Chapter Text
Bruce Wayne had, technically, never been inside Metropolis City Hall.
Batman had broken into it perhaps half a dozen times. But always at night, and it had certainly never looked like this before; so, in a sense, the way Bruce was peering around himself, eyeing the Special Forces personnel in their tac vests lined up along the hallways, wasn't entirely feigned.
The US military was everywhere—unsurprising, under the circumstances, but nevertheless uncomfortable. Granted, he had the reassurance of certainty that he was not being assessed as any kind of threat, not like this, not as Bruce Wayne. But there was still a certain tension in it: the sheer number of soldiers, the tactical effort that would be required to neutralize them and the lack of the majority of the equipment that would have made it possible; deliberate, obviously, because he could never have come here in the suit, and yet some part of his hindbrain was persistently aware of it, threatened by it, pointlessly and continuously sounding the alarm.
He should, perhaps, be grateful that the staging area that had been chosen for this was Metropolis, and not Gotham. Moving through his own territory like this would have been even more difficult to tolerate.
He was escorted to one particular office. Externally, unremarkable; under normal circumstances, judging by the signage on the door, it served as the workspace of one MAISIE PETERS, MAYORAL AIDE.
But when Bruce was ushered inside, after a fifteen-minute wait, it wasn't to meet a mayor's aide.
He raised his eyebrows, hands in his pockets. "Maisie," he said, with a grin. "I have to say, you look a little different than I'd expected."
Lieutenant General Calvin Swanwick, head of United States Northern Command, gave Bruce a level, unamused look. "Mr. Wayne," he said. "Please tell me you know why you're here."
Bruce shrugged. "Won the lottery, and first-place prize is the US government marries me off to an alien."
Not untrue, as long as you meant the word "lottery" approximately the way Shirley Jackson had defined it.
Swanwick's expression had been flat, unyielding. But something about that answer, about the silence after Bruce gave it, seemed to mean something to him; his eyes narrowed sharply, his gaze suddenly intent.
"That's about the size of it," he said, more slowly. "Frankly, Mr. Wayne, I was surprised to see your name in the running, and not in a good way. I did not and still do not believe you to be an appropriate choice, let alone the best option available. Unfortunately, I have been overruled."
Fair enough. No doubt there had been plenty of highly qualified individuals on the list—diplomats, ambassadors, experts in cross-cultural communication and psychology; people who could have been trusted to conduct themselves with care, to put effort into observing the aliens and adapting their behavior accordingly, to never speak without thinking.
But, ultimately, Bruce hadn't had to pull as many strings as hard as he might have expected in order to guarantee the results he had needed. Because the flip side of choosing someone competent for this was the risk that they would use that competence in other ways: would take the initiative, would try to play a meaningful role in any ensuing negotiations—would want to do something that mattered.
And that would never be a concern with Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne was a useful idiot. Bruce Wayne wasn't going to be prying, wasn't going to learn anything he wasn't supposed to learn—Bruce Wayne was barely going to be paying attention at all. Bruce Wayne would be, at best, a helpful distraction, drawing press attention in the ways he always drew press attention and not in ways that were going to create serious problems behind the scenes. Problems in general, sure. But they would be, ultimately, superficial problems, easily smoothed over, if they were created by Bruce Wayne acting the way he always did in public.
Swanwick couldn't be blamed for wishing he'd been allowed to pick someone who would at least act like a responsible adult. But there were reasons Bruce's name had been in the running at all, and there were reasons it had stayed there.
"Not much fun at parties, huh, Maisie?" Bruce said aloud.
Swanwick didn't blink. He was still—watching Bruce, in an odd, focused way Bruce couldn't possibly have earned.
But then Swanwick was taking this seriously, as seriously as it deserved; little wonder, perhaps, that he'd be straining himself searching for signs that Bruce was capable of doing the same.
"This is a matter of the gravest possible importance to national security," Swanwick said after a moment. "To national security, to global security, and potentially to the fate of this planet. The Kryptonians are an essentially unknown quantity, with whom the people of Earth hope to negotiate an alliance because quite frankly we have no other option here. Marrying one of us to one of them is the only way for us to get our foot in the door, according to their laws. I know why I'm here, Mr. Wayne. But what in the hell made you agree to this?"
Bruce shrugged again, made a face as if to suggest he hadn't really thought about it that hard. "Well, aliens popped up on our doorstep, right? I'm just as curious as everybody else. I guess I figured—why not? Plus, I've always thought getting tied up and probed by little green men sounded kind of fun," he added, in a low suggestive tone, and winked.
It was easy, to make it meaningless. Almost comforting, in a certain sense, to be able to put so much space between the words he was saying, the way he was saying them, and the truth.
(—the memory, strung-taut panic that had been almost a kind of agony, when that ship had appeared—when the power to the Cave, the Cave, had cut out without warning, when the back-up batteries had utterly failed to kick in; when suddenly two dozen screens, every monitor he had, the consoles for every scanner and analyzer, the phone he'd drawn from his pocket, had lit up at the same time with that message: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. The fractured shape of a face, for some time, one of our kind has lived among you—)
(—intolerable. Unbearable. Ten thousand times worse for having come so utterly out of nowhere, for having been unexpected; unexpected, the way nothing ever was, the way nothing was allowed to be. He could not have permitted it to continue. There had been no other way forward. He had had to find some way to put himself in control, to make it deliberate, strategic, a plan: he would place himself in the middle of it. He would learn for himself what these aliens wanted, what their ultimate goals might be; whether they were telling the truth about why they had come, about any of it—whether, if their intentions were nefarious after all, there was anything that could be done to stop them, and if there was, then he would have put himself in a position to make sure it was done without hesitation—)
Swanwick was watching him, silent, strange and assessing. Bruce cleared his throat, aimed a lone finger gun and squinted a little, said, "So, is that it? Do I get to meet the alien now, or what?"
"As soon as I'm convinced you understand the terms of this arrangement," Swanwick said evenly. "The Kryptonians do not consider any agreement valid or legally binding unless it is accompanied by a marriage between two or more members of the entities involved in that agreement. To them, it's a way to demonstrate mutual commitment to a particular outcome. The marriage ceremony is followed by a trial period of twenty days, which applies to both the marriage and the agreement symbolized by it; if, at the end of that period, all involved entities having abided by the terms, the agreement remains acceptable, then both the agreement and the marriage are considered formalized—permanent.
"Make no mistake, Mr. Wayne. Technically speaking, nothing can prevent you—or the Kryptonian you are about to walk in there and marry—from calling this thing quits, at the twenty-day mark. But I would strongly urge you to pretend otherwise. You will be causing far, far worse problems than the ones you are supposed to be solving if you tap out at that point. If you agree to proceed and walk out of this office, you have committed to marrying whichever Kryptonian is waiting for you out there, and to staying married to them for as long as they are willing to put up with you. Is that clear?"
"You got it, man," Bruce agreed, with a thoroughly half-assed salute. "You need me to sign a waiver or something?"
Swanwick sighed through his nose. "You already did, Mr. Wayne," he said, and he stood there just looking at Bruce for a moment—but then, at last, he nodded toward the door where Bruce's escort had been left waiting, and Bruce opened it, and stepped out.
At the end of the hall, there was a courtroom.
Bruce's escort, four soldiers in even heavier tactical gear than the average in evidence within City Hall today, guided him to it without pausing. Two of them stepped forward to open the double doors; Bruce said, "Hey, thanks," and kept his hands in his pockets, kept the look on his face bland and amiable, as he went through.
And Bruce Wayne was, fortunately, allowed to be curious. Bruce Wayne was allowed to stare around himself with interest, as long as he never appeared to have reached particularly insightful conclusions about what exactly he was looking at.
The gallery was full. Almost all Kryptonians in attendance, judging by the partially transparent masked helmets on nearly every head—to allow them to breathe, Bruce knew, because Kryptonian physiology was capable of adjusting to Earth's atmosphere, but it was an uncomfortable process, painful, disorienting.
There was a handful of humans, though. Lined up against the back wall—that was probably mostly press, though there was only one visible camera present. But a scattering in the first row of the gallery, too: an older woman, formally dressed, gray-haired, who turned in her seat to look at Bruce and offered him an incongruously encouraging smile; a man, perhaps in his thirties at the most, redheaded and a little overweight, shifting nervously in place; another woman, younger, dark-haired, strikingly pretty.
And ahead of him, arrayed before the empty judge's bench, more Kryptonians. Five, in more of those semi-transparent helmets—all of them older, faces lined, bearing regal. Important somehow, no doubt, and the one standing forward of the other four was, presumably, the designated officiant. And—
And the last person standing there stood bareheaded, as if human. But Bruce knew better.
That was him. Kal-El. The one who had come first, who had been living on Earth in secret for over a year, who could breathe its air unassisted. He had been by far the most visible of any of the Kryptonians—when his people had come, when their ship had appeared over the midwestern United States, he had stepped forward to meet them, and since then he'd been addressing the media semi-regularly, speaking in clear and relatively colloquial English with only the barest trace of an accent.
Bruce hadn't known what to expect, hadn't been able to gauge whether the Kryptonians would make their selection with reference to the same kinds of criteria Bruce might have used. He had refused to assume he could predict them, refused to make so basic a mistake.
But it did make sense that they had picked Kal-El for this. He was the one who'd been living on Earth, after all, the one who'd learned enough about humanity—or at least about the fraction of it that made up the population of Kansas—to blend in, until he'd chosen not to anymore. He was the best-prepared to take on a human spouse. And—
Bruce had seen him a hundred times, a thousand. In every broadcast covering the aliens; in the selection of video Bruce had recorded, collected, reviewed repeatedly, the better to glean any information he could from the way the aliens moved, spoke, stood. He had taken a superficial accounting of Kal-El's features: blue eyes, dark hair, a gentle dent in the chin; a clean, sharp, solid face.
But it was, irrationally enough, different—to be standing here in the same room with him, in person. To be facing him, walking toward him.
He was—he met fundamental standards for human beauty, for baseline attractiveness. Plausible, that the Kryptonians might be well aware of it; that that was why he had been sent, why he had been selected to live among humans in the first place.
And of course he no longer needed a sealed breathing apparatus like the rest of them. Pointless, to put one on him for no reason. But nevertheless, there was something that seemed almost too convenient about it: the psychological effect of it, that Kal-El, standing there, looked so very normal compared to the rest of them—practically human. Practically comprehensible, practically relatable, when in reality he was still just as alien as the rest of them.
Bruce refused to forget it.
He forced himself to observe the alien thoroughly, objectively. Kal-El stood tall, almost as tall as Bruce himself. Everything about him looked strong, beautifully shaped, practically carven: the line of his throat, the bones of his face, the yoke of his shoulders and the curl of his hair. He was wearing a kind of tunic, long sleeves slashed like something out of the 1600s, fine dark fabric, with the lower half clearly some kind of robe or skirt, falling almost to the floor. He was—
He was watching Bruce, looking back intently, something in his face suggestive of a tentative, hopeful warmth.
Probably an impression he'd learned to create, during his time pretending to be human.
The soldiers accompanying Bruce came to a halt. Bruce had reached the swinging door that would let him pass the railing and enter the well of the court.
"This part's all me, huh," Bruce said, half under his breath, and reached for it, pushed it wide and stepped through.
And as he did it—Kal-El strode forward, away from the officiant, to meet him.
"Hello," the alien said.
His voice was low, soft, his tone quiet.
"Hi there," Bruce said, and lifted one hand, waggled his fingers in an utterly pointless wave. "I've heard of speed dating, but this is pushing it."
Kal-El blinked.
"Two minutes to chat, right in front of the altar?"
"I—I'm sorry," Kal-El said, carefully. "I would have liked to be able to give you more time, but—"
"No, hey, not up to you, right?" Bruce said. "I get it. Relax."
And Bruce Wayne could be flexible, in his inability to care too much about anything. He could be even-tempered, in his unwillingness to take anything seriously if he could avoid it. But there were some parts of his personality Bruce couldn't realistically compromise, if he was going to stay recognizably Bruce Wayne in front of an audience. And if there was a line here, if there was a way in which Bruce Wayne could overstep within two minutes that Kal-El would find so unacceptable he would reject this marriage before it could even be performed, then Bruce needed to know what it was.
"Besides, I'm not exactly complaining," he added, and gave Kal-El a significantly more obvious onceover. "You clean up great."
"I," Kal-El said, blankly, and swallowed. "Thank you, Mr. Wayne?"
So somebody had told him who he'd be dealing with, at some point along the way; or he'd used his Kryptonian powers and found it out for himself. And whether he'd known what to expect, or he was simply difficult to perturb, the end result was the same. A relief—conduct that fell within the bounds of Bruce Wayne on his best behavior was evidently not intolerably rude by Kryptonian standards. That meant Bruce probably wasn't going to be able to offend Kal-El so badly that he would call this off, which was going to make Bruce's job that much easier.
Bruce raised his eyebrows. "Uh, you're literally about to marry me. Call me Bruce."
"Bruce," Kal-El repeated obediently.
"How are you feeling about this whole thing, anyway? Pretty major life decisions getting made here, am I right?"
Kal-El's expression flickered—but only in confusion, uncertainty; not so much as a hint of anger, or even a disgust response, showing through no matter where Bruce looked. "I'm—honored," the alien said, soft. "Grateful, to be chosen to do this for my people, and grateful you're here. You, all of you, did not have to do any of this. You could have turned us away. Instead, you promise us refuge, safety on your world, and follow our ways instead of your own so we can trust that we may believe you."
"Well, isn't that sweet," Bruce said, grinning.
(—turned us away—as if they hadn't shown up in a spaceship, one that was the size of a small city; as if Kal-El himself hadn't calmly demonstrated the practically unthinkable abilities he claimed Earth's sun had given to him, in front of a hundred TV cameras and half the command structure of the US military, a display that had made it perfectly clear that he in and of himself posed a staggering threat to the entire planet, and there were almost a hundred more just like him on that fucking ship—)
"All right, come on. Let's make honest men out of each other, shall we?"
"I—am being as honest as I know how," Kal-El said uncertainly.
"Yeah, right, no, it's—it's just a thing we say, here on Earth," Bruce said, because he'd learned how not to choke on his own sense of irony a long, long time ago; and then he braced himself, smiled into the alien's face and took him by the hand, so that when they stepped forward, toward the judge's bench again, they would do it together.
After all, it would look better that way.
Kal meant what he'd said. He was grateful.
Perhaps in more ways than he had admitted; perhaps Bruce Wayne had known as much, somehow, had perceived it, and that was what he had meant, when he'd said they should make themselves honest.
But Kal was honored. To have been chosen for this, to be able to do something so inarguably substantial to save all that remained of his people—because marriage meant something to the people of Earth, Kal knew that much for certain. It joined people, joined families; that was what it did on Krypton, too.
(—had done. Krypton wasn't—Krypton didn't—)
And if he could do that here, could join his people to humanity in a way that mattered to humans just as much as it did to Kryptonians, that alone would be worth all he had done, all he had borne, in order to make it possible.
Bruce Wayne talked quickly. He was confusing. Already, in two minutes, he'd done things Kal didn't understand, said things Kal couldn't make sense out of. But he was here, and he'd agreed to this, agreed to marry Kal; he'd called Kal sweet, and something in his face had suggested he hadn't quite meant it the way it seemed, but that still wasn't a bad thing.
What he didn't know was that it would go both ways. Marriage was important to humans, binding; surely they would be disinclined to attack a people they'd married into, surely they would be more likely to listen. And if Kal could help keep what was left of his world safe, then he would do it, and gladly.
But—the High Council would consider this marriage binding, too. Which meant that no matter what the warrior guild said, no matter how they might argue in favor of their purpose, the High Council as a whole would not let itself be swayed. The law was the law—and the law would apply to Earth, would apply to humanity, once Kal had made it apply.
Earth wasn't Krypton, and it never would be. The magnitude of it, what was now gone, what had been lost and would never return, was so vast Kal still couldn't think of it, couldn't bear to try to make himself feel it. But Earth remained, and it was immense and strange and beautiful; Kal had learned to like it, in the time—the year, it was called here—that he had had in which to do it. He had begun, he felt, to learn to love it, perhaps. And its people were odd, weirdly fragile, stubborn, reactive—but so interesting, so staggeringly varied. And Kal couldn't save Krypton itself, not now, but he could save them, maybe.
He worried too much, perhaps. The High Council had shown no interest in conquest; he had no reason to think they would. But—
But still, it would be good to have this done. It would be good to have married Bruce Wayne, and know he'd done all he could, for his people and for Earth.
And—well.
He was, in truth, grateful for Bruce Wayne, too.
They stood before the High Council, here in this room, and Bruce Wayne didn't know how strange that was, didn't know Kal ought to have been honored by a single guild, his own, instead—didn't know Kal didn't have a guild at all.
He didn't know any of it. He didn't know who Kal's parents had been, didn't know how Kal's house had been shamed by willful imperfection—didn't know how the bitter astonishment, the stale resentment, lingered, now that Father had at last, so terribly, been proven right, in the face of all who had ever doubted him and now lived because he had refused to heed them.
Elder Sor Lir-Ay stepped forward, and Bruce Wayne met her gaze and smiled—because he had no idea what it meant, that the elder of the laborer guild officiated here, no idea that all the others had refused.
"Kal Jor-El, of the House of El," Elder Sor Lir-Ay said. "Is there one of your house who offers you their blessing?"
"Yes," Kal said, and didn't look—there was no need. Even if he hadn't been able to hear it, so clearly it was as if he were standing right next to her, one of the many impossible gifts of Earth, there would have been no need.
Kara had never left him to stand alone, when she could prevent it.
She rose and stepped forward, and inclined her head.
"Kara Zor-El," Elder Sor Lir-Ay said, acknowledging.
And then she stopped, and looked at Bruce Wayne.
"What is his whole name?"
And of course Bruce couldn't answer, not without Kal's help—he didn't even know what she'd asked.
"Bruce, I'm sorry, I don't know," Kal said, in English. "What is your father's name?"
Something passed across Bruce's face in an instant, his mouth pressing itself into a line. "Thomas," Bruce said, strange and quiet.
And Kal wanted to ask what had happened, why he'd said it that way, but—Elder Sor Lir-Ay was waiting, there wasn't time. "His whole name is Bruce Thomas-Wayne," Kal said, to Elder Sor Lir-Ay, and it wasn't English anymore, but Bruce still heard his name in it, his gaze cutting sharply from Kal to Elder Sor Lir-Ay and back again.
"Bruce Thomas-Wayne," Elder Sor Lir-Ay repeated. "And is there one of his house to offer him a blessing?"
And—Kal knew some of the answer to that, he thought, because the only humans who were here because they'd been asked instead of because they were meant to share what happened here with the rest of their people were here because he'd asked, Martha and Pete and Lana. No one had come in with Bruce except some of the human warriors, and Bruce hadn't acted as if he knew them, as if they were members of his house who'd come to guard him.
But Elder Sor Lir-Ay was looking at him, and he had to ask.
He relayed the question; and he wasn't speaking loudly, but the room was very quiet. Martha made a soft, half-stifled sound, and Kal felt abruptly as if he'd done something wrong, and if he could only have asked Martha then she'd have told him what it was, but he couldn't.
Bruce said nothing, for a moment. And then he smiled, and it was almost right except it did not touch his eyes.
"Nope," he said.
Kal swallowed, and looked away. "There is not," he told Elder Sor Lir-Ay.
She was silent. "Then he shall have mine," she said at last, and the rest of the High Council shifted behind her, but none of them spoke aloud to object to an alien receiving an elder's own blessing, and if she had said it, then she would do it.
After that, it was easier. There was little required of Kal and Bruce, as the blessings of the gods were all recited. A handful of questions for each of them to answer, whether they were here of their own will, whether they agreed to be married, whether they had any objection or other matter that must be settled before the proceedings could continue—but Kal taught Bruce quickly how to say "yes" and "no" in Kryptonian, and after that, Bruce hardly needed prompting at all; he was listening, and he heard what Kal said each time and repeated it before Kal could even tell him to.
Then Elder Sor Lir-Ay gave each of them an ear cuff, with the emblem of the House of El worked into it—nothing but a symbol, in modern times, but still, Bruce would be regarded as a provisional member of the House of El whenever he wore it, until the twenty-day trial period had passed. Kal met Bruce's eyes, fit his over the curve of his ear, and as he had begun to suspect Bruce would, Bruce watched him do it, matched him perfectly: slid the cuff he had been given onto the same ear on himself, in the same place, as smoothly as if he had known what to do all along.
The most difficult part, in its way, was to listen to Kara, as she spoke the blessing of their house for him. Her voice was clear and strong, and Kal loved her, was grateful beyond all words that she was here at all, that she had survived—but it should have been Mother, and Kal couldn't stop wanting it to be, couldn't keep his eyes from stinging when it wasn't, when with every new word it was still Kara speaking.
But soon enough it was over, and his eyes were wet but he hadn't wept aloud, at least. Elder Sor Lir-Ay gave her blessing to Bruce, next, and that was easier.
And then Kal stepped forward, held up his hand, and Bruce followed the cue, did the same and set his palm to Kal's, and they stood that way in the quiet for a moment that felt longer than it was: Bruce's hand was warm and steady, and he was looking at Kal in a close attentive way, waiting to learn what he should do next, except there was nothing to do next; it was done, and they were husbands.
It had been witnessed, and now it was finished; everyone stood, and began to file out.
But Kal should probably have guessed humans did things differently—within a moment, Martha was there, beaming at him, sweet and warm, generous as she had always been. "Oh, Clark," she said, lifting her hands to his face, smiling up at him; and then she caught herself, grimacing. "Oh, dammit, I meant—Kal, I'm sorry. Just habit—"
"It's fine," Kal said, and he had thought somehow it might be difficult, but in the end it was easy, to smile back at her. "It's fine. I like it when you call me Clark. Aunt Martha," he added, on a whim—because that was what they had pretended, the year he had been here alone: that he was part of her family, staying with her for a while.
And it worked. She grinned at him, pleased, and said, "Oh, all right. I'll still try to remember, mind you, but—a 'Clark' is going to get out now and then no matter what I do, honey, so I just won't apologize when it does. Okay?"
"Okay," he agreed, and then she laughed a little and drew him down into a hug, and over her shoulder was—
Was Bruce. Bruce Thomas-Wayne of the House of El, now, or at least that would be his name in all the Kryptonian records, after this. He was standing there, watching, with his hands in the pockets of his suit and the silver cuff bright along the shell of his ear, and Kal was—looking at it, eyes drawn to it helplessly, for no good reason he could name.
"Oh, congratulations," Martha was saying, drawing away again, squeezing Kal's shoulders. "And—Mr. Wayne, I'm sorry, I should've introduced myself. Martha Kent," and she held out a hand for him to shake.
Bruce took it, and then—turned it, kissed the back of it, and Martha's mouth pinched suddenly at the corners in a way that Kal knew meant she was amused, trying not to laugh because it wouldn't be polite, but wanting to, a little.
"Aunt Martha," he repeated, as he let go.
"Oh—yes," she said. "Clark—Kal—well, he crashed in my back field, when he first got here. I helped him out for a while, told everybody my nephew Clark had come to stay. Worked pretty well, till the next spaceship showed up."
"Mm, apparently," Bruce murmured. "And do I get to meet these lovely young ladies, too?"
Kal blinked, and turned around. "Oh—Kara. Kara, thank you—"
"Of course, Kal," Kara said, gentle, clasping his hands.
"And Lana, I—thank you so much for coming."
"As if I'd have missed this," Lana said, reaching up to squeeze his arm, with Pete at her shoulder smiling uncertainly; and it was so—surreal, almost, to have them here. Smallville, and everything it had come to mean to him, everything he'd grown used to while he lived there, transplanted into the middle of this, this Kryptonian ceremony. It was disorienting, it was—he had been Kryptonian so much longer than he had been pretending to be human, and he'd done that precisely because he'd known this role would be his to take on once whatever was left of his people arrived. There was no good reason it should feel so difficult, so strangely suffocating, to face these people as Kal-El.
He cleared his throat, shook the heaviness from himself as best he could and smiled. Lana introduced herself to Kara, and Pete with her, and then Martha asked after their travel to Metropolis—because Pete could be awkward, shy, but only when he didn't have a story to tell, and soon he was caught up in describing their race through the terminal to find the right gate, and Lana was laughing, nodding wryly along. There were still Kryptonians, lined up to depart from the hall, and some of them turned and looked; because Kryptonians told stories to educate, or else refined narratives into art, art that was meant to enrich rather than amuse. But Lana didn't notice, and laughed again, and in that instant Kal felt obscurely—proud of her, proud for her, unapologetically human as she was, all the weight of their expectations incapable of touching her.
Kara stood beside him, watching; and then he felt her hand against his wrist, and she spoke, low enough that she wasn't interrupting Pete. "My sorrows are with you," she said in Kryptonian.
Kal swallowed, once and then again. "And mine with you," he said in the same tone, because it was hardly her fault that she had had to speak the blessing for him, that there had been no one else to do it. If anything, of the two of them, he'd suffered less; her parents hadn't escaped the death of Krypton, either, but at least he hadn't been made to walk up to her and tell her so. He had—he had hoped, still, from the moment he saw the ship in the sky to the moment he'd seen her step out of it. And she must have known it, and had had to look him in the eye and kill that hope with her own hands.
Her grip tightened, on his arm. He covered her hand with his, feeling the brief sharp stab of his own uselessness in the face of her grief as much as his own, his eyes abruptly hot. He wanted to press his forehead to hers, to acknowledge it, but he couldn't—she was still wearing a breather mask.
He controlled the impulse, squeezed her hand a little harder to make up for it, but couldn't bring himself to meet her eyes. He looked away, instead, and—
And his husband, Bruce Wayne, was looking back.
Pete was still talking, bright and animated. Martha, Lana, were still listening to him, smiling. And Bruce was standing with them, his shoulders and his body and his face all angled toward Pete also, but his eyes—he was looking at Kal, not Pete, and after a moment, he offered Kal a wry little quirk of his mouth.
He didn't know, Kal thought distantly. He didn't know any of it. He might have thought it was all the way it was supposed to be—that it would always have been Kara who spoke for Kal. He didn't know Mother and Father were gone; he didn't know that they shouldn't have been, that they hadn't had to be, that Kal had only known it, truly known it, when the ship arrived—
He didn't know. And he shouldn't have to. That was only reasonable, wasn't it? That was only—considerate. He had agreed to be here, to marry Kal, because his people had generously chosen to respect Kryptonian laws, to make the great gesture of cooperation that had been asked of them. He had already allowed himself to be burdened enough. Kal could make this easy for him, could be unobtrusive to him; could give him that much, at least, in return.
Kal blinked, and swallowed, and smiled back just a little. And it felt strange on his face, pinched and awkward and false, but—at the very least, Bruce Wayne didn't seem to notice.
They weren't allowed to stand in the hall with Martha and Pete and Lana forever.
They were given some time. But Kal only realized that was what it had been when Bruce Wayne cleared his throat and said, "Well, it's been a real pleasure, but—I'm pretty sure there's a couple places we need to be," and Kal became aware, belated, that some of the human warriors had approached them again, were standing in formation and waiting silently.
"Oh, of course, of course—I'm sure they got a whole circus lined up for you two," Martha said at once. "We'll get on out of your way. Come on, come on—we'll be seeing you again this evening, isn't that right?"
"Hmm? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I heard my PA say something about a reception later," Bruce agreed. "I'll text her, get you guys added to the list. Booze, music, maybe a cake. The works. You won't want to miss it."
Dizzying; but Martha seemed to ignore half of it, pressed her mouth into an amused line and said, "That's very kind of you, Mr. Wayne," in a diplomatic sort of tone, and then she was—ushering Pete and Lana away, and Kara squeezed Kal's hand one more time, offered him a quick soft smile, and went with them, and suddenly it was just—Bruce.
Bruce, standing there, eyebrows raised a little. Waiting for something, Kal thought, but he had no idea what it could be; for all that he did know, all he'd learned about this world and its people, he still had so little true understanding of—what a human would do, what a human might expect from him.
"I," Kal said, and then faltered, helpless. "Thank you for—for agreeing to—"
"Yeah, no, that's like the third time you've thanked me for this," Bruce said, mild, hands in his pockets, tilting his weight back briefly over his heels. "You had to agree to it, too, so let's call it even, okay?"
And if he preferred not to have attention called to all he had done simply in choosing to be here, then the least Kal could do was oblige him. "Of course."
"I guess you probably don't have a PA," Bruce added, "but somebody filled you in on the rest of the schedule for today, right?"
"There will be a press conference," Kal ventured, because he knew that much; he didn't like press conferences, but he had done many of them, in the first days after the ship had arrived, and he understood how they worked—it had been a relief, in a way, to learn there would be one today. Perhaps an hour, all told, where he would actually know what he was doing; a reassuring thought.
"Sure, yeah," Bruce said. "You know what those are, right? You get questions shouted at you by randos who are going to do their best to make you look bad no matter how you answer?"
"I don't," Kal said. "I don't—think that's how they are supposed to work—"
"Guess we'll see who's right soon enough," Bruce allowed, and then tilted his head. "Pretty sure we've got just a little bit more paperwork to deal with first, though. Convenient, since we're already in City Hall and all."
"Oh," Kal said. "I—yes."
Getting married the way humans did was almost absurdly simple.
Or at least it was the way they were doing it. Which wasn't very much like the weddings Kal had seen in human movies, or on television; but then Martha had always been careful to tell him that he couldn't rely on television to learn how anything really worked, unless he was watching the kind of program where learning how things really worked was the entire point.
They were escorted from the hall, and then down several corridors that brought them at last to a significantly smaller room. Bruce had been right: there were papers waiting for them, but only a few sheets apiece, and most of the blank spaces on the pages had been filled in already by someone else. Kal's had fewer words written in than Bruce's seemed to, but once Kal actually started reading, he could see why—there were lines for things like a personal identification number and residential address, which had simply been marked NOT APPLICABLE, and a place and country of birth, which had been filled in with KRYPTON (PLANET).
But he had been left a line on which to write his name, and another line on which to write it again but differently—he remembered that much, a sunny afternoon sitting in the farmhouse and watching Martha sign a birthday card for a neighbor's child, seeing the way her writing changed and wanting to understand why.
The English alphabet had been something of a challenge for him, at least in print—all those straight squared-off lines. Martha had been surprised by how much better he'd been at cursive, once she'd shown him the difference; but it was so much easier, looked so much more like writing.
Bruce had taken the pen he'd been given, was already scribbling away smoothly. Kal accepted his own with a cautious smile, from the woman behind the large curving desk, and then hesitated.
It was a human piece of paper, a human record. And he had a human name, in a way. It was only reasonable.
But it felt like an act of daring, somehow, to pin the sheet in place with his hand and write across the line at the top. FIRST NAME—Clark. CURRENT SURNAME—Kent; he didn't know why it should specify CURRENT there and nowhere else, but now didn't seem like the time to ask. MIDDLE NAME—he supposed there should be some point of correspondence between the Kryptonian accounting of this day and the human one, so he wrote in Kal-El, the way Martha had helped him decide was probably the most accurate way to spell it.
When he was done, he looked down at it. Suddenly it seemed stranger than he had thought it would, juxtaposed that way, and he felt abruptly self-conscious, conspicuous. He wasn't Martha Kent's nephew; he wasn't even pretending to be, not anymore. He was Kryptonian, he was—his people were here now, and he was part of them, he was meant to represent them in all that he did. He shouldn't have written it that way. But—
But it was in pen. It was in pen, and this had been prepared for him; he couldn't just throw it away and ask for a new copy.
It would be fine, he told himself. This was for the humans. No one from the Council, the guilds, would ever see it, and if they saw it, they wouldn't know how to read it anyway. Perhaps the humans would even appreciate it, would see it as an effort to identify himself according to their ways.
He swallowed, and moved down to the last line—signed it in the same way, all three names, even if only one of them belonged to him anymore. The last time, perhaps, that he would be Clark Kent to anyone but Martha; and when he thought of it that way, he was glad he had done it, sharp and bittersweet.
He looked up. Bruce was done, passing his set of papers back across the desk to the woman, and Kal quickly did the same. She smiled at them, quick and polite, only a little wide-eyed, and then vanished through a door.
"Certainly keeping things moving, huh," Bruce said.
And they evidently were. Kal was careful not to listen, not to let his uncertainty get the better of his control—but it seemed like so improbably brief a time before the woman came back that he almost wished he had been listening, had looked through the wall and knew exactly what it was she had done there.
She returned to them with some new sheets of paper, a license and some kind of waiver, and a page that was blue and white, the text oddly hard to read until she set it down flat and Kal could get a clear look at it: CERTIFICATE OF MARRIAGE REGISTRATION, that was what it said, though the letters were shaped very strangely.
"Wow—do we even have to say the words first, or can we just grab that and run?" Bruce said.
The woman blinked at him and cleared her throat. "Everything has been—very emphatically expedited for this, Mr. Wayne. However, it would be best to observe the formalities."
"Sure, sure, okay. I do," Bruce said, and then paused. "Wait, you talk first, right? Sorry, I've never actually gotten this far with the whole thing before."
"Yes, I talk first, Mr. Wayne," the woman said, very evenly, and then cleared her throat again. "We are gathered here to witness the marriage of Bruce Thomas Wayne and—Clark Kal-El Kent," and Kal hadn't known she was going to say it; but Bruce didn't look at him, didn't turn to him to ask him what he had been thinking, only stood there listening as if it were nothing remarkable. His hands had gone back into his pockets, once he had finished filling out his part of the paperwork, and he looked relaxed, unbothered, at ease.
Kal wished, briefly, selfishly, pettily, that he would at least—reach up, fiddle with the cuff around his ear; seem uncomfortable, or unprepared, if only for a moment.
"If there is anyone here who knows of any reason this couple cannot legally be joined in matrimony, speak now," the woman was saying.
And this part, at least, did happen in movies sometimes. But they weren't in the kind of movie where anyone spoke, where someone crashed into the room late and shouted something dramatic and heartfelt—it was silent, the air still; the floor creaked a little, one of the human warriors shifting their weight, and Kal realized his hearing had escaped him and made himself breathe, forced himself to concentrate on the sound of it instead of reaching any farther.
"Bruce Wayne," the woman said, "do you promise to love, honor, and respect Clark Kent for as long as you both shall live?"
"Oh, hey, it's now," Bruce said. "It's now, right? I do."
And then the woman's gaze moved from him to Kal. "Clark Kent—do you promise to love, honor, and respect Bruce Wayne for as long as you both shall live?"
Bruce had as good as told him what to say, what humans said; he'd have known what came next even if he had watched no movies at all. I do.
But he was caught on it, helplessly, for longer than he meant to be. He had heard the words, or variations on them, before—but it had never been his promise to make, and suddenly it felt so weighty, so unwieldy. How could he promise such a thing? Kryptonians agreed to terms, to unobjectionable arrangements that would benefit their houses; they did not swear to feel things—
Bruce leaned toward him, held a hand up to his own mouth as if to shield it from the woman's view. "Or until you get sick of me, anyway. Trust me, you do not need to worry about anybody holding you to that part," he whispered.
"What?" Kal said. "No, I—that is, I do. I promise."
He could not be sure he would succeed. He could not be sure of anything. But he would—he would try, at least, and if Bruce came to feel he'd broken this oath, measured him against what a human husband was meant to be and found him wanting, he wouldn't argue.
"Inasmuch as you have both consented," the woman said, "by the power vested in me, I now pronounce you married."
"Guess we're grabbing some rings later," Bruce murmured. "I should text my PA," and he elbowed Kal in the arm, a sudden brief warmth through Kal's sleeve, and then took the blue and white paper from the woman, waved it at her as if in farewell, and turned to walk out.
"Thank you," Kal said quickly, because he thought he might have to rush to catch up—but Bruce had paused in the doorway, looking back, and was waiting for him after all.
The press conference had been set up outside, on the steps of City Hall.
The ship was still overhead, hovering where it had come down to allow the Council, all the representatives of each guild and house, to disembark for the ceremony—the Kryptonian ceremony, at least. It took a moment for everyone waiting to even notice that Bruce and Kal had come out; they were all too busy taking pictures, cameras craning up at awkward angles, trying to capture the ship and the building at the same time.
But then they did notice, and, well. This much, at least, Bruce had been entirely right about: they all started shouting questions at once.
It was a little startling, coming after the stillness of that room, Bruce and Kal and four silent human warriors, the woman's low steady voice. Kal grimaced without thinking, and then caught himself, forced his hearing to dull itself further still, until he could hear them, their voices, but it was all less sharp, pushed away.
Bruce stepped forward, waving with one hand, and that helped, too—all the cameras, the hard bright flashes, were focused on him for a moment instead of Kal. There was a microphone, and Bruce stepped up to it, reached for it, pointed into the crowd and said, "That one again. Who are you, US Weekly? People? The Wall Street Journal? Didn't quite catch it, yell louder this time—"
"Does your marriage mean the alien is now officially a US citizen?" someone shouted.
Bruce raised his eyebrows. "Really? Really? First off, guy's got a name. Kal-El Wayne—say hi, everybody. Second, how the hell would I know? Do I look like a lawyer to you? He probably gets a green card or something out of it, but that's, like, State Department, who knows. Come on, ask me something fun, for Christ's sake."
"Plans for the honeymoon?" someone else yelled.
"That's more like it! Much better. And—yeah, for sure. I think we're officially supposed to stick around for a few weeks, but if you think I'm not taking that to Tahiti," and Bruce hooked a thumb over his shoulder, incomprehensibly, at Kal, "as soon as I get the okay for a week-long test drive, then—"
A murmur; someone who wasn't a reporter stepped forward quickly, from somewhere off to the side, and she closed her hand around Bruce's elbow, leaned in and spoke into his ear. Kal looked away, concentrated on the sounds of more cameras clicking, until he could be sure he wouldn't hear a thing.
"Right, right," Bruce said, and cleared his throat. "Apparently that's a little more detail than anybody wants in print. My bad. Help me out here, give me something else—"
"Where are you going to live?"
Bruce made a face, scratched his chin. "Mm, probably downtown. One of the penthouses? I'll admit I'm hoping he's going to offer to build me a getaway on the moon, but until then, you guys are going to be seeing plenty of the two of us."
And this was—this was nothing like any of the press conferences Kal had done before. He was almost glad not to be the center of attention, and yet at the same time, he didn't know what to do with himself; he always had been before. He had always been standing in the center of the faces, the lights, the cameras. He had always been answering the questions, and they had always been serious, not like this. But there were so many more people here than there ever had been before, and so far, they had barely been asking questions Kal understood, never mind questions he might be able to answer.
The next voice that rose above the crowd, though, chose to ask something else.
"Do you think you were the right choice for this, Mr. Wayne, given your personal history and the extreme importance of successful negotiations with the Kryptonians?"
Bruce was briefly silent. "Wow," he said at last, "rude. Listen—"
"Wait," Kal heard himself say.
He wasn't close enough to the microphone; most of them couldn't hear him. But Bruce could. Bruce could, and turned toward him, and Kal stepped forward, next to him instead of lurking awkwardly at his shoulder, and met Bruce's eyes, and cleared his throat.
"Let me," he said. "Let me answer."
"Knock yourself out," Bruce murmured, after a moment. Which was nonsense, but his tone made it agreement, so Kal leaned in a little toward the microphone, and looked out at the crowd of reporters, the cameras; the line of human warriors behind them, and the street that had begun to fill beyond as people stopped to see what it was that was happening.
"Hello," Kal said, even though Bruce hadn't started with a greeting, because as far as Kal knew—as far as Martha had told him—that was always a polite way to begin. "Thank you all for being here to hear us, and to share our words. I hope you will make sure to share these.
"We came together here to be married in order to secure lasting peace, safety, and happiness for both our peoples. Bruce was asked, and he agreed to do this, to commit to this—his willingness, his courage in stepping forward, his decision to do what was requested of him, all these things are what make him the right choice." Kal shrugged a little, helpless. "Whatever he has or hasn't done in his life—whatever I have or haven't done in my life, for that matter—we will each do our best now, and that is what matters; it must be."
Not the right kind of answer, perhaps. Too long, too convoluted. Awkward. Not quick or smooth, as Bruce's answers had been. Kal fell silent, and it stayed quiet for a moment after; there was no laughter, none of the fast easy energy with which Bruce had navigated back and forth between question and answer.
He swallowed, and looked sideways. And Bruce—
Bruce was looking back at him, something odd and dark and watchful in his face, a close intent sharpness that made him almost unfamiliar.
And then Bruce turned away, and smiled. "Well, aren't you sweet," he said, into the microphone, to Kal and at the same time not to Kal at all. "Okay, you vultures, twist that around somehow, I dare you. Come on, next question."
They caught a little bit of a break before the reception, at least.
Bruce had pretty much ignored the arrangements, because that was Bruce Wayne's prerogative—because there had been so many things about this situation that felt unbearably, crushingly urgent, and the logistics of a semi-public quasi-wedding reception had not been one.
But whoever it was he'd told to take care of it had done a good job.
He scrolled through a dozen email chains he'd ignored when he'd gotten them, in the car on the way over, and the details all appeared to have fallen into place.
Almost unfortunate. He wouldn't have minded having something to do, a problem to solve, a strident and demanding phone call to make.
But as it was—perhaps he shouldn't have expected to be able to concentrate well enough to find something for Bruce Wayne to misunderstand or blow out of proportion, when he was trapped in yet another enclosed space with the alien.
In a spirit of grim resignation, he allowed the screen of his phone to go black, and put it away. On one level, it didn't matter whether he looked up or not; he was helplessly, persistently, agonizingly aware of Kal regardless. On another level, at the absolute least, looking up eliminated the frankly untenable amount of iron-fisted focus he had had to put into refusing to look up.
Impossible to decide whether Kal-El took up too much space or not enough. He was tall—but not as tall as Bruce. He was broad, strong, an unmistakable power in his body even if you discounted the staggering abilities he had publicly demonstrated time and time again; but he stood as if he weren't, as if unsure of himself. He wasn't unsure of himself, he couldn't be—he'd spoken calmly, clearly, evenly, in front of a crowd of reporters that had been massive even by Bruce Wayne's standards. He hadn't had to. He hadn't had to say anything; he could have, as Bruce understood it, shot lasers out of his eyes and melted the microphone stand where it stood, and then flown back up to the ship where it had been hanging in the sky overhead. He held all the cards, and then some.
But even here, even now—he sat in the car, opposite Bruce, tucked in on himself as if he wasn't sure how much of the seat he was allowed to touch. He was gazing out the window with distant eyes, drawing slow, controlled breaths and letting them back out; he kept pressing his mouth into a line, wetting it, pressing at it again.
He caught the motion of Bruce looking at him out of the corner of his eye—he couldn't have been more obvious about it, gaze cutting sharply from the middle distance right to Bruce's face.
Was he simply not certain whether he'd done enough to win Bruce Wayne over? Was it a deliberate effort to make himself disarming, to make the threat of his physical power feel less present than it was? He had no real reason to want Bruce to like him—except to make his own life easier, Bruce supposed. Perhaps they were both endeavoring to make themselves as likable as they knew how, if for very different reasons; or for not-so-different reasons, if the alien was trying as hard to hide his true motivations as Bruce was trying to hide his suspicions regarding those motivations.
But he hadn't snapped Bruce's neck in the middle of City Hall. He had hugged Martha Kent—Bruce hadn't known where it was he'd been hiding himself, had been consumed by the retroactive awareness of his presence in every respect but that one
(—for some time, your world has sheltered one of my species. He has chosen to keep his existence a secret from you; he will have made efforts to blend in—)
and yet it did make sense that someone had been helping him, that he should have built what relationships he could in order to best keep himself safe on an alien world. And he was clearly prepared to play this out, at least over the short term. He intended for Martha Kent to continue to think of him as a beloved nephew, for Lana Lang and Pete Ross to think of him as their friend Clark—for Bruce to perceive him as harmless, and better still, to like him, to want to like him. That was the only objectively sound motivation he could have had, surely, for doing something as stupid as attempting to defend Bruce Wayne's character in front of the press.
"So," Bruce said aloud. "Still feeling okay about this whole thing so far?"
"Yes," the alien said softly, and then paused. "I'm afraid I—don't know how to tell. Is it—are we doing well? Will your people be pleased?"
"Oh, we're doing fine," Bruce said. "Don't sweat it. We don't really work like that," he added, "it's not—my people. We're not as organized as you guys are about that kind of thing. But if anybody asks me, you get five stars, no question."
"Ah," the alien said, in a tone that suggested he felt he understood less now than he had a moment ago. But apparently he did at least know that five stars was supposed to be good, because the next thing he said was, "Thank you."
"Hey, just calling it like I see it," Bruce said. "So have you been to a lot of wedding receptions? Or, you know. Literally any wedding receptions?"
"I've—seen movies," the alien ventured, after a moment.
"Okay, well, you've probably got the basic idea, in that case. Sort of like I said before: booze, music, maybe a cake. We stand around, saying hi to everybody who wants to say hi to us even if we've never seen them before in our lives, for approximately four and a half hours. If we're lucky." Bruce squinted at him for a second, assessing. "Although I guess you don't have to worry about your feet hurting, do you? You can just float like an inch, take a load off without anybody noticing?"
"I—suppose I could," the alien said. "I don't think I would need to 'take a load off'. I—your world, your sun, has made me strong."
"Right, right," Bruce said, as if he had forgotten. As if it were possible to forget it; as if he were able to imagine what it might be like to have forgotten it, and to need to be reminded. "Strong, fast, floaty. Laser eyes, and—super senses, right? Did I leave anything out?"
"Your weapons can't hurt me," the alien offered, and Christ, it was ludicrous; he said it almost timidly, a suggestion that Bruce might have left something off his list. As if it weren't, implicitly, the most terrifying threat he could possibly have made, as if it weren't so absurdly frightening it was almost difficult to fully comprehend. "Or at least it seems that way. When the ship bearing my people here first arrived, some of your warriors shot at me, but nothing happened. They tried to restrain me, too, but nothing they could bind me with was strong enough to hold me."
"Soldiers," Bruce said, smiling. "We call 'em soldiers."
"Right," the alien said, ducking his head. "Of course."
"Probably won't be too many at this thing, though," Bruce added after a moment. "Outside, maybe. But they set this shindig up to make us look normal—couple of newlyweds having a party, no big deal."
"Normal," the alien repeated, soft.
"Yeah," Bruce said, and laughed. "Normal. An alien and a billionaire. Lost cause, right?"
It came out perfectly: wry, relatively warm, without bitterness, without sharpness. But the alien looked at him with sudden close attention anyway, and Bruce kept his game face on, ran the conversation back in his head; what could have done it? Where had he misstepped? What could have possibly caught at the alien about any of—
"You are—unusual among your people, then?" the alien said.
What could that matter to him? Impossible to guess; but easy enough to play off in a manner that suited Bruce Wayne, at least.
"One of a kind, baby," Bruce said, and winked.
The reception was being held on the top floor of Hyde Towers, which was about as upscale as it got in Gotham. There was indeed extra security lurking around the ground floor, in the form of both uniformed personnel standing at attention and a few too many well-groomed and physically trim individuals in aggressively nondescript clothing. But that was presumably more on behalf of certain attendees—because Swanwick was probably around here somewhere, and no doubt he'd made the Kryptonians certain guarantees regarding their physical safety—than the event itself, strictly speaking.
Metropolis City Hall had been the important part, the part that both the aliens and the US government itself had had a genuine stake in. The reception, by contrast, was going to be pure PR, and Bruce's survey of the relevant emails suggested that Bruce Wayne's people had been allowed to make the arrangements essentially without interference.
And they'd handled the task well. The street immediately outside Hyde Towers, the lobby, were conspicuously free of press; Bruce and the alien went unaccosted, and were able to reach an empty elevator in peace. The alien seemed interested, looking around himself with attentive eyes, but not unduly startled or confused when the elevator started moving—much the same way he'd reacted to the car, at first. So, much as with cars: presumably he had encountered elevators in Kansas, too, and simply had never seen one quite as expensive to exist inside of as this one.
The ride was swift and silent. The alien voiced no objection; if he perceived a certain pointlessness in bothering with the elevator when he could have simply flown up the side of the building, pried the roof of Hyde Towers off as if he were opening a tin can and climbed inside, he didn't say so aloud. He stood against one gleaming wall, with his hands folded over each other in front of him, and he made no move toward Bruce; he did not attempt to take advantage of the enclosed space, the myriad of hard surfaces against which Bruce's skull could easily have been split if desired.
He stood still, and he breathed. His gaze moved along the walls, mostly, and only occasionally to Bruce, in quick darting glances Bruce felt as if they were blows. Bruce ignored the sensation, aggressively countered the tension attempting to string itself along his spine by leaning into the wall at a louche angle. He kept his hands in his pockets, allowed his elbows to splay themselves out; lifted a foot, and set it against the side of the elevator with no consideration as to the marks the sole of his dress shoe might leave on it.
It was a relief, obscure but palpable, when the doors opened. Bruce wanted, in a stupid mindless way, to rush from the elevator; so he didn't let himself, raised his eyebrows and gestured to the alien instead, and Kal-El looked at him uncertainly, swallowed and inclined his head and stepped out first.
Whoever had been responsible for decorating the space, they'd put genuine thought into it. They couldn't have had much to work with—the clothing Kal-El had worn when he'd revealed himself to the world, the armor most of the other Kryptonians had been wearing at first, the curved carapaced aesthetic that seemed to govern Kryptonian ship design—and yet they'd clearly taken some pains to create an impression of Kryptonian influence. The palette was all shimmering silver, hints of bronzy iridescence here and there, a rich deep black as an accent, and the only straight lines in the whole place were the surfaces of the tables; almost everything else, the edges of tablecloths and light fixtures, the paneling that covered the walls, was curved, scalloped, gently arched one way or another.
The space was perhaps half full, but undoubtedly it wouldn't stay that way for long. Every big name in the Metropolis-Gotham metro area who had been diplomatically turned away from the wedding itself had been invited here instead, the better to allow Bruce Wayne and his brand-new alien husband to make a first impression a little more naturalistic than a press conference. And—
And, of course, a delegation of Kryptonians had been invited, too.
They were easy to pick out, among the crowd. Not just because of those half-transparent helmets they were all still wearing, every one of them except for Kal-El; not just because they seemed disinclined to mingle, standing together in forbidding stillness. They were all so—so striking, undeniably statuesque, with such precisely controlled physical poise that it was—
Well, unearthly. Unearthly; inhuman.
The alien had come to a stop, hesitating, seemingly unwilling to move too far from the wall; as if he somehow hoped to avoid notice, though Bruce couldn't begin to guess why. Bruce Wayne certainly had no such compunctions, and Bruce strode forward, glanced over his shoulder at the alien and smiled, and said, "Better get in there, guests of honor and all. Come on."
"I—of course," the alien said, and Bruce didn't look back again, Bruce Wayne not about to take any extra consideration in making sure anyone was following him, but it wasn't as if he needed to. He could practically feel it: the alien's gaze on the back of his neck, the alien's proximity at any given moment, the movement of the alien's body relative to Bruce's in motion.
He forced himself to refocus, deliberately applied all his attention to the task of monitoring the line of his shoulders, keeping his stride long and loose and easy, assembling a list of individuals he recognized in the back of his mind.
The tables were arranged in such a way as to look as if they hadn't been deliberately arranged; but the one that stood approximately in the center, against the opposite wall, was subtly raised, a sloping and unobtrusive step upward from its neighbors and the rest of the space. Bruce headed straight for it—and then past it, for a second, to grab a glass of champagne from one of the smaller tables placed up against the wall behind it.
"Thank god," he said, and took a swig. "Little lighter on the refreshments in here than I was hoping—but I guess that makes sense, if all you guys except you have to keep those helmets on, huh?"
"Oh," the alien said. "Yes, I—that's very—considerate."
Bruce shrugged. "Not much fun watching everybody else eat. There had still better be a cake, though." He took another sip of champagne, surveyed the space and raised an eyebrow. "You guys know what that is, right?"
"Cake?" the alien said, after a moment.
"No, no—fun," Bruce said, grinning, and then he gestured with his champagne flute. The Kryptonians were still mostly just—standing there, silent, unblinking. Frankly fucking creepy, though even Bruce Wayne plausibly had the sense to refrain from saying so out loud.
Kal-El grimaced a little, as if he felt some genuine secondhand self-consciousness. "We have ceremonial banquets," he offered. "But those aren't precisely meant to be—fun. There are religious festivals, with works of great artistic merit on display, and the fruits of scientific effort, so all may appreciate them."
"And that's as close as it gets, huh?" Bruce said. "You don't do anything just for the hell of it?"
"Every endeavor has a purpose, on Krypton," the alien said, and then something passed across his face that left it abruptly, starkly grave. "Had," he amended.
Because it was gone.
Because it was ostensibly gone, Bruce reminded himself. Because that was what they had claimed, their justification for coming to Earth in search of shelter, safe harbor, a living world that could offer them refuge. He had no way to confirm it, no way to disprove it; humanity could not afford for him to take their word for it.
"Each individual always seeks," the alien was saying, "to exercise the maximum degree of skill in all that they do, so that all Kryptonians may benefit—so that each of us may contribute to our society in the way we are best suited for."
"Wow," Bruce said. "If you're going to explain that at the next press conference we do, you're going to have to find a way to sound a little less like a Commie."
The alien looked briefly bewildered. Martha Kent hadn't given him too thorough a rundown on recent geopolitical history, apparently.
But Bruce was spared having to fumble his way through Bruce Wayne's best efforts to explain such a thing. Someone had, inevitably, noticed they were there—Vivian Wenner, long gray hair done up regally, hands heavy with rings, said, "Bruce? Brucie Wayne, is that you?" as if there were any excuse to be uncertain about it, and Bruce had to smile at her vaguely, put up with a kiss being pressed to the air to either side of his face, let her congratulate him on finding such a dramatic way to take himself off the market at last, after setting the pace as Gotham's most eligible bachelor for decades—
No help for it; Vivian simply had to be waited out, until her attention was drawn elsewhere. Bruce nodded along, made half-hearted attempts to extract himself that Vivian gleefully ignored. In his periphery, Kal-El greeted the woman named Kara, who seemed to be his sister, or perhaps a cousin, and Bruce would almost have been grateful to Vivian for providing him cover to eavesdrop except that they were speaking to each other in Kryptonian. Bruce was going to have to work up a basic vocabulary tonight, start taking audio recordings whenever there was even a fraction of a chance the alien might be interacting with another of his kind; he could not fucking afford to be left in the dark, goddammit.
At last, Vivian tired of toying with Brucie Wayne, and swanned off with a smile. Bruce downed the rest of his champagne, indulged briefly in wishing it were something a little harder, and then set the empty glass down and picked up another. He turned toward the alien, and reacted as if surprised, as if he had had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to observe who the alien was talking to, and said, "Oh, hey—Kara, right?"
"Yes," Kara said, with a creditably warm smile. "Kara Zor-El. You must forgive me, my English is very bad compared to that of Kal—"
"Nah, you're doing just fine," Bruce said.
He considered tacking on a wink—the kind of thing Kara and Kal-El would probably politely ignore, but which could be taken the wrong way from across the room when he was standing next to his husband and talking to someone who was essentially a conventionally beautiful woman—but decided against it. Even Bruce Wayne could probably manage to go at least eighteen hours before provoking a rumor that he was cheating on his brand-new alien spouse.
Although that might be about to get a little more difficult. There were half a dozen socialites on a direct approach, giggling behind their hands and looking very, very appreciatively back and forth between Bruce and the alien, with a speculative sort of light in their eyes—and Bruce Wayne's usual approach would absolutely have been to invite as many of them as were willing back to the lake house for some fun, which left Bruce with some potentially complex improvisation ahead of him.
Except, at six feet and closing, the two in the lead abruptly swerved, redirected the inertia of the entire group at once, because—
Because there were four Kryptonians in full-body armor, cutting in front of them without seeming aware of them in the least.
Bruce had a moment to clock the fundamentals: three women and a man, all of them equally tall; the man and one woman dark-skinned, three of the four dark-haired and the last a very pale blond; each of them staggeringly, inordinately beautiful.
And then one of the women came to a stop in front of Kal-El, and all the rest did the same behind her as if on cue. Kal-El looked at them, inclined his head to them—and then the woman began speaking, goddamn Kryptonian and Bruce's agonizingly limited speech samples to date, and Kal-El went still for an instant, jaw abruptly tightening. Kara, beside him, was less restrained: her face turned sharp, her eyes flashing, and she stepped between Kal-El and the woman and interrupted, speaking in a hard clipped way that couldn't possibly be friendly, no matter how alien they were.
The woman looked at her, cool, unmoved, and simply waited until she had stopped talking—and then she shifted her gaze from Kara to Kal-El, and spoke again, in soft even tones.
Kal-El's expression was utterly blank, surprisingly unreadable, except for that tension lingering in the set of his jaw; his chin was high. But there were spots of color forming high on his cheeks, and he certainly didn't look happy.
Impossible to know what was being said. Impossible even to guess. Right now, with the utter lack of concrete evidence Bruce could bring to bear, this was as likely to be a simple interpersonal disagreement stemming from childhood dislike as it was to be a sign of meaningful institutional tensions among the Kryptonians—and it might just as easily be staged, deliberately intended to encourage Bruce to reflexively sympathize with Kal-El.
He could not assume anything. He could not leap to conclusions. If he let himself believe he understood the aliens' motivations and then was proven wrong, there might be no opportunity to recover.
The tableau held for only a moment longer. Kal-El said nothing; the woman watched him for another deliberate beat, and then looked at Kara, who appeared utterly furious and was taking no pains to seem otherwise. She inclined her head to Kara, though she had not offered the same gesture to Kal-El. And then she walked away, and the rest of the Kryptonians went with her.
Kara turned her back to the room, took Kal-El by the arm and said something rapidly to him. Kal-El mustered up a smile, except allowing expression onto his face at all seemed to betray him: distress pinched his eyebrows, resignation settling itself along the line of his mouth. Either he was genuinely upset, or he was a consummate actor and his time in Kansas had given him a truly exceptional grasp of human facial expression.
"Whoa," Bruce said aloud, once Kara had stopped speaking. "Friendly folks, huh?"
"Oh," Kal-El said, swallowing. "I—I apologize. Some acknowledgment should have been made to you, but—perhaps it is best that it was not."
His diction had changed, too, Bruce noted; turned stiffer, more formal, less natural. Kal had already proven he was comfortable with contractions, and yet he had lost them nevertheless, under mental stress. Good attention to detail, if it was deliberate—and there was, of course, a certain helpless irony in thinking it, considering it was no less attention to detail than Bruce had been applying all day.
If Kal-El turned out to have been lying about everything, all along—at least it would only have been to Bruce, and not to some poor civilian who might have believed him; who might have cared for him in earnest, who might have even been in some genuine danger of falling in love with him.
"No, hey, it's fine," Bruce said, with a smile. "I kind of like getting ignored, it's a nice change of pace. Doesn't happen to me very often."
And—if the scenario had been calculated to engender sympathy, then it would only be reasonable to appear sympathetic, to allow Kal-El to come to the tentative conclusion that it had worked. Because three more people had just stepped off the elevator, and Bruce Wayne couldn't have asked for better timing, if he'd wanted a way to make the alien feel a little better.
"Say, that's your friends, right?" he added, and raised a hand, twiddled his fingers.
Pete spotted him first, while Martha and Lana were still craning their heads around and exclaiming over the space itself. But within a moment, Pete had pointed him out, and—an embarrassment of riches that weren't even his, but Martha's gaze moved to Bruce, to Kal-El, and her face lit up, startling in the sheer impact of its warmth.
"Yes," Kal-El said, and smiled. "Yes, it is."
The room had begun to fill in earnest, now, and it took almost half a minute for the three of them to work their way through the gradually thickening crowd. Kal-El stepped forward, helped close the last of the distance himself, and Martha beamed up at him, rubbed her hands down his arms briskly and said, "Oh, Clark—Kal—how are you holding up, honey?"
"Fine, fine," Kal-El said. "It's all been—very interesting," and he almost managed to make it sound as if he meant it, but not quite; Martha's smile turned gently wry.
"I'm sure," she said, and then let him go. "But what a lovely place for a reception—thank you so much for getting us on that list, Mr. Wayne," she added.
"I may be new to this whole getting-married thing," Bruce said, "but even I know to stay on my honorary aunt-in-law's good side, Mrs. Kent."
It was Bruce Wayne at approximately his best, almost genuinely charming; she laughed, shook her head, and said, "Please, please, you're my honorary nephew-in-law—call me Martha."
Either unintentional, or evidence that the aliens' knowledge of him was frighteningly comprehensive, and that they wanted him psychologically destabilized. But he could take refuge in Bruce Wayne's utter emotional insensitivity, could refuse to give them the satisfaction; he ducked his head and agreed, "Martha—call me Bruce, then," and he did it without hesitating, without flinching, as if it were the same to him as any other name might have been.
Lana was greeting Kal, hugging him, exclaiming over Hyde Towers, with Pete hovering awkwardly at her shoulder. "And there is a cake," she was saying, "they were just bringing it up when we came in, it's huge—"
"Well, of course it is," Bruce said, "nobody's cutting corners with my cake, they wouldn't dare," and Lana laughed.
The next twenty minutes were straightforward enough. Kal-El, surrounded by the friends he had cultivated, gradually lost all appearance of distress. Bruce Wayne inserted himself into the conversation between them by interjecting the occasional joke, and turned away in between to greet a dozen different people who walked up to him—politicians, local and federal, most of whom he did not appear to recognize; fellow businesspeople, beautiful women, and a minor internet celebrity, most of whom he did appear to recognize, though he couldn't remember all of their names.
And then Pete said, "Holy shit," and Bruce turned his head and found his hand taken by none other than Alexander Luthor, Jr.
"Lex!" he said brightly. "Wow, great to see you, glad you could make it."
"Oh, wouldn't have missed it for the world, Brucie," Luthor said, and his gaze was sharp, fixed—he smiled, in that way he had that made his entire expression more unsettling rather than less, every time. "Wouldn't have missed it for the world. Never thought I'd see you settling down! Ha—not that it was up to you, hmm?"
Bruce shrugged. "They told me my name was on the list, and asked. I figured—why not?"
"Yes, why not," Luthor repeated softly, and then smiled again, more widely still. "What an opportunity, what a wonderful opportunity. Can't blame you, can I? No, of course not. Who would turn that down? Why, you must be thrilled. Up close and personal—as personal as it gets."
"Here's hoping," Bruce said, with a wink, because Bruce Wayne had never had the perspicacity to find Lex Luthor as skin-crawlingly disturbing to talk to as a reasonable human being would.
Luthor kept smiling at him, for far too long—and then Luthor's gaze shifted past him, to Kal-El. "And there he is! The creature himself—I kid, I kid. Just a harmless little joke. After all, you'd never know it to look at him, would you? You'd never think it for a second. Remarkable, isn't it, how much they look like us? How much they look like people?"
And the conversation had been carrying on behind Bruce in fits and starts, despite Pete's evident shock at having Lex Luthor standing less than five feet away from him; but at that, there was a sudden lull, and into it, Lana Lang said sharply, "He is a person."
"What? Oh, yes, of course!" Luthor said. "Of course, of course. Unfortunate turn of phrase; slip of the tongue. Promise you won't hold it against me. But it is fascinating, don't you think? Made in our image—except I suppose the image is theirs, considering. If anyone's the inferior copy here, it's us. Hm? With our feet stuck on the ground, with our breakable little bodies—"
"Okay, Lex, getting a bit carried away there," Bruce tried, because Christ—
"Yes, I am," Luthor agreed immediately. "Of course I am. Understandable, I think, under the circumstances. It is all a little overwhelming, isn't it? Aliens are real!" and he splayed out his hands, affected a look of shock as if he were reliving the moment of the first Kryptonian broadcast all over again. "Falling from the sky, setting up shop, making themselves at home."
"No," Kal-El said.
Luthor raised his eyebrows. "No?"
"No, we—this planet belongs to you," Kal-El said. "We know that. Our Council acknowledges it, our laws acknowledge it. It is your homeworld, and we have no right to it. We wouldn't take it from you if we could—"
"If," Luthor repeated, very quietly.
Very quietly; but Kal-El, with his alien powers, could hear it and did. He stopped short, shut his mouth and swallowed—but then his brows drew together sharply, and his chin came up.
"We wouldn't take it from you," he said again, though he didn't repeat the part Luthor had highlighted for the lie it was. "It's your world, not ours."
"Yeah, I don't—I don't know when this conversation got away from me," Bruce cut in, blinking, "but an alien invasion is—jeez, Lex, where are you even getting this stuff? We're all friends here! That's why I married the guy; it's official. Nothing to worry about, okay?"
"Yes," Luthor said softly. "Yes, of course," and then he laughed, sudden and loud, all the more bizarre because it sounded so genuine, as if a joke had been made, as if he honestly couldn't help himself.
"All right, good talk!" Bruce said, and clapped Luthor on the shoulder. "Never a dull moment with you, but I think it's about time I got a first dance with my husband."
It wasn't untrue. Within the last five minutes, the music had changed; now that the space was mostly full, and presumably the actual official start time for the event had come and gone, bland featureless tinkling designed to recede into the background had given way to the instrumentals of an actual song. No one else was dancing, the unspoken rules of a wedding reception evidently in effect despite all that was unusual about the circumstances, and that made it as good an excuse as any to get the hell out of Lex Luthor's immediate radius.
He turned to Kal-El and smiled, extending a hand. "May I have this dance?"
"Oh, I—yes," Kal-El said, and closed his fingers tentatively around Bruce's.
As if every single thing Luthor had said weren't unnervingly accurate; as if he couldn't have snapped every bone in Bruce's hand simply by closing his own a little more tightly, the barest additional effort for him. Bruce drew him along a step, waved past him at Luthor and said, voice raised, "Seriously, great chat, let's do it again sometime!" and then another stride, another, brought them out toward the center of the room.
The crowd had naturally begun to concentrate itself near the tables, along the walls—near the drinks, though some of them had presumably also been aware, consciously or subconsciously, that the middle of the space was likely to end up serving as a dance floor. As Bruce moved out into that space, and drew Kal-El with him, everyone nearby began to cheer, to clap, and moved out of their way. The humans, that is; and the Kryptonians were halfway across the room, so it didn't matter that they presumably had no idea what was going on.
Bruce gestured with his free hand, encouraged the cheering, which prompted a wave of laughter—more noise, more attention, and now the space around them had cleared enough that he could make a show out of turning, pulling Kal-El in toward him, without having to worry about running into anyone.
Kal-El was temporarily cooperative. But as soon as Bruce stopped actively pulling on his hand, he ground to a halt, looking at Bruce with wide eyes.
"Oh, come on," Bruce said. "You told me you watched movies, right? You cannot not know what dancing is."
"I know what dancing is," Kal-El agreed. "In—theory."
Bruce affected surprise. "Wait, hold on, are you serious? I was joking. You—what, you come from the Footloose planet? You guys don't dance at all?"
"There are artisans whose chosen medium is physical movement," Kal-El said, halting. "They—it's a display, a presentation to be appreciated on an aesthetic and spiritual level. We—you don't just get up and—"
"So, yes," Bruce said. "Footloose planet. Okay, well, I assume they'll grant you a special dispensation, seeing as you're participating in the cultural rituals of your husband's people. It's not that hard, music like this."
"Music?" Kal-El said.
Bruce met his eyes.
For an instant, the alien held it: perfect, no hint of guile in it, those wide blue eyes and that open, wondering face.
And then Kal-El coughed, cracked—smiled, sudden and brilliant.
Bruce caught his breath; Bruce Wayne shook his head, snorted through his nose and said, "All right, well-played, you got me. Nobody warned me they were marrying me off to such a smartass, Christ. Look, come here and watch my feet. Like this."
He walked Kal-El through a simple box-step.
"I move back, you move forward—I go that way, so do you. Yeah, there you go. Okay, so now quit looking at your feet."
"But I—"
"Nope," Bruce said, and caught him by the hand—the wrong way, at first, so he had to draw Kal-El's hand upward and then shift his own around it, until he could settle palm-to-palm, standard ballroom hold. It took two seconds at most, but it was—it felt somehow drawn-out, excessive, Bruce's consciousness of the brush of Kal's knuckles, Kal's fingers settling into place around the side of his hand, disproportionate to the magnitude of the sensation. "This hand like this, other one up on my shoulder. Just like all those movies. You keep your head up, look at me, and let me lead. You don't need your eyes to move your feet."
"Look at you," Kal-El repeated, so softly Bruce almost missed it.
And he did. Bruce smiled at him, Bruce Wayne pleased that his half-assed advice was being followed; and Bruce caught him by the waist—not a delicate curve so much as simply the place where the thick arching muscles of his chest, his back and shoulders, contracted down to less generous bulk around his ribs, but there was something like a dip and Bruce's hand settled into it easily enough.
They'd wasted a whole song on the logistics. The next one started, and Bruce allowed a few measures, liberties taken with the beat throughout the introduction, to pass before he drew Kal-El into motion on a downbeat.
No option but to keep it simple. Bruce Wayne was an unmotivated dancer at best. They were still being cheered, a wave of applause moving through the human crowd as everyone realized they had in fact begun the first dance at last, and no one else was joining them; there were no other couples to steer around, nothing that could plausibly demand even Bruce Wayne's paltry attention, except Kal-El.
He was doing well, on the whole. It took him perhaps three maneuvers to understand that the subtle pressure of Bruce's hands was an indicator as to which direction they were going next. He didn't look down at his feet; he watched Bruce's face, gaze flicking back and forth, adjusting each of his hands the barest fraction of an inch as he began to grasp how closed position worked, how they could hold themselves together around their joint center of gravity as they moved.
And then, abruptly, it happened. He stopped thinking; he followed, easily, fluidly, as Bruce directed him wordlessly across the floor. He was—he didn't look away, hadn't for even a moment, and their pace was easy, exertion meaningless to him in any case, but he was—he began, very gradually, to flush, soft pink warmth rising up the column of his throat, settling into his cheeks. The lighting was moderate, indirect, and didn't do nearly enough to diminish the blueness of his eyes, his expression attentive and sweetly uncertain; and Martha Kent, Lex Luthor, the endless calculus of social interaction as Bruce Wayne, had allowed Bruce to stop thinking about it temporarily, but Christ, he was unbearably fucking handsome.
That had to be why it was him. They'd known, they had to have known, how agonizingly tempting it would be to take him at face value; and Martha Kent had done it, Pete Ross and Lana Lang, half the population of Kansas and the United States and probably the world, and that was precisely why Bruce could not afford to.
Someone had to be ready for it. Someone who wasn't Lex fucking Luthor—someone rational, someone capable of objective action. Whatever it was that was coming, someone had to be ready to stop it; and Bruce had to, had to make sure that it was him.
They did end the night at the penthouse.
One of them, the closest; naturally, Bruce Wayne had several to choose from. Fortunately, all the available options were equally featureless and personality-free. It had been too obvious to even require contemplating, that Bruce could not afford to allow Kal-El to come anywhere near the lake house—even if the alien possessed only the powers he had demonstrated publicly and enumerated personally, even if he wasn't keeping an ace or two up his sleeve, that was more than reason enough to keep him as far as possible from the Cave. But the lake house was the only location associated with Bruce Wayne that carried that kind of risk; there was nowhere else that mattered half as much, nowhere else that bore any potential for exposure.
The rest of the reception had passed approximately as Bruce had expected it to, and without any particular strategic developments of note. Kal-El had—kept up well, whenever Bruce had managed to get him back out onto the dance floor; in the company of people he knew, with no further interruptions by either Alexander Luthor, Jr., or other Kryptonians, he had eventually relaxed. Had been—warm, smiling, engaging, in such overt contrast to the silent helmeted Kryptonians on the other side of the room that it must surely have been deliberate.
But Bruce Wayne wouldn't have noticed. Bruce Wayne wouldn't have been making any effort to hold himself at a distance. Bruce Wayne had married an alien who looked like an extremely attractive man, and an extremely attractive man who very much suited his established tastes, at that; Bruce Wayne had nothing to complain about. Bruce Wayne was, in all his shortsightedness, his utter dearth of genuine analytical ability, feeling pretty pleased with himself tonight, and not at all sorry to have agreed to marry himself off to a Kryptonian for the sake of interspecies diplomacy.
The cake had been huge, and had tasted excellent, and Kal-El had looked artlessly obscene eating it. That was what mattered to Bruce Wayne.
Observation was of limited utility, when there was no reason to believe anything about Kal-El was genuine or could be trusted. Then again, if Kal-El's mask should slip, even for a moment—better to catch it, to glimpse whatever might be behind it, than not.
Kal-El seemed unsuspicious, when the elevator opened onto the penthouse entryway. He didn't start asking pointed questions about how many other properties Bruce did or didn't have, how much time Bruce usually spent here or who had done the decorating. Bruce stepped out, stretched his arms over his head for a moment and then ambled through the main doors toward the sofa; Kal-El stood there and looked, for so long the elevator doors began to close again automatically. Bruce caught the soft shushing sound, Kal-El's startled, "Oh—" and that was excuse enough to look over his shoulder, as he kicked off his shoes.
"Almost got you there, huh?"
Kal-El looked briefly sheepish. "I," he said. "Yes." He had paused again, but outside the elevator this time instead of inside; he was looking around himself, that was all.
Which was fair enough, Bruce could allow. After the reception, the Kryptonian aesthetic influence that had resulted in that monochromatic decorating scheme, the tasteless opulence of one of Bruce Wayne's penthouses was even more overwhelming than usual.
Bruce blew out a breath, threw himself down comfortably onto the sofa and linked his hands behind his head, brought his socked feet up onto the gleaming coffee table.
And Kal-El watched him do it, the pressure of his eyes unmistakably present, and then Bruce heard him move; he came around the far side of the sofa and into Bruce's line of sight, after a moment, and sat down gingerly on the other end.
"I'm afraid I'm—not entirely sure what to expect."
"What about all those movies?" Bruce said, mild.
"They addressed a great variety of scenarios," Kal-El said, "but unfortunately none of them were about a marriage between strangers to normalize diplomatic relations between species."
"Real oversight," Bruce observed. "I'll get my guy at Hallmark on that, stat."
The alien let out half a breath, the ghost of a laugh, and the line of his mouth of his mouth began to bend sweetly for a moment; must've been enough Hallmark in the mix to let him get the gist of the joke.
But then his face went still again, and his throat worked, and he said, "Do you—expect to keep separate quarters?"
"Hmm? No, no," Bruce said. "Not for at least six months, anyway, if you think you can put up with me for that long. Here on Earth, in the U-S of A, if you get married then people expect you to live together. And this thing with us, if it's going to look real, if it's going to look like it means something—not to you guys, to us humans—then we're going to have to walk the walk, at least for now."
"Ah," Kal said. "Okay," but his brow creased just a little.
"What, nobody gave you the rundown?"
"Aunt Martha," Kal said, and then stopped awkwardly. "That is, Martha Kent, she—her husband passed away some time ago. What she told me mostly matched the movies, though. That humans usually marry each other because they like each other so much they want to spend as much time together as they can. But—"
"But that's not true for us, since we barely know each other at all, so you don't see how living together is walking the walk," Bruce filled in. "Fair enough, I guess. End of the day, marriage means different things to different people, but we're supposed to keep this looking as conventional as we can get it. Which means people need to see what they're expecting to see, and that means living together. No—separate quarters, or whatever. And we're going to be spending a lot of time together, too. No complaints here," and Bruce paused to give Kal yet another thorough onceover, on the off chance the alien would betray some reaction here, late in the evening, alone, that he hadn't in front of an audience.
Nothing. Kal-El looked, if anything, blankly confused.
Surely at least some of those goddamn movies had had come-ons in them. What could possibly be the point of pretending otherwise? What was there to gain by it?
Bruce couldn't begin to guess.
"Well," he said aloud, and brought his hands down, slapped his thighs lightly. "You need something to eat, something to drink? Was the cake enough? Or were you just being polite, and you eat—sunlight, or whatever?"
"Oh, I'm—I'm fine," the alien said. "I don't know if I could starve, on your world, but—I like to eat. I'm not hungry now, though, I—"
"Great! Not going to lie, it's been a pretty long day by my standards, so." Bruce hooked a thumb over his shoulder, at the half-open door to the bedroom. "I'm out. Feel free to do whatever you guys do for fun—or, not fun," he corrected himself, "pursuing purposeful endeavors, I guess—if you aren't tired yet. If you get tired. I don't know your life. Point is, there's like three other bedrooms in here—"
"But it would be," Kal-El said, and then paused. "It would be—expected, here, for us to sleep in the same room."
"Yep. Same room, same bed," Bruce said—easily, without undue weight or emphasis. He breathed with ironfisted control, ran through a quick silent biofeedback exercise to minimize the urge of his heart to pound; because if the alien's plan was to snap his neck, to attack right when the general public must assume the preliminary agreement with the Kryptonians would hold, when no one's guard was up anymore, then this would be the perfect opportunity. He had to be ready, and at the same time give the alien no sign of it. "Also, you should know that we both inalienably—whoops, sorry—possess the sacred right to kick if the other guy starts snoring. Right or left?"
He rose and moved toward the bedroom door as he spoke, kicked it farther open without consideration for the delicately filigreed molding. The bed was huge, naturally, and pristine, as impersonable as a hotel. Far from the worst place anyone expected Bruce Wayne to die.
And Kal-El followed him, quiet. Bruce experienced a relentlessly pressing awareness of the alien's presence at his unprotected back; as if his front or any other part of him were more protected, when the alien's physical strength outstripped his by unfathomable margins, but nevertheless, some animal part of him remained helplessly fixated. He sighed a little, rolled his head to one side and back again, and moved past the corner of the bed to the closet—not to put his clothes away, naturally, but rather to shrug off his suit jacket, strip out of his slacks, somewhere where he could drop them without leaving them in his own way later.
He'd known already that Kal-El was capable of interpreting and acting on a cue. It couldn't rightly be called a surprise, that when he turned, unbuttoning his dress shirt at the same time, the alien was—doing the same, or the Kryptonian equivalent: stripping himself of the outer tunic he wore, the long split-sleeved shirt, the draping skirt. Underneath all of that was some kind of bodysuit, in a strange tesselated fabric that gleamed subtly. It was skin-tight, and—objectively—unnecessarily flattering.
And some of those movies must have had beds in them. Kal-El cleared his throat, reached out and lifted the corner of the coverlet, the sheets beneath it. He sat first, looked at Bruce and wet his mouth and then slid cautiously downward until he was supine, gaze uncertain as if to ask whether he was doing it right.
He lay there, and he watched, with an air more of curiosity than anything else, as Bruce banged around for a minute—brushed his teeth, for a cursory thirty seconds, and then very deliberately winked at his audience as he pissed, because Bruce Wayne would.
It got him no more of a reaction than any of the other times Bruce Wayne had hit on the alien today: Kal-El blinked at him, blue eyes wide, as if uncomprehending.
Bruce climbed into the bed. Kal-El had followed this cue just as well as every other one Bruce had given him today; when Bruce had, seemingly without thinking despite having asked, moved to the right side of the room to shed his suit, Kal-El had responded by taking the left.
The right side of the bed was no farther from the door than the left. The right side of the room held the bathroom: a tight, enclosed space, theoretically controllable, with plenty of hard surfaces and a door that locked.
Not that any of that would do him any good, if the alien wanted to kill him after all, but in principle, the decision had been sound.
Bruce shifted against his pillow, yawning, and then rolled onto his side, away from the alien. "Goodnight, honey," he said over his shoulder, making it just a little mushmouthed.
"Goodnight," Kal-El said, very softly.
Bruce lay still. He had thought perhaps the Kryptonian ear cuff would prove itself obtrusive, change the sensation of his ear against his pillow just enough to be unignorable, but after a moment, his skin, his nerves, habituated, and he could barely feel it. He relaxed, and then scanned his body for areas of stubbornly lingering tension, and relaxed further. He forced himself to go utterly slack, to breathe with increased depth and evenness. And Kal-El—
Kal-El breathed, too. Softly, but audibly. Bruce monitored the minute shifts of his weight through the mattress, as his body gradually went limp; it took perhaps an hour, but in time, his breaths came more slowly, more fully. He twitched, once and then again—peculiarly mundane, to think an alien experienced hypnic jerks.
Kal-El—slept. And he didn't do a single goddamn thing to Bruce, all night.