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Bruce and Clark are taking it slow.
Relative to the cliché of the third-date milestone, anyway. By their own standards, they've made the jump to FTL.
But then Bruce supposes that shouldn't be a surprise. It's always been that way with them: eighteen long months circling each other before they'd even come face to face, before they'd even looked into each other's eyes and shaken hands—and then, within the span of a single night, they were smashing each other into walls and then fighting at each other's shoulders, before Bruce had been left standing there watching Clark die. Next, another long cold span of quiet, Clark lying in his grave and Bruce alone, before the day Bruce had brought him to life again; before Clark had thrown him into a car, left, come back, saved Bruce and the League and the world. Before Bruce had stood with him outside his mother's house, offered him an olive branch and a cautiously calibrated smile and spread a hand across the back of his shoulder, and felt—
Another year and a half, since then. Closing what might once have been an uncrossable distance an inch at a time, a thousand tiny moments spent talking, arguing, saving each other's lives, sitting up late at night in the dark together without speaking at all; adding up, at last, to one more impossible leap. A long painful day, a near miss, and Clark's unsteady hand on Bruce's face, Clark's eyes huge and blue and searching, Clark's teeth in his own lip—and then Clark had kissed him, altered the axis of their shared universe all over again.
And now they're taking their time. Allowing themselves to adjust to it. Bruce can admit, if only to himself, that he's working in part off the theory, the faint but urgent hope, that familiarity will breed at least a little bit of contempt: that if he spends enough time plastered against Clark from chest to thigh with their clothes on, with his tongue in Clark's mouth and his hands in Clark's hair, then perhaps if he's lucky he won't combust spontaneously the first time he actually takes Clark's shirt off or shoves his hands down Clark's pants.
He doesn't feel any need to rush, either. The kissing is, in and of itself, ecstatically wonderful.
Bruce Wayne kisses people reasonably often. It's part of the portrait Bruce is required to paint. But the other part of that portrait is that it's rarely the same person more than once, rarely for longer than the amount of time required to conduct an inadvisable hookup in an opera house's bathrooms, a club's not-entirely-dark back hallway, a less-than-fully-concealed alcove in the dim unused side gallery at an art show.
It isn't like this. Like Clark, over and over and over again—looking at him across the table at a League meeting, across Bruce Wayne's desk during an interview, and knowing he'll sway into Bruce's hands later, seat himself across Bruce's thighs and cup his hands around the nape of Bruce's neck and suck on Bruce's tongue for half an hour. Familiarity breeds something, though Bruce can't claim it's contempt: the awareness that Clark likes it when Bruce rubs a thumb up behind the shell of his ear, will tilt his head back with artless weakness to let Bruce lick the line of his throat, will pant into Bruce's mouth even though he doesn't need to breathe, simply because Bruce has worked him up enough that he does it subconsciously, psychosomatically.
They've been at it for a good three weeks, every spare moment they can find together, dragging each other into chairs or onto sofas, pinning each other up against desks and tabletops, trading kisses, when it starts happening.
The first time, Bruce doesn't think twice about it. He's got Clark's head tipped up at just the right angle, is running his tongue in long slow strokes along Clark's that make Clark shiver against him, and Clark breaks away to breathe, admits in Bruce's ear that he's tired.
Not physically, obviously. That's functionally impossible, not least because it's been sunny all day. But Bruce is aware that sometimes stress, mental and emotional exhaustion, combine to create essentially the same feeling, for Clark.
It's not as if it's a problem. He slows the pace further still, turns them over so Clark is lying on him instead of holding him up, runs his hands in soft soothing strokes down the line of Clark's back. Another half-hour, and Clark's asleep; Bruce lies still, consciously relaxed, as comfortable a surface as possible. Far from a hardship.
The second time isn't as easily dismissed. A few days later, and Clark reacts with an indrawn breath, a flinch away instead of pressure toward, when Bruce slides a thumb up into that spot beneath and behind his ear. He flushes almost immediately, makes a sheepish face. "Sorry, sorry. I've been—I don't know. Maybe it's a solar flare or something. Everything's felt kind of oversensitive. Sore."
Not something he's complained of before, or at least not to Bruce. But all Bruce does about it, in the moment, is make a mental note to confirm or refute Clark's hypothesis, investigate whether there are any other meteorological phenomena that could explain what Clark's experiencing. And then he raises an eyebrow, as if considering, and murmurs, "Oversensitive. Hmm."
The next twenty minutes are taken up by choosing strategic spans of skin to lick, from Clark's lips to his jaw to his throat, blowing soft air across them and asking how it feels, whether it's too much or not enough, and listening to his increasingly inarticulate answers. Twenty minutes well spent.
It isn't until later, when Bruce can't turn up any correlation between Clark's symptom and solar activity of any kind—or anything else, the ozone layer, atmospheric pressure, the closest auroral activity, fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field—that he decides a certain degree of concern is warranted. But even then, it's not much. Clark seems fine overall, and a single day's skin sensitivity isn't a lot to go on.
And then it becomes a pattern. It escalates.
They're kissing again. Clark started it this time, and Bruce is pinned against a wall by his weight, the barest strength exerted by his hands around Bruce's wrists, and not thinking about much of anything except how sore his mouth is, how red it must be, how little he wants to stop.
Clark pauses, just for a second. Bruce manages to blink his stunned eyes open, and sees the way his throat is working. "Sorry," Clark says. "Sorry, I—"
He pushes forward, kisses Bruce again, and for perhaps a minute, they sink easily back into it.
And then Clark draws away again—further, this time, letting go of Bruce's arm to flatten a hand against the wall, wetting his lips. His brow's furrowed, just barely, and it's only a hunch, but there's something about the expression on his face, a certain vague inward-looking discontent, that leads Bruce to say carefully, "Clark, are you feeling all right?"
"I don't know," Clark admits. "I've been tired, I told you that. It happens sometimes. I didn't think it was important. But this week, it's been—I don't know," he says again. "I'm uncomfortable, sometimes, and I don't know why."
"Uncomfortable," Bruce repeats.
"Like part of me is moving when it isn't supposed to be, like it's going to crawl out of me, and the rest can't catch up. Lying down helps, but closing my eyes makes it worse."
"Nausea," Bruce suggests automatically.
"Nausea." Clark echoes the word in an absent sort of tone, without any particular emphasis or inflection. And then something flashes across his face, and his eyes widen; he takes a long step backward, letting go of Bruce entirely, abruptly looking downward—toward his feet? His shirt? Bruce has no idea. "Oh, I—oh," he says blankly. "I have to, um. I have to go. Right now."
"Okay," Bruce says, automatic, as even and calm as he can make it. By the time the word is out of his mouth, Clark is gone anyway, leaving a rush of air in his wake.
He doesn't come back.
Bruce doesn't even begin to put the pieces together until the next morning.
He's preoccupied, that's all. Not by Clark's departure; that would be unreasonable. It's entirely possible that Clark heard something, saw something, and couldn't take the time to explain it to Bruce. Emergencies happen, and they happen to Superman more often than they happen to most people. Granted, none of his own monitors, alerts, or twenty-four-hour news scrapers had caught any disaster of the kind of magnitude he was expecting, but—that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Clark will turn up again, sooner or later, even if it's only to deal with League business. He'll tell Bruce what happened. Everything will be fine.
He has work to do, anyway. Repairs he's been putting off, potential design advancements he's been thinking over that he should pin down, draft, evaluate.
Everything will be fine.
But he is still—considering the issue, in the back of his mind, when he descends into the Cave in the morning with a fresh cup of coffee.
He doesn't know what precisely leads it to occur to him. Something about the combination of apparent symptoms, repeating them to himself: fatigue, oversensitivity, skin soreness, nausea. And in retrospect, the way Clark had moved, that quick downward glance along his own body, nags at Bruce. The angle of it, and something about the look in his eyes at that moment, a certain almost unfocused quality. As if he'd been looking past himself—
As if he'd been looking through himself. As if he'd been looking inside himself.
Fatigue. Soreness. Nausea.
The worst thing about the moment it snaps into place isn't anything about the idea that Clark is, quite plausibly, pregnant. Not in and of itself.
It is the idiotic, selfish, agonizing stab of awareness that if Bruce is right—it has nothing to do with him.
He and Clark have been necking like teenagers at every opportunity. But that's all. They're still tiptoeing in circles around second base.
There must be someone else.
He sits there, holding his mug very gently, very steadily, the dark surface of the coffee steaming, without ripples.
Take it apart. Consider all the angles. Strategize.
If Bruce is right—he doesn't know that he is. Perhaps he's wrong. Perhaps Clark will call him in an hour, will fly down over the lake and meet Bruce at the end of the dock, and explain sheepishly that he caught a Kryptonian stomach flu.
And even if he is right, anything is possible. Perhaps it's over, already was when Clark kissed him or was precipitated into its end—egotistical, surely, reckless optimism he hasn't earned, but technically the chance may exist.
Or—
It isn't as though he and Clark have talked about what they're doing. Not in any meaningful detail. Bruce simply stumbled into it, the world rearranging itself around him without warning, as Clark has so often made it do. If Bruce has made unwarranted and unproven assumptions that Clark is—that Clark is feeling anything close to the kinds of things Bruce—
It isn't Clark's fault. He can't act as though it's Clark's fault. They've made no formal commitments, no specific promises. He has no right whatsoever to feel eviscerated, by slow torturous inches, at the idea that Clark has been sleeping with someone else all along.
And if he's going to feel it anyway, then at a bare minimum, he can't make that Clark's problem.
He'll be calm. He'll be reasonable. And whatever Clark's explanation turns out to be, whatever it is he wants to ask of Bruce in response, Bruce will listen, undistraught, attentive, and give Clark the best answer he can.
If it's illness, a Kryptonian stage of metamorphosis—Christ, if it is Bruce's fault after all, a flaw in the mother box or an impurity in the genesis fluid, that the resurrection is running out—
No. Stop. The point is, the last thing Clark will need in that case is a heap of unfounded and melodramatic accusations shoved in his face.
And if it is exactly what the cold heavy feeling in Bruce's gut says it is, then Clark will have something difficult to say to him, one way or another. That he thinks the baby would be better off with both of the biological parents, that he's going to try to make it work; that he isn't ready, that he's going to ask the ship to help him get rid of it, that he does or doesn't want Bruce there with him. Any of those things will be hard enough for Clark to talk to him about without Bruce making it harder.
By the time Clark does show up, Bruce is ready for him.
The perimeter alarms go off. Clark could speed past them fast enough, fly high enough, to prevent it; that he's let it happen says he wants Bruce to know he's coming, wants Bruce to have a minute's warning.
Bruce accepts it, uses it, and is seated on the dock, cross-legged, with a second mug of coffee for Clark, by the time Clark is sinking low through the last of the morning mist over the lake.
He stops before his feet have actually touched down, floating nervously in the air. His cheeks are flushed, just a little, from the wind; his hair is loose, a curling mess, no hint of Superman in it. The rising mist catches the warm morning light, holds it, framing him perfectly, as if Bruce weren't already profoundly well aware of how beautiful he is.
"Bruce," he says softly.
"Clark," Bruce says, very evenly, and pushes the full mug of coffee another two inches in the direction of the end of the dock—of Clark.
Clark seems willing to take it as the peace offering it is. He comes to rest on the end of the dock, steps forward and then sinks to his knees, sitting back on his heels, folding himself up cautiously. He picks up the mug, with a weak smile of acknowledgment, but doesn't drink out of it.
Maybe the nausea's back again.
"Bruce, um," Clark repeats, and then stalls out—shifts his coffee from one hand to the other, and then back. "I know that you talk to the ship sometimes. That you must've done some research, or something, before you brought me back from the dead."
Bruce blinks. Not one of the opening sallies he'd braced himself for.
"Yes, that's right," he agrees.
"So you, uh. You know a lot about Kryptonian biology?"
"The amount I needed to know to get the job done," Bruce says, and then bites down on the inside of his cheek; the wrong tack to take no matter what Clark's here to tell him, reminding Clark how relentless he'd been, how inexorably invested, even before he'd actually known Clark well at all.
But Clark's mouth quirks. Clark—smiles, and not the wan thin way he'd done it deliberately a moment ago. Absent, even fond.
"Sure, of course. Mr. Shortest Distance Between Two Points," he murmurs, and then bites his lip, looking down. "But you know about the genesis fluid, the pods. How they were used."
"Kryptonians had stopped reproducing naturally," Bruce hears himself say. This is it, it must be. The segue. It really is—Clark's actually—
He controls the wave of it, the sudden swell, the dizzying mixed signals of his own bewildered heartsore amygdala; the undeniable fascination of it, the whole idea that Clark could be—that Clark is—and the raw gutting agony of the inevitable corollary, that it wasn't Bruce and probably never will be, that Clark is about to tell him as much to his face.
"Right," Clark is saying, grimacing a little. "Well, so the thing is, they didn't get there all at once. They didn't switch from—from doing it the old-fashioned way straight to the pods and the genetic engineering."
Bruce blinks again, twice, three times. Another left turn he hadn't anticipated. He feels a vague sense of strain. He's not going to be able to handle this conversation if it takes more than about five minutes, ten at the outside. If Clark keeps wandering down the garden path, Bruce is going to have to find a way to excuse himself, to figure out how to fit his heart back inside his chest somewhere where Clark isn't looking at him while he does it.
"There were stages. They were trying to increase their efficiency, minimize uncertainty. Make it faster, easier."
"Can't blame them," Bruce hears himself say, artificially light.
Clark can tell; it shows instantly, the uncertainty returning to his expression, his gaze flicking worriedly back and forth across Bruce's face. "Yeah. Um, but it's—increasing efficiency, for them, was about, uh. About minimizing the need for—"
He stalls out again, face pink, flustered.
No. Surely not.
"For sexual contact," Bruce says.
He isn't sure how. He doesn't feel as though he's breathing. Because it's not—there's no way Clark's actually trying to tell him—
"My parents didn't use the Codex to make me," Clark blurts. "But that doesn't mean they went all the way back to square one. They were just using the next-least-efficient method, the one their bodies were still designed to accommodate. Which meant all they needed was for one of them to, uh. To internalize a genetic sample from the other. Any kind of genetic sample."
Bruce swallows. He has no idea why; his throat feels bone dry. He's dimly grateful for the mug in his hands, that clutching it is allowing him to minimize the tremor in his hands.
"Any kind of genetic sample," he repeats. "Including saliva."
And Clark looks abruptly, beautifully, bonelessly relieved, of all things. As if Bruce has followed exactly where Clark meant to lead him; as if Clark is grateful.
"Yeah, exactly."
It is, of course, a staggering work of genetic engineering in and of itself, to design such a thing, to make it function in a body in which the capacity had never evolved. That it should be possible to accept any available genetic material of a compatible type, to process it independently into a sample that could be recombined with the host's own to create a unique zygote—
With any host's own, apparently. Bruce has never previously had cause to wonder whether it was Clark's biological mother or his biological father who'd carried him; it hadn't even crossed his mind.
But for all that Bruce can achieve a basic understanding of the technical principles involved in such a thing, it's still an undeniably striking thought. Clark, like some sort of fairy child: made of distant starlight, born from a kiss.
He realizes distantly that he's been sitting there staring silently for a good twenty seconds; that Clark has been sitting there equally silently, shifting his weight, still distinctly pink in the face.
"And for the past month I've been sticking my tongue down your throat," Bruce says for him, "and contributing all the genetic samples you could possibly have needed."
Clark flushes harder. "I know we haven't even," he says hurriedly, and then grimaces and switches gears. "I mean, we haven't, um, talked about this. About us. And there's no way you could've known there was a chance that just kissing me would. Uh."
"Knock you up," Bruce murmurs.
He can't help it. Something strange and light and warm is unfolding itself beneath his skin, all the cold weight he'd been counting on to keep him grounded utterly gone; and the look on Clark's face after he says it, the way he laughs helplessly and covers his face with his hands at the same time, is more than worth it.
"Oh, god," Clark says into his palms. "God, I thought you were going to—I don't know, I couldn't even figure out how I was going to say it—"
"Clark," Bruce says, and he sets his mug down, leans forward and rolls his weight to his shins so he can reach out and draw one of Clark's hands out of his way.
He kisses Clark's jaw, first, and Clark sucks in an unsteady breath and doesn't stop him, so he kisses Clark's mouth next—slides his tongue, newly aware exactly how daring it is, over the flat of Clark's lip, and Clark laughs shakily through his nose, takes Bruce's face in his hands, and kisses back, a sweet soft second, before he lets Bruce break it.
"I'm not saying it's not a lot," Bruce murmurs against Clark's cheek. "I thought I'd at least get to sleep with you before I had to worry about something like this, I'll grant you. But—"
There are some things that are difficult to say, difficult to find the words for. But Clark made the effort, for Bruce, to tell Bruce—to tell Bruce about their baby. And this is the least Bruce owes him in return.
"But I would. I will. It's up to you—of course it's up to you. But if you want me for this, for anything, then you have me. You already have me."
It's not everything. It's not half of everything.
But it's enough. It must be enough, to judge by the slow soft light that comes into Clark's face then, the way he bites his lip, the way he's looking at Bruce. He finds the nape of Bruce's neck with one hand, draws Bruce in to rest their foreheads together. "Yes," he whispers. "Yes, jesus, I want you. For this, for everything. I didn't know—I didn't know what had happened, what could've happened, until the ship explained it to me, until I knew it really had been you, and god, I was so glad—"
He chokes himself off, catches Bruce's jaw with his thumb and tips Bruce's face in and kisses him again.
And apparently, Bruce thinks dimly, he's already pregnant—so it can hardly do any harm now, to push him backward onto the dock in the sunlight, and lick his mouth open, and kiss him back.