Fic: 32 Views of Mt. Fuji: Summer (2/9)
Title: 36 Views of Mt. Fuji: Summer (2/9)
Pairing: Clark/Bruce
Disclaimer: The boys belong to DC and to each other, but not to me.
Series Notes: 36 Views of Mt. Fuji is a series set early in Batman and Superman's careers, shortly after the S/B annual #1. The full series can be found here.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Clark and Bruce arrive in Tokyo and find themselves without lodging. Unusual accommodations are found and an unusual conversation follows.
Word Count: 3200
The night is black
And I am excited about you.
My love climbs in me, and you ask
That I should climb to the higher room.
Things are hidden in a black night.
Even the dream is black
On the black-lacquered pillow,
Even our talk is hidden.
--Anonymous geisha song
Bruce Wayne blinked groggily as he walked down the runway next to Clark Kent into Narita Airport in Tokyo. There were precautions against jet lag, but no cure. He had spent most of the flight with his eyes resolutely closed, trying to sleep. He had hoped that by closing his eyes and shutting out the sight of Clark Kent he would be able to relax, but instead, somehow, the lack of visual cues had made him even more uncomfortably aware of Clark's body taking up space next to him.
He was already overly aware.
He had drifted off once only to wake with a jolt, finding his body sliding, leaning toward the other man's, head dangerously close to nestling on a broad shoulder.
Bruce Wayne was not used to his body betraying him like this.
He didn't get much sleep.
And here he was, walking into Tokyo with Clark. What had he been thinking, coming along on this trip? He wasn't even going to allow himself to flirt with the nice Kansas boy. So even though Clark had meltingly beautiful blue eyes and a washboard stomach made for stroking and an ass that--well, best not to think too much about Clark's ass, Bruce thought hastily, hurrying to catch up from where he had involuntarily fallen behind the other man. Anyway, even though Clark was delicious to look at, Bruce wasn't getting any of it, so why bother?
An inner voice, alarmingly Alfredesque: Horror of horrors, could it be that you actually enjoy Clark Kent's company?
Bruce sighed and tried not to dwell on that too much.
: : :
Clark watched Bruce argue with the hotel staff, then stomp back to where Clark stood waiting. "Great. Just great," he snapped. "There's been some kind of mixup with the rooms, they don't have our reservations."
Clark raised incredulous eyebrows. "Bruce Wayne, the great and powerful, can't get hotel rooms?"
"I suppose if I waved enough money at them, they would turn some people out of bed for us, but that hardly seems ideal. Well," Bruce said, squaring his shoulders and picking up his bag, "time to find alternative lodging."
It was not apparently that easy. After being turned away from three hotels, Bruce's mood was clearly frayed, and even Clark wasn't feeling terribly cheerful. "We could try a capsule hotel," muttered Bruce.
"Ah, you mean those hotels like a beehive with the coffin-sized rooms?" Bruce nodded glumly. "Um, no. Please."
"Agreed."
"We just need a place to sleep. I don't really care what it's like any more," Clark said in desperation, and saw a glint that could have been called "mischievous" in the other man's eyes.
"All right then, follow me," said Bruce, and set off through the streets.
They came to a building that rather resembled Cinderella's Castle in Disneyland, with a discreet side entrance off the main street. "Hotel Stellate" was written in blue letters on the front. Bruce slipped in and Clark followed.
The lobby was sparse and totally empty. There wasn't even a concierge desk, just an assortment of things that looked like vending machines. Bruce was glaring at one of the vending machines, which had only one selection still lit. "Figures," Clark heard him mutter as he jammed a few bills into the machine. There was a clonk and a key fell out of the machine. Bruce snatched it up and stalked out of the lobby.
The hotel was eerily silent, and Clark followed Bruce, glancing from side to side. "Bruce? What kind of hotel is this?"
"You said you didn't care what kind of place I got us as long as it had a bed," Bruce said with something that sounded suspiciously like a snicker in his voice. He unlocked a door and ushered Clark inside.
The room was entirely done in red--walls, ceiling, floors. In the middle of the room was a circular bed. The bed was surrounded, improbably, by a cage, its red bars stretching between the floor and ceiling. Various handcuffs were attached to the bars of the cage.
"Uh, Bruce...?" Clark let the statement trail off, too astonished to add to it.
Bruce sighed and dumped his bags on the floor, adding a massive yawn. "Love hotel, Clark. Couples use them to get away from the family for a few hours or the night." He shot a look at Clark as the other man's silence became increasingly awkward. "Look, I'll sleep over on the chair there. I swear I wouldn't lay a hand on you, but if it makes you uncomfortable--"
"No, no," Clark protested. He felt very uncomfortable indeed, but not because he was afraid Bruce might come on to him. Hardly. "We shared a bed on the cruise--"
"--for about fifteen minutes before being mercifully interrupted by explosions--"
"--it's no big deal, really." Clark desperately hoped his actual response to the idea of sharing a bed with Bruce Wayne wasn't blindingly obvious. He was rather afraid his face was like a blinking neon sign: This man is perfectly willing to have Bruce Wayne put the moves on him. Bruce was the world's greatest detective, he could probably read Clark like a book.
An amazingly, terribly dirty book.
Fortunately, Bruce didn't seem that interested in reading Clark right now. He was rummaging in his bag and came up with some pajamas and a toothbrush, then disappeared into the bathroom. Clark took the opportunity to change hastily into his own pajamas and walk into the red-barred cage to sit down on the bed, staring at the manacles and such attached to it and feeling terribly silly.
Bruce emerged from the bathroom. "Your turn." He blinked at Clark and for a brief moment a flash of abstract appreciation appeared on his face. "Nice pajamas. Very metrosexual. Since when do you wear silk pajamas?"
Since I found out we'd be traveling together didn't seem like a very wise answer, so Clark just shrugged. "Maybe you convinced me with all that GQ stuff you spouted at me last time I was at the Manor."
A snort of laughter as the bathroom door closed behind him. Clark washed his face with very cold water and spent a long time staring at his dripping face in the mirror. You can do this. Calm under pressure. No problem.
He left the bathroom to find Bruce hovering halfway between the hard plastic chair and the bed, looking surprisingly uncertain of himself. Clark didn't have to feign exhaustion as he waved at the bed. "Really, Bruce, I'm too tired to care one way or the other." Not technically true, but close enough. Clark went into the cage and laid down on the bed--circular was not a convenient shape, and his legs slid off the edge a bit.
Bruce followed him in and closed the cage door behind him. It made a sharp click and they both jumped a bit. Bruce snickered and intoned: "It's a cage match between the world's most powerful men. Two men enter...one man leaves!" He grabbed the bars of the cage and rattled them dramatically.
Clark found himself laughing a little more than the joke warranted, but it seemed to lower the strange tension in the room somewhat. Bruce joined him on the other side of the bed, throwing his arms above his head. "I'm going to be asleep in about five seconds," he said through a massive yawn. "Night, Clark."
"Night, Bruce." With no windows, the walls carefully soundproofed, the room became almost thick with silence. Clark lay as still as possible, trying not to brush up against Bruce. The silence fell across everything like static. His eyes half-closed, Clark could see the cage circling the bed, and in a sudden, entirely unbidden flash had a vision of Bruce cuffed naked to those bars, face flushed, begging Clark to...to...
Clark reminded himself brutally that Bruce, as a master escape artist, could easily get out of those feeble cuffs.
If he wanted to.
An hour went by.
"Clark?" Bruce's voice was almost a whisper. "Are you asleep?"
"No," Clark said more quickly than he meant to, banishing his fantasy-Bruce to a very hidden place.
"Stupid jet lag," muttered Bruce.
"This place is too quiet," complained Clark. "It's weird. This whole place is bizarre."
Bruce chuckled. "In a country this crowded, people need places to get away. There's no places to go parking, after all." A yawn. "I mean, how do you and that reporter of yours find the space? I can't imagine you whisk her to the Arctic every time, you can't take her to your apartment..." Bruce paused, ruminating, as Clark felt his face becoming hotter. "Could you do it in midair? The physics might be a little complicated..." He slowly seemed to realize Clark wasn't responding and that the silence had become awkward. "Clark? Aren't you and she...uh, seeing each other?"
"Sort of." Clark could tell his voice sounded somewhat tense and he tried to relax. "But I'm...really busy, and...I'm pretty conservative and all, and..."
"Well, but if not her, there've been other women you've...I mean..." Some tension in the line of Clark's back must have triggered an intuition in the detective, and he blurted out, "Clark, are you a virgin?"
: : :
Bruce wished he could kick himself the moment he said it. Clark made an uncomfortable harrumphing noise, his back still to Bruce. "There's nothing shameful about being a virgin," the Kryptonian said stiffly.
"Of course not! It's just...I would have thought...being Superman and all...I mean, you're Superman!" Bruce paused a moment to literally bite his own tongue; he sounded incredulous in the extreme.
Clark's voice was annoyed. "I don't want to have sex with people as Superman! And Clark's a dork no one would look twice at! Plus, as previously noted, I'm very busy when I'm not running around Japan with you."
"In my book, blowjobs count as sex, so..." Bruce noted, trying to be helpful, part of his mind still making strange grinding noises like over-stressed machinery. The silence, if anything, grew more uncomfortable. "You--you haven't even--" Bruce sputtered. "Then have you--"
"--Look," Clark interrupted him, turning his face toward Bruce slightly, "What is this, Quiz the Kryptonian night? Is there some purity test I'm required to fail before I'm allowed to recruit for the Justice League? Let's skip the mortifying interrogation, then: beyond some fully-clothed groping and kissing, I'm as virginal as they come. There. Happy?"
Bruce wasn't exactly sure what he was, other than filled with a vast and boundless amazement, sliding inevitably into lustful envy: somewhere out there in this world was the person who was going to be the first to touch Clark, the first to taste him, the first to--he tried to cut off his galloping thoughts, as well as his sudden desire to hunt down this nameless woman and break her kneecaps. "Well, if we ever need a unicorn tamed, we'll know who to turn to," he said feebly.
"Har har." Clark didn't seem insulted, merely embarrassed and resigned, thank goodness. There was a thoughtful pause in which Clark cleared his throat a couple of times before beginning again. "So, obviously you're not..."
Bruce laughed. "The amatory arts are but one of the many skills the Dark Knight of Vengeance needed to master."
"You...trained? In sex?"
"Of course! The ability to pleasure a person skillfully is potentially as important as the ability to pick a lock, after all."
Clark sounded dubious. "And while undergoing this training, you..." The sentence hung unfinished, but Bruce could guess where it was going.
"...figured out that I preferred being with men to being with women? That's about right, yes."
"Do you like to top or bottom?" The question was blurted out, and Clark added defensively, "Well, I had to talk about my sex life, or lack of it. I'm just curious." His tone was studiously casual, and Bruce rolled his eyes, glad Clark's back was to him. He knew this line of questioning: the straight guy determined to prove how open-minded he was by talking about sex with his gay friend. Well, Kent had no one to blame but himself if it made him uncomfortable.
"Believe it or not, Clark, it's not always set in stone. I happen to enjoy both."
Clark's shoulders moved in the darkness as he took a deep breath. "You can enjoy, uh, bottoming? Isn't that kind of..." Another awkward trailing-off.
Bruce resisted the impulse to kick the other man and kept his tone level. "For your information, being the receptive partner can be intensely pleasurable. See, there's an organ called the prostate--"
"--I know what a prostate is, Bruce." Clark sounded both annoyed and flustered. "Kryptonians have...something like one as well." Bruce raised an eyebrow into the darkness but decided not to follow that line of questioning. Clark continued, "It just seems...vulnerable."
"The key is in knowing and understanding the other person. Besides, it feels good."
"What--what does it feel like?" Clark's voice had lost the annoyance and sounded just flustered now, dropping to almost a whisper.
For just a second, Bruce couldn't help but imagine showing Clark instead of telling him, and had to struggle to keep his voice level. "It's...hard to explain. Like jolts of sensation. A little uncomfortable at first, but then it kind of...shifts, like electricity. When your partner gets the right rhythm, it's...well, you can come just from the feeling." He backtracked hastily. "I mean the generic 'you,' of course, not specific."
Clark had curled his legs up into a slightly tighter fetal position at Bruce's description. "So you like both?" His voice remained light and casual as if they were discussing the weather. Bruce felt a stab of annoyance, a desire to get some kind of reaction from the man, even if it were disgust. Anything other than this deliberate indifference.
"Sure," he said clinically, "but topping is a lot of fun as well. There's something about the look on a man's face at the moment of penetration. It's...naked, I guess is the best word. Vulnerable, like you said, but not in a frightened way. If there's trust, it's...it's an incredible look." Clark's eyes half-closed, white teeth biting into that perfect lower lip, hair tumbled across his forehead in disarray, Clark's eyes at that moment--Bruce yanked his attention back to reality.
"Sounds interesting," Clark said, his voice tight and just a little too high. Bruce grinned rather sadistically to himself. Straight guys always got uncomfortable eventually. Served him right.
Time to twist the knife a bit. "And then there's the sound your lover makes when you hit that spot for the first time--how the surprise shifts into enjoyment, into wanting more, needing it. It's--"
Clark's legs twitched slightly, and he sat up abruptly, away from Bruce. "I'll be right back," he muttered, standing up. He stepped forward and promptly walked square into the red bars. "Oh," he said, groping around. "Sorry. Sorry. Be right back." The Kryptonian finally found the door in the cage and disappeared into the bathroom. There was a sound of running water for a rather long time, as Bruce laid in the darkness and tried to calm down. Nice job, getting yourself all riled up and freaking out the farm boy. He's probably battling nausea.
With Clark's solid, distracting presence gone, Bruce could look at his reactions a little more clinically. Clark's virginity, his untouched--and untouchable, he reminded himself--innocence, had rattled Bruce much more than he would have expected, and this annoyed him greatly. It wasn't like him to make a fetish of virginity. Bruce liked his partners to know what they were doing, what they enjoyed, and to be relatively good at it. It was more fun.
Somehow, his sexual reactions to Clark did not seem to revolve primarily around having fun. Bruce felt another pang of envy as he wondered who would be the woman who first got to bring Clark that kind of ecstasy, the first to watch his face as he abandoned himself to it, the first to feel his hands on her bare skin, to teach him both how to receive and to give pleasure... Who would be the first woman to feel Clark enter her, to be made his, the archaic phrase rich with possible meaning...
Bruce twisted uncomfortably on the bed and tried to regulate his breathing. His thoughts were refusing to stay clinical and analytical.
This was why he generally preferred not to work on teams.
Stupid Justice League.
Stupid Clark Kent.
Stupid--
The bathroom door opened and Clark returned, stopping to carefully bend the bars of the cage back into place from where the impact of his body had twisted them. The Kryptonian flopped onto the bed with a sigh, all the tension gone from his body. "Mmmm," he mumbled as he tucked his legs up to match the circular shape of the bed, sounding ridiculously content and relaxed. "Night, Bruce."
He seemed to fall asleep almost instantly. Well, at least he didn't seem offended by Bruce's overshare. That was a relief.
Bruce curled his legs to take full advantage of the little space available on the round bed and focused on regulating his breath. To his annoyance, it fell nicely into the falling and rising rhythm of Clark's sleeping respiration, but it was too soothing to force out of it.
As he felt some of the tension slowly leave his body, he reflected that from above, the two of them on the circular bed must look a little like a yin-yang symbol. Light and dark curved around each other, meeting and yielding.
Of course, in the true yin-yang symbol the light always had a little bit of the darkness inside it, and the darkness a little bit of the light.
That was either a very deep or a very smutty thought, Bruce mused as he slipped into sleep.
Or perhaps both.
----
Clark and Bruce's room
Pairing: Clark/Bruce
Disclaimer: The boys belong to DC and to each other, but not to me.
Series Notes: 36 Views of Mt. Fuji is a series set early in Batman and Superman's careers, shortly after the S/B annual #1. The full series can be found here.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Clark and Bruce arrive in Tokyo and find themselves without lodging. Unusual accommodations are found and an unusual conversation follows.
Word Count: 3200
The night is black
And I am excited about you.
My love climbs in me, and you ask
That I should climb to the higher room.
Things are hidden in a black night.
Even the dream is black
On the black-lacquered pillow,
Even our talk is hidden.
--Anonymous geisha song
Bruce Wayne blinked groggily as he walked down the runway next to Clark Kent into Narita Airport in Tokyo. There were precautions against jet lag, but no cure. He had spent most of the flight with his eyes resolutely closed, trying to sleep. He had hoped that by closing his eyes and shutting out the sight of Clark Kent he would be able to relax, but instead, somehow, the lack of visual cues had made him even more uncomfortably aware of Clark's body taking up space next to him.
He was already overly aware.
He had drifted off once only to wake with a jolt, finding his body sliding, leaning toward the other man's, head dangerously close to nestling on a broad shoulder.
Bruce Wayne was not used to his body betraying him like this.
He didn't get much sleep.
And here he was, walking into Tokyo with Clark. What had he been thinking, coming along on this trip? He wasn't even going to allow himself to flirt with the nice Kansas boy. So even though Clark had meltingly beautiful blue eyes and a washboard stomach made for stroking and an ass that--well, best not to think too much about Clark's ass, Bruce thought hastily, hurrying to catch up from where he had involuntarily fallen behind the other man. Anyway, even though Clark was delicious to look at, Bruce wasn't getting any of it, so why bother?
An inner voice, alarmingly Alfredesque: Horror of horrors, could it be that you actually enjoy Clark Kent's company?
Bruce sighed and tried not to dwell on that too much.
: : :
Clark watched Bruce argue with the hotel staff, then stomp back to where Clark stood waiting. "Great. Just great," he snapped. "There's been some kind of mixup with the rooms, they don't have our reservations."
Clark raised incredulous eyebrows. "Bruce Wayne, the great and powerful, can't get hotel rooms?"
"I suppose if I waved enough money at them, they would turn some people out of bed for us, but that hardly seems ideal. Well," Bruce said, squaring his shoulders and picking up his bag, "time to find alternative lodging."
It was not apparently that easy. After being turned away from three hotels, Bruce's mood was clearly frayed, and even Clark wasn't feeling terribly cheerful. "We could try a capsule hotel," muttered Bruce.
"Ah, you mean those hotels like a beehive with the coffin-sized rooms?" Bruce nodded glumly. "Um, no. Please."
"Agreed."
"We just need a place to sleep. I don't really care what it's like any more," Clark said in desperation, and saw a glint that could have been called "mischievous" in the other man's eyes.
"All right then, follow me," said Bruce, and set off through the streets.
They came to a building that rather resembled Cinderella's Castle in Disneyland, with a discreet side entrance off the main street. "Hotel Stellate" was written in blue letters on the front. Bruce slipped in and Clark followed.
The lobby was sparse and totally empty. There wasn't even a concierge desk, just an assortment of things that looked like vending machines. Bruce was glaring at one of the vending machines, which had only one selection still lit. "Figures," Clark heard him mutter as he jammed a few bills into the machine. There was a clonk and a key fell out of the machine. Bruce snatched it up and stalked out of the lobby.
The hotel was eerily silent, and Clark followed Bruce, glancing from side to side. "Bruce? What kind of hotel is this?"
"You said you didn't care what kind of place I got us as long as it had a bed," Bruce said with something that sounded suspiciously like a snicker in his voice. He unlocked a door and ushered Clark inside.
The room was entirely done in red--walls, ceiling, floors. In the middle of the room was a circular bed. The bed was surrounded, improbably, by a cage, its red bars stretching between the floor and ceiling. Various handcuffs were attached to the bars of the cage.
"Uh, Bruce...?" Clark let the statement trail off, too astonished to add to it.
Bruce sighed and dumped his bags on the floor, adding a massive yawn. "Love hotel, Clark. Couples use them to get away from the family for a few hours or the night." He shot a look at Clark as the other man's silence became increasingly awkward. "Look, I'll sleep over on the chair there. I swear I wouldn't lay a hand on you, but if it makes you uncomfortable--"
"No, no," Clark protested. He felt very uncomfortable indeed, but not because he was afraid Bruce might come on to him. Hardly. "We shared a bed on the cruise--"
"--for about fifteen minutes before being mercifully interrupted by explosions--"
"--it's no big deal, really." Clark desperately hoped his actual response to the idea of sharing a bed with Bruce Wayne wasn't blindingly obvious. He was rather afraid his face was like a blinking neon sign: This man is perfectly willing to have Bruce Wayne put the moves on him. Bruce was the world's greatest detective, he could probably read Clark like a book.
An amazingly, terribly dirty book.
Fortunately, Bruce didn't seem that interested in reading Clark right now. He was rummaging in his bag and came up with some pajamas and a toothbrush, then disappeared into the bathroom. Clark took the opportunity to change hastily into his own pajamas and walk into the red-barred cage to sit down on the bed, staring at the manacles and such attached to it and feeling terribly silly.
Bruce emerged from the bathroom. "Your turn." He blinked at Clark and for a brief moment a flash of abstract appreciation appeared on his face. "Nice pajamas. Very metrosexual. Since when do you wear silk pajamas?"
Since I found out we'd be traveling together didn't seem like a very wise answer, so Clark just shrugged. "Maybe you convinced me with all that GQ stuff you spouted at me last time I was at the Manor."
A snort of laughter as the bathroom door closed behind him. Clark washed his face with very cold water and spent a long time staring at his dripping face in the mirror. You can do this. Calm under pressure. No problem.
He left the bathroom to find Bruce hovering halfway between the hard plastic chair and the bed, looking surprisingly uncertain of himself. Clark didn't have to feign exhaustion as he waved at the bed. "Really, Bruce, I'm too tired to care one way or the other." Not technically true, but close enough. Clark went into the cage and laid down on the bed--circular was not a convenient shape, and his legs slid off the edge a bit.
Bruce followed him in and closed the cage door behind him. It made a sharp click and they both jumped a bit. Bruce snickered and intoned: "It's a cage match between the world's most powerful men. Two men enter...one man leaves!" He grabbed the bars of the cage and rattled them dramatically.
Clark found himself laughing a little more than the joke warranted, but it seemed to lower the strange tension in the room somewhat. Bruce joined him on the other side of the bed, throwing his arms above his head. "I'm going to be asleep in about five seconds," he said through a massive yawn. "Night, Clark."
"Night, Bruce." With no windows, the walls carefully soundproofed, the room became almost thick with silence. Clark lay as still as possible, trying not to brush up against Bruce. The silence fell across everything like static. His eyes half-closed, Clark could see the cage circling the bed, and in a sudden, entirely unbidden flash had a vision of Bruce cuffed naked to those bars, face flushed, begging Clark to...to...
Clark reminded himself brutally that Bruce, as a master escape artist, could easily get out of those feeble cuffs.
If he wanted to.
An hour went by.
"Clark?" Bruce's voice was almost a whisper. "Are you asleep?"
"No," Clark said more quickly than he meant to, banishing his fantasy-Bruce to a very hidden place.
"Stupid jet lag," muttered Bruce.
"This place is too quiet," complained Clark. "It's weird. This whole place is bizarre."
Bruce chuckled. "In a country this crowded, people need places to get away. There's no places to go parking, after all." A yawn. "I mean, how do you and that reporter of yours find the space? I can't imagine you whisk her to the Arctic every time, you can't take her to your apartment..." Bruce paused, ruminating, as Clark felt his face becoming hotter. "Could you do it in midair? The physics might be a little complicated..." He slowly seemed to realize Clark wasn't responding and that the silence had become awkward. "Clark? Aren't you and she...uh, seeing each other?"
"Sort of." Clark could tell his voice sounded somewhat tense and he tried to relax. "But I'm...really busy, and...I'm pretty conservative and all, and..."
"Well, but if not her, there've been other women you've...I mean..." Some tension in the line of Clark's back must have triggered an intuition in the detective, and he blurted out, "Clark, are you a virgin?"
: : :
Bruce wished he could kick himself the moment he said it. Clark made an uncomfortable harrumphing noise, his back still to Bruce. "There's nothing shameful about being a virgin," the Kryptonian said stiffly.
"Of course not! It's just...I would have thought...being Superman and all...I mean, you're Superman!" Bruce paused a moment to literally bite his own tongue; he sounded incredulous in the extreme.
Clark's voice was annoyed. "I don't want to have sex with people as Superman! And Clark's a dork no one would look twice at! Plus, as previously noted, I'm very busy when I'm not running around Japan with you."
"In my book, blowjobs count as sex, so..." Bruce noted, trying to be helpful, part of his mind still making strange grinding noises like over-stressed machinery. The silence, if anything, grew more uncomfortable. "You--you haven't even--" Bruce sputtered. "Then have you--"
"--Look," Clark interrupted him, turning his face toward Bruce slightly, "What is this, Quiz the Kryptonian night? Is there some purity test I'm required to fail before I'm allowed to recruit for the Justice League? Let's skip the mortifying interrogation, then: beyond some fully-clothed groping and kissing, I'm as virginal as they come. There. Happy?"
Bruce wasn't exactly sure what he was, other than filled with a vast and boundless amazement, sliding inevitably into lustful envy: somewhere out there in this world was the person who was going to be the first to touch Clark, the first to taste him, the first to--he tried to cut off his galloping thoughts, as well as his sudden desire to hunt down this nameless woman and break her kneecaps. "Well, if we ever need a unicorn tamed, we'll know who to turn to," he said feebly.
"Har har." Clark didn't seem insulted, merely embarrassed and resigned, thank goodness. There was a thoughtful pause in which Clark cleared his throat a couple of times before beginning again. "So, obviously you're not..."
Bruce laughed. "The amatory arts are but one of the many skills the Dark Knight of Vengeance needed to master."
"You...trained? In sex?"
"Of course! The ability to pleasure a person skillfully is potentially as important as the ability to pick a lock, after all."
Clark sounded dubious. "And while undergoing this training, you..." The sentence hung unfinished, but Bruce could guess where it was going.
"...figured out that I preferred being with men to being with women? That's about right, yes."
"Do you like to top or bottom?" The question was blurted out, and Clark added defensively, "Well, I had to talk about my sex life, or lack of it. I'm just curious." His tone was studiously casual, and Bruce rolled his eyes, glad Clark's back was to him. He knew this line of questioning: the straight guy determined to prove how open-minded he was by talking about sex with his gay friend. Well, Kent had no one to blame but himself if it made him uncomfortable.
"Believe it or not, Clark, it's not always set in stone. I happen to enjoy both."
Clark's shoulders moved in the darkness as he took a deep breath. "You can enjoy, uh, bottoming? Isn't that kind of..." Another awkward trailing-off.
Bruce resisted the impulse to kick the other man and kept his tone level. "For your information, being the receptive partner can be intensely pleasurable. See, there's an organ called the prostate--"
"--I know what a prostate is, Bruce." Clark sounded both annoyed and flustered. "Kryptonians have...something like one as well." Bruce raised an eyebrow into the darkness but decided not to follow that line of questioning. Clark continued, "It just seems...vulnerable."
"The key is in knowing and understanding the other person. Besides, it feels good."
"What--what does it feel like?" Clark's voice had lost the annoyance and sounded just flustered now, dropping to almost a whisper.
For just a second, Bruce couldn't help but imagine showing Clark instead of telling him, and had to struggle to keep his voice level. "It's...hard to explain. Like jolts of sensation. A little uncomfortable at first, but then it kind of...shifts, like electricity. When your partner gets the right rhythm, it's...well, you can come just from the feeling." He backtracked hastily. "I mean the generic 'you,' of course, not specific."
Clark had curled his legs up into a slightly tighter fetal position at Bruce's description. "So you like both?" His voice remained light and casual as if they were discussing the weather. Bruce felt a stab of annoyance, a desire to get some kind of reaction from the man, even if it were disgust. Anything other than this deliberate indifference.
"Sure," he said clinically, "but topping is a lot of fun as well. There's something about the look on a man's face at the moment of penetration. It's...naked, I guess is the best word. Vulnerable, like you said, but not in a frightened way. If there's trust, it's...it's an incredible look." Clark's eyes half-closed, white teeth biting into that perfect lower lip, hair tumbled across his forehead in disarray, Clark's eyes at that moment--Bruce yanked his attention back to reality.
"Sounds interesting," Clark said, his voice tight and just a little too high. Bruce grinned rather sadistically to himself. Straight guys always got uncomfortable eventually. Served him right.
Time to twist the knife a bit. "And then there's the sound your lover makes when you hit that spot for the first time--how the surprise shifts into enjoyment, into wanting more, needing it. It's--"
Clark's legs twitched slightly, and he sat up abruptly, away from Bruce. "I'll be right back," he muttered, standing up. He stepped forward and promptly walked square into the red bars. "Oh," he said, groping around. "Sorry. Sorry. Be right back." The Kryptonian finally found the door in the cage and disappeared into the bathroom. There was a sound of running water for a rather long time, as Bruce laid in the darkness and tried to calm down. Nice job, getting yourself all riled up and freaking out the farm boy. He's probably battling nausea.
With Clark's solid, distracting presence gone, Bruce could look at his reactions a little more clinically. Clark's virginity, his untouched--and untouchable, he reminded himself--innocence, had rattled Bruce much more than he would have expected, and this annoyed him greatly. It wasn't like him to make a fetish of virginity. Bruce liked his partners to know what they were doing, what they enjoyed, and to be relatively good at it. It was more fun.
Somehow, his sexual reactions to Clark did not seem to revolve primarily around having fun. Bruce felt another pang of envy as he wondered who would be the woman who first got to bring Clark that kind of ecstasy, the first to watch his face as he abandoned himself to it, the first to feel his hands on her bare skin, to teach him both how to receive and to give pleasure... Who would be the first woman to feel Clark enter her, to be made his, the archaic phrase rich with possible meaning...
Bruce twisted uncomfortably on the bed and tried to regulate his breathing. His thoughts were refusing to stay clinical and analytical.
This was why he generally preferred not to work on teams.
Stupid Justice League.
Stupid Clark Kent.
Stupid--
The bathroom door opened and Clark returned, stopping to carefully bend the bars of the cage back into place from where the impact of his body had twisted them. The Kryptonian flopped onto the bed with a sigh, all the tension gone from his body. "Mmmm," he mumbled as he tucked his legs up to match the circular shape of the bed, sounding ridiculously content and relaxed. "Night, Bruce."
He seemed to fall asleep almost instantly. Well, at least he didn't seem offended by Bruce's overshare. That was a relief.
Bruce curled his legs to take full advantage of the little space available on the round bed and focused on regulating his breath. To his annoyance, it fell nicely into the falling and rising rhythm of Clark's sleeping respiration, but it was too soothing to force out of it.
As he felt some of the tension slowly leave his body, he reflected that from above, the two of them on the circular bed must look a little like a yin-yang symbol. Light and dark curved around each other, meeting and yielding.
Of course, in the true yin-yang symbol the light always had a little bit of the darkness inside it, and the darkness a little bit of the light.
That was either a very deep or a very smutty thought, Bruce mused as he slipped into sleep.
Or perhaps both.
----
Clark and Bruce's room