was faint, sourceless illumination. Dim—which was to say neither headache-inducingly bright, nor entirely absent, nor alternating between the two in a sequence designed to deprive the cell's occupant of sleep. It was enough to see by without making itself felt even when Bruce let his eyes fall shut. Almost pleasant.
And it was quiet. No distant screams, no rattling bars, no clanking chains. Bruce wasn't secured within the room, hadn't been bound; presumably it had been deemed unnecessary, given both the construction of the cell and his current physical condition.
He was still conscious, and the flow of blood had slowed. It would probably stop entirely, as long as he didn't move around too much. If there had been any indication that doing so would yield meaningful results, and perhaps even allow him to escape from this cell, it would have been worth considering. But as it was, he lay there and listened to himself breathe. Worsening his injuries for no obvious tangible benefit was an easy mistake to avoid; and caution, patience, and rest now could prove critical later.
There was no other sound. Only his breath. No hitches, hissing, or gurgling, he evaluated distantly.
And then he heard something else.
Voices, overlapping, growing louder. Footsteps, heavy—the four-part tread of the Miorchtarians, who had eight feet that moved in pairs; and another, much more familiar pattern.
Clark.
Bruce turned his head, and pried his heavy eyes open in time to watch the door reappear in the cell wall. It did appear to be in the same place it had been before; perhaps there was some difference in the material's structure in that location, then.
"—medical care? Don't your people have rules governing the appropriate treatment of prisoners?"
Definitely Clark, speaking in that strained, level tone that said he was clinging to the last shreds of his patience but it was taking superstrength to do it.
A moment later, he was visible: pushed into view, and then prodded with the end of a Miorchtarian battle stave until he gave in and stepped through. He was dressed the same way Bruce was, in the pale flowing robes favored by the Taakuuri—who'd been their hosts for a local celebration of gratitude, until the Miorchtarians had brought the festivities to an unceremonious close.
"You heal," the Miorchtarian spat, with a distinctly displeased ruffle of their shoulder spines.
Lantern translation units were capable of parsing Miorchtru. But apparently not without considerable loss of nuance. Clark and Bruce probably sounded equally inarticulate in return.
"I heal," Clark said. "He doesn't!"
The Miorchtarian leaned down, clattering their chin spines in frustration, and pointed with the end of their stave to Bruce where he lay, and then at Clark. "Same."
Clark stared at them, and barked out a sudden uneven laugh. "Jesus, of course you can't tell. No, goddammit, he's not my species! We're not the same. He can't—"
"Same," the Miorchtarian repeated, evidently annoyed by this pathetically transparent attempt at trickery.
"Clark," Bruce said.
Clark turned to him immediately, rushing across the cell, paying no heed to the Miorchtarian's withdrawal or the sealing of the wall behind him. "Bruce," he said, and came to his knees at Bruce's side. "God, I'm sorry, I thought you were unconscious—"
"I'm fine," Bruce said.
Clark gave him a speaking look, mouth pressed flat.
"It isn't life-threatening," Bruce amended.
"Someday," Clark said quietly, "I'm going to convince you there are meaningful degrees of experience in between 'fine' and 'already dead'."
He reached for Bruce, touched his side where the stave had gone in and applied gradually increasing pressure; Bruce drew a slow breath and absorbed the spike of pain, and then—and then Clark had a hand on his face, too, leaned down and brushed their foreheads together, a moment's gentle warning before his mouth touched Bruce's.
Bruce ruthlessly controlled the reflexive urge to tense. It was abruptly impossible not to be aware of where they were and why, that the cell's interior might be monitored in ways they didn't understand. Something deep within him recoiled from the thought of this being seen, recorded, in this place; of these aliens knowing this about him, of having the deepest and rawest heart of himself exposed before them—
But of course that was irrational. There was no reason they should perceive it as such. He and Clark had been taken together, and Clark had flatly refused to escape without him, though Superman's powers would have made it as easy as they made most feats of daring. If the Miorchtarians believed Bruce was also Kryptonian, that would have looked like meaningless playacting; but they had surely been assessed as companions at the bare minimum, and now undoubtedly as companions with some degree of attachment to each other, depending on how much time Clark had had to spend shouting at them before they'd decided to toss him in here, too.
And why should they recognize a kiss as meaning anything in particular? It was hard to imagine they did it themselves, with those spiny faces. Perhaps they simply considered it a peculiar outworld habit, a physical interaction that, for all its significance to them, was interchangeable with shaking hands, or stepping on each other's feet. Besides—
Besides, Clark wanted to do it. Clark had demonstrably found it a comfort to kiss Bruce after Bruce had been hurt, or after they had been apart for any length of time at all, and this satisfied both criteria.
Bruce lay there and closed his eyes, felt Clark's hand pressing into his side, the throb of the wound and the pounding of his heart, and kissed back, to the degree he was able.
"Okay," Clark said softly, as if satisfied, and then gave it the lie by immediately kissing Bruce again. "Okay, all right. You're sure it's not that bad?"
"The bleeding had already begun to slow before you got here," Bruce said. "Must not have hit an artery."
"You say the most reassuring things," Clark murmured, mouth quirking. He leaned down and shifted his hand, and Bruce thought it would be to examine the wound until he heard the rush of air, perceived the wash of cold across the skin where his robes had been torn and bloodied. Clark was breathing ice on him.
Which would contract his blood vessels, obviously a good idea under the circumstances—and the undeniable secondary benefit was the slow spread of creeping frigid numbness.
Christ. A shaky breath escaped Bruce without permission. The cessation of the most extreme pain was a profound, animal relief. He felt almost drugged by it.
"God. Did it go all the way through?"
"Not quite," Bruce said, with perhaps a little too much honesty.
He blinked, and with some effort forced his eyes to focus. Clark was looking down at him grimly, mouth pinched, a furrow beginning to carve itself into place across his brow.
"You shouldn't have done that," Clark bit out.
He should have expected this. "Their projective rays work on you," Bruce said, and he kept his tone as even and level as he could.
It was true. That was how the Miorchtarians had learned Clark could heal himself: they had battle staves, but they also had strange humming energy bows that shot some sort of light. Red—perhaps it was a combination of the wavelength and something else, some boson-photon force applied, that had cut through Clark's chest so readily.
Not enough red light to counter the fact that Clark had been steadily soaking up the rays of the Miorchtarians' blue-white sun. But there had been no guarantees that would remain the case for long, if the Miorchtarians had been sufficiently dedicated.
"And sufficiently pointy sticks work on you," Clark snapped.
"We don't know how they were able to harm you," Bruce said. "We have no way of knowing what repeated exposure to those bolts might have done. Putting myself between you and the next shot was strategically sound. There was no way to know one of them would try a javelin instead. Your chances of successfully escaping from this world are higher than mine—"
"Jesus Christ—"
"—even if," Bruce ground out pointedly, "you insist on taking me with you. You can lift my body weight easily, whether I'm conscious and capable of assisting you or not. If you'd been incapacitated, I wouldn't be able to say the same."
"—shut up," Clark said, with equal force. He stopped, and bit his mouth until it was red. His jaw worked. He drew a breath, and let it out again, and then he met Bruce's eyes and said, very precisely, "I understand what you're saying. I'm not even trying to tell you you're wrong, tactically speaking. But—" He stopped again, and looked away, and after a moment his eyes fell shut. "I wasn't making a tactical evaluation, okay? I was telling you: I think you shouldn't have done that. I wish you hadn't. I didn't like seeing you deliberately put yourself in danger, and I didn't like seeing you get hurt." He shook his head, and when he looked at Bruce again the expression on his face had changed—it was soft, wry, understanding. Resigned. "I know you'd have preferred a tactical evaluation. I know you don't like it when I get—when I'm so—"
He fell silent.
Bruce swallowed. He should say something. He had to say something. He should have had eight to ten options at the ready, the full spectrum from a dismissive change of subject to vague reassurance at his fingertips. But his tongue felt huge and thick in his mouth, and there were no words in his head.
"I," Clark said, and then his mouth twisted; he rubbed a hand across his face. The other was still applying relentless steady pressure to Bruce's wound—even when he'd been halfway to shouting at Bruce, that hadn't changed. "God. I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you manage to set this aside the way you do. You, how I feel about you, it's like it's the only thing in my head half the time. I thought that spear had killed you. Can't you understand that?"
"Yes."
Not any of the words he might have intended to say. But it had been ripped from him, torn out of him, inexorable. There was no way to retrieve it or erase it. And Bruce discovered dimly that if there had been, he couldn't assert to himself that he would have used it.
Clark was staring at him.
"Of course I can," Bruce gritted out. His throat ached, his eyes were hot. He couldn't breathe. "Christ, you think—you think I—"
Suddenly, there was too much to say, not too little. How painfully, conspicuously obvious he felt, every moment of every day; that it had been that way not even since the day Clark had kissed him for the first time, but since—god, since the day he had brought Clark back to life. Since the day he had insisted on it, excruciatingly aware of how he must have sounded to Diana, to Victor and Barry and Arthur, but entirely unable to prevent it. How thoroughly and unhesitatingly his world had rearranged itself around Clark, and that instead of taking steps to counteract or discourage that effect, he had only waded in deeper. The League, the Hall, mission after mission: excuse after excuse to share space with Clark, to see Clark, to speak to Clark.
God. It was mortifying, how transparent he'd been. The simple truth was that he could find no middle ground when it came to Clark, no capacity in himself for moderation. He'd sought Clark's death with every breath he had in him, and then, in even less time, he'd—
he'd—
He'd tried to minimize the damage it could do. Of course he had. He'd tried to conceal the evidence, when he could. But it was like bailing out the Atlantic with a teaspoon, it was—it spilled out everywhere anyway, all the time.
Or at least it had felt to him as though it did.
But he must have been wrong.
He couldn't get any of it out. He didn't know why he couldn't get any of it out. But Clark said, hushed, "Jesus, Bruce," and touched his face.
"Their projective rays worked on you," Bruce forced out, inane, inadequate. "That bolt was—it went—" Christ, couldn't he string one single goddamn thought together? He dug his teeth into his lip and brought one arm up, pressed his hand as hard as he could to Clark's chest.
That was where it had gone in. Gone in, gone through. Clark had looked faintly surprised, had reached up with strangely steady fingers to touch the bloody mess of it, a hole in him all over again—
"Jesus," Clark said again, and he shouldn't have been able to figure out what those five words, Bruce's palm against him, was supposed to mean, but it was clear by the look on his face that he had. His eyes looked wet; he squeezed them shut, and leaned into the touch of Bruce's hand, and then let out something that was almost a laugh. "You could've just said you were worried, too," he said unsteadily, and then he bent down closer still and kissed Bruce again.
Again, and again. Longer, this time, sweet and soft and lingering, and Bruce shuddered beneath it and found a ragged sound caught in the back of his throat.
Clark broke away, and pressed their noses, their cheeks, together; kissed Bruce's jaw, and then his temple, and then his mouth again. "I know you love me," he said into Bruce's ear, low and breathless like the secret it wasn't.
Bruce tensed, and bit the tip of his tongue hard. His heart was pounding. He couldn't say it, not here, not like this. But he could let it stand. He could choose not to contradict it—
"I know," Clark said again. "Sometimes I just—I just let myself forget it. But I shouldn't. I shouldn't, and I'm sorry."
He was sorry.
"Shut up," Bruce grated out, and pulled him in again: kissed him first, this time, deep and hard and desperate, hoping dimly that it spoke for him, that it would be enough.
Clark kissed him back just as hard—and then gentled it by degrees, said, "Okay," against his mouth. "All right. Shh, it's all right."
He moved to the corner of Bruce's mouth, lingered there for a moment, and then eased away just far enough to smile, slow and warm and slanting.
"They took my comm away before they brought me here. But before that, Diana said she and the Lanterns were about an hour out from this system."
"An hour," Bruce repeated, hoarse in his own ears. His hand had moved without permission, found its way from Clark's chest to his throat, his jaw; now he reached up with his thumb, rubbed it across Clark's mouth.
Clark's smile widened beneath the touch. Widened, and then softened again, and he moved his mouth deliberately against Bruce's thumb—kissed it, turned his face down into Bruce's palm and kissed that, too. "Bruce," he said softly, against Bruce's fingertips.
"Clark," Bruce said; and Clark leaned down and kissed him again, and Bruce closed his eyes and held on.