*waves* So, I’ll probably post Halloween pictures tomorrow night to make up for my final disgust with my computer last night. I just couldn’t do it–every change of URL was a struggle, and deciding which windows to close to keep my computer from freezing was like playing Fuck/Marry/Kill with my Internet browser. (Fuck GoodReads, Marry Twitter/FB, Kill Washington Post–repeatedly.) Anyway– I have a SuperBat bug, and an itch for some Destiel in the future… not that I don’t want to write Cartinski anymore, but, you know… varietals.
Oh! And I took the kids to Plymouth to play with my parents today–and remembered all the reasons I loved Mom & Dad and can effectively forgive them for not being liberals. *sigh* That makes me a happier moo.
So, on we go with some SuperBat–and NightMares.
* * *
He really hated this night.
He’d smashed–literally, over the head with the side of a warehouse–an entire cadre of drug dealers who had peppered a party with “sample” packets. Not soon enough though– there had been three overdoses before the ambulances had gotten there, and he’d had to run anyway.
A group of thugs wearing Boehner and Paul Ryan masks were trying to vandalize a local Planned Parenthood, and those assholes he had to string up by their ankles. (Well, not had to, but since he was against killing people outright, it was the best he could do.)
From the BatMobile, while on his way from one crime in progress to another, he’d managed to stop a cyber-terrorist act that would have set everybody’s computer on seizure strobe.
And all the super villains were fucking out, cackling their way through the trick-or-treaters in the suburbs of Gotham, slipping razor blades into apples and snakes into licorice boxes and generally, he’d just started injecting them all with sedatives as he passed by, pretending to be an overzealous parent in full dress armor. By midnight, there were several piles of sleeping super villains, passed out on lawns, getting rousted by the police and put in the drunk tank because nobody believed the real Penguin would be harassing little kids on a holiday.
Batman was out of the patience to explain that all the super villains were little kids hyped on tragedy and resentment, and that horror was their sugar rush.
He was just tired, period.
He hauled his ass into the BatCave at the asscrack of a late dawn on November 1st, parboiled himself in the shower and crawled into the infirmary bed. He still felt dirty, and he wanted nothing to do with what was waiting for him in his room.
An hour later he sat up in his own bed, freezing, sweating, shouting, “No! No! Don’t eat the fucking candy bar! Don’t take the drug! Don’t jump off the goddamned bridge! Jesus, why don’t they listen?”
Strong arms wrapped around his shoulders and he was borne down to the mattress, while a firm male body enveloped him in comforting heat. “They heard you, Bruce. It’s okay. It’s okay–don’t worry about it. They’ll be fine.”
“They never listen,” Bruce whispered brokenly against Clark’s naked chest. “They never listen.” He fell back asleep–for five minutes. Then ten. Then a whole half-an-hour. At one point, he lay awake, in one of those horrible waking-comas, where he kept trying to sit up but his eyes wouldn’t even open.
He heard two voices, Alfred’s and Clark’s, whispering just outside the curtains around his bed.
“Every year, Alfred?”
“Since he was a small child, sir–even before his parents were killed.”
“This is…”
“Master Grayson started leaving town. This day broke his heart.”
“I’m stronger than Master Grayson,” Clark muttered, and Bruce felt himself relax into sleep.
Yes, Clark. You are stronger, you are smarter, and you have the biggest dick. We all know it. Brag some more… Even as the thought trailed off, his stomach clenched in fear of the next time he jerked awake, sweating, consumed with the things he couldn’t undo.
A warm cloth moved along his limbs, the heat saturating his skin, bergamot and amber permeated his dreams. He grumbled as the cloth was moved along his chest, under his arms, around his neck.
Between the crevice of his buttocks and thighs. Around his genitals. Then down his legs.
Strong fingers worked the muscles of his calves, his feet, his ass, his lumbar, his shoulders, his neck. By the time he was rolled over–again–those hands and fingers were working insistently along his arms, and his entire body felt limp and wrung out, a used dishcloth, a scrap of soiled silk, crumpled on the bed.
And he wasn’t asleep.
“What time is it?” he mumbled.
“Does it matter?”
“Bruce Wayne has a meeting at–“
“A time that’s been canceled,” Clark said, his tone brooking no argument.
Bruce managed to open his eyes–barely–and glare. “We agreed, no inter–“
“Interference of The Justice League in Bruce Wayne’s business matters. Sue me. I lied. Now either shut up about it or get up, get out of bed, and call the damned meeting if it’s so fucking important.”
Bruce couldn’t move. “You’re swearing a lot,” he muttered.
“Only since living with you.”
“Heh heh heh heh…” He was naked and clean, and Clark’s hands were on his skin. That terrible, chest pressing anxiety wasn’t fading, really, but it was… taking a step back, and letting his animal needs be met. Speaking of…
“Sit up,” Clark ordered, pulling at his shoulders. “You haven’t eaten in forty-eight hours. Time for soup!”
Bruce glared at him. “Who told?” he snapped.
“Alfred–and I took your blood sugar before I went with the sponge bath.”
“Because…”
“I’m obsessive about my fragile human,” Clark snapped. “And you wouldn’t let me help, remember? ‘Gotham is my business, you go save the world, I’ll save my city’. Ring any bells, you obsessive fuckhead?”
“No,” Bruce grumped. “I don’t remember that. Must be brain damage from my low blood sug–” The bite of stew shoved in his mouth wasn’t unwelcome.
“Liar.”
“I’m not ly–ump!”
He glared as Superman, leader of the Justice League and multiple-time savior of Metropolis and Planet Earth, fed him soup like he was an infant.
But the more he woke up, the more he recognized this mood–Clark wasn’t just trying to comfort him, he was trying to save Bruce, just like he saved everything else.
Well, it was what you did, when you were Superman, right?
“I’m done,” he said, as Clark tried to scrape the bowl. “I’ve eaten, I”m fine. I can get up now.”
Clark continued with the spoon until Bruce saw little bits of enamel peeling off with the dull edge of the good silver. With a sigh, he put his hands out and stilled Clark’s restless bowl-scraping.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice soft. “I’ve eaten. You can come back to bed now.”
Clark nodded, not looking at him, and set the bowl on the tray. He was dressed like any man who’d been wandering the house in the morning–in sleep pants and a T-shirt–and he took nothing off as he slid in next to Bruce. Bruce rested his cheek on that broad, Fortress of Solitude chest and picked restlessly at the cotton under his cheek.
“Take it off,” he ordered.
Clark ripped it down the center, and Bruce let out a half-laugh, laying his head down on the smooth-skinned muscle that protected the strongest heart on earth. He closed his eyes and listened to that heart beat under his ear for moment.
“Strong,” he said.
Clark ran his hand along his back. “Very,” he murmured.
“You’ve done your job,” Bruce said, smiling a little. “You can get up and go–“
“What haunts you?”
Confused images ran behind his eyes, grownups in masks, overloud laughter, the screaming of children, a still, floating form, water closing over his face, a broken mask and a scarred mouth underneath… pain… violation… fear…
“I don’t even remember,” Bruce confessed, embarrassed about this, embarrassed because of a nightmare or a child’s fear, so deeply embedded in his mind that he couldn’t root it out and kill it himself. He owned his neuroses, dammit– he wore them on his body as armor and drove around in them like a giant fucking tank.
“Tomorrow then,” Clark said, running that comforting hand down his back.
Bruce was sated and fed, and still tied, but he purred and ground up against that super-body, unashamed of his hunger.
Clark laughed softly and turned, taking his mouth–but not gently.
The kiss was not gentle, and his hands on Bruce’s body were hard, demanding–almost bruising. Bruce stayed boneless, pliant, liquid, as Clark made his body ready, spreading his thighs and nipping at his nipples, squeezing BRuce’s cock until it was hard and weeping with need. When Clark slid down the bed and slid two spit-slicked fingers into Bruce’s entrance, Bruce gasped–and allowed.
Bruce, the top, the dominator, the one who took the strongest man in the solar system and bent him to his will, bent, opened, and allowed.
Clark thrust into him, aggressive and commanding, and Bruce let the pain wash over his body, the way pain always did. This pain was followed by pleasure, followed by possession, followed by the nightmares, tearing like tattered flags of childhood, disintegrating into wind of relentless sex.
His orgasm swept over him, possessing him completely, a man’s body reacting to his lover’s complete domination, and Clark’s grunt and howl of completion filled him from the inside. Bruce’s neuroses burned away, his memories burned away, his ghosts disappeared like smoke.
Cock and ass and come… flesh and blood and bone…
Painful twisted love, unfurling in his loins, in his body, sending him to sleep for one precious moment, whole and as undaunted as a newborn.
*
Clark didn’t clean them up when they were done–Bruce had fallen asleep as Clark panted into the hollow of his shoulder and ear anyway. Instead, Clark slid to the side and rolled Bruce over, so he could spoon his shorter, stockier other half, and smooth his sweaty hair from his forehead.
“So haunted,” he whispered. “So broken. It’s like you were broken and haunted for me alone to fix. Why would the world do that? Why would God do that? I don’t understand.”
“Because,” Bruce said, and dammit how he could fake sleep so convincingly like that, Clark would never know. “I like it when you fix me. It tells me God exists. And the ghosts can scream all they want, but you will keep me safe.”
Oh…that's…yes.