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Bruce wakes up slowly, warm from head to toe. His dream— unremarkable, a flurry of fuzzy nothingness— fizzles out as he comes back into himself.
Already, he’s disoriented. Confused. Unsure of when he fell asleep last night and how exactly there’s weak rays of gray-white sunlight peeking through the curtains.
Bruce never wakes slowly, let alone comfortably. He jerks awake from nightmares, echoes of memories and spilt blood half his own, or he never sleeps at all. He gets hours by the handful if he’s lucky, body heavy no matter what he does, a rot and filth deep in his soul that no amount of sleep can gouge out.
That's how it’s always been. Fits of restless hours of sleep stolen between nights of fist fights and mornings spent bleeding for a city that never heals.
He’s not in the cave, not asleep at his desk surrounded by chattering static, or slumped against the cold stone walls. He’s not even in the medbay. There are silk sheets beneath his bare legs, a plush mattress cradling his body.
His eyes ache a bit, itching with the urge to shut against even the meager light filling the room. He's warm, bordering on hot, swaddled in blankets and tucked tight against a—
Oh, right.
Bruce smothers the yawn building in his throat, and looks down his bare chest spotted with scars and bruises to the forearm locked around his middle.
Clark.
Memories fade in, gold-tipped and drenched in unreality. They are real, they just don’t feel real. That unapologetic, incandescent happiness that was blooming in Bruce's chest, as he watched Clark's dimples deepen and his grin eat up his cheeks. His laugh echoes even now, deep and genuine, the sparkle in his eyes far too adoring to have been directed at someone like Bruce.
Evidently, it doesn’t matter to Clark what Bruce feels he deserves, because Clark had pulled him close and kissed him breathless, held him like something precious. Smiled that smile that turns him into sunshine incarnate, and said, I love you.
In the present, warm, soft lips press to Bruce's nape, bared and vulnerable, prickling with heat. Clark noses into Bruce's hair from behind and breathes deep, humming on the exhale. It vibrates from his chest, traveling through their connection. Bruce's leg shifts in a minute kick, helpless against the shiver in his bones.
Clark smiles. The curl of his lips brushes down and across Bruce's throat; Bruce swallows against the urge to tilt his head for ease of access, instincts screaming at him to never show his belly. To guard his softest, weakest parts with his life.
He’s still learning— the fact that he doesn’t have to prepare for devastation when Clark touches him.
Bruce fists the sheets, forces himself still. Another kiss to the side of his throat, then a meandering path downwards, to the slope of his pale shoulder, back inwards towards his spine.
At the topmost knob, another kiss, reverent and worshipful. Bruce sighs into it, eyes fluttering shut. Clark's hand presses gently into the rise and fall of his stomach, the lower half of his ribcage, cupping Bruce's heartbeat as if he even needs to feel it to know how fast it’s beating.
Clark dips down, kisses the knob below, then below that, and again, mapping out the peaks and valleys of Bruce's spine beneath his skin.
It’s… incredibly disarming. A single thought, a squint of the eyes, and Clark could look inside of Bruce and see the skeleton for himself. He doesn’t, and Bruce knows he won’t, but the knowledge that he could still raises goosebumps along his arms.
Clark has to shuffle slightly down the bed to keep along his path, a lazy thing, turning Bruce's joints to liquid. The next kiss swerves the predictable pattern, instead aiming for where Bruce’s shoulder blade protrudes. Clark kisses there, too, something longer and sweeter.
Bruce fights not to squirm or twitch, and realizes he’s got a beauty mark there, one of the darkest ones, right before hot breath fans out across his skin and Clark licks a path from the mark to the nearest scar, a healed over bullet wound that’s still a fleshy pinkish-red. Bruce has only seen in it glances in the mirror, but it can’t be pretty. None of his scars are.
Clark kisses it anyways.
Heat lances through Bruce's body as though Clark spread it there himself with broad strokes, a surge right beneath his skin that feels like a frenzy, spreads like wildfire up his nerves, flooding the backs of his ears and bleeding out into his cheeks.
Bruce works his jaw, turns his face further into the pillow. Tries desperately to keep his breathing steady even as his lungs shudder.
Clark continues on his way back up, his thumb petting the length of Bruce's rib, the swell of muscle there.
He’s not… gonna do the same to the other side, is he?
Bruce finally manages to speak around the knot constricting his throat. It feels like his jaw is sealed shut with tar, but he forces his lips to move anyways.
It’s just a raspy, quiet, “Clark.”
“Hm?” Clark retreats to the relative safety of Bruce's neck, leaving his back tingling all over and warmth skittering across his nerves. Clark pulls him in, molds their bodies together. “Bruce,” he returns, low and fond.
“What…” Clark kisses the burning tip of Bruce's ear. Bruce bites the inside of his cheek, vicious and quick. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” is the guileless response. Clark's fingers start tapping idly atop Bruce's chest, overlaying the pattering rhythm of his heart. Bruce opens his eyes if only to glare at the window across from him. Clark probably senses it, because his lips twitch the way they do when he’s suppressing a smirk.
And so, in the face of Bruce's radiating ire, he amends, “Appreciating.”
Bruce's chest jumps on a scoff. What's there to appreciate?
The curtains sway, an invisible breeze parting them to let in more swathes of early morning sun. The light is kind of pissing him off.
“Let me roll over,” Bruce demands, and doesn’t wait for a response before he proceeds to do just that. Clark doesn’t fight it, of course, and he’s smiling when Bruce comes face to face with him.
Against every single one of his wills, Bruce softens in the face of it— the carefree lift to Clark's lips, the sleepy curve of his eyes, the happy glow to his cheeks. Bruce reaches up and watches as though outside of his body as he gently tugs at an errant curl brushing the top of Clark's eyebrow. Clark's smile widens, goes pleased like a spoiled house cat.
Though, he’s hardly a cat. He proves it the next second as he presses his head further into Bruce's hand, seeking pets, metaphorical tail thumping a happy rhythm.
Bruce huffs a vague approximation of a laugh at the thought, and indulges. He combs through dark curls and marvels at the softness, the endearing messiness of Clark Kent's bedhead.
“Good morning,” comes Clark's voice a few minutes later, rich and low like smoldering embers. He catches Bruce's wrist on the next comb over his scalp, stroking the blue-veined pulse.
Bruce freezes, only just barely managing to suppress the instinctual urge to wrench his hand free; he twitches despite his best efforts. Clark's touch is gentle, smooth skin and large fingers that encircle Bruce’s wrist entirely. He’s barely even holding it.
His eyes are pools of dark aquamarine, dripping with molten affection. He waits calmly, patiently, while Bruce fights the tension threading through his muscles. The alarms pulsing along his nerves.
Bruce loses the fight to maintain eye contact, head dipping with a silent breath. He relaxes his muscles one by one with slight effort, forearms to shoulders and down his back.
Clark moves only when Bruce is relaxed again. He gives his wrist a gentle, supportive squeeze, but otherwise keeps his touch light even as he guides Bruce's hand down from his hair. His lips meet the center of Bruce's palm, warm and steady, then the sensitive inside of his wrist, pausing to feel the pulse pounding beneath the skin there.
Bruce stares at the hollow of Clark's throat like it holds the answers to all of Gotham's problems— like somehow the solution to the corruption intwined within its very cement is written along his collarbones— and tries desperately to ignore how his heart is making a spirited attempt to burst from his chest.
Clark's other hand slides up Bruce's spine, cradles his nape and the hair at the back of his skull. He tilts Bruce's head back up, gentle enough that Bruce could fight it easily if he tried. He doesn’t.
“There you are,” Clark murmurs into Bruce's fingers, then kisses his battered knuckles. Bruce chokes on the air trapped in his chest, helpless but to watch Clark watch him. Struck breathless from the easy affection that sets his nerves alight.
Each of his knuckles, one after the other, Clark kisses, like he’s trying to heal the injuries, like he can will them out of existence as if they never even happened.
It’s when Bruce’s skin starts crawling that he works his jaw in an attempt to speak. He has to swallow, and also clear his throat, because there’s something knotted in his chest that’s crawling up past his esophagus, and it spreads heat through his bloodstream like honey.
And Bruce truly, genuinely, has no fucking idea what to do with that.
“You're pampering me,” he finally says, and it was supposed to be an accusation, but it comes out weak, rough, sapped of all fire.
Clark makes an amused hm sound. He lowers their hands, but threads their fingers together. Bruce's grip tightens immediately, accidentally. “I told you, I'm appreciating you.” Then, cheekier, “I wouldn't dare pamper Bruce Wayne.”
Bruce scowls because it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to process the sheer fondness and adoration in Clark's tone. He can tell it’s a gentle scowl, knows that the heat in his cheeks would dampen any expression he tried to make anyways. It probably looks more like an embarrassed frown. He clings to it all the same.
Bruce searches for a proper response through the murky, foggy depths that are his thoughts right now, but isn’t able to find something sufficient before Clark speaks again. It’s all too tangled, out of reach. It just leaves him feeling frustrated.
“You have beautiful eyes,” Clark says, breathless with awe like it’s the first time he’s seen them and not the thousandth, and Bruce's lips part, scrambling.
Every prior thought and frustration crowding his mind promptly evaporates.
“Stop that,” Bruce whispers, skittering away from the gaze Clark tries to capture him in. He collects himself whilst studying the deep gray of his pillowcases. Eventually, he manages a steadying breath.
Bruce's voice is blessedly stronger when he next replies, a belated, “…Good morning.”
Clark laughs something rumbly in his chest, the kind of fond laugh that makes Bruce want to fall through the floor and perhaps be buried beneath cement and earth for the rest of his life. If only to escape.
“It is a good morning,” Clark agrees, eyes creased; bright and blue and holding an entire solar system within their depths.
He sounds so… tender. Happy.
Overwhelming heat floods every inch of Bruce's skin, blood racing and clambering. His heart pounds frantically, all too happy to help, a relentless drumbeat he can feel all the way to his fingertips.
Bruce has the sudden, violent urge to shut Clark up. To expel this feeling. Maybe throw himself off the Tower and see what happens.
He does nothing, he would never— at least not without the suit— but the ferocity with which the feeling floods him and just as quickly fades away leaves him dizzy.
“It's too early,” Bruce rasps, curling into himself and, consequently, Clark. The darkness of his chest is a relief Bruce gladly sinks into, wishing he could will away his consciousness. “Good night.”
Clark doesn’t laugh again, but Bruce can hear the smile in his voice anyways. He pets at Bruce's hair, warm and steady and soothing, caressing his nape. “Okay. Sleep well, Bruce.”
I will, Bruce doesn’t say, already relaxing, and instead untangles their fingers to wrap his arms around Clark’s torso. He has to put a bit of force behind the one he wedges beneath Clark, but the man goes with it easily enough, arm settling heavy and grounding over Bruce's waist.
“Mm,” he says into Clark’s chest, fighting not to take a deep breath of his fresh paper-and-sunshine scent. “Wake me.”
He doesn’t say when, but Clark seems to understand anyways. “I will,” he assures. His fingers resume combing through the hair at the back of Bruce's skull, and they leave it at that.
Bruce has a few questions, mainly How long did I sleep? and What time actually is it? and Do you not have to work, Reporter Clark Kent? But they melt away with the last of the tension in his shoulders as Clark's heart thumps strong and steady, firm and real in his arms.
He's not really tired enough to fall asleep, but Bruce rests his mind anyways, giving himself over to the warm, content haze Clark envelopes him in.
For now, he’s safe. And that’s enough.