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Bruce has already put himself back together, for the most part, by the time the League arrives.
It isn't difficult to look bored, a little impatient, to lean against the ferry railing in a Bruce Wayne kind of slouch. He's sure he's been required to do the same under much more trying circumstances than these, even if he can't precisely recall what those circumstances might have been, even if the inside of his head currently feels strange and cold and empty.
His clothes are—wrinkled, disarranged. He'd yanked them back on in a hurry, fumbling with them, fingers unsteady; it probably shows.
But Diana is a warrior. She assumes a fight by default; and when she lands on the deck and allows herself a moment of concern, looks him over with dark worried eyes, she's looking for visible wounds. He has none, aside from a few bruises—and there are many, many civilians on the ferry for whom she's equally concerned.
Victor's scans, his eye, probably discern something, as the sweep of red light passes over Bruce. But judging by the way Victor's brows draw together, the brief inquiring glance he gives Bruce, it's something inconclusive at best. If he'd—if he knew, he wouldn't have looked at Bruce that way, as if he expected Bruce to say something about it. He'd have understood instantly that that was not on the table.
Barry doesn't notice a thing, going ten directions at once as always, checking over the entire ferry from end-to-end to make sure there aren't any more bad guys lurking anywhere nobody else looked. And if Arthur knows, Bruce is fairly sure he'll give no indication of it, at least not now; Bruce will have to wait, see whether he says something in private to Diana later.
Which leaves only one problem.
Because Clark—
Clark can probably smell it, Bruce forces himself to acknowledge, as viscerally uncomfortable a thought as that is. And the instant he makes himself meet Clark's eyes, he's sure he's right: Clark definitely knows.
At the very least, Clark doesn't say anything about it while they're in public.
He keeps—looking at Bruce. Watching Bruce, with his mouth pressed into an unsteady line, his throat working as if he's about to be sick.
He isn't needed to move the ferry back to the dock; Arthur can do that. The group of men responsible for taking the ferry and its passengers hostage were secured within the first minute, and Diana and Victor together are more than enough to hold them, Victor with his arm formed into a stun cannon that's ready to fire if any of them move. On the off chance several of them move at once, and one manages to evade him long enough to make a break for the rail and throw themselves into the bay, there's Barry to intercept.
So there is nothing to occupy Clark's attention, no way for Bruce to avoid that half-stunned half-nauseated gaze. But at the bare minimum—he keeps his mouth shut.
Bruce appreciates the time to prepare. Clark can't be held at bay forever; once they reach the dock, once the authorities take full control of the ferry and the civilians who were trapped on it, once Bruce is able to slip away—there will be no way out, then.
And there will be no point in making it more difficult than it needs to be.
There will be no risk of interruption; he'd already radioed Alfred, as soon as the ferry had docked, to reassure him that Bruce was in one piece and to allow him to extract a promise that there would be no patrol tonight, that the day had already been sufficiently perilous, which should keep him from developing any particular suspicions for at least eight to ten hours. So Bruce chooses his ground deliberately. He may as well make the staging as accommodating as possible. He positions himself alone, in the Cave: easy to find, easy to corner.
The sooner he can get this over with, the better.
He doesn't have to wait long before there's the sound of the lake surface opening up, and a telltale rush of air. He's standing there, hands in his pockets, and he hasn't bothered to change, to rush off and clean himself up—to try to cover up the evidence. Clark knows, and he knows Clark knows, and he isn't going to attempt to pretend otherwise.
Clark comes to a stop in the air, touches down a few steps away, and doesn't say anything. He's still in the Superman uniform, but the hair, the curls, are loose—as if in his hurry to get here, his distress, he's run his hands through them too many times for them to stay slicked down. And his face, his eyes: there's none of Superman's calm benevolence there. It's only Clark, staring at Bruce wretchedly, mouth twisting, mute with the sheer incapacity to speak of it.
"I assume you can tell what happened," Bruce says after a moment, evenly.
"I," Clark says, hoarse, swallowing convulsively. "Yes."
Bruce had, of course, known as much already. But it had also been clear to him that Clark needed to be gently shepherded onto the same page; and if Bruce could, at the same time, force the ice to be broken—ask Clark a question to which Clark knew and could speak the answer—so much the better.
"I'm fine," Bruce tells him. "It was the best of a handful of very bad options."
He meant it as reassurance. But it's clear he misstepped somehow, by the look of nauseated anguish that wrenches Clark's face in response.
"The best—" he starts to say, sounding choked, horrified.
As if Bruce hadn't thought it through. "They were hijackers," Bruce points out coolly. "They were prepared to take what they pleased, and to take it at gunpoint if that was the only way to get it. They had almost two hundred civilians to choose from, and they weren't feeling particularly picky. So—yes, Bruce Wayne managing to catch and hold their attention, to become the focal point from which they chose to take their satisfaction, was in fact the best possible outcome."
"No," Clark says unsteadily, "no, I didn't—I didn't mean you did—anything wrong, or—I," and then he grinds to a halt, shakes his head helplessly. His eyes are wet. "Jesus, Bruce, you shouldn't have had to, it shouldn't have been anyone, it—" He stops again; his hands are opening and shutting, half-clenching into fists and then stretching out uncertainly, as if almost to touch, before closing themselves up again. "But you, you're—all right?"
He's already grimacing, even as he says it; cringing from himself, from some perceived inadequacy in the question, his face twisting itself up. As if it weren't a perfectly natural thing to ask—as if Bruce hadn't already been prepared for the likelihood that he'd need to reassure Clark on this particular point, and probably several times.
"Yes," Bruce says quietly, "I'm all right."
Clark's expression is wretched, but nevertheless eloquently dubious.
"They were—not careful," Bruce allows. "But they were also selfish; their goal was to enjoy themselves, not to inflict pain. I was there to facilitate their gratification, and not because they had any particular interest in causing me suffering."
It's only about eighty percent true. There had been some—entertainment derived, on the part of the hijackers, from Bruce Wayne's identity; from having the opportunity to take someone wealthy and famous, someone they'd only ever seen on TV, and make him get on his knees, spread his legs, for them. But in the context of the line Bruce is attempting to draw here—the villains Batman has faced in the past, the ones who viewed pain as an end in itself and were determined to make him feel as much of it as possible—it's essentially accurate.
Bruce is certainly bruised. He was handled ungently. There were six of them; he'd had enough time, afterward, as he'd dressed himself, to determine that he wasn't bleeding unduly heavily from anywhere in particular, but that doesn't mean there isn't—persistent discomfort, a sharp ache he would rather not be feeling.
He did have the opportunity, before Clark arrived, to take a few samples. But blood tests take time, even with the specialized equipment Bruce has available to him, and he won't know the results, won't know whether he has any other—aftereffects—to deal with, until he's waited several weeks and run them a second time, perhaps even a third, to be sure.
But Clark doesn't need to know most of that, obviously.
It matters less than Bruce had thought it might, that Bruce isn't saying it; in the quiet, Clark's expression is slowly crumpling, a little more every moment, as if under the force of a weight too great even for Superman. He swallows, and then—and then lifts his hands, tentatively, and not during the half-clenched-fists phase, not as if he intends to punch Bruce in the face and leave. "Can I," he says, and then, flinching, "Sorry, that's—that's probably the last thing you—"
Ah, Bruce thinks.
He makes a quick self-assessment. He's reasonably sure he won't have a negative reaction, or at least not one he can't control if it should prove necessary; and if Clark needs the confirmation, needs to be convinced Bruce suffered no undue harm through more direct evidence than Bruce's word, then that's more than worth the risk, minimal as it is. And—
And Bruce has some reason to believe that Clark's worries are misplaced. Being touched by someone he trusts as deeply, as bone-marrow involuntarily, as he trusts Clark—someone who could, hypothetically, break anyone else who tried to touch him right now in half in the space of a picosecond—is not likely to upset him. Is, if anything, dangerous only in the sense that it may well make him feel better, in ways he won't be able to maintain or duplicate after Clark has left.
"It's fine," he says aloud.
Clark looks at him uncertainly.
And it is, Bruce tells himself, in service of convincing him of a truth he seems unable to accept that Bruce allows his own composure to unbend enough to admit, more shakily than he had intended, "I'd planned to take a shower, when I got here. But I—"
—don't want to touch the buttons on this shirt again, but Christ, he can't say that; it's nonsensical, irrational. Even if it hadn't been pointless in any case, he wouldn't have had time to get into the shower and out of it again before Clark arrived; and if he'd been in the middle of it, Clark might have taken that as an implicit dismissal, a rejection of his concern. It had been a perfectly reasonable decision, not to do it. Entirely independent of his unsteady hands, of the relentless pressing clarity of the memory of standing there, afterward, alone in the dark, listening to his own ragged breathing, and forcing himself to do those buttons up one at a time, smooth and small and slippery beneath his fingertips—
But it doesn't matter, thankfully. The conclusion of the sentence is not required. Clark is already moving, and his gaze is close, intent, so terribly agonizingly cautious, searching for even the slightest flicker in Bruce's expression as Clark takes the lapels of Bruce's suit jacket in his hands.
If Bruce had felt the urge to flinch, even minutely, he'd have suppressed it without mercy. But he checks and finds it absent, and in the end, it's easier than it ought to be to stand there and allow Clark to remove the suit jacket, to slide it off his shoulders. To pick apart the knot in the tie—excessively tight, undeniably uneven, and Bruce had known no one else would notice, but the awareness of it, of his own inability to do any better, had pricked at him relentlessly anyway; it's a relief to have Clark loosen it, pull it free and slide the tie out from under Bruce's shirtcollar.
Clark starts at the throat, with the shirt. Bruce experiences a brief and pointless impulse to redirect his attention, as if it will do any good—as if he won't get there one way or another, as if there is any possible way to prevent him from observing the particularly dark bruising there. Several of them had chosen to hold Bruce down that way, had derived amusement from Bruce Wayne's panicked struggles for air; a necessity, both because they had had to get what they wanted out of the interaction, had had to find it convincing, and because there was no reasonable excuse for Bruce Wayne to be capable of holding his breath for minutes at a time—
"Bruce, jesus," Clark says, very softly. Bruce blinks, swallows, reorients himself: he's in the Cave. No one else is here but Clark. And Clark—Clark's hands are big, broad, and very gentle; distinct, identifiable. Clark's caught his lip in his teeth, and his fingertips slide between the open sides of Bruce's shirtcollar and settle tentatively over the swollen blue-black shadows beneath Bruce's skin.
But he doesn't say anything else. His eyes seem huge in his face; they're still—wet, but Clark doesn't seem to realize it, isn't wiping at them. There is nothing in the least suggestive about the way he continues—the way he undoes the rest of Bruce's shirt-buttons, at a careful steady pace, and then parts the shirt's sides, undoes the cuffs, lifts the open shirt from Bruce's shoulders and eases it down the lengths of his arms.
And he's thorough, precise, in his accounting: skimming his fingers so lightly, so tentatively, over each bruise he finds on Bruce that Bruce can hardly feel it. If anything, Bruce discovers he is inclined to move into it, the undeniable animal comfort of it; Clark's hands are also warm, a sensation Bruce is beginning to realize he hasn't felt in several hours. Shock, most likely. He hadn't even noticed precisely how far it had progressed until Clark had offered him its opposite, had made it conspicuous through simple unintentional contrast—a painfully literal manifestation of something Clark has been doing for him almost since the moment Bruce managed to fail to kill him.
Clark doesn't circle him, doesn't move out of his field of vision to step up behind him; but then he can probably look through Bruce, focus his gaze on the surface of the far side of Bruce's skin and find the bruising on Bruce's back that way. He moves from the shoulders, the arms, the wrists—the worst of it there, thick heavy marks that are unmistakably in the shapes of fingers—to the chest, the ribs. Fewer, but Bruce was kicked several times to emphasize to him that he was down, that he wouldn't be allowed to get up until they were finished with him, and Clark lingers longer over the dark distinct shadows left by steel-toed boots.
Clark removes Bruce's belt the same way he removed Bruce's tie: gently, one step at a time, focused on the motions of his hands, and utterly without intent. Bruce has refused to engage with it, refused to acknowledge it, but Clark has—evidenced some degree of attraction to Bruce before, and even to Batman; to see no hint of it now should perhaps trouble him, as if he's been robbed of even that mild palliative in the effort to manage his own fixation on Clark. Instead, he discovers he's distantly relieved. Clark would probably have felt uncomfortable with it, with thinking or feeling any such thing, under the circumstances. He'd probably have—jerked his hands away, apologized. Left.
He doesn't. He slides Bruce's belt free of his beltloops, and even opens Bruce's slacks at the waist—hitches them gently down, skimming his thumbs along the outlines of the unfortunately telling bruises that litter Bruce's thighs as if to erase them. He says nothing; he doesn't flinch from them, doesn't grimace at them. He only inhales, slow and shaky, and then draws Bruce's slacks the rest of the way down his legs—drops to his knees, unhesitating, to slide them out from under Bruce's feet as Bruce lifts them, one and then the other, even though Bruce could as easily have stepped out of them and left them there.
"I'll just," he says, quiet and hoarse, lifting his eyes to meet Bruce's and swallowing. "I'll—you can, um," and then he looks away again, gathers the clothes up carefully and is gone in a rush of air.
Bruce takes his time, in the shower.
Perhaps his choice of location hadn't been entirely selfless; it's irrational, but the shower in the Cave feels—more secure, sheltered, private, than the shower upstairs in the lake house, even though no trespasser on the property would be able to reach either one without Bruce knowing they were coming.
He spends an excessive amount of time—scrubbing, even after he is, for all practical intents and purposes, clean. He knows perfectly well, intellectually, that it won't do a goddamn thing to erase any of it. But it feels necessary anyway, letting the water pound down against his shoulders, allowing himself the pretense.
By the time he's done, he finds it hard to imagine Clark won't have left. It's been—Christ, over an hour. Clark might have waited for a little while, but surely even his patience would've run low after the first twenty or thirty minutes; or, worse still, he'll have taken Bruce's continued absence from upstairs, the endless sound of the shower running, as an implicit dismissal.
Bruce can only hope that he went, and did it for his own sake—that he decided he'd rather duck out while he could, and not have to deal with this situation anymore, not have to think about it anymore. Who could blame him?
But once he's dressed again—not one of Bruce Wayne's suits, but the oldest set of spare clothes he'd ever stowed away down here, a pair of faded jeans and a henley—and about halfway up the stairs, a faint hissing sound becomes undeniably audible.
Clark hasn't gone anywhere. Or—no, he must have, however briefly, however supersonically; he's not wearing the suit anymore, but slacks and a t-shirt, thoroughly Clark Kent if it weren't for the absence of the glasses. And he's standing in the lake house kitchen with a frying pan in his hand, making—omelets.
He seems absorbed, far away; under most circumstances he'd have heard the water shut off, and he'd have known Bruce was coming at least five minutes ago. As it is, though, he appears to be surprised—he only looks up once Bruce has entered what must be approximately the edge of his peripheral vision, and he blinks, draws a quick breath and says, "Bruce."
Bruce cuts a mild, inquiring glance at the pan, and raises his eyebrows.
"Oh, I, uh." Clark lifts a hand to rub sheepishly at the nape of his neck. "I know it's pretty far past breakfast, but I—Alfred told me you like them. When you're tired or you haven't eaten in a while, or—" He stops; and the shadow's never been far away, not really, but it settles over him again almost visibly, the yoke of his shoulders sinking, that awful sick look creeping back onto his face. "I didn't know what else to do," he says at last, soft and hoarse, and then grimaces sharply, turns away and grips the pan and tips a perfect steaming omelet out onto the plate on the counter beside him. "God, I'm sorry, I—this is stupid. I'm just reminding you that it—that something happened."
Christ. As if there's any chance Bruce would've forgotten about it, if only he hadn't walked up here and found Clark waiting for him; if only he'd been standing here alone, in the quiet deepening dusk, with nothing—
Bruce shuts his eyes. "No," he says, as levelly as he can manage. "You're being kind."
But that doesn't help; Clark makes a strange wounded noise, and Bruce looks in time to see the expression on his face before he covers it with his hands. "Jesus Christ, that's not the point. The point isn't for you to make me feel better about this—"
He stops short. His hands falter, fall away, and he's looking at Bruce squarely, with a sudden sharp attention.
"Except it is," he says slowly. "Isn't it?"
"Clark—"
"That's why you're letting me do all of this," Clark says over him, unsteady. "Be here, and—you're—you're trying to make me feel better." His mouth twists, his face crumpling; he screws his eyes shut, scrubs both hands up to press the heels of his palms against the backs of them. "Jesus, I should go—"
"No," Bruce says.
It's what he meant to say, what he'd planned to say. But he hadn't planned to say it so loudly, so quickly, as if it were bursting from him without permission. He'd planned to sound calm, lucid, reasonable.
Clark is staring at him, wet eyes wide. Bruce needs to do something, correct for the error. But the only words in his head are—
"No, don't. Don't leave. Please."
Clark draws a slow breath, and takes a cautious step toward him, and says, "Bruce?"
Bruce blinks, wets his lips, carefully tucks his hands away in his pockets; they're trembling, for some reason, and he can't stop it, but he can at least mostly conceal it.
That was foolish, he decides. Irrational. If Clark wants to leave, would feel more comfortable leaving, then he should.
"I apologize," he says, almost evenly. "Of course you can go. But leave the omelet, if you would."
It's a joke. It's supposed to be a joke. A reassurance, to Clark, that Bruce is in fact essentially fine, or will be within a moderate amount of time.
But his voice comes out odd in his own ears, thin and strained instead of light, and Clark's expression doesn't change.
"No," Clark says quietly.
"Changed your mind that fast?" Bruce tries.
Clark doesn't waver. "Yep," he agrees, and his gaze is still close, intent, but after a moment his mouth slants gently. "Besides, that one's for me. I haven't made yours yet."
"Then I'll—get out another plate," Bruce manages, and turns away, and does it.
The second omelet doesn't take long. Ignoring the physical discomfort that comes of sitting is easy, and if Clark is able to perceive it, some miniscule tightening of Bruce's muscles that's simply out of his control, well, he says nothing about it.
They eat. When his omelet is gone, Bruce can't quite remember tasting it, but it was hot, and that warmth persists pleasantly, spreading through his chest, between his ribs. Clark takes the plates away, washes them, and Bruce sits and watches him like an idiot, head utterly empty, but Clark doesn't say anything about that, either, even after catching him at it.
Clark—doesn't leave.
He doesn't even bring up the possibility again. The book he had been partway through, the last time he'd spent an afternoon lurking in the Cave while Bruce worked, is sitting on the coffee table waiting for him; he goes over to the sofa, and he picks it up.
As good a time as any to begin assessing the need for damage control. And it would be—it would be a waste of the opportunity Clark's presence provides, the opportunity to prove to him that Bruce is functioning perfectly adequately, to leave him here and head back downstairs.
Bruce sits down at the other end of the sofa, and picks up his tablet.
Bruce Wayne has approximately eight hundred unread emails and climbing—at a glance, mostly requests for comment on his ordeal. Bruce feels a brief sharp chill; but a scan of major US news headlines suggests that it's only about the hijacking, about the combination of being held hostage and Bruce Wayne's celebrity status. No one appears to have any particularly salacious scoops on offer.
Bruce searches for interviews. He'd done his best to strategize: to interrupt the first attempt to order a woman belowdecks alone without seeming to have noticed what he was interrupting—to have put himself forward with a rich white man's blithe confidence that he could negotiate a deal better than any trained professional. But he simply couldn't be certain how much anyone might have—heard, or inferred, once he'd been taken away.
None of the civilians who've been accosted with microphones so far look especially familiar, though. He spots only one woman he recognizes, and she pushes the microphone out of her face and walks away before the reporter can even finish asking her to describe what happened.
He'll set up a real scrape later, collect all the text and video he can find and analyze it properly. But for the moment, the matter appears to have avoided any significant exposure in the press.
It's a relief. Bruce has always found navigating Bruce Wayne's persona the most difficult in moments where the distance closes, where farce is inappropriate or impossible—speaking about his parents' deaths, or about Dick; forced to transform from a caricature to a real person. Trying to decide how Bruce Wayne ought to react to an experience that should probably have traumatized him severely would take so much more thought and care than Bruce is presently capable of.
Bruce swaps back to his email inbox. Nothing needs to be done about most of it—Bruce Wayne will ignore it, will be hounded in person for a statement on it, and will probably eventually allow his publicist to bribe him into doing an interview, the majority of which he will spend either appearing to lie transparently about how he kept a level head and didn't let the hijackers push him around, or else talking about something else entirely. But Bruce should still run a few analyses; collect the names of the senders, the news outlets, contact information. Knowing just the right person to leak a little information to has proven invaluable in the past.
It's not engaging work, waiting for various utilities to either report results or throw errors. Bruce is, helplessly, pointlessly, aware of Clark—of his quiet presence at the other end of the sofa, the sound of his breathing; the shifts in it, now and then, as he reacts internally to what he's reading, and the occasional soft shuffle of a page being turned.
It's calming, idiotically reassuring. Soothing. Bruce finds himself blinking increasingly heavily, even though true darkness has only just barely begun to overtake dusk. As if he did anything genuinely—genuinely physically demanding, today, when all that was required of him was to struggle a little, to lie there restrained and let himself be—as if he has any right to have been truly fatigued by it.
He allows his eyes to close, takes a few deep, even breaths and then opens them again. There's no reason he shouldn't be able to focus on this for another ten minutes, at the minimum. Then he'll get up, give himself an excuse to move. Make himself some coffee, perhaps, and return to work.
He wakes in near-total darkness.
It takes him a moment to orient himself. He's on his back, curled at an odd angle, knees tipped together to one side. He's—he was sitting up, but somehow he didn't manage to stop himself from drifting off; he must've begun to sink backwards, sideways, into the sofa.
And Clark must've noticed, must've guided him carefully down without taking the opportunity to wake him. Because his head is resting on something broad and warm and solid that can only be Clark's thigh, and there is a hand in his hair, open, gently cradling.
Clark must also have heard him wake—because Clark's fingertips move for the first time, a cautious little motion, Clark's thumb rubbing slowly along the edge of Bruce's hairline, and Clark says, very quietly, "Bruce?"
Bruce swallows. It's difficult to do; his throat abruptly feels extraordinarily tight. He stares up at the ceiling, in the dark, and he finds himself saying, "They contradicted themselves."
Clark is silent; his hand goes briefly still.
"That was—that was the frustrating part," and Christ, it must sound like nonsense; Clark knows what happened, has no doubt assessed for himself that "frustrating" is hardly the word for the worst of the experience. But—they were violent men, and so Bruce had been prepared for violence. They had demonstrated an inclination to add rape to the tally, and so Bruce had been prepared for that, too.
The one task that remained to him had been to navigate both in a way that would leave them satisfied, that would prevent them from continuing on to someone else who wasn't prepared for it. And they had—they had made that so much more goddamned difficult than it had needed to be.
"They didn't want a volunteer," he tries to explain. "The point was in being able to take what they pleased from someone who didn't want to give it to them, and yet could be made to surrender it anyway. But they—then they wanted me to ask. They wanted me to beg. They wanted Bruce Wayne to beg," he amends, because that had been part of the problem: having mere moments to come to grips with it, to improvise a response that plausibly suited Bruce Wayne under conditions to which that persona had never been intended to be exposed.
Granted, it could've been worse. It wasn't entirely out of Bruce Wayne's wheelhouse; he has always been, in some respects, a punching bag, albeit typically in a less literal fashion. Bruce Wayne was allowed to find himself utterly out of his depth, to sink rapidly into cringing sniveling desperation—to try to fight back, and fail, and find himself trapped, without recourse.
And it had worked, in the end. Six out of seven men in that room had walked out of it believing a profound assault had taken place, but that could not make it truth. Because Bruce Wayne is only real when it's convenient, and Bruce—Bruce had assessed the situation, had made a deliberate decision to do what was necessary. He'd known what was coming, and he'd accepted it, he'd chosen it. He could hardly assert now that it was—that it had been—
"Once they started," he hears himself say, "it was easier. It was easier to know what to do, to react the right way. I was—I was relieved. I remember thinking—finally. It was all going to get so much simpler."
He intends to keep going, the goal now taking shape ahead of him: to explain that the rest hadn't really been that bad, relatively speaking, and to reassure Clark that he hasn't suffered some kind of intolerable secret injury, that he made a decision he knew he could live with and he stands by it. But he becomes aware, suddenly, of a shiver of movement, the faintest wet intake of breath, and he understands in an instant that Clark is crying.
Shit.
"Clark," he says, and pushes himself up onto his elbows, swings his legs down to the floor; reaches carefully for the dim shape of Clark in the darkness. "Clark, don't. It's all right, I'm fine—"
"Oh, shut up," Clark says, choked, and then he's—his arm is around Bruce's shoulders, the other twisting itself up tight in Bruce's shirt at the waist; his face is pressed into the side of Bruce's throat, damp and hot. And Bruce—
Bruce finds himself, inexplicably, clutching at Clark's back. Feeling him, the solid weight of him, the strength of him, and clinging to it, as if he has any possible excuse to need it.
"Jesus, Bruce," Clark says, half-muffled, and then lifts his head a little, shakes it—presses his temple to Bruce's jaw, Bruce's cheek. His breath is ragged, too fast, and he's so close that Bruce can tell when he's shut his eyes from the brush of his eyelashes; and then he gulps in air, shifts his hand from the blade of Bruce's shoulder to the nape of Bruce's neck, and as quickly as that, it's—his mouth is pressed to the corner of Bruce's.
It's not a kiss that asks to be reciprocated, that carries with it the expectation of anything in particular. And considering the way Clark's been crying, Bruce thinks distantly, it seems vanishingly unlikely that he's suddenly been—overwhelmed by Bruce's attractiveness, or that he might have decided this was a good moment to try to get Bruce into bed. It's simply the solid honest touch of his mouth, in the grip of an emotion he found no other way to express.
Bruce should push him away. If he does, Clark will let him, and will probably apologize besides. Months of effort, of constructing a careful pretense of ignorance and giving Clark room to think better of focusing his attention on Bruce, will be wasted if he doesn't.
But his hands are only fisting themselves tighter in Clark's shirt, his knuckles pressing themselves helplessly into the broad warm muscles of Clark's back, and he can't quite figure out how to stop it.
"Sorry," Clark says against his cheek, when it's over. "Sorry, I just. It took so goddamn long for us to realize you were on the ferry, it was—the negotiators were already working, by then. And I know why, I know, but we couldn't—we weren't allowed to do anything," and his voice is wrecked, breaking; Bruce realizes with a dim cold jolt that depending on when exactly that was, Clark might very well have been listening, long before he'd actually gotten to bend a dozen guns in half and then had to look Bruce in the face.
God. If he—if he heard it, any of it—
It's selfish of Bruce to think it. The experience must've been profoundly horrifying for Clark, especially when he couldn't act without endangering other lives; if he'd rushed in to save Bruce, only for someone being held in the bow of the ferry to be shot before he could prevent it, simple retaliation for his interference, he'd have been equally distraught.
But in the worst kind of way, it means—Bruce wasn't alone in there after all.
"And I," Clark is saying, halting, fingers twisting tight in Bruce's shirt. "I—care about you so much, I can't—"
Softening it, Bruce understands. Gentling it. Or trying his best to, but it's abruptly obvious anyway: the tone of his voice, the touch of his hands, the way he can't seem to talk himself into moving so much as an inch away from Bruce even now.
Attraction had seemed like the most plausible explanation for his behavior, his occasional bouts of preoccupation. But it doesn't anymore.
"You love me," Bruce says slowly.
It should be ridiculous. But Clark just swallows, tips his head down to rest it against the line of Bruce's shoulder, and says, "Yeah. Yeah, I do. I'm sorry, I know this isn't a good time. You don't need to do anything about it, I'm not—asking you for anything."
"I know that," Bruce says.
It's only the truth. Clark has asked Bruce to listen to him, has asked Bruce not to hurt him, and received neither; he hasn't asked again. By all rights, his expectations should be so low as to be nonexistent. And yet here he is, saying he—saying he loves Bruce, and he wouldn't say it if he didn't mean it, if he didn't feel it, as sincerely and thoroughly as he feels everything.
It's staggering, overwhelming, and moderately terrifying.
"You should," is all Bruce can think to say. "You should ask me for—lots of things." He clears his throat; it doesn't really help, but he manages a tone that's somewhere in the ballpark of wry when he adds, "I'm rich."
But Clark lifts his head, eases away the handful of inches necessary to meet Bruce's eyes, and god, Bruce wishes it weren't so goddamn dark in here, wishes he weren't stuck frantically trying to guess at the contours of Clark's face.
"I guess there's one thing I'd ask you for, if it were fair to do it," he says quietly, shifting his hand, rubbing a careful thumb along the line of Bruce's jaw. "But it's not the kind of thing anybody can buy, I hear."
Bruce shuts his eyes. "Unfortunately for you," he manages, "I'm much better at buying things than I am at—caring."
And it's that, somehow, instead of the joke a moment ago, that makes Clark laugh, half a breath through his nose.
"No, you aren't," he says. "God, are you—are you kidding me? No, you aren't. You care about everything, you care about people you've never met—"
Christ. An intolerable list, coming from him; Bruce cuts it off without shame. "At being cared about, then," he amends.
He's had some practice. Alfred, if nothing else. He's managed to ignore it when he can, to bear it when he can't; to accept it, grudgingly, when no other option remains. But he's never been good at it.
He means it as a warning, careful discouragement. But Clark draws a slow breath, slides the side of one knuckle up under Bruce's chin, and says softly, "You'll get the hang of it."
And this time—this time, he is asking, silent and cautious, impossibly gentle. Tilting Bruce's face the barest fraction, the tip of his thumb against Bruce's mouth; and then waiting, as if to see whether Bruce is going to muster some kind of objection. And Christ, he deserves better than negative space, than the silence where Bruce saying too bad, I don't love you back isn't, but Bruce can't think, his heart is pounding; it's been a long fucking day, and he's so fucking tired, and he's not sure he's ever wanted anything more than he wants Clark to—to kiss him, to hold him. To help him to his bed and then lie in it with him, until everything hurts a little less.
He doesn't move. And Clark does kiss him—just the curve of his lower lip, at first, barely there, but Bruce makes a helpless sound in the back of his throat and sinks into it instantly, and Clark's there to meet him, to catch him: he isn't alone, and maybe he never was.